Tag Archives: War

‘Revolutionary Defeatism’ and war in Ukraine – a view from a reader in Poland

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Three years ago, a joint statement by this blog and Boffy’s Blog set out the collapse of many “Marxist” organisations into social-imperialism in relation to the Ukraine-Russia War.  These organisations had abandoned the independent camp of the international proletariat and instead, lined up behind one of the contending imperialist camps of NATO/Ukraine or Russia/China.  Over the last three years their capitulation has hardened and deepened despite the imperialist nature of the war becoming more obvious.  The arguments of each side, such as they are, can only lead them to extend this support to the various imperialist camps in the future wars that are inevitable.

The contribution below was sent by a Polish reader who explains its origin.  A response by this blog will be drafted and published.

From Jan Jędrzejewski:

On May Day 2026 I published and distributed a leaflet, resulting from my first reading of Hal Draper’s The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism”, where I agreed with Draper’s conclusion to abandon the concept of revolutionary defeatism. The pdf file can be downloaded at: https://chomikuj.pl/janjedrzejewski , its name is: War-no-Socialism-yes. It would be interesting to learn the opinion of the authors of the above joint statement on my arguments against using the slogan of revolutionary defeatism. Jan Jedrzejewski, Warsaw, Poland.

Statement:

In Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Iran and else-where, capitalism bleeds with war – let’s reach for socialism! Not socialism stuck halfway, like an island in the capitalist ocean, but socialism as a world system. Such socialism will permanently ensure freedom and peace for nations. A socialized, planned economy, democratically managed through a system of workers’ councils elected at workplaces, will ensure decent jobs, adequate housing, access to adequate healthcare, education, culture, and recreation for all. The great cleanup after capitalism will begin the planned process of reclamation of devastated areas and effective protection of the Earth’s natural environment, encompassing radical changes in industry, agriculture and livestock farming. Humanity will be able to minimize social losses caused by subsequent natural disasters. Socialism is the only solution to the threat of a devastating world war in which no one will emerge victorious.

I’m speaking out about the program of a prospective revolutionary party, or rather, what shouldn’t be in it: the slogan of revolutionary defeatism. I myself used to promote defeatism in the Marxist Discussion Bulletin, which had been edited with the help of a few comrades from 2019 to 2025. I’d no longer advocate it in either Russia or Ukraine. Nor would I now present revolutionary defeatism as an alternative to the postulate of Jacobin war (see MBD no. 1, December 31, 2019).

However, I uphold Karl Liebknecht’s slogan from 1915, sometimes equated with defeatism: “The main enemy of every people is in their own country”. The bourgeoisie in Poland not only exploits the labouring masses and denies fundamental rights to the masses’ majority, such as access to housing. The rulers are currently preparing the entire country to defend itself against a supposedly inevitable attack from Russia. As the bourgeoisie claims through their spokesmen, they’re ensuring Poland’s “security”. They’re doing it by participating in a proxy war of the United States and its NATO allies against Russia, waged with Ukrainian hands on their territory, and by developing an intensive arms program. However, it’s not so much Russia as the Polish bourgeoisie itself that is pushing the labouring masses towards a war catastrophe and therefore remains our main enemy. Thus, I reiterate the call from MBD of 2024: Down with NATO! Stop rearming Ukraine! Not a man and not a penny for bourgeois militarism!

What was revolutionary defeatism? For me, defeatism was always associated with a declaration of choosing the “lesser evil”. This was the case, for example, in the definition provided by Leon Trotsky, leader of the Fourth International:

“Defeatism is the class policy of the proletariat, which even during a war sees the main enemy at home, within its particular imperialist country. Patriotism, on the other hand, is a policy that locates the main enemy outside one’s own country. The idea of defeatism signifies in reality the following: conducting an irreconcilable revolutionary struggle against one’s own bourgeoisie as the main enemy, without being deterred by the fact that this struggle may result in the defeat of one’s own government; given a revolutionary movement the defeat of one’s own government is a lesser evil” (A Step Towards Social Patriotism, July 1939, marxists.org).

What’s wrong with this definition? I think it’s impossible to be sure whether a wartime defeat or a victory of one’s “own capitalist government” would create better conditions for the success of a revolutionary intervention by the proletariat during or immediately after the war. This is especially true if it were a Pyrrhic victory, exhausting all forces. So, to paraphrase this definition, defeatism is, on the one hand, the policy of a relentless revolutionary struggle in the country during a war, against the main enemy, and, on the other hand, a kind of forecast of a less burdensome outcome of that war for the proletariat (it’s always the defeat of one’s own government). Such forecasts, however, are worthless as prophecies, and I reject this part of the above-quoted description of the policy (or tactics) of defeatism.

The impetus for me to abandon defeatism came in 2025 when I read Hal Draper’s article, The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism” (New International [USA], 1953-1954). It’s available in English at marxists.org, from which the quotes were taken.

Draper belonged to a splinter group within the Ameri-can Trotskyist movement, which, following the revelation of Hitler’s 1939 pact with Stalin regarding the partition of multinational Poland, refused to recognize the USSR as a workers’ state. Those dissidents believed that the bureaucracy in the USSR was no longer a social stratum but a new class of exploiters, and they called the country’s system bureaucratic collectivism. This contradicted Trotsky’s assertion that the USSR remained a degenerate workers’ state, requiring a proletarian political revolution.

Although I’m opposed to the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, I found Draper’s arguments for abandoning defeatism compelling. To support this thesis, he points to Rosa Luxemburg’s rejection of the victory or defeat dilemma, quoting that revolutionary’s 1915 article:

“For the European proletariat as a class, victory or defeat of either of the two war groups would be equally disastrous. For war as such, whatever its military outcome may be, is the greatest conceivable defeat of the cause of the European proletariat. The overthrow of war and the speedy forcing of peace by the international revolutionary action of the proletariat alone can bring to it the only possible victory” (The Crisis of German Social Democracy, translation used by Draper).

