Israel is reported to have killed more than a thousand people in its two weeks of bombing Lebanon and has now started a land invasion, which has caused a displacement of more than a million people, almost a fifth of the population. It continues to murder hundreds of civilians in Gaza with the death toll approaching 42,000, not including many more buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings. One estimate, and not the highest, is 186,000!
After repeated provocations Iran attacked Israel with an unknown number of missiles that Israel says were mainly shot down, while video evidence claimed to show that many were successful, although it is not obvious that they hit their intended targets. A main objective appears to have been to impact military airbases.
Iran reportedly gave notice to both the US and Israel that it was going to attack, allowing the Israelis to remove their aircraft from harm’s way, while it also said that its response to the provocations had finished.
Netanyahu shamelessly and offensively publicised his order to kill the leader of Hizbollah (and those unconnected who were near him) when he was at the UN in New York, straight after a speech in which he claimed that “Israel seeks peace. Israel yearns for peace. Israel has made peace and will make peace again.” After the Iranian missile strike he warned that Iran had made a “big mistake” and threatened that it “will pay for it”.
After the continuing genocide in Gaza, the more than thousand killed in Israeli bombing and now ground invasion of Lebanon, Keir Starmer declared that he and the country he claims to speak on behalf of, “stands with Israel” and recognises its right to self-defence. The Labour Defence Secretary John Healey said that British forces had “played their part in attempts to prevent further escalation”, which must be his way of boasting that British aircraft helped the genocidal Israeli military to stop the Iranian missiles. The US has already sent more military into the region and also boasted of its efforts against the missilles.
No one reading this will need an exposition of the lies and hypocrisy these statements involve, told by either the Zionist leaders or their Western backers: the selective condemnation of terrorism, selective endorsement of the right to self-defence, selective concern for civilian casualties and selective condemnation and sanctions against outside invasion. All this is obvious. Starmer’s support and defence of the genocidal Zionist regime has played a part in the collapse of his already low popularity and that of his government – his net approval number is now minus 30 and his government less popular than the one that has just been shredded:
More demonstrations are taking place and planned across the world, following the mass walk-out of delegates to the UN at the start of Netanyahu’s speech. The pathetic role of the Irish delegation was clearly exposed by their staying in their seats to listen to the latest catalogue of lies that insults its listeners.
The Irish people have an opportunity to demonstrate their opposition to genocide and the attack on Lebanon through a march on Saturday. The support declared for it reveals widespread support but also the depth of much of it. What is the purpose of this demonstration and the campaign generally? Is pointing out the hypocrisy of the government and its actions anywhere near enough?
The purpose, it would seem, can only be to put pressure on the government to take action but the repeated demands on the Government by some opposition TD’s have only been met by revelations that it will not even enforce its own laws that might somewhat inconvenience the transport of weapons to Israel – allowing flights over Irish airspace without any question. The governing parties are riding high in the polls and are busy bribing the population with their own money in the budget – their money and that amassed as a tax haven for US multinationals. If putting pressure on it is the objective, the question must be asked – what pressure?
The political voices of these 160 civil society organisations supporting the demo have been demanding various actions from the Irish government for a year, with no success beyond its hypocritical statements that rival those of the other Western powers. After a short time, this reveals not the power of public opinion but its weakness and that of the solidarity campaign that seeks to mobilise it. It reveals the political poverty of demanding that the Irish bourgeoisie do something that is not in its interest. If you expect they will do so you are naïve at best and if you don’t you are fooling your supporters and yourself.
Look at the organisations supporting the demonstration! They include the trade unions and will probably include Sinn Fein; the party that partied with genocide Joe on St Patricks day. Who could possibly feel pressure from such hypocrites? The governing parties could easily turn round to the trade unions and ask – what have you done to boycott the Zionist state?
In other words, the Palestine solidarity campaign should be demanding that those who claim to support it do something, beyond supporting demonstrations that long ago revealed that bourgeois governments don’t care what their populations think as long as they can get away with it. If these governments will not take action, it needs to be taken for them, or rather – against them.
That means demanding that Sinn Fein boycott the genocidal US regime and the trade unions campaign to persuade their members to take direct action to boycott Israeli bound armaments etc. and defend them when they do. If they don’t then their participation in solidarity demonstrations is a sham and by extension is a fraud on all the other participants who are genuinely opposed to the actions of the Zionist state and want to do something about it.
The Irish state is a very junior and subordinate partner in a Western imperialist alliance that supports the Zioinist state because this state is the West’s – primarily the US’s – instrument of power in the Arab world and beyond. To expect that it will rebel against its dominant partners is delusional, and continual demands that it do so miseducates and misdirects everyone who doesn’t understand this. It must stop, and the campaign look to Irish workers as the means to put pressure on imperialism, starting by opposing their own state that is a part of it.
Photo: Cemetery in Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine, Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images
On top of the fog of war we have the additional problem of understanding due to the fog of the media. Again and again we have been told that the West can increase its intervention because Putin’s red lines are a bluff.
In The Irish Times, its Ukraine correspondent commented (under the headline – ‘Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian supply lines would likely expose Putin’s escalation bluff’) – that previous delivery of F16s and invasion of the Kursk area of Russia had not ‘triggered the escalation that Moscow threatens.’ The byline also states that ‘Permission from US and Britain for Kyiv to hit targets deeper inside Russia expected to spark closer Moscow link with Iran and North Korea, not conflict with Nato.’
A second IT article states that ‘The US may in the coming days grant the UK and France permission to let Kyiv use their long-range strike weapons, which rely on American navigational data, inside Russia as requested by Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said people familiar with the discussions.’ In the event, we have been told that this decision has been postponed.
The British, in the shape of Starmer and Lammy have been to the forefront in pushing their use, with Lammy rejecting Putin’s threats because he was just “throwing dust up into the air” with “a lot of bluster.” Some voices urging caution have been reported (see the second link above) but no explicit explanation why Putin’s ‘threats’ might be real.
The western media pretends to the truth and objectivity but this whole narrative is suffused with propaganda and illustrative of how an unwitting and unwilling public could be dragged into war. The US and UK threaten to hit Russia with long-range missiles, but it is Putin who issues ‘threats’. The potential for escalation can be ignored because previous Russian red lines have been crossed without consequence, even if many of these red lines have been the creations of the Western politicians and media itself, under the cover of general Russian disapproval and vitriol.
The West threatens these attacks while dismissing Russian ‘escalation’ as if the word escalation is a Russian one, which only its actions involve. It has also been suggested that Russia doesn’t really have any red lines, a view which ironically helped bring about the war in the first place. If there are three claims made about it, it is that Russia carried out a full-scale invasion in 2022 that was illegal and unprovoked. However, only one of these is correct.
Without doubt the invasion was illegal but it was not full scale and was not unprovoked. The head of the Ukrainian armed forces Syrskyi recently admitted that Russia invaded with around 100,000 troops, a force far smaller than the Ukrainian army. Hardly full scale in terms of numbers and therefore in objectives. Russia had for decades made it clear that Ukrainian membership of NATO was unacceptable and represented a threat to its security. The Russian invasion took place because this red line was crossed, and the threat of long range missiles against it is confirmation of why it took this view.
This does not mean that its position is therefore justified and should be supported. The nature of the war is determined by the nature of the forces involved and socialists cannot support either Russia or Ukraine/NATO without ceasing to be socialist. Many in the West have taken this course and in doing so crossed class lines – the red lines that socialists have – to become traitors and enemies of the working class.
Repeated escalation of Western involvement has been accompanied by the claim that previous Russian red lines have been crossed while at the same time stating that they don’t exist. Russian warnings can thus be acknowledged and then ignored, bit by bit habituating workers in the West to further and further aggression and steps towards outright war. This has been clear from before the Russian invasion through NATO expansion into Eastern Europe but still many leftists in the West pretend there is not an imperialist proxy war, a claim more and more impossible to square with each escalation.
Putin, who the media is ever so keen to quote, has stated that in order for long range missiles to strike Russia NATO personnel must be directly involved, on top of provision of intelligence and targeting assistance. This is one reason given why Germany has rejected such action – because it involves NATO in direct conflict in a new way. The risks of a significant step towards world war are obvious, made all the more unjustifiable by repeated acknowledgement by those championing their use that these missiles ‘would have only “a limited effect” on the war as a whole’ and Lammy’s admission that “No war is won with any one weapon.”
Putin has stated that “direct participation” of NATO countries in the war in Ukraine “would substantially change the very essence, the nature of the conflict. This will mean that NATO countries, the USA and European states, are fighting with Russia.” The self-censorship of the Western media means that this statement is quoted without any attempt to acknowledge its truth or even to deny it.
There is a certain amount of irrationality in such a course and a number of ideas have been propounded about it, such as that the US and Russia will have an agreement that certain targets will be off-limits if/when these attacks are carried out. In any case, it is clear that Zelensky and the most rabid Ukrainian nationalists either cannot or will not survive politically without escalation, with their justification that it will bring the end of the war closer through Russian agreeing to negotiations already being disproved.
Ukraine is losing the war, and its only hope is increased US/NATO intervention, which it may seek to achieve through provocations against Russia producing a response that could be used as justification. Just as Ukraine is losing, so is Russia winning, which is why so many of its purported red lines have been ignored while it has continued its objectives of degrading and neutering the Ukrainian armed forces. It has no reason to seek to go beyond its existing approach.
