The answer to the question how to oppose war seems simple – to fight for peace. In the article ‘Socialism and War’ Lenin set out the view of socialists, at that time in relation to the First World War, but applicable to the attitude to war in general:
‘Socialists have always condemned war between nations as barbarous and brutal. But our attitude towards war is fundamentally different from that of the bourgeois pacifists (supporters and advocates of peace) and of the Anarchists. We differ from the former in that we understand the inevitable connection between wars and the class struggle within the country; we understand that war cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created; and we also differ in that we fully regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-owners, serfs against land-owners, and wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive and necessary.’
When wars break out, those concerned with the oppressed are often impatient at the argument that war is inevitable under capitalism and that the fundamental task is to overthrow it and start the building of a socialist society. More immediate tasks always seem more pressing and demand attention with the argument that all those on the side of the oppressed must unite to stop the worst of immediate suffering.
The task, of course, is not to ignore these immediate tasks, but unless they go hand in hand with creating a movement and party that will lead to the overthrow of capitalism such campaigns will have little role to play in preventing greater and more barbarous oppression in the future. Good intentions count for naught in politics. Those who have been involved in politics longer will have seen multiple wars and will know that to simply oppose war with peace is treating symptoms but not the disease.
The current weakness of the socialist movement partially explains the pursuit of substitutes for it, which for some is ‘Ukraine’, for others Russia, and for others an unwillingness to consider such political considerations at all, with immersion in activity devoid of long-term perspectives: waiting for the next war so to demand peace. Without stopping to think how can war be stopped before it starts – what is it that creates war after war.
Trotsky in The Programme for Peace dealt with this question in the midst of the First World War:
‘What is a peace program? From the viewpoint of the ruling classes or of the parties subservient to them, it is the totality of the demands, the ultimate realisation of which must be ensured by the power of militarism. Hence, for the realisation of Miliukov’s “peace program” Constantinople must be conquered by force of arms. Vandervelde’s “peace program” requires the expulsion of the Germans from Belgium as an antecedent condition. Bethmann-Holweg’s plans were founded on the geographical warmap. From this standpoint the peace clauses reflect but the advantages achieved by force of arms. In other words, the peace program is the war program.’ So, today, the peace programme of Ukraine and its supporters, and the peace programme of Russia and it supporters, is the war programme of the Ukrainian and Russian capitalist states, which some socialists have decided to endorse. For the former peace will come only from expulsion of Russia from all of Ukraine while for the latter peace will only be assured by a Ukraine too weak to join with NATO in threatening Russia and its legitimate security.
Consider too, for example, the peace programme of my local anti-war movement, which put out the following leaflet, which states that ‘The Belfast Anti War Group has opposed the war in the Ukraine and has called for a ceasefire and negotiations.’ But who and what will determine the outcome of the negotiations and what relationship will the outcome of the negotiations have for ‘the oppressed’; never mind the interests of ending war for good through socialism?
The answers are obvious – the stronger in the war will define the peace and the peace will be the victory of one capitalist power over the other; it will not care for the oppressed and far from bringing forward the end of war will simply create the grounds and starting point for the next. It will not advance the interests of the working class and socialism.
This is what the call for the ending of war by negotiations means.
Trotsky’s following words could have been written for today, with reference to Ukraine instead of Belgium:
‘For the revolutionary proletariat, the peace program does not mean the demands which national militarism must fulfill, but those demands which the international proletariat intends to enforce by dint of its revolutionary fight against militarism in all countries. The more the international revolutionary movement expands, the less will the peace questions depend on the purely military position of the antagonists.’
‘This is rendered most clear to us by the question of the fate of small nations and weak states.’
‘The war began with a devastating invasion of Belgium and Luxemburg by the German armies. In the echo created by the violation of the small country, beside the false and egotistic anger of the ruling classes of the enemy, there reverberated also the genuine indignation of the common masses whose sympathy was attracted by the fate of a small people, crushed only because they happened to lie between two warring giants.’
‘At that first stage of the war the fate of Belgium attracted attention and sympathy, owing to its extraordinarily tragic nature. But thirty-four months of warfare have proved that the Belgian episode constituted only the first step towards the solution of the fundamental problem of the imperialist war, namely, the suppression of the weak by the strong.’
The analogy with Ukraine like all analogies is imperfect – Ukraine is not a small country and has large armed forces – but near enough to warrant close comparison. Above all, such a comparison illustrates the definitive nature of the war as the ‘World competition of the capitalist forces, [which] means the systematic subjection of the small, medium-sized and backward nations by the great and the greatest capitalist powers.’
‘The war destroys the last shreds of the “independence” of small states, quite apart from the military outcome of the conflict between the two basic enemy camps.’
The mistake of those supporting Ukraine is that they think it irrelevant that Ukraine provoked the war by advancing membership of the major imperialist alliance – preparing for its own attack – and that this imperialist alliance had helped put in place in Ukraine a government that would pursue this course so that it might weaken its major competitors – Russia and China.
The supporters of Russia make the mistake that this justifies the Russian invasion, which has nothing to do with defending democracy or its own people but is simply to protect its own capitalist interests – what else, after all, are capitalist states for? Or do they, like the supporters of the Ukrainian state, believe that their chosen champion is unique such that it defends the interest of its working class? When these ‘socialists’ justify support for these interests, including the integrity of the Russian state, they simply admit their complete abdication from the socialist cause. The mistakes of either are the mistakes of both. From the point of view of socialism, they land in the same place, simply waving different flags.
‘Only charlatans or hopeless simpletons can believe that the freedom of the small nations can be secured by the victory of one side or the other’, wrote Trotsky.
The supporters of one or other of the warring capitalist states are oblivious to a fact that should be blindingly obvious to Marxists, that they are supporting a capitalist state and in doing so surrender any claim to be Marxists. I have read supporters of Ukraine claim it is a democracy while Russia is an autocracy, while supporters of Russia have claimed it is an autocracy but Ukraine is fascist. The fundamental problem is not that both are wrong but that even if one were correct, it could not justify support for either capitalist state.
Trotsky put it this way:
‘Social-patriotism which is in principle, if not always in fact, the execution of social-reformism to the utmost extent and its adaptation to the imperialist epoch, proposes to us in the present world catastrophe to direct the policy of the proletariat along the lines of the “lesser evil” by joining one of the two warring groups.’
‘We reject this method. We say that the war, prepared by antecedent evolution, has on the whole placed point-blank the fundamental problems of the present capitalist development as a whole; furthermore, that the line of direction to be followed by the international proletariat and its national detachments must not be determined by secondary political and national features nor by problematical advantages of militaristic preponderance of one side over the other (whereby these problematical advantages must be paid for in advance with absolute renunciation of the independent policy of the proletariat), but by the fundamental antagonism existing between the international proletariat and the capitalist regime as a whole.’
Lenin opposed the war and refused support to ‘democratic’ imperialism even when he saw Tsarism as especially reactionary, and refused support to Russia even when, after the February 1917 revolution, it was ‘the freest country on earth’, with dual power between the workers and peasant’s soviets and the capitalist Provisional Government. Meanwhile the German social democrats supported the German state on the grounds that Tsarism was a special reactionary force compared to its own.
Today’s supporters of capitalist states only prove that, just like there is no fool like an old fool, there are no mistakes like the old mistakes.
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