Draper also quotes Trotsky, who at the same time rejected Lenin’s lesser-evil orientation, writing:

“…under no conditions can I agree with your opinion, which is emphasized by a resolution, that Russia’s defeat would be a »lesser evil«. This opinion represents a fundamental concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, a concession for which there is no reason or justification, and which substitutes an orientation (extremely arbitrary under present conditions) along the lines of a »lesser evil« for the revolutionary struggle against war and the conditions which generate this war” (Nashe Slovo, June 4, 1915, translation used by Draper).

Draper writes that Trotsky pointed to the “social-patriotic potential which resides in” the defeat-slogan regarding one’s own government. I don’t intend to enquire into this methodology of social-patriotism or social-patriotic potential. As I wrote above, I reject defeatism for lack of foundation of declaring in advance which outcome of the war represents the lesser evil.

Moreover, Draper’s history of defeatism provides arguments for its rejection. First, Draper emphasizes that the tactics of defeatism, inherited by Lenin, applicable only in Russia, valid in pre-imperialist times, during the 1914 inter-imperialist war was opposed by revolutionary social democratic activists in exile (Luxemburg, Trotsky, Radek) and at home (e.g., Bukharin, Pyatakov, but not Zinoviev). Second, Draper alleges that Lenin abandoned defeatist tactics forever upon his return to the country after the February Revolution of 1917, without explaining by Lenin, why. This occurred after being confronted with the “social-patriotism of the masses” (Draper’s formulation).

According to Draper, the main reason for Lenin and the Bolshevik Party abandoning defeatism was the orientation of the masses towards defence of the country, understood by them as defence of the gains of revolution that over-threw czarism. Draper explains that Lenin abandoned defeatism when he realized “that the defeat-slogan [regarding one’s own government] broke all links between the sentiments and interests of the masses and the program of the consistent revolutionaries”.

As for the titular myth of Lenin’s “revolutionary defeatism”, it refers to the political counterrevolution in the USSR. Draper writes that after years of oblivion, “Defeatism was revived as a »principle of Leninisim« in the beginnings of the Stalinist counter-revolution, most specifically by Stalin’s partner in the »troika« which succeeded to Lenin’s leadership – Zinoviev”. It should be summoned up here that the political counterrevolution in the USSR took place after Lenin’s death in 1924, under Stalin’s slogan of building “socialism in one country”, or as Trotsky later explained, the recognition that “the revolution is wholly completed; social contradictions will steadily soften; the kulak will gradually grow into socialism; the development as a whole, regardless of events in the external world, will preserve a peaceful and planned character” (The Revolution Betrayed 1936, marxists.org).

However, the history of defeatism is even more complicated. Draper points to Trotsky’s later adoption of the slogan of defeatism, even “revolutionary defeatism”, despite his 1915 critique of defeatism, quoted above. Draper notes that Trotsky didn’t justify this decision. He writes that Trotsky “has fallen precisely into the methodological error of putting the question in the form of a choice between military outcomes on the government plane – the error which he saw so clearly in Lenin before he started to find »orthodox« formulations”. However, as Draper writes, Trotsky “never did accept it [the term defeatism] in the sense given to it by Lenin or anyone else. What happened is that he sought to reinterpret it in a peculiar fashion which not only deprived it of Lenin’s content but sometimes of any content whatsoever”. All of it together speaks for abandoning defeatism as an unjustifiably tolerated baggage from the past.

As we’ve seen, Draper believed that the slogan of defeatism had social-patriotic potential. Therefore, in his article, he argues that the Palestinian Trotskyists’ 1939 concept of advising defeatism to workers in fascist states, but not in the “democratic camp”, was “the first case we know of where serious thinking about Lenin’s concept of defeatism led a group in an objectively social-patriotic direction; where, so to speak, the social-patriotic potential in it was acted out in politics”. In turn, Trotsky, in the above-quoted (after Draper) letter from 1939 to these Palestinians, already in the title states that their concept is “A Step Towards Social Patriotism”.

In short, social-patriotic potential, which “resides” in the slogan of defeatism (Draper), emerged along with rejection of this slogan for some countries, as a step to-wards social-patriotism (Trotsky). I’d propose another explanation: this “step” of the Palestinian Trotskyists probably resulted from the mood of the masses, from the fact that the Jewish workers in Palestine saw their main enemy in European fascism, and not in the British bourgeoisie. I wouldn’t call it social-patriotism, a term I’d re-serve for the revisionist policy of “political truce” with the bourgeoisie by a workers’ party in the name of “defence of the fatherland”, such as that adopted by the German SPD and many workers’ parties in other countries after the World War One broke out.

To sum up, I advocate proletariat’s revolutionary struggle “against war and the conditions which generate this war” (Trotsky, 1915); I believe that “The overthrow of war and the speedy forcing of peace by the international revolutionary action of the proletariat alone can bring to it the only possible victory” (Luxemburg, 1915); I believe that what’s necessary is “conducting an irreconcilable revolutionary struggle against one’s own bourgeoisie as the main enemy” (Trotsky, 1939). The effects of this struggle should be assessed not in terms of drawing close to a wartime defeat of one’s own government, but in terms of drawing close to an overthrow of capitalism, as the social system that generates predatory and increasingly destructive wars. On May Day, let’s call together: War – no! Socialism – yes! Socialism – where? All over the world!

File to download: chomikuj.pl/janjedrzejewski Contactwith the author: (e-mail) mbd-warszawa@wp.pl 

Ukraine, Iran and World War III

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Volodymyr Zelensky has said that World War III has already started.  If so, Ukraine is fighting it, supported by Western imperialism, which means that the ‘left’ supporters of Ukraine have already picked a side.  From the point of view of opposing the further development of this war they are worse than useless.

Its development includes attacks on Venezuela, and now once again on Iran.  In the first day this involved the destruction of an elementary school, killing over one hundred young girls, barely acknowledged with a shrug and a lie, plus the sinking of an unarmed Iranian ship with its sailors left to drown.  This is a war crime that even the Nazis adhered to at the start of World War II.  As one commentator noted the US had “now dropped below that level.”