The goal of the US is degradation of Russia, and it has no interest in ending a war that achieves this or makes a significant contribution towards it. At the same time, it has no interest in a war with Russia although miscalculation can play a part in creating one. Its intervention so far has been to prolong the war through military support to Ukraine, without which it could not have continued, and scuppering the potential peace deal that was being negotiated, something given additional support by a recent interview with the US apparatchik Victoria Nuland. If the war cannot be pursued through Ukrainian collapse the US with NATO may seek to freeze it in order to lay the ground for another one at a more propitious time, as it did with the MINSK agreements.
Whatever motives and calculations are being made by the various imperialist elites we can be sure that the fog of the media will not reveal them but provide the gloss necessary for their actions to maintain the passivity and ignorance of their populations. The pro-war left go a step beyond this to prettify these motives, calculations and actions so that they are worse than the capitalist media. They too rely on it to ensure that the real nature of the war is covered up.
Most of Europe is involved in a proxy war against Russia, costing billions of Euros and untold lives; untold because the personnel involved were not supposed to be in Ukraine in the first place. Who voted for the war?
This question sums up bourgeois democracy.
This has not prevented many on the left enthusiastically supporting it. This left, which normally would not dream of calling a strike without a ballot, has given a blank cheque to its ruling class and its state. Rather than demand a vote in order to debate the purpose and objectives of the war, they have simply endorsed it and called for it to be supported more vigorously. I doubt the idea of a debate and vote even crossed their minds, not least because they don’t have an alternative anyway.
The justification, ironically, is that Ukraine is a ‘democracy’ and Russia is not; even though the current president of Ukraine is no longer an elected leader, since his period of office has expired, while the President of Russia actually won an election, for what it’s worth. In the last few days Zelensky has tried to concentrate even more power in his hands by sacking around half his cabinet. That opposition parties and media are banned in Ukraine matters not a jot to these people while Russia’s elections are regarded as a sham. Let’s think about that for a minute and consider recent elections in the ‘democratic’ West as a comparison.
First, we have the new Labour government in Britain, elected with an enormous parliamentary majority by only 20% of the electorate on the basis of not much more than not being the Tories. Starmer and his colleagues did their best not to commit to any specific policies and have quickly broken promises that they did make – on energy prices and austerity. No doubt, further measures will confirm this course. The widespread opposition to genocide in Gaza, reflected in support for some independent candidates, could find no reflection in the choice of government as both Labour and Tories support it.
Second, we have the most powerful bourgeois democracy in the world in which counting the money is a better guide to who will win than the polling of support for the various policies that the candidates claim to support. The US is possibly even worse than Britain in terms of the vacuum of debate on what exactly parties will do when elected, whether anything they say can be believed and is not just a catalogue of lies. For every Donald Trump and Kamala Harris we have a Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer. The main appeal of each candidate is aversion for the other.
When the usual mechanisms for making sure the ‘right’ candidates are selected fail these are ditched and the men and women with money and political power step in to make the ‘right’ selection. After months of primaries and the votes of millions – 14.5 million in fact – the Democratic grandees and apparatchiks stepped in to ensure that Genocide Joe would not be the Presidential candidate. In this he was simply the subject of the same machinations that ensured he was the candidate in 2020 instead of Bernie Sanders, who was judged too left wing regardless of the popularity of his policies or of himself.
Even the proponents of bourgeois democracy worry that all this is not sustainable, while certain sections of the left cling to it all the more firmly the more rotten it becomes. In an opinion piece in the Financial Times, a contributing editor noted that Kamala Harris has given only one media interview and even that not by herself – ‘she seems to think that if voters understand what she will do as president, they will be less likely to support her.’ It notes the irony that, while claiming to defend democracy against the “existential threat” to it posed by Trump, the failure to do what you say you are going to do means that ‘rather embarrassingly, you will be the one undermining the system of representative government.”
The argument of socialists is that bourgeois democracy – “representative government” – is a sham. How could it be otherwise in a system in which the means of production are controlled by the capitalist class, including the means of communication – of producing ‘the news’ and disseminating it, and the state machinery through which government policies are implemented – thorough its top personnel and the economic structures through which policies can be allowed to work or alternatively are throttled.
A final example of bourgeois democracy in action is in France, where the defeated Emmanuel Macron, having prevaricated for two months, has announced that Michel Barnier has been chosen by him to be Prime Minister. Despite the New Popular Front having won a plurality of the votes he has selected a leader from the right wing Les Républicans, which won only 6.57% of the first round vote.
The leader of France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has declared that “We’ve been robbed in this election”. It is normally the largest formation that is permitted to form an administration but such normalities are always disregarded when the political establishment thinks that it faces some sort of threat, especially from the left.
The real anti-democratic nature of this move by Macron is not so much the abuse of this Presidential mechanism but what the employment of this power signifies. The elections were a decisive rejection of Macron and his policies, reflected in the vote for the New Popular Front and in the rise of the far right Rassemblement National. Yet Barnier was selected preciously in order to confirm and continue these policies.
The front page of the Financial Times explained that the purpose of Macron’s choice was to ‘find a candidate . . . who would not seek to undo his pro-business reforms.’ The fraudulent nature of the far right alternative to mainstream capitalist policies was revealed by the response of Marien Le Pen who is quoted as ‘cautiously’ welcoming the appointment and saying that “Barnier seems at least to meet one of the criteria we’d demanded . . . and be able to speak with the Rassemblement National. That will be useful as compromises will need to solve the budget situation.”
An analyst from one of the think tanks that litter the capitalist political environment stated that his appointment would ‘help in France’s bid to reassure markets over the economy and public spending’. “He’s a safe pair of hands known to market participants, known to Europe and the domestic political elite within France”, adding that he would be expected to ensure that ‘Macron’s labour and pension reforms would remain intact.’
So, there we have it. An overwhelming vote against Macron’s policies is turned, or is attempting to be turned, into an administration that will ensure their maintenance. It is not the clear wishes of the electorate that must be counted but that of the ‘markets’ – national and international capitalism – and the ‘political elite’ that counts.
For all the hypocritical cant about ‘democracy’ we have yet another example of how bourgeois democracy is democracy for the bourgeoisie. For the majority, including the working class, democracy does not extend beyond occasional visits to the polling booth in which meaningful choice has often been removed, or when it has not, constitutional devices are employed until these too are insufficient whereupon more forceful measures are employed.
Mélenchon is reported to have called for protests against this subversion of the popular will, demonstrating that, for the working class, democracy can only be enforced and guaranteed by its own actions. What this action cannot do, however, is democratise the state itself, which is the instrument of the political elite and the markets – the bourgeoisie and capitalism.
The resort to protest is testament to where power for the working class arises and where it must be advanced – in the organisation and mobilisation of the workers themselves. Elections can measure its strength and level of politicisation but only the workers own organisations can form a democratic alternative to the political elite, the bourgeois class and its state. This in turn demands that the organisation of the working class movement itself must be democratic, but until some current socialists stop supporting capitalist war in defence of bourgeois democracy they will have nothing but a reactionary role to play in building up the workers own democracy.
When the Ukrainian regime first accepted responsibility for the invasion of the Kursk region of Russia the justification was that it was simply giving it to the Russians as the Russians had given it to them. And this, as far as it goes, is perfectly true. This will not give its supporters in the West any pause for thought that this equality might mean that both sides are equally reactionary. When one of the early apologists for the Ukrainian state justified support for it and its alliance with Western imperialism and NATO, he said that:
‘To describe the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, in which the latter country has no ambition, let alone intention, of seizing Russian territory, and in which Russia has the stated intention of subjugating Ukraine and seizing much of its territory – to call this conflict inter-imperialist, rather than an imperialist war of invasion, is an extreme distortion of reality.’
He went on to justify the supply of western weapons to Ukraine with the argument that:
‘Since the Ukrainians’ fight against the Russian invasion is just, it is quite right to help them defend themselves against an enemy far superior in numbers and armament. That is why we are without hesitation in favour of the delivery of defensive weapons to the Ukrainian resistance.’
“Defensive weapons” became the loophole through which this support for western imperialist intervention was smuggled in – ‘we must also oppose the delivery of air fighters to Ukraine that Zelensky has been demanding. Fighters are not strictly defensive weaponry, and their supply to Ukraine would actually risk significantly aggravating Russian bombing.’
This loophole has now been ripped apart to reveal wholehearted support for western imperialism, with the provision of main battle tanks spearheading the invasion of Russian territory; ATACMS /HIMARS/ storm shadow missiles hitting targets inside Russia; special forces troops on the ground ensuring their successful operation; attacks on Russian territory including on radar stations that warn of nuclear attack from the West; and now the F16 fighter planes that were claimed to typify a non-defensive weapon. By its own admission Ukraine and Western imperialism is on the offensive
The British Ukraine Solidarity Campaign has been urging its government to supply more military material than it has, in effect criticising one of the most hawkish western imperialist powers from the right – for not being aggressive enough! According to its earlier analysis the war is an imperialist proxy war and they should now be opposing the Ukrainian state and western imperialism.