This statement would be true were the word ‘now’ removed.  While each atrocity is treated as a singular act of barbarity with its own characteristics, it is unfortunately the case that this level is all too familiar. It is not only ‘now’ that US imperialism, its Zionist attack dog and the ‘civilised’ European states have involved themselves in atrocity.  What is worse than a rolling genocide in which ‘peace’ is declared as a real estate project to build a golden holiday resort over the ashes of the dead?

The working class is constantly invited to compartmentalise the world into discrete and separate events that are unrelated, so that they are unable to understand or remember them as more than individual examples of immoral turpitude. The foreign policies of states are somehow different from domestic policy, one foreign policy has nothing to do with another, and what happened in the past stayed there.  

The ‘left’ supporters of Ukraine excel in this–western imperialism is condemned in relation to Palestine and Iran while approved for support for Ukraine. It supports a Ukraine that supports the attack on Iran and states that it wants to be a “big Israel” in Europe. It now also seeks to provide help to the reactionary and authoritarian Arab states collaborating with the attack.  Yet the pro-Ukraine left justify their position by claiming a war between democracy and authoritarianism.

The authoritarian policies of Trump and Starmer demonstrate what a deception it is to provide political support to any imperialist state. Inconsistent opposition to imperialism can only be justified by claiming that imperialism itself is inconsistent: not an irradicable feature of capitalism but a choice that sometimes means imperialist war is progressive.

Authoritarian politics inside the West is directly related to its foreign wars.  This is evidenced in country after country: Starmer treats anti-genocide protesters as terrorists; the German state represses Palestine supporters, and Trump unleashes State paramilitaries on the working class while elected not to engage in foreign wars.

In Ukraine, credentials for the good fight against authoritarianism include the ban on opposition parties and media; martial law; the ‘busification’ of men into the army; the conscription of the working class and poor while the sons of the rich and connected are free, and millions seeking escape to avoid the draft.  

In Ireland, the Irish bourgeoisie trumpets its anti-colonial history while the state has become an integral part of imperialism.  Shannon airport has become an important hub for US supply of war material to Israel; the Irish Central bank has facilitated the sale of Israeli bonds that have helped finance the genocide, and booming trade with Israel has made it that state’s second biggest trading partner.

The Irish pretence at neutrality is increasingly an obstacle to the state’s international political role aligning with its economic.  This is why the ‘threat’ from Russia, like everywhere else in Europe, is paraded as justification for massive rearmament with the objective of joining NATO.  The Irish left defends ‘neutrality’ and opposes joining while much of it supports Ukraine’s war for NATO membership and the arming of it by the alliance.

Western hypocrisy in relation to the attack on Iran finds refuge in its denunciation of the repressive character of its state while the Western media fixates on questions of the purpose and endgame of Trump’s attack. The crazed and criminal intentions of the Zionist state are simply reported as a natural and accepted condition of that state, which of course is true, but without the moral approbation it would normally entail.

The dismay among media commentators that there is a complete lack of strategy in Trump’s actions, and no endgame ,fails to understand that war is itself a strategy, albeit an inadequate one, and that the inter-imperialist rivalry that lies behind it does not have an end outside of human catastrophe or an end to imperialism itself.

We have seen one attack on Iran end without resolution and there may be another.  The weakening of it can be expected to continue in any event, as one aspect of exerting US power against China and its Russian ally.  The remaining power of the US is displayed both by its attack on Iran together with the relative weakness of the Russian and Chinese responses, alongside the extreme reluctance to ‘put boots on the ground’, and the analogous but opposite situation in Ukraine.

The endless horror of war requires greater censorship and repression at home. The Russian invasion cannot be mentioned without it being called ’unprovoked’, ignoring the obvious provocations by NATO and Ukraine, while the word ‘unprovoked’ disappears from the dictionary when describing the attack by the US and Israel on Iran.

This is obvious propaganda.  It has largely succeeded in relation to the war in Ukraine but not regarding genocide in Gaza, and many can also see the hypocrisy involved in the attack on Iran.  It doesn’t translate into opposition because there is no pre-existing political opposition to imperialism that can navigate the cascading conflicts and present an alternative, although this is simply to declare the current weakness of socialism.

We have already noted the stupidity of much of the Irish left in opposing the push to Irish NATO membership but supporting the Ukraine war for it.  The rest of the Western left supporting Ukraine must explain how it can oppose imperialist rearmament while calling for more weapons to Ukraine that require it.  Why doesn’t it support Russian arms to Iran since it is the subject of an unprovoked attack by imperialism?  That way it could demonstrate its otherwise ridiculous claim not to be ‘campist’ by supporting the US against Russia in Ukraine and Russian against the US in Iran. Instead of opposing both it could achieve this feat by the truly remarkable device of supporting both!

The propaganda succeeds because the invasion should be opposed but not by supporting the Ukrainian state in its alliance with western imperialism, which began before the invasion.  In addition, the Iranian regime is brutal and reactionary, but US imperialism has paraded its callous cruelty with bombastic pride since the start of its attack.  Without a working class perspective there is no third force or policy to consistently pose a coherent response.

The petty bourgeoisie, with moralistic beliefs, is incapable of overcoming in politics the limitations of its social position that reduces social questions to good versus bad without any deeper social critique.  No understanding can arise from it of the differences between the Ukrainian state, its people or its working class and that they should be considered to have separate and opposed interests.  When the Ukrainian state unites with imperialism; its corruption involves its bourgeoisie siphoning off millions of dollars of aid; when it attacks working class people in the street to cart them off to the front; when it celebrates the fascist units in its armed forces–all this does not fit the desired narrative of a good victim, so is effectively ignored.

In Iran, the perceived need not to ‘complicate’ the narrative leads to reluctance to separate the interests of the Iranian state and its regime from that of the Iranian people and its working class. Yet the reality that they are not the same was proved by the regime killing thousands of protesters only a couple of weeks ago.  The idea that these were all Mossad agents shows only the susceptibility of many to the view that only the Iranian regime and its imperialist enemy matter.  That opposition to one means support for the other.  Yet the future of Iran and its people depend on this not being true.

For many on the left old formulas of ‘self-determination of nations’ and ‘anti-imperialism’ show only that they seek to hit a target but miss the point.  The socialist movement has witnessed many imperialist wars, and it is now some time since they held up the banner of socialism as the only way to stop them.

Another brutal lesson on imperialism

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The attack on Venezuela and Trump’s declaration that the US is going to run the country is about as naked a demonstration of imperialism as one can get.  It is also a crystal clear expression of the new ‘multipolar’ world order that many on the far right and on the left have supported.  You think not?  Do you think the ‘multipolar’ world will not have a pole that includes United States imperialism?

The dust has hardly settled before speculation on future attacks on Cuba and Iran.  Apparently the one on Venezuela was held back because Trump wanted to bomb Nigeria first. Under the cover of the latest events the Brits and French bombed Syria while the war in Ukraine drags on amid European forecasts of war with Russia in a few years.

The nauseating assent by the leaders of European imperialism was displayed by agreed statements that so reeked of hypocrisy that they would have been better to say nothing.  We support international law but it’s great that Maduro was ousted and can we now please have peaceful regime change! What will they do if Trump decides he would like Greenland?

The plea for peace is not without self-interest.  The European leaders know that their own legitimacy is undermined by naked US aggression, and at a time when for many people their support for genocide in Palestine already damns them.  It further isolates them not only from their own populations but also from the rest of the world and places a question mark over how they can find a way out of it while preventing total subordination to the United States.

The attack on Venezuela is also an attack on Chinese and Russian interests as both are heavily invested in the current regime, both politically and economically, with Trump making it plain in his own vulgar way that it’s about oil.  Control of the world’s greatest reserves would weaken the power of Russian ownership, the supply to China, and permit lower risk in attacking Iran.  So, no one thinks the attack on Venezuela is simply about Venezuela.

Yet that is how much of the left behaves.  As I wrote in a post nearly a week ago, ‘it seems to think European imperialism is the alternative to US imperialism, which used to be the alternative to Russian imperialism.’  This is illustrated in its solidarity with the Ukrainian state, which is supported by European imperialism, to take the place (or rather to complement) that of the US. Ukraine proclaims its support for European imperialism in return, and seeks to lock it and the US into a formal alliance far into the future.  This left thinks it can support Ukraine in its alliance with European imperialism while it also seeks the continuation of US support, and at the same time defend Venezuela by opposing the same US imperialism and the European assent for its aggression!

It thinks it can pick and choose what imperialism to support in each conflict; now defending the intervention of European imperialism in Ukraine while damning its hypocrisy over Venezuela; damning US imperialism today while supporting its intervention in Ukraine a year ago and seeking it to continue, while still absolving it of any responsibility for the war starting in the first place.  It is wilfully blind to the accumulation of conflicts and wars, of which Ukraine is just one, that discloses a World conflict and presages a World War that will involve every imperialist power.

The myopia is admitted when they state that the war in Ukraine will only become an inter-imperialist one once Western troops are directly fighting on the ground.  Do they not know that this is already happening? In which case, how many will there have to be for them to recognise it?

Imperialism is not a feature derived from individual states, governments or regimes but of the imperatives of the international accumulation of capital and the irreconcilable competition it involves. It is this that destroys the illusions that ‘multipolarity’ is a step forward; as if the development of new and stronger imperialist powers is good because it weakens the older ones.  The left suffers a derangement of ‘anti-imperialism’, which prescribes an arbitrary checklist to allow the surrender of working class political independence to support for one or other imperialist pole.

And just as this ‘anti-imperialism’ allows one to un-recognise one or other imperialism, so does it prevent one from recognising what isn’t, and therefore what is, socialism.  It’s a long time since many declared illusions in Venezuelan or Chavez ‘socialism’ and the current Maduro regime lacks legitimacy, although it now exceeds anything that Trump could attempt to put in place.

There is no insuperable obstacle to the existing regime being made to accommodate US interests but the demand to allow the US to ‘run’ the country is certainly one of them.  It is not possible to achieve this, and Trump’s limited action may betray some dim awareness of it, while his dismissal of the main opposition leader reveals the weakness of any of his plans.  The Venezuelan regime may or may not seek to cut a deal although Trump may stupidly seek more than he can get if recent history is any guide.

We have been told that US policy is pivoting away from Asia and towards its own hemisphere but even this involves global geopolitical consequences, as we have seen, and does so because imperialist competition encompasses the globe.  Whoever fails to see this has not learned the first thing from two world wars.  In any case, it is very doubtful that the new US national security strategy means any such thing.

The absence of the working class from the global class struggle has allowed many on the left to pick one imperialist camp against another, with further delusions that they are fighting campism!  The failure to establish the political basis on which the working class should take a stand means that we have leftists in my own country opposing Irish NATO membership, and the presence of British rule in the north of the country, while supporting the Ukrainian state, which currently declares the absolute necessity for a NATO-like agreement and for the presence of British and French troops on the ground as part of its ‘solution’.

The attack on Venezuela is widely accepted by the left as an exercise by imperialism that will have a worldwide impact but much of it currently displays no coherent understanding of the reason for these consequences, never mind a consistent policy to oppose it.

Standing Firm with Western Imperialism

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There comes a point in political argument in which the least effective argument is the most appropriate – that you quote the opponent’s own words as admissions.  However, given it’s their own words they are unlikely to revoke them. We have long since past this point in dealing with the supporters of Ukraine and its alliance with Western imperialism.  It’s doubtful that even while calling for it they will admit its existence.

The existence of a proxy imperialist war might also seem obvious given the hundreds of billions of dollars given to Ukraine in the shape of weapons and financing, with unprecedented sanctions, not to mention intelligence support and special forces on the ground, and much else besides.  Yet this too is denied, despite the repeated declarations of both Western leaders and Ukraine that they are fighting for each other – what do they know?