They cannot because they will not, and they will not because they have decisively placed themselves as the ‘left’ of a pro-imperialist alliance. This formal and informal coalition has far, far stronger partners than them, from the imperialist states it calls on to arm Ukraine to the reformist left that is reformist precisely because it will never break from its own imperialist state. It does not have the political tools to explain its capitulation and navigate its way out of it. It can currently damn this imperialism for its role in perpetrating genocide in Palestine while urging it to greater action in Ukraine, as if it had a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, a good side and a bad side, that will sometimes play a progressive role in advancing the interests of the working class.
It has hooked itself up to Western imperialism with excuses that by supporting the Ukrainian state it is supporting the Ukrainian people, while it disregards altogether the class nature of the state and of the different classes within it. By this logic we are now witnessing the invasion of Russia by the Ukrainian people. Given that the invasion is led by the most effective units of the Ukrainian armed forces, which are also among the most rabidly nationalistic and reactionary, we should also be hearing its support for the working class Russian conscripts fighting them.
We don’t because the reality of Ukraine has exposed the hollowness of its claims to victim status. It chose to build a large army trained by NATO and to allow the CIA to camp in its territory in order to assist its covert actions against Russia. It chose to seek NATO membership and float the idea of stationing nuclear weapons on its territory.
Whenever it is not urging increased intervention by its own imperialism the pro-war left is dispensing analysis oblivious to its meaning. Even in the paragraph quoted above, it is noted that Russia is ‘an enemy far superior in numbers and armament’. Left to itself, Ukraine would have already sued for peace. That it has not is because of the support of Western imperialism, and just as the war continues because of imperialism so is the nature of the war determined by it.
The Western media portrays the Kursk invasion as an ‘incursion’ even as it celebrates the magnitude of the territory conquered as much larger than that won by Russia over many months in the Donbas. It claims that the Western powers that finance and plan its war; that trains its army; provides the weapons, targeting and intelligence for its attacks on Crimea and Russia, had no knowledge of the invasion. Only the ignorant or stupid could swallow this nonsense. We are expected to believe that Ukraine has not told the US and NATO of its invasion when it is supposedly required to tell them how far it can fire its missiles. NATO helped plan its 2023 offensive, so the idea it has not done so now – peddled by the Western media – simply exposes its output as propaganda.
A western-planned invasion of Russia using US and German armoured vehicles, and British main battle tanks has crossed another Russian red line, just as many earlier ones have been erased. There is no reason to believe that this is the last, while such a course leads to a world war and a descent into hell.
The pro-war left feigns concern for the Ukrainian people while more of its young men try to escape from being sent to the front, recruiter’s vehicles are burned, and it faces into a freezing winter with a power system mostly destroyed. Instead of supporting the end of the war it rows in behind its own imperialism’s increasingly belligerent prosecution of it, using Ukraine as its proxy.
This support for continuation of the war is in the interest of neither the Ukrainian or Russian working class. It is not even in the interest of the Ukrainian state that is now bankrupt, in hock to western imperialism, and denuded of people and territory it will not get back. The Russian state has no interest in a forever war on its doorstep, or any peace deal that sees NATO camped in whatever is left of Ukraine and that is only a temporary respite before another NATO inspired conflict is provoked. Just like the previous Minsk Accords experience.
The only player that has an interest in continuation of the war is Western imperialism, which has no concern to end the bloodshed, as it has demonstrated in its support for the Zionist state in Palestine. But as we have argued, one other minor performer has evinced no interest in an end to the war without Ukrainian victory. Why would its position be any different, having hitched itself to Western imperialism?
The Ukrainian regime is now claiming that its invasion is intended to encourage negotiations, which Russia has said are impossible while its territory has been invaded. The invasion is an initiative born of approaching Ukrainian defeat that it cannot escape, from ‘an enemy far superior in numbers and armament.’ Either Western imperialism accepts this prospect and tries to extract something from it or it escalates and crosses more red lines and brings hell closer.
Socialists should be supporting the end of this war and opposing the supply of weapons and troops to Ukraine and Eastern Europe as a whole. If they continue to support it, their claims to socialism will be a case, not of wearing the emperor’s new clothes, but of wearing the uniforms of the armed forces of western imperialism.
As we noted in the previous post, the rejection of permanent revolution in practice is ultimately a result of the abandonment of any view that the working class and socialism are relevant. It is not that the objective prerequisites of socialism do not exist – in terms of development of the forces of production and creation of a large working class – but that this class is not conscious of its interests as a class and never will be. Supporting Western imperialism in Ukraine or supporting Hamas in Gaza is a result.
For defenders of these views, being on the right side of the struggle of the oppressed is enough and everything else is secondary. Other, perhaps ‘nice to have’ factors, like specifically working class political leadership, are relegated to an indefinite future. Socialism becomes something so distant from application that it becomes akin to the promise of life after death.
As far as campaigns go, humanitarian demands raised in solidarity with the oppressed suffice to address the issues, and de facto support is provided for whatever political leadership happens to exist, justified on the basis that it does exist – the oppressed have picked their political leadership and who are we to disagree? ‘Being on the right side’ and ‘supporting the leadership of the oppressed’ become moralistic incantations that are supposed to demonstrate one’s commitment to the struggle while ironically condemning it to defeat. This approach reaches its nadir when it entails support for Western imperialism in Ukraine or Islamic fundamentalism in Palestine.
Identification of the class forces involved and the distinctions arising go missing through talk, for example, of ‘Ukraine’ and the ‘Ukrainian resistance’. Concepts such as class and the necessity for socialist leadership are rehearsed when left organisations recruit young people and provide them with what passes for a basic education in Marxism but are often ignored when real struggles develop.
* * *
Permanent revolution does not claim that certain democratic advances cannot be made by bourgeois forces (or by petty bourgeois ones) in every instance, although in the case of Ukraine and Palestine this is clear. In Ukraine, western imperialism ignores the clampdown on democratic rights by the Zelensky regime including its lack of any constitutional legitimacy. In this it repeats the events of 2014 and provides another example of the rules-based international order being whatever the Western powers say it is.
In Palestine it routinely speculates on what sort of Palestinian regime will be installed once the Zionist state has halted its genocide, with not the slightest recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to select its own government. The leaderships that are touted as potential candidates are corrupt and designed to be weapons in the hands of the Zionist state (including the Palestinian Authority).
What democratic tasks that are achieved by bourgeois forces are carried out in their own interests, which interests demand that real democratic control by the majority of a country’s people is excluded. It is ironic that those who argue that Western imperialism is in effect defending democracy in Ukraine do so when the façade of what passes for democracy is more and more exposed as fraudulent by its policy of support for genocide in Palestine.
In the West the right to protest is under attack as students are clubbed by cops and Zionist thugs in the US, while meetings are proscribed and Palestinian speakers expelled in Germany. In the US the Presidential election is between two equally repulsive senile geriatrics, almost equally unpopular, where it is almost the case that Trump is the only candidate that Biden could possibly beat and Biden the only candidate that Trump will most likely defeat.
In Britain the choice between Sunak or Starmer is rendered fundamentally meaningless since no essential differences are involved so that there is no worthwhile choice to be made. When the limits of capitalist democracy are so blatantly exposed the stupidity of the claim that these forces are defending democracy becomes impossible to vindicate. This should provide the opportunity to tear away the fraudulent pretence that imperialism is in some way the protector of any sort of democracy but this requires putting forward an alternative.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries democracy was viewed as tied tightly to the working class movement and socialism so that Friedrich Engels was able to state at one point that the two were almost synonymous. The bureaucratisation of the workers’ movement, reaching its apogee in the Stalinist states, was a product of its incorporation into, and reconciliation with, the capitalist state, either in the form of reforming the state or in the form of ‘socialism in one country’ and its pursuit of accommodation with ‘democratic’ capitalism. In doing so it lost the identification of socialism with democracy.
The associated transformation of socialism into the idea that the capitalist state is the means to socialism, or even the potential embodiment of it, has meant that the central claim of Marxism, that the emancipation of the working class must be carried out by the working class itself, has been buried and lost. This distortion is so ubiquitous it is how the idea of socialism is habitually and unthinkingly understood.
So, in Ireland the idea of a ‘left government’ (of a capitalist state) is paraded as the answer while in Britain the idea of nationalisation (capitalist state ownership) was, in the form of clause 4 of the Labour Party, the totem of socialism. Other forms of capitalist rule, such as authoritarianism or fascism, thus become not just particular forms to be opposed but turn ‘democratic capitalism’ into the ‘lesser evil’ that must be positively supported. What democratic rights that do exist thus become not just elements to be defended but reasons to ‘suspend’ opposition to capitalism and ally and subordinate socialism to the demands of ‘democratic’ capitalism.
These corrupting assumptions makes it easier for many self-declared socialists to claim that the Ukrainian state, Western imperialism, or the Russian or Chinese varieties are today’s forces of democracy, ‘anti-imperialism’ or even socialism. All such claims are what permanent revolution rejects, and the road back to the central assertion of Marxism lies through reclaiming it.
* * *
In relation to Ukraine, permanent revolution means opposition to the Russian invasion, opposition to the Ukrainian state and opposition to the intervention of Western imperialism. Opposition to war thus means organisation of the working class in opposition to membership of NATO and its rearmament.