Instead, it is declared that this unprecedented level of support to Ukraine is less than ‘the full international assistance they deserve’, despite the stocks of western arms running embarrassingly low and exposing its military weakness.  It speaks of a ‘Trump-Putin axis’, but is Trump selling weapons to Russia or Ukraine and is he imposing sanctions on Ukraine or Russia?  Who does the US provide military intelligence to?  Does it allow its satellites to spy on Ukrainian positions for the Russians, or on Russian positions for the Ukrainians?

The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign denounces what it calls ‘neo-colonial plunder’ by this axis.  But who supported the intervention of western imperialism in the first place?  Who said this was a good idea? Who said it knew that western imperialist intervention was for its ‘own interests’.  What on earth did it think these interests were?  And still it calls for its yet greater intervention!

Now it seems to think European imperialism is the alternative to US imperialism, which used to be the alternative to Russian imperialism.  Unfortunately, it believes that European imperialism has fallen for ‘Trump’s deception’ and ‘delayed autonomous European action that could effectively help Ukraine . . .’  But if Starmer, Macron and Merz are not the answer, who is?  Who’s more anti-Russian than this lot?

What about the Ukrainians themselves?  We have been told repeatedly to respect their ‘agency’, except it is Trump that is now blamed for the ‘neo-colonial plunder disguised as sovereignty [that] entrenches Russian occupation, excludes the occupied from governance, and blocks any possibility of reversing Russia’s conquests.’  Not much room for Ukrainian agency there it would seem.

And this is not the only example of the supporters of Ukraine overlooking Ukrainian agency (consciously or unconsciously).  The hundreds of thousands of deserters, who don’t want to die, are routinely ignored, as are the hundreds of thousands of young men avoiding forced conscription by emigrating, or by running away, or fighting with army recruitment teams that try to snatch them off the street.

What do they think of the Ukrainian agency of those who fight with the Russians?  Or about the millions (variously estimated) who have moved to Russia?  Do they really believe everyone in the Russian occupied areas of the Donbas and Crimea are loyal citizens of Ukraine who wish to return to the tender embraces of the regime in Kyiv?

And what of other Ukrainian agency expressed in the growing role of ethno-nationalism, with its suppression of the Russian language and Russia-aligned Orthodox church?  Or the rampant corruption that they, along with the western media, purposely downplay?  Are these too not expressions of ‘Ukrainian agency’?  Or does the sanctity of Ukraine not involve this messy reality of the real world?

The pro-war left is incapable of integrating all this into its simple story of support for the fight against Russian aggression because its cause is that of the Ukrainian state itself, and it is precisely the Ukrainian state that deserters do not want to die for.  It is the state that many emigrants want to leave behind and many young men dread being beaten up by and sent to the front to become meat for first person drones.  It is the Ukrainian state that is rotten with corruption; that seeks to suppress the rights of Russian speakers and adherents of the church.  It is the Ukrainian armed forces that is full of neo-Nazi units to whom the Jewish President presents medals, absolved by the pro-war left in the West because he’s Jewish and these things can’t actually be happening.

Yet Ukrainian agency miraculously returns when it comes to the possibility that Ukraine can win the war – ‘we reject Trump and Putin’s lie of inevitable Ukrainian defeat or imminent frontline collapse. The difficulties Ukraine faces are manufactured by the failure of others to provide necessary aid.’  Presumably yet more arms must be sent to Ukraine even while the state finds it more and more difficult to find Ukrainians to use them and much of the aid goes missing.  Why doesn’t the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign not support Starmer’s and Macron’s plans to get British and French troops into the country? Or is that too obviously imperialist?

The left distinguishes itself not by its proclaiming an independent working class position but by trumpeting the cause of the Ukrainian state louder than anyone else.  In doing so it abandons everything it thought it stood for.  It makes clear its objective of defending the ‘sovereignty’ of the Ukrainian state, forgetting that sovereignty of the capitalist state is what must be opposed and that this principle of ‘national sovereignty’ brings it full circle back to the pro-Russian left that also proclaims national sovereignty as its first concern.

Ukraine is an independent capitalist state: not a colony and not an oppressed nation.  If there is a national question it is the Russian-aligned population that the Ukrainian state has considered a problem of terrorism since 2014.  And if there is a national question the war has demonstrated that no variety of nationalism is the solution – Ukrainian or Russian.

‘Self-determination’ for Ukraine, championed by the pro-Ukraine left, is simply the demand that the decisions of the regime in Kyiv be enacted – the ‘sovereignty’ of the state to be respected. The restoration of ‘freedom of choice’ can only mean defence of the Kyiv regime’s policy of joining NATO and rebuilding its armed forces to 800,000, bigger than it currently has and impossible for the bankrupt country to afford..

This has nothing to do with socialism and directs the Ukrainian working class into the hands of the increasingly corrupt Kyiv regime; a choice more and more Ukrainians are voting against with their feet.  The Western left parrots the demands of the most rabid neocons in Washington and discredited leaders in Europe, pushing an agenda that can only mean fighting to the last Ukrainian.

The pro-war left has created a world in which Western imperialism (now shorn of the United States because Trump is in charge) is fighting ‘against authoritarianism and fascism’ in opposition to Russia and China, which between them is supposedly leading the threat to ‘global democracy’, whatever that is.

Forget about the world being divided into classes.  Forget about class struggle and the fight for socialism.  The war in Ukraine is presented as a struggle for ‘global democracy’ and supporting the Ukrainian state is the litmus test.  Forget that this democracy is a capitalist democracy and that Ukraine is a debased example of it.  Forget that only now, with Trump, is the US its enemy, and forget that presumably Genocide Joe was on the right side of the struggle before him.

Forget that even if all of this was true, the response of socialists would not be to unite with one imperialism against the other but to seek a workers’ united front against both.  Forget the lessons of the Popular fronts of the 1930s; they look progressive compared to a putative alliance with Zelenskyy, Starmer, Macron, von der Leyen and Lindsay Graham etc. 

As the US has demonstrated, imperialism can shift from ‘democratic’ to authoritarian forms quickly and with relative ease, especially when part of its ‘opposition’ claims it can play a progressive role.  The character of the state, and workers’ opposition to it, is not determined fundamentally by its form but by its nature.  Not its governmental style or model ,but by its essential class character. The idea that Starmer, von der Leyen and assorted US neocons are democratic alternatives that the working class must stand beside is to have surrendered all understanding gained by being a socialist.  In the midst of a genocide in Palestine – that all of them have supported – such a view is criminal and unforgivable.

As Trotsky once said: “I can give counsel only to the workers. My counsel to them is not to believe for a single instant that the war of the two imperialist camps can bring anything else but oppression and reaction in both camps. It will be the war of the slave-owners who cover themselves with various masks: “democracy,” “civilization,” on the one hand, “race,” “honour,” on the other. Only the overthrow of all slave-owners can once for all end the war and open an epoch of true civilization.”

Mission creep Ukraine (2 of 2)

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The views of more honest Western commentators, that the Russian invasion has been provoked, have been roundly denounced as the work of Putin apologists who are excusing the invasion.  However, knowing the invasion was provoked neither excuses it nor requires one to support it.  It was open to the left opponents of the invasion to acknowledge this as well, but many of them didn’t. They came out with the same response as the vast majority of bourgeois propagandists and politicians in the West in denouncing any recognition of this reality as an apology for Putin.

In other words, the pro-war left joined in the whitewashing of their own imperialism’s responsibility for the war.  They didn’t have to, but they did.  For many bourgeois writers, simply setting out known facts and accepted realities, and pointing out the role of the West did not invalidate their support for it because for them NATO is a very good thing.

Such an approach was not open to the left supporters of Ukraine because they can’t claim the same innocent character for NATO.  They therefore couldn’t acknowledge the previous close cooperation of Ukraine with Western imperialism, otherwise the alliance now so obvious during the war would be seen as the flowering of an existing collaboration, robbing Ukraine of its cloak of innocent bystander.   The so-called Marxists were thus left hiding the role of their imperialism much more radically than even the more honest of its bourgeois supporters!

The most that would be admitted was that western imperialism was supporting Ukraine ‘for its own selfish interests’, as if this disposed of the matter; as we have seen, these leftists were claiming that ‘NATO won’t intervene’ and that even though Ukraine had the right to seek help, this was something ‘which it won’t get’.

Others stated that ‘we are without hesitation in favour of the delivery of defensive weapons to the Ukrainian resistance.’  This source further said that ‘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.’

Of course, the Bradley’s, Abrams, Leopards, Chieftains, HIMARS, ATACMs, Storm Shadows and F16s etc. have disposed of the ridiculous notion that ‘NATO won’t intervene.’  Has the exposure of their blunder caused them to row back?  Of course not.  Even the supply of F16s that was previously opposed has not signalled the least change, except of course that the supply of increasingly powerful weaponry does represent a change in the real world that the social-imperialist supporters of Ukraine refuse to acknowledge.

By doing so these leftists effectively stake a claim for the same innocent character of NATO intervention that its Western bourgeois allies do, its ‘selfish interests’ notwithstanding.  By virtue of the Ukrainian fight being simply defensive, so therefore (we must assume) is the NATO supply of weapons!  NATO, though it is threatening expansion into Russia’s next door is still presumably a defensive alliance!  All its moves, as that of Ukraine, are simply written off as reflexes to Russian aggression.  As we said in the first post – opposition to imperialism means opposition to Russian imperialism, no more and no less. Russian imperialism has thus performed the amazing feat of rendering Western imperialism non-imperialistic!

The problem for this left is that it left a lot of hostages to fortune; we have already seen the delusion involved in the statements that NATO won’t intervene and won’t supply weapons.  It has supplied so many it has seriously depleted the stocks it says it needs for itself! It now needs massive rearmament to continue its support to Ukraine, which presumably must also be supported by the pro-war left. Once more the ‘selfish interests’ behind this must again presumably be considered entirely secondary, if not irrelevant.

Joe Biden made it very clear before the war that he knew that the invasion would take place but was not the least interested in seeking to stop it: he would not “accept anybody’s red lines.”  Instead, he had “the most comprehensive and meaningful set of initiatives to make it very, very difficult for Mr Putin to go ahead and do what people are worried he’s going to do.” Except, these weren’t measures to stop an invasion but to hammer Russia after it had done so.

The escalation of weaponry supplied since these “initiatives” is both a sign of the intention of Western imperialism to prosecute a proxy war and a sign that it has been losing.  The first leftist quote in the previous post stated that “Ukrainians have the right to take weapons from wherever they can get them in a fight to the death with the invaders.”  The insouciance to the prospect of ‘fighting to the death’ with the help of weapons from imperialism has otherwise been correctly described as ‘fighting to the last Ukrainian’, and lies behind certain imperialist interests demanding conscription of the youngest cohort to the Ukrainian army.  

Such is the policy of Western imperialism (now with the added twist that Trump wants to make money out of it) and also the policy of the social-imperialists.  Having admitted that the supply of Fighter aircraft “would actually risk significantly aggravating Russian bombing”, this has proved to be the case; yet it has given rise to no re-evaluation of support for Western intervention.  Like the imperialists themselves, the resulting retaliation by Russia suffered by the Ukrainian population is completely secondary to the cause they jointly support.

The firing of long range missiles into Russia with the direct participation of western troops has dramatically escalated Western provocation that increasingly incentivises Russia to escalate in return since the price paid may be less than that of acceptance: with the lack of deterrence of further western escalation if it does not.  This logic is not inevitable, the weapons supplied by the West have not been able to gravely hurt Russia, never mind deliver the victory that Ukraine has until recently claimed it could achieve. I don’t know if its Western left supporters are still under this illusion.

Without a mass antiwar movement seeking to prevent it escalation is made more likely, but in any case out of our hands, and less likely the weaker Western imperialism is.  How far we are from such a movement can be seen in the need for articles like this one attempting to stop much of the left from supporting the war, with all its escalation and potential for further in the future.