In Palestine it means opposition to the Zionist State and its genocide and the liberation of the Palestinian people through a permanent revolution that seeks the unity of the Arab working class of the region against their exploiters and oppressors. The liberation of the Palestinian people can only be achieved by the liberation of all the working classes and oppressed in the region, which alone can offer a socialist alternative to Jewish workers and an alternative to their allegiance to Zionism.
In this, we really have no choice. The ‘democratic’ governments and states of the West have provoked a war in Ukraine and their defence of the Zionist state has shown us that there are no limits to the barbarity they will support. Continued escalation of the war in Ukraine only points us to a world war.
Russia and China are no defence against such a war because ultimately their only weapon against their Western enemies is also war. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is proof, as are the repeated threats against Taiwan and the constant provocations of the United States that threaten to precipitate it.
Perhaps it will then be clear – even to the most stupid – that imperialism defends itself, is not interested in those it exploits and is no defender of democracy. The working class, whose members are always expected to fight and die in every war, will face the choice of war or peace and that peace can only come through ending capitalism. Once again it will be permanent revolution to end the war or war to end civilisation.
Of course, we are not there yet, but one product of the war in Ukraine has been the readiness of many in the West, normally opposed to war – as previously in Iraq – to rally behind this one. The fake-left supporters of war are only a small part of this much larger constituency. However the war in Ukraine ends, with some temporary ceasefire or agreement, the conflict and antagonism between rival imperialisms is not going to go away; imperialism itself has no way of ensuring that they do not intensify, and the world will face the possibility of their eventual resolution by way of force, in the way such conflicts have been settled before.
In some ways we are back to Marx, when the working class was not ready then either:
‘although the German workers cannot come to power and achieve the realisation of their class interests without passing through a protracted revolutionary development . . . they themselves must contribute most to their final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organised party of the proletariat.’
Just as political programmes have a logic of their own irrespective of intentions, and war is the continuation of politics by other means, so does war impose its logic on those who politically support it. The pro-war left has defended support for Ukraine and the intervention of Western imperialism, but as the war has developed it has been admitted by the leaders of both Ukraine and Western imperialism that for the war to continue Western imperialism must decisively increase its intervention.
One obvious consequence is that those who initially supported Ukraine on the grounds of self-determination can no longer honestly do so, given complete reliance on the West for its success. The only way out of this lack of self-determination (that is supposed to achieve self-determination) is to argue that, ultimately, Western imperialism is a benevolent ally with no interests of its own that might conflict with those of the Ukrainian people.
Such an argument would up-end everything socialists believe about capitalism, its imperialist form, and the interests of the working class. Whatever way you look at it there is no way to avoid this consequence. You can, however, avoid admitting it, but this can only be attempted by trying to cover it up and war is very unforgiving of attempts to deny reality.
Reliance on Western imperialism has revealed the conflict as a proxy war against Russia in which the role of Ukraine is to fight and die for NATO, justified by the Ukrainian state on the grounds that membership will provide its people with security! As we have explained in many posts, NATO powers provoked the war, with the complicity of the Ukrainian state, on the understanding that it would result in Russian defeat. The build-up of the Ukrainian armed forces with the assistance of Western powers, alongside unprecedented economic sanctions, would result at worst in the crippling of Russian power and at best a return to a subservient Russian regime à la Boris Yeltsin.
The pro-war left rejected the characterisation of the war as a proxy conflict but its continuation being possible only on the basis of Western intervention means that this is not credible. The evolution of the war has meant that the position of this left is now exposed: as the saying goes, when the tide goes out you find out those who are swimming naked. To mix the metaphors, standing still with the existing justification for supporting the war will not do and it is necessary to find a reverse gear. It appears the pro-war left don’t have one.
A recent article by a leader of the Fourth International, Catherine Samary, indicates that instead of either revising its view of the war to one of opposition, or even of attempting to substantiate the claim that there is no proxy war in place, it has decided to justify the proxy war!
Samary now admits that Ukraine ‘had a vital need for its [Western] financial and military aid in the face of Russian power’ and that ‘the war consolidated NATO and favoured the militarization of budgets.’ In addition to the ‘vital’ role of Western imperialism, the directlyregressive consequence of the war for the Western working class is admitted; as is the reactionary nature of the Ukrainian regime, characterised by the ‘social attacks of Zelensky’s neoliberal regime and its ideological positions’, including its apologetics for the “values” of the West.
So, the hypocritical claims of the West are highlighted, although not in relation to the war: the claims about Russian imperialism and sole responsibility for the war, its intention to threaten the rest of Europe, and absolute necessity for its defeat – all this is shared by this left.
* * *
The first reason given for rejecting the proxy nature of the war, and the irrelevance of the reactionary nature of the Kyiv regime and progressive character of Western intervention, is the ‘popular resistance to a Russian imperial invasion.’ This, it is claimed, is the ‘essential characteristic ignored by many left-wing movements’ – ‘the massive popular mobilization . . . in the face of the Russian invasion,’ which means that we must support ‘the reality of armed and unarmed popular resistance.’
Unfortunately the armed popular resistance she claims does not exist–there are no independent working class militias, and the unarmed resistance equally has no political independent organisation since opposition parties have been proscribed. Even popular enthusiasm for the war amongst the Ukrainian population opposed to the Russian invasion is draining away, as it inevitably does in capitalist wars. She quotes an article stating that ‘at the start of the invasion, citizens from all walks of life lined up in front of the recruitment centres. Nearly two years later, that is no longer the case . . .’
She quotes another article that ‘the fragilities of the popular resistance are real after two years, analyses Oksana Dutchak, member of the editorial board of the Ukrainian journal Common. She evokes a feeling of ‘injustice in relation to the mobilization process, where questions of wealth and/or corruption lead to the mobilization of the majority (but not exclusively) of the popular classes, which goes against the ideal image of the “people’s war” in which the whole of society participates.’
Samary states that ‘while the majority opposes and may even dislike many of the government’s actions (a traditional attitude in Ukraine’s political reality for decades), opposition to the Russian invasion and distrust of any possible “peace” agreement with the Russian government . . . are stronger and there is very little chance this will change in the future.’ With these words Samary does not appear to realise that she admits the lack of any popular control of the war and it lying in the hands of the ‘neoliberal’ regime that she professes to oppose, ‘and there is very little chance this will change.’ The choice of many Ukrainians has been to flee abroad while increasing numbers of soldiers are choosing to surrender rather than die. Some have even done so on condition that they are not sent back to Ukraine in any prisoner swap.
Even the Western media, at least sections of it in the United States, demolish the ‘ideal image’ that Samary wishes to project. The Washington Post (behind a paywall ), reports that:
‘Civilians here say that means military recruiters are grabbing everyone they can. In the west, the mobilization drive has steadily sown panic and resentment in small agricultural towns and villages like Makiv, where residents said soldiers working for draft offices roam the near-empty streets searching for any remaining men.’
The report goes on:
:
The Ukrainian state is not offering people ‘the opportunity to participate in defining the future of the country’ that she says is necessary for victory. Why would a ‘neoliberal’ regime do that? Many don’t want to take part in what Samary calls the ‘popular resistance’ because they don’t want to die and don’t trust their authorities not to throw their lives away.
She acknowledges the problem that ‘the majority opposes and may even dislike many of the government’s actions’ and are also in ‘opposition to the Russian invasion’ but calls on them to swallow their doubts and fight on the basis of a political perspective composed of fairy tale illusions. These include ‘a socially just view of wartime policies and post-war reconstruction’; ‘for social and environmental justice, for democracy and solidarity in the management of the “commons”, and the defeat of any relationship of neocolonial domination.’ How would an alliance of a neoliberal regime, a congenitally corrupt state and Western imperialism deliver any of that?
She says that those opposed to the war are ‘blind to the relations of neocolonial and imperial domination of Russia’ but she is oblivious to her own blindness to Western imperialist domination, which is now able to decide whether to dump its support to Ukraine or promise more escalation, with the former promising more death and destruction and the latter involving another step towards world war.
Under what political perspective would it be possible to both oppose oppression by Russia and avoid submission to being cannon fodder for the Ukrainian state and Western imperialism? Only a socialist policy could uphold commitment to this, the first practical steps of which would be opposition to the war, opposition to the Russian invasion and NATO expansion and organisation of resistance to the demands of the Ukrainian state.
Samary has no perspective of a socialist road out of the war so has no role for the Ukrainian working class except to fight and die for a ‘national liberation’ and a ‘self-determination’ that seeks to preserve the integrity of the capitalist state but condemns many of its workers to destruction.
The first rationale for supporting the proxy war is thus becoming less and less credible as it grinds on. The Western powers are not disturbed by the loss of Ukrainian lives; so we hear more calls by British and American politicians for the age of mobilisation to be dropped so that its youth can join the roll call of death – ‘young blood’, as it is quite accurately called. But what sort of socialist supports dying for a capitalist state fighting a proxy war for imperialism?
* * *
The second rationale from Samary is expressed succinctly in one sentence as she asks – ‘was the defence of Ukrainianness “reactionary” or “petty-bourgeois” in essence?’ To which the only socialist answer is Yes.
What is ‘Ukrainness’ but a nationalist confection to be put to use by the Ukrainian ruling classes? What is the democratic content of nationalist exclusiveness encapsulated in this word, especially in a country with historically very different conceptions of what is involved in being a Ukrainian? For what reason was the right to national self-determination historically supported by Marxists, except as a democratic demand for the right of an oppressed people to break its colonial chains and create a separate state? How could this apply to Ukraine, which had already become an independent state but decided that it would employ this independence to seek a military alliance with imperialism against a rival capitalist power? And now wishes to defend itself through nationalist ideological garbage! How can all this be called socialist?
Samary has a response to these objections, if not a credible reply – the Western military alliance is not a problem! Having signed up to support for the war and the Ukrainian capitalist state she has been compelled to find reasons to also support its imperialist backers. What are they?
She states– ‘As regards NATO, the European left missed the moment of a campaign for its dissolution when this was on the agenda, in 1991.’ So no more chance of opposing NATO! This organisation has no anti-Russian agenda, she says, blaming Russia itself–in the shape of Boris Yeltsin–for dismantling the USSR, ignoring that it was the United States who did its best to keep him in power, subsequently rebuffing Russia even when it wanted to join NATO and helped NATO in Afghanistan. She even admits that :
‘Putin hoped to consolidate the Eurasian Union with Ukraine’s participation in trade with the EU, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, he intended to offer the West the services of the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) after the collapse of the United States and NATO in Afghanistan.’ Yet the West refused this cooperation.
She states that this was because of ‘the consolidation of a strong Russian state, both internally and externally’. But why, if the West sought a strong alliance, did NATO not welcome Russia as a strong ally?
It can only be that being a strong state, Russia would have its own interests that it would want accommodated, which the West was not prepared to accept. Unfortunately, this then makes the West co-perpetrators of the conflict that Samary wants to pin blame solely on Russia. In fact, given the Russian offer of cooperation, it looks like it is the Western capitalist powers who are primarily responsible for the increased rivalry between Russia and the Western capitalist powers that has led to the war. This, however, is somewhere that Samary doesn’t want to go, because it is Ukraine and its NATO sponsors that she wants to defend.
She states that ‘NATO, led by the US, was . . . “brain dead” and not threatening on the eve of the Russian invasion;’ a view that ignores its nuclear posture, its expansion into Eastern Europe, its wars in Afghanistan and Libya, its support for the end of Ukrainian neutrality, its policy of supporting Ukraine re-taking Crimea, and its assistance in building up the Ukrainian armed forces to enable it to do so. The war, she claims, ‘gave back a “raison d’être” to NATO and the arms industries’, presumably because they didn’t have a reason to exist beforehand? Who can seriously believe such nonsense? And from someone claiming to be on the ‘left’!
If we sum up, support for the war now involves a new mobilisation in Ukraine while demoting its increasing unpopularity and the stench of corruption surrounding it. It means defending the role of the Western powers against Russia, despite the consequences of militarisation on workers in the West, including its impact on working class living standards.
It involves whitewashing the role of NATO while dismissing opposition to it as a bus that has been missed. It argues instead for ‘general socialized control over the production and use of armaments’, that is, workers control of militarisation and imperialist war! Impossible to conceive as something real and utterly reactionary as a mere concept.
The policy of support for the current war thus inevitably entails alliances with reactionary forces in the West: ‘broad fronts of solidarity with Ukraine can include – and this is important – an “anti-Russian” Ukrainian immigration supporting neoliberal policies like those of Zelensky, and uncritical of the EU and NATO. It is essential to work towards respecting pluralism within these fronts . . .’
The circle of a reactionary pact is completed. And all this under an article entitled Arguments for a “left agenda”. Whoever pretends such an agenda has anything ‘left’ about it is either an idiot or is seeking to recruit one.
At some point the war in Ukraine will end but the rationale for the pro-war left to continue to defend Western imperialism will remain. It will, in other words, continue an agenda best described, in Marxist terms, as social-imperialist – socialism in words (although Samary doesn’t even manage this!) and pro-imperialist in action.
The presentation of the war in Ukraine in the Western media is exactly like that of the genocide in Gaza. Just as history began with the Russian invasion on 24 February 2022, so the ‘war’ in Gaza was started by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Russia and Hamas are to blame.
The majority of the Left has correctly sought to put October 7 into context, to be understood as an almost inevitable explosion arising from brutal oppression. In the case of Ukraine the context has all but been ignored, and in any event Russia is not an oppressed people and it had a choice. Of course, both of these observations are true, which are some of the reasons why Sráid Marx has not supported the Russian invasion, but this does not excuse the failure of the pro-war left to provide a coherent explanation of why the invasion took place.
Their impoverished attempts to do so, based on the flawed understanding of history and megalomaniacal mental disposition of Vladimir Putin, is about as useful for the task as depending on the flawed understanding of Jewish history and psychopathic tendencies of Benjamin Netanyahu to explain Israeli actions, or the antisemitic, crazed impulse for revenge of Hamas. Personalising such causes, or placing the onus on the inhuman character of those you don’t like, prevents understanding of the real causes and in this case avoids having to account for the interests of the Russian state, consideration of which might invite deliberation on those of the Ukrainian and Western states. This might lead to comparisons between them that would dissolve the simple narrative of big against small, good facing evil, and freedom opposing oppression.
This year is the tenth anniversary of the Maidan demonstrations and occupation, which is sometimes given as context to, and presented as the start of, the Russian aggression, although this is a particularly difficult ‘revolution’ for the left to hang its coat upon. This ‘revolution of dignity’ was based on the illusion that an EU association agreement would lead to Western standards of living, and put an end to corruption with the introduction of democracy, so that the then Ukrainian President was wrong to accept the alternative offer from Russia and attempt to repress the popular movement by force.
Unfortunately, such a story of a pure democratic movement repressed by a Russian proxy does no justice to the events, as explained before here and here. These include the issues raised in prior attempts to negotiate a deal with the EU, Russia making a better offer, and the EU deal threatening the livelihoods of millions of workers in uncompetitive industries in the East of the country. The Maidan uprising was not therefore universally supported but was based on liberal illusions and sponsorship by the US, including by Western backed NGOs.
The occupation of the Square was led by far-right forces that may well have been to blame for the final massacre. The oligarchic Government and state that arose out of this ‘revolution’ continued to be riddled with corruption and was a creature moulded at least in part by the US, including through collaboration with its secret police, the SBU. Even this Ukrainian supporter of the war cannot help admitting that the Maidan revolt was highjacked by the right.
From 2014 Ukraine built up a large army and adopted a policy of recovering Crimea and the other areas in the East occupied by Russia. Integration into NATO began and the penetration of the US through its usual vehicles, such as the CIA, has been admitted even by a US publication that cannot be accused of providing excuses for Russia. This source makes it abundantly clear that the Ukrainian state was a willing proxy for US imperialism long before the Russian invasion and that 24 February 2022 was very definitely not the ‘first shot’.
This function continues and has increased enormously through the war. Speaking about the role of the CIA at its commencing, Ivan Bakanov, then head of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, stated that “Without them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians, or to beat them”.
The details of this, disclosed by The New York Times, were “a closely guarded secret for a decade”, including from the Ukrainian people. What this demonstrates is that the Ukrainian state and political regime–that the pro-war left in the West supports–walked the Ukrainian people into a war in a process of which they were blissfully ignorant. It proves yet again the old socialist adage that the main enemy is at home.
This left has been unable to tell the difference between the Ukrainian state, people and working class, and has loudly declared the ‘agency’ of Ukraine against charges of the war being a proxy one on behalf of Western imperialism. It is surely beyond doubt that the price paid to become part of NATO isn’t worth it. It is also clear what agency has been active in Ukraine before and during the war, and thus bears some responsibility for it, although this is an agency the pro-war left would like to deny.
The Ukrainian state worked against the interests of the Ukrainian people, and it behoves socialists to explain this and to work towards the working class in the country acting as an agency on its own behalf, not as cannon-fodder for the capitalist state. The pro-war left that declares its defence of the Ukrainian people and working class can’t do this because it can’t tell the difference between their separate interests and so never makes a real distinction between them. Since the working class has no independent organisation separate and opposed to the Ukrainian state the left supports the state, while lip service is paid to working class interests that are never political but simply express economistic demands compatible with, in fact subordinated to, the war.
* * *
in November 2021, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced a ‘Strategic Partnership’ with Ukraine that included a commitment to supporting its objective of taking the territory lost to Russia, including Crimea. On the 17th December Russia sent an ultimatum demanding a reduction of Western military deployments in Eastern Europe and an official end to attempts to bring Ukraine into NATO. Inside Ukraine, Zelensky sanctioned three ‘pro-Russian’ TV channels and arrested the opposition leader, Viktor Medvedchuk. He demanded new and immediate sanctions, and questioned why Ukraine didn’t have an ‘open door’ into NATO given that it was functioning as Europe’s ‘reliable shield’ against Russia. The dynamic towards war and Western involvement was set, explaining why the invasion did not come out of the blue from the deranged mind of a Russian dictator.