The first quotation states that ‘NATO won’t intervene because it doesn’t want a new world war.’  The author obviously saw that such an intervention threatens it.  Well, NATO has intervened – big time – and the author and his fellow social-imperialists are still cheerleading it.   Has the threat disappeared or does it not matter anymore? Or does the sacred character of the Ukrainian capitalist state demand that the risk to the future of all of humanity is a risk worth taking?

Perhaps the author has forgotten his statement; although forgetting that one foresaw the potential for a world war when the circumstance that might bring it about have been amplified would show remarkable detachment.  Alternatively the author might not have really believed the statement, in which case there would still exist a degree of detachment.

In any case, the exposure of the claims of the supporters of the Western imperialist alliance in its war against Russia fully confirms its political bankruptcy.  Its predictions have been disproved and its statements of position have been exposed as false.  Running through them is the thread of social-imperialist politics – socialism in words and pro-imperialism in practice.

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What does “Don’t betray Ukraine” mean? (2 of 3)

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In a Democracy Now programme, US professor John Mearsheimer told the Ukrainian ‘democratic socialist’ Denys Pilash  that “the best outcome would be to settle this war now” since it will otherwise  be “settled on the battlefield.’  Pilash could only respond that there were still measures such as sanctions that could be taken by the West to pressure Russia into a ceasefire.  This is not a proposal to end the war but to allow Ukraine to regroup and the West to put itself in a better position to support it when it is recommenced.  Ukraine has not tried to disguise this intention and has not modified its maximal objectives.

The British and French have threatened to put their own troops into Ukraine and want the US to protect them under the formula of ‘security guarantees’.  They hope that this would dissuade Russia from taking the offensive again following any ceasefire, at least to the point that Ukraine thinks itself in a position to take the initiative.  It is not a solution but a transparent attempt to achieve the goals of Ukraine and the West later since they cannot be achieved now.  It promises not the end of the war but its resumption.  This is the position of the Ukrainian state, western imperialism and the ‘democratic socialist’ of Sotsialnyi Rukh interviewed by Democracy Now.

Trump has already moved to enact what Pilash proposed by raising tariffs on India for its purchase of Russian oil, although it has failed to do so on China.  This is a sign of weakness while India has signalled that it will continue buying from Russia.  So this proposal hasn’t worked, just as all the previous sanctions and previous financing, weapons, logistics, intelligence, planning and Western ‘volunteers’ haven’t delivered on their hopes.

Thus, the Sotsialnyi Rukh programme has already failed and promises only to prolong the war with its attendant death and destruction.  The objective for socialists should be to end it as quickly as possible while the policy of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign and that of Sotsialnyi Rukh is to continue it to victory, apparently regardless of the cost.

Millions of Ukrainians have voted with their feet and have left the country while Trump is trying to send them back, which would only result in the men being conscripted, sent to the front and then killed.  A lot of Ukrainian soldiers have already voted with their feet and deserted, while those seeking to avoid conscription are voting with their feet by running away from recruitment press-gangs or attempting to escape the country.

Sotsialnyi Rukh could give a political voice to this instinctive opposition, born out of healthy suspicion and distrust of many Ukrainians for their state, but this is a road they will not take.  Instead, it champions a war its own state played a major role in creating, and a political and military alliance that subordinates the country to imperialism.  Its view of the war means it can do nothing other than tail-end a corrupt and ethno-nationalist state, its alliance with imperialism and a political regime that is responsible for both.

In Pilash’s fabricated reality Trump is supporting Putin; a view which requires ignoring the sanctions against Russia and the continuation of US military support.  Such a stupid statement so at odds with reality only confirms the reactionary character of the whole Sotsialnyi Rukh programme.

NATO is not the issue, says Pilash, but did he think repeated Russian warnings about Ukrainian membership were so much hot air?  Does its huge role in the war today not tell him something about its centrality to its origin and purpose, and does his enthusiasm for Western ‘security guarantees’ not confirm it?

Pilash thinks that Putin himself is the cause of the expansion of NATO – to Finland and Sweden – and look Russia hasn’t invaded them!  The problem, of course, is that he must assume the importance of NATO expansion for the argument to matter, while pretending that Russian warnings about Ukrainian membership are empty, even while his country is in the process of being devastated because of it.

His support for ‘security guarantees’, which means willingness to go to war against Russia, shows that the purported irrelevance of NATO is absurd, and his attempt to cover his ass by calling on the ‘global south’ to join western powers as guarantors is political camouflage.

Not even all the European NATO powers are prepared to put their troops into Ukraine, or at least to admit to it, including those in Eastern Europe; why would the ‘global south’?  And what, anyway, is the ‘global south’?  Does he want China, India, Brazil or South Africa to put troops into Ukraine?  Would they do it without Russian agreement, and would they want to be made hostage to the good intentions and behaviour of a Ukraine determined to get all its 1991 territory back?

The proposal for a ceasefire is thus not a promise to end the war, and not a resolution to it, but to put into Ukraine the exact forces that Russia invaded to keep out.  It is an incentive to Russia to continue hostilities in order to prevent it happening, and is a statement by the West that any end or even pause to the war will, absent an overall agreement, entail a NATO win. The cries for a ceasefire and peace are thus the habitual imperialist lies now trumpeted by some on the ‘left’.

Pilash states that Washington is about dividing the world into spheres of influence, as if this is something invented by Trump, and will not be the case in the form of the ‘security guarantees’ that he seeks.  Occupation of Ukraine by Western troops would be a fitting end to the claim to be fighting imperialism, colonialism and for independence.  And that’s if WWIII is avoided in the process.

He claims that there is a new axis of authoritarian regimes being created that includes Russia and calls for all the oppressed to unite against all the oppressors, mentioning Palestine as an example.  Who does he think was sitting in the White House with Trump while they discussed the possibility of guarantees; the prime candidates for providing and enforcing them?

Ursula Von der Leyen, who gave Israel a blank cheque to do what it wanted after October 7.  Keir Stamer, who announced on radio that Israel had the right to commit war crimes?  And Donald Trump the main provider of weapons and financing for the genocide.  Where does that leave his notion of uniting the ‘democratic’ countries against the authoritarian regimes in a fight against oppression?