The immediate UK media response was to paint Russia’s Special Military Operation as a ‘full-scale invasion’ that aimed to invade and occupy the whole country, with Reuters reporting that “Ukraine’s forces no match for Russia in manpower, gear and experience.” Russia was, after all, the great bear threatening the whole Western world and prime justification for the creation and existence of NATO.
Since the total Russian invading army was smaller than the Ukrainian, and much smaller when the latter’s reserves were included, this did not make much sense, since we all learned that a ratio of at least 3 to 1 was required for the attacking force. Russia launched 600 airstrikes in the first ten days, far fewer than the 2,000 strikes launched in the first days of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Two years later, the civilian deaths attributed to Russia are around 10,000, less than one third of those inflicted by the Israeli state in less than a quarter of the time. While the former led to massive economic sanctions; unprecedented supply of weapons and ammunition that drained the stock of materiel from the Western world; billions of dollars and Euros in financial support, and supply of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR); in Gaza it led to sanctions, weapons, finance and ISR as well, except the sanctioned were those being massacred and the assistance went to those committing the genocide.
One might think that this would torpedo Western justification for supporting Ukraine, at least among the left, but this didn’t happen, even when the Ukrainian state declared its solidarity with the Israeli state and the Israeli state reciprocated.
Presenting the Russian offensive as a ‘full-scale invasion’ that aimed to occupy the whole country made it possible for Western ‘experts’ to repeatedly denounce it as a failure when this very obviously wasn’t happening. Russia’s characterisation of it as a ‘Special Military Operation’ (that did not require full scale mobilisation beforehand) was derided as simply a dishonest pretence.
Since the West ensured that quick ceasefire negotiations in March 2022 were torpedoed, and promises were made to support Ukraine in a fight to the end, the Russian state then did much of what the western media claimed it had already done. It expanded its military-industrial complex and mobilised hundreds of thousands of new troops, which the Western media denounced without acknowledging that this was already supposed to have happened.
The media, having predicted a quick Russian victory, then took to ridiculing the incompetence of the Russian forces, reporting its massive casualties and hailing its coming total defeat. Their retreat from Kyiv was hailed as a huge reverse, as was the later retreat from much of Kharkiv in the East and Kherson in the West. This ignored that fighting around Kyiv was more a series of skirmishes than a massive full-frontal assault; that the loss of significant territory in Kharkiv was due to thin defences that proved the invasion had not been ‘full-scale’, and that the retreat back across the Dnieper was a well-executed manoeuvre that made perfect sense from a military point of view.
None of this means that these were not victories for Ukraine, but they were not the disasters for Russia painted in the West. Influential media like Foreign Affairs carried articles such as “How Not to Invade a Nation” while Russia Matters declared “No End in Sight to Beginning of Putin’s End”. Russian advances were written off–“Russia’s Capture of Azovstal: Symbolic Success, ‘Pyrrhic’ Victory?” said Radio Liberty Europe.
The British media reported that “Vladimir Putin’s total defeat is now within reach”, according to The Telegraph on 8 Sept 2022.
“Putin is finished. The Ukrainians have him on the ropes” in The Telegraph, on 11 Sept 2022 .
“Humiliation for Vladimir Putin as Ukrainians liberate key city of Lyman” said The Guardian on 1 Oct 2022, and
Ukrinform on 19 November 2022 stated that “Defense Ministry predicts Ukrainian forces be back in Crimea by end of December”.
This obviously biased and ignorant approach continued with the promise, repeatedly delayed, of a Ukrainian offensive in the spring of 2023. Russia was apparently not only running out of missiles (repeatedly) and had suffered horrendous losses of men and tanks, but the low morale of its troops could mean a rapid victory for the new NATO armed and trained Ukrainian brigades.
In the event, Russia continued to fire its missiles at various levels of intensity; its first defences were hardly reached never mind breached, and the morale of the Russian army held while that of Ukraine fell following the utter failure of the offensive and the high level of losses incurred. It appeared, after it was all over, that during the offensive Russia had captured as much territory as Ukraine.
There then began the claim that the war was at a stalemate, with little territorial gains by either side, while stories of repeated meat grinder assaults causing horrific casualties were attributed to the Russians that had in fact become a feature of the previous Ukrainian offensive. This was combined with incompatible stories about the considerable Russian advantage in artillery in what was characterised as a war of position. Pro-Russian propaganda pointed out that this was precisely the Russian strategy – of degrading Ukrainian forces rather than seeking territorial gains, which would ultimately follow.
The only way to gain any appreciation of the state of the conflict from a military point of view was to look at this propaganda (with a critical eye). This, of course, was not something the pro-war and Pro-Ukraine left was inclined to do. The defeat at Bakhmut was thus the story of the loss of a strategically unimportant town and not that of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, while the grinding war of attrition was still a stalemate at a time when Russia was making more advances than the previous heralded Ukrainian assaults. Reading Western coverage of the war was like reading a crime novel in which pro-Russian outlets had already revealed in previous months who had been killed, how they had been killed and who was guilty.
Even now, the story is being told that Ukraine is losing only because of lack of resolve by the West and that victory is still possible. More weapons and ammunition should be supplied even though it is now admitted that neither the troops to wield them, nor the materiel itself, exist in sufficient quantity. This leads to the siren calls for NATO infantry on the ground and NATO aircraft in the sky. This became another illustration of the claim that if Ukraine falls the rest of Europe will be next, while having claimed during most of the last two years that Russia was losing.
Repeated lies by the Western media, its contradictory claims and their clash with reality should have caused the more fundamental lies about the nature of the war to be questioned and rejected. However, having swallowed Western imperialist explanation and justification for the war, the pro-war Left by and large also became subject to the illusions peddled about its course. They have become stuck in support for a proxy war that has the potential to escalate catastrophically and a political position that can only oppose catastrophe when the grounds for it have already been created.
The second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to several retrospective summaries of the war and recapitulation of the arguments about its justification. This should have involved an examination of the various claims made about its course over the two years and how they stand up today, but this was studiously avoided. If we take even a cursory look at these claims, we can see how the lies told by the Western media about the war have increasingly been shredded by reality. Instead of winning against a stupid and incompetent Russia the all-powerful NATO might be losing? But let us come to that presently.
The genocide in Gaza has to a great extent eclipsed the war while the bias and lying of the Western media has increasingly been impossible to hide. That the BBC live-streamed the Israeli case at the International Court of Justice but not the South African is just one example. While driving my car this morning Sky News reported that one hundred Palestinians had just ‘died’, which must be taken to refer to the killing by the Israeli army of their desperately starving victims attempting to get food from one of the few aid convoys the Zionists allowed through.
All this should provide grounds for clarifying the nature of the war in Ukraine but instead these have been treated as two entirely separate happenings, including by much of the left, which supports the actions of the United States in one and damns it in the other; excuses its intervention in one and rejects all its excuses in the other. And we are supposed to believe this makes sense.
So, the war in Ukraine is the war in Ukraine; and the genocide in Gaza is but the latest murderous assault on the Palestinian people that must be addressed by a Palestinian solidarity movement. The long adopted method of single issue campaigns, designed supposedly to involve the maximum number of people, is exposed as divorced from reality. Rather than help explain the world, it fragments reality and is an obstacle to understanding it. Without such understanding the fundamental cause of war – capitalism – will forever lurk in the background, smothered by the appearance of this or that conflict, inviting this or that ‘solution’ that often relies on the criminals who caused it.
Much of the Western left has supported the Ukrainian state, and Western intervention, which is now accepted in Washington and Kyiv as the only thing keeping it going, with repeated threats that it will lose very soon if Western weapons do not continue to come. Since money on its own does not kill Russians the reckless sponsorship of the war has been exposed because the Western powers no longer have the ammunition or other war materiel to keep Ukraine fighting.
Zelensky promises a new offensive in 2025 but the integrity of his armed forces might not last that long. Western powers are scrounging ammunition from various parts of the globe, but these simply mean that Ukrainians will keep on fighting and dying a little longer. The alternative is the provision of more advanced weapons such as longer-range missiles and F-16 aircraft but these cross previous red lines, risk Russian retaliatory escalation and will not lead to Ukrainian victory. In turn this risks further Ukrainian attempts to provoke greater Western intervention.
Threats to directly intervene with troops on the ground have only revealed that some have already been there and many of them have been killed. A Russian officer has already stated that “NATO military personnel, under the guise of mercenaries, participate in hostilities. They control air defence systems, tactical missiles and multiple launch rocket systems, and are part of assault detachments.” The loss of over 60 French ‘mercenaries’ has already been reported in Kharkiv. Now the German Chancellor Olaf Sholtz has let slip that the British and French are using their own troops to target and fire their missiles. And someone else has revealed discussions within the German armed forces to attack Russia.
What successes Ukraine have achieved, such as the sinking of Russian warships and scarce and expensive surveillance aircraft, could only have been accomplished with Western systems, intelligence and personnel. The most advanced weapons systems can only be used effectively by forces trained and familiar with them while their servicing and maintenance requires similar support. None of this has prevented increasingly rapid Russian advances on the ground.
Stopping, and reversing, this could not be achieved even by French, German, British or US troops on the ground without creation of a massive intervention force that these countries are currently in no position to construct and employ. This has not excluded repeated announcements of the possibility of Western troops being sent to take part directly in the fighting. This, even if on a limited scale, has the potential to lead to a World War. The piloting of F-16 fighters by NATO pilots, with the green light by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to attack targets in Russia, shows one path to escalation and war.
The prospect of Western infantry in Ukraine raised by Macron and shot down by others reflects awareness of the possibility of defeat, which Biden in particular has cause to fear, if this becomes clear before the November Presidential election. Even If Western escalation were partial, limited to occupation of Western Ukraine, Russia has the capacity to continue to move forward to achieving its aims, which would be expanded to account for a Western incursion.
Left supporters of the Ukrainian state face the defeat of what has, politically, become their own proxy in their imagined progressive struggle alongside Western imperialism. The presumed priority of Russian defeat would require massive Western imperialist intervention, with the risks discussed, and serves to justify the most reactionary nationalism in Eastern Europe (to be covered later).
Given the nature of the parties involved, exemplified in the massive disparity in power of the two forces, it is not Western imperialism that has become a proxy for the Left but the Left that has become a bourgeois proxy within the socialist movement. Such is the position this pro-imperialist Left has put itself by supporting a pro-Western capitalist state in a war and by also supporting the assistance provided to it by Western imperialism.
The split personality of this left can be seen in their support in the case of Ukraine and opposition in the case of Palestine, as if all the Western powers are confused as to what is in their interests. This disorder is as real for those that straight-forwardly support Ukraine and deny the proxy nature of the war as it is for those who directly express their confusion by both supporting the capitalist Ukrainian state while opposing the assistance of the capitalist states supporting it.
Defence of the Palestinian people will not be advanced by upholding in Ukraine the imperialist supporters of the Zionist state that is carrying out genocide, or by claiming that it is capable of playing a progressive role in one but not the other.
Of course, the genocide in Gaza is immediately more obvious and easier to argue, and especially more convenient for the moralistic approach that single-issue campaigns rely upon. But for exactly this reason it is important to show how the two require the same approach and are not two single issues but two expressions of the one oppressive system that must face one combined struggle against it.
Both are wars by proxies of US imperialism in order to defend its hegemonic position in Europe and the Middle East. Both reveal the poverty of its putative capitalist rivals. The Russian invasion is incapable of stirring the sympathy of the workers of the world, and China, as the ultimate target of the US, cannot politically defend the Russian invasion. In the case of Gaza, these putative leaders of the alternative pole of imperialist power have stood aside while the Zionist state commits genocide. Russia and China have not made even a significant symbolic gesture by expelling the Israeli ambassador, while its BRICS associate, Saudi Arabia, has facilitated trade with Israel to nullify the efforts of the Houthis in Yemen to block it. Iran has been as keen as the US to limit its opposition through its allies so that it can avoid war between them.
In both cases the Left, of almost all shades, sees no role for socialism in ending these capitalist wars but puts forward purely formal democratic proposals that do not go beyond capitalist solutions and have no bearing on reality. This includes the demand for ‘self-determination’ for Ukraine when the part of it allied to the West is already utterly reliant and subordinated to it.
In Gaza, the renewed murder and displacement of Palestinians has revived the debate over a two state or one state solution, neither of which are socialist and neither of which address the over-reaching power of the Zionist state, its US sponsors, or the opposition of the autocratic Arab regimes, which oppose the creation of any democratic Palestinian state lest it act as a beacon of inspiration for their own oppressed populations.
The hypocrisy that has been exposed by the two conflicts is a starting point to enlightening working people about the depraved and ruthless nature of the societies they live in, and that the scope and scale of the barbarity exposed is not accidental but is a fundamental feature. This means that only a complete reordering of society will work and that this is what the socialist alternative involves. If capitalist war does not demand and call for a socialist alternative then activists opposed to these wars will never be able to promise that one day they will end.
The Ukrainian and British Governments have just signed a security agreement that is supposed to be the first of many to follow with other Western countries. What attitude should the supporters of Ukraine take to this agreement? Should they support it? After all, it promises an increase in military commitment from £2.3bn in 2021 and 2022 to £2.5bn in 2024, and the pro-Ukrainian left supports the provision of arms to Ukraine because it knows that without it the country would already have lost the war.
The main objective of the Agreement is ‘to ensure Ukrainian Armed Forces and security forces are able to fully restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its internationally recognised borders,’ which is precisely the objective of the Ukraine supporting left.
Of course, the agreement is also ‘committed to implementing the full set of policy requirements as set out in the IMF programme’, with Ukraine being able to ‘attract private finance, boost investor confidence, tackle corruption and create a fair and level playing field for all parties, including through a reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs).’ This is all to be ‘underpinned by a strong private sector-led economy. The UK will seek to build a modern, resilient and sustainable Ukrainian economy that is integrated into global markets, is not susceptible to hostile Russian influence . . . ‘
This is obviously an imperialist charter but the intervention of the Western powers is usually dismissed as ‘of course’ the West is intervening ‘in its own interests’, which is taken to effectively bat away the problem, although how it does so outside the world of the pro-Ukraine left remains a mystery. Would not NATO membership, as supported in the Agreement, swiftly follow ‘victory’? Not to mention widespread privatisation and exploitation? This is after all, what we mean by the West intervening ‘in its own interests’. In what way then is this a victory for the working class, unless the continued integrity of the Ukrainian state is paramount to this Left as it is to the Ukrainian ruling capitalist class and Western backers?
This left is keen that Ukraine is not saddled with onerous debt and the Agreement has an answer to this – ‘the Participants reaffirm that the Russian Federation must pay for the long-term reconstruction of Ukraine’, so that’s sorted? Well, the idea that Western countries such as the US and Britain will pay to restore Ukraine and scrub its debt, when the debt of these countries themselves has exploded, is another mysterious eventuality of the pro-Ukraine left.
Since military victory against the Russian invasion is the absolute priority, it is hard to see how this Left, including its British component, cannot support this Agreement. Since they advocate that everything else must wait until this success there can be no reason for it not to be welcomed. Besides, stating support for some of it and not for others is a bit like saying that I want the chocolate from the chocolate cake but not the sugar, butter, eggs and flour – good luck with that!
In fact, opposing it because of the clear imperialist intentions of Britain within the Agreement implies that Ukraine also cannot be supported because these intentions are agreed and shared. Unfortunately, prioritising support to Ukraine then means endorsing British imperialism, its partner in agreeing all the measures promised. In fact the Agreement declares that Ukraine will defend the British state should it be attacked! And why not? (section 5.7) By supporting the capitalist Ukrainian state which in turn supports the British imperialist state, by one remove, so does this British Left.
The Agreement caused some apprehension because it said that ‘in the event of future Russian armed attack against Ukraine, at the request of either of the Participants, the Participants will consult within 24 hours to determine measures needed to counter or deter the aggression. The UK undertakes that, in those circumstances . . . it would: provide Ukraine with swift and sustained security assistance, modern military equipment across all domains as necessary. . .’
It was thought that this might mean any new incursion by Russia into Ukraine, such as around Kharkiv or from Belarus, would cause direct British troop involvement, but this seems not to be the case. This would entail war between Britain and Russia. The British would need the US on-side and the US to believe that NATO would not fracture in such a situation with some European states perhaps considering that it was not in their interests to suffer the costs of fighting for Ukraine.
The Agreement also implies the threat to confiscate the estimated $300bn in assets of Russia currently frozen in the West, mainly in Europe; the latest wheeze that could save Western countries from an expense it is more and more unwilling to bear. The Russians have called this piracy, and it is difficult not to accept this description.
The pro-war Left might point to Western hypocrisy, especially its current support to Israel, but again, in the circumstances of absolute (that is unqualified) support to Ukraine, pointing to hypocrisy would be the height of their opposition. They could, I guess, say that two wrongs do not make a right and that therefore Russian ‘imperialism’ should be made to pay. What they can’t do is damn all the capitalist pirates and villains in the conflict because that again would include the West and its Ukrainian proxy.
Ukraine might not actually see much, if any, of this $300bn as much of it would go to the US (primarily) and other Western arms manufacturers to pay for past, current and future arms purchases. What isn’t military hardware would go to Western contractors in Ukraine, with no doubt something for the local oligarchs and some reduction of the burgeoning Ukrainian state debt.
The Agreement’s objective to ‘fully restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its internationally recognised borders’ is a recipe for slaughter and bloodshed on a massive scale. The summer 2023 Ukrainian offensive led to the massacre of tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, and they didn’t even reach the first of three defensive lines. The offensive was called off because of the losses. To think that a new offensive can succeed is to support the press-gang of hundreds of thousands Ukrainian workers, men and women, many of whom have either fled the country, hope to escape, or hide in their homes out of fear of being apprehended on the streets by the recruiting commissars of the Ukrainian army. Even with this conscripted-against-their-will army Ukraine cannot succeed.
An interview with two supporters of this objective, who believe it can be achieved – one from Ukraine and one from Russia – declare that ‘we have to end the Russian invasion as a priority. They state that ‘the government’s stance is clear about fighting for the sovereignty of Ukraine’, and that the war ‘is, first and foremost, a people’s war for national liberation’. ‘The key priorities of the state should be based on the protection of people’s interests, fostering social cohesion, and promoting global solidarity against oppression.’
They repeat the maxim that ‘the Ukrainians have the right to defend themselves; they are the main victims in this conflict. This label of ‘proxy war’ doesn’t give any agency to the Ukrainians themselves.’ Yet it is acknowledged that, for the working class ‘there are not really other viable options in terms of separate fighting militias and units at the moment.’
The objectives and conduct of the war are thus in the hands of the Ukrainian state, in so far as it is not in the hands of its Western sponsors. Thus, the ‘agency’ we are to bow down to is that of this state, including its conscription of workers to be flung onto the front in meat-grinder assaults. The agency of Ukrainian workers does not stretch to having their own militias, never mind determining the objectives of the war and how it is to be conducted.
This is not considered a problem because ‘the sovereignty of Ukraine’, that is, the sovereignty of the Ukrainian capitalist state is what must be defended for these ‘socialists’; not that of the working class. They believe that the Ukrainian capitalist state can be made to base itself ‘on the protection of people’s interests, fostering social cohesion, and promoting global solidarity against oppression.’ What capitalist state has ever displayed these features?
The Agreement is further evidence that the Ukrainian state is basing itself on Western imperialism and that such lofty and fanciful views are preposterous and unbelievable, including its aspiration to ‘a hundred-year partnership.’
The Ukrainian interviewed believes that ‘some on the left . . . put an ideological lens on the war that obscures rather than clarifies, but actually obscures the situation for real people on the ground.’ Except hundreds of thousands of dead are not just ‘on the ground’ but underneath it, while tens of thousands more are disfigured and disabled above it. The coerced conscription of the unwilling, who are not prepared to die for their state, is forcing many to hide while hundreds of thousands of refugees will not go home. It is the supporters of Ukraine who give no evidence of appreciating the bloody consequences of the war while displaying total innocence of any understanding of its capitalist character.
The interviewee, Vasylyna, asserts that the war ‘is, first and foremost, a people’s war for national liberation’, while she admits the workers cannot even organise themselves in their own defence: since when did British imperialism ever support ‘a people’s war for national liberation’?
‘The “deliverance” of Ukraine does not at all constitute the fundamental aim of the Allied governments. Both in the further progress of the war and after its conclusion, Ukraine will become but a pawn in the great game of the capitalist giants. Failing the intervention of the third power, Revolution, Ukraine may as a result of the war either remain in Western bondage, or fall under the yoke of Russia, or be divided between the powerful robbers of the two coalitions.’
Of course, Trotsky spoke of Belgium and not Ukraine, and of it being divided between Germany and Britain and not the West and Russia, but these are the only differences. If some ‘socialists’ pretend that the victory of the US and NATO, or of Russia, will not witness the subjugation of the Ukrainian working class to the impositions of one or the other, or more likely both, they no longer understand how the world works.
Plans are already being advanced to sell off what is useful to the Western powers who have forked out so much money and weapons to ensure the Russians are defeated; the Russian main interest is that no sort of Ukraine is ever strong enough to be an effective ally of Western imperialism. Of course, supporters of Russia see no harm in this but their concern for the working class is so subliminal they do not stop to consider the consequences of this for the Ukrainian working class. Heads they win and tails you lose, unless you stop playing the imperialist game.
As Trotsky put it ‘The independence of the Belgians, Serbians, Poles, Armenians and others is regarded by us not as part of the Allied war program . . . but belongs to the program of the fight of the international proletariat against imperialism.’
The supporters of the capitalist state of Ukraine defend its reliance on Western imperialist weapons so their claims to stand for any sort of Ukrainian independence are something of a joke; while the supporters of Russia defend the destitution of that part of Ukraine not to be annexed on the grounds of the primacy of the security of the Russian capitalist state. Their claim that the Russian intervention is some sort of protection of (part of) the Ukrainian population is also a joke, akin to the claims of many Western ‘humanitarian’ interventions of recent history.
In both cases the outcome of either policy is light years away from socialism or any move towards it. Trotsky put forward three possible outcomes of war:
‘Theoretically, three typical possibilities may here be considered: (1) a decisive victory of one of the parties; (2) a general exhaustion of the opponents without decisive sway of one over the other; (3) the intervention of the revolutionary proletariat, which interrupts the “normal” development of military events.’
To work towards the last, to whatever extent possible, is the task of socialists. At the very least they must understand that this is the alternative they must strive for:
‘As regards the third possible issue of the war, it seems to be the clearest. It presupposes that while the war is still on, the international proletariat rises with a force sufficient to paralyze and finally to stop the war from below. Obviously, in this most favourable case, the proletariat, having been powerful enough to stop the war, would not be likely to limit itself to that purely conservative program which goes no further than the renunciation of annexations.’
We have already seen that for Lenin the correct view on annexation is that it ‘is violation of the self-determination of a nation, it is the establishment of state frontiers contrary to the will of the population.’ (Lenin, The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up) while the correct approach is the ‘freedom to settle the question of secession by means of a referendum of the nation that desires to secede’ (The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination)
Trotsky notes that the French “socialists” had approached the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine from Germany by reducing ‘the consultation of the population of Alsace-Lorraine to a shameful comedy: first occupying (that is, acquisition by force of arms) and then asking the population’s consent to be annexed. It is quite clear that a real consultation presupposes a state of revolution whereby the population can give their reply without being threatened by a revolver, be it German or French.’
He goes on: ‘The only acceptable content of the slogan “without annexations” is a protest against new violent acquisitions, which only amounts to the negation of the rights of nations to self-determination. But we have seen that this democratically unquestionable “right” is being and will necessarily be transformed into the right of strong nations to make acquisitions and impose oppression, whereas for the weak nations it will mean an impotent wish or a “scrap of paper.” Such will be the case as long as the political map of Europe forces nations and their fractions within the framework of states separated by tariff barriers and continually impinging upon one another in their imperialist fights.’
‘It is possible to overcome this regime only by means of a proletarian revolution. Thus, the centre of gravity lies in the union of the peace program of the proletariat with that of the social revolution.’
‘We saw above that socialism, in the solution of concrete questions in the field of national state groups, can make no step without the principle of national self-determination, which latter in its last instance appears as the recognition of the right of every national group to decide its national fate, hence as the right of peoples to sever themselves from a given state (as for instance from Russia or Austria). The only democratic way of getting to know the “will” of a nation is the referendum. This democratic obligatory reply will, however, in the manner described, remain purely formal. It does not enlighten us with regard to the real possibilities, ways and means of national self-determination under the present conditions of capitalist economy; and yet the crux of the matter lies in this.’
‘For many, if not for the majority of the oppressed nations, national groups and factions, the meaning of self-determination is the cancellation of the existing borders and the dismemberment of present states. In particular, this democratic principle leads to the deliverance of the colonies. Yet the whole policy of imperialism aims at the extension of state borders regardless of the national principle . . .’
‘ . . . the national-separatist movement very often finds support in the imperialist intrigue of the neighbouring state. This support, however, becomes decisive only in the application of war might. As soon as there is an armed conflict between two imperialist organisations, the new state boundaries will not be decided on the ground of the national principle, but on the basis of the relative military forces.’
‘. . . even if by a miracle Europe were divided by force of arms into fixed national states and small states, the national question would not thereby be in the least decided and, the very next day after the righteous national redistributions, capitalist expansion would resume its work. Conflicts would arise, wars and new acquisitions, in complete violation of the national principle in all cases where its preservation cannot be maintained by a sufficient number of bayonets. It would all give the impression of gamblers being forced to divide the gold justly among themselves in the middle of the game, in order to start the same game all over again with double rage.’
‘The right of national self-determination cannot be excluded from the proletarian peace program; neither can it claim absolute importance. On the contrary, it is, in our view, limited by deep, progressive, criss-crossing tendencies of historical development. If this “right” is by means of revolutionary power, set over against the imperialist methods of centralisation which place weak and backward peoples under the yoke and crush national culture, then on the other hand the proletariat cannot allow the “national principle” to get in the way of the inevitable and deeply progressive tendencies of the present industrial order towards a planned organisation throughout our continent, and further, all over the globe.’
The war in Ukraine is not the product of either the revolutionary power of the working class against narrow nationalist claims, or the international development of ‘the present industrial order towards a planned organisation throughout our continent’, and Ukraine is being destroyed not built up. Both the West and Russia are developing their industry for the purposes of increasing the means of destruction in a capitalist rivalry over how their respective developments are to weigh against each other in the current and future wars. Were a war of ‘progressive tendencies of the present industrial order towards a planned organisation throughout our continent’ to occur it would not entail the incorporation of Ukraine into the European Union but would have the aim of also including Russia.
To contemplate this would involve two further considerations involving the breaking away of Europe from subordination to the United States, and the misgivings of China that a new European capitalist power might seek to exercise its power against it.
Liberals appear to labour under the illusion that, despite the whole history of nation states being one of revision of borders, the settlement since World War II is inviolable; except of course when it suits their purposes, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, break-up of Yugoslavia and expansion of Israel. The example of Ukraine demonstrates that there is no final and settled solution to the national question, or to the wars asserting national rights, within capitalism, which turn each claim to national rights into a claim for exploitation.
This does not, of course, absolve us from attempting to address each question concretely in its particularities to advance democratic measures in so far as we can, but it does indicate where the ultimate resolution lies.
Sráid Marx 