The US, British and French states have a blood-soaked history of imperialist war and the German variety an unrivalled reputation for barbarity.  Their foreign expeditions have never stopped.   Today these states parade their democratic credentials while their foreign policy reverberates at home with threats of an approaching war with Russia and repression of domestic dissent.  

The christening of Ukraine as a beacon of democracy while its regime enforces martial law, refuses new elections, celebrates its fascist history and closes opposition media and political parties is testament to what Western states consider is democratic. 

The pro-war left always advises opponents of the war to follow the lead of the Ukrainian ‘socialists’ but these ‘socialists’ approve and flatter the actions of the imperialist states and encourage their aggression.  In following their lead their Western friends encourage the bellicosity of their own states and their movement to a war against Russia. It leads to them holding up as a beacon of democracy a state renowned as one of the most corrupt in Europe that the Ukrainian people themselves have made repeated attempts to change. 

The policy of supporting their own imperialism through its de facto military alliance with Ukraine is summed up in a few words – “Don’t Betray Ukraine”.

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Forward to part 3

What does “Don’t betray Ukraine” mean? (1 of 3)

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The British Ukraine Solidarity Campaign publicised a rally under the slogans Don’t Betray Ukraine and Occupation is not Peace.  What do these slogans mean?

The demand not to ‘betray’ Ukraine was raised as Western leaders met to discuss the possibility of negotiations with Russia.  The call not to ‘betray’ is obviously directed to them.  So, let’s pause there for a moment.

When the Russian invasion was launched sections of the Western left stated that Ukraine had the right to get armed help from western imperialism (as if the Ukrainian army was not already being armed and trained by the West). While recognising that the West had its own selfish interests in doing so it affected to believe that this would not incur any political cost and would not determine the nature of the war.  Apparently, the selfishness of the west would somehow disappear; it would impose no demands on Ukraine and seek not to impose any of its interests.  A case of selfish imperialism becoming unselfish.

Today’s slogans go much further and it is now this left itself which is calling on their own imperialism to intervene and arm Ukraine.  The bedrock socialist belief that the state is a weapon of the ruling class and that it should be disarmed and abolished has been transformed into the need for it to use its armed forces to do good in the world, or at least in Ukraine.  This is apparently necessary because Russia is imperialist and must be defeated, although this doesn’t apply to the western variety; despite the watchword that the main enemy is at home there is no call for Russian imperialism to defeat their own. Not when it can do good.

The slogan Occupation is not Peace implies that the West must keep arming Ukraine and otherwise supporting it as long as any part of Ukraine is occupied.  In other words the call by the USC is for the war to continue until complete victory.  The implications and consequences of such a victory are many, but it is rarely stated what they are.  In fact, off the top of my head I can’t think of any time this has been explained. There have, of course, been many warnings about the consequences of Ukrainian defeat but that is not, quite obviously, the same thing.

At the moment Russia is winning the war.  Ukraine is increasingly stretched and suffers mainly from a shortage of people to fight for it.  Given what this implies for the number of casualties that the Ukrainian forces must have suffered, this in itself should give pause for thought.  I have read time and time again claims about the scale of Russian losses but a studied ignorance on the scale of Ukrainian deaths (when they are not being falsified).

Like the consequences of victory, left supporters of the war are both keen to proclaim its deathly consequences but seemingly reluctant to demand of Ukraine that it reveal its losses.  No doubt, this is because they believe this will demoralise Ukrainian society and set back the war effort, but this only reveals yet another aspect of the conflicting interests of the Ukrainian state and its western allies on one side and the Ukrainian people and its working class on the other.  The latter are paying the price, they should know exactly what it is.

The slogan Occupation is not Peace is therefore a call to continue a war that cannot be won.  There may be a belief that yet more western (unselfish!) intervention can turn the tide, but even the moron Donald Trump understands that this can only mean escalation that points towards World War III.  Zelensky thinks he can entice Trump by promising that he will buy $100bn of weapons from the US, paid for by ‘Europe’, which means European workers, but even this is an illusion.

Repeated injections of Western arms have been destroyed in the war, along with the Ukrainian troops using them; so much so that stocks in Western armouries have been sorely depleted.  The weapons are not there, and you can’t kill people with dollar bills.  The pro-war left says that the remaining weapons stored in the West should be sent to Ukraine, but this is just another illustration of the stupidity of pretending that western imperialist intervention is unselfish.  They want these weapons for themselves because they might want to fight other (unselfish?) wars, or perhaps ultimately in Ukraine itself

The US and European powers have said that they will build up their military-industrial complex to help produce the arms that can go to Ukraine, which leaves the pro-war left supporting the militarisation of their own countries.  But this will take time, and meanwhile the death and destruction will continue.

The negotiating positions of Ukraine and Russia are not miles apart, but light years, so the war is going to continue with all its disastrous consequences. If the pro-war left insists on complete victory it needs to spell out exactly the imperialist intervention that will be necessary to achieve it.

Don’t hold your breath.

Forward to part 2

The imperialist war against Iran

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Before looking at the ceasefire in the imperialist war against Iran, including its breaking just announced as this is written, we should note the hypocrisy.  The Israeli attack on Iran was a flagrant breach of international law for which Russia has been widely and repeatedly condemned, with the horrendous war supported and prolonged by massive injections of weapons and funding from western imperialism to Ukraine.  The unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia have significantly impacted on the living standards of the working class in Europe, which has committed to massive rearmament that brings us closer to an even greater conflict.

In Gaza, the attacks by the imperialist proxy involve genocide while imperialism has defended Israel’s actions as self-defence and provided the means to implement it.  Opposition to genocide has been criminalised across Europe and the US and equated to terrorism.

The attack on Iran by Israel and then the United States has been defended by posing the issue as Iranian possession of nuclear weapons it doesn’t have, which Israel does. Iranian aggression is condemned while ignoring Zionist aggression in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and now Iran.  Immediately after the Israeli and US attacks the leaders of the European Union called for restraint, de-escalation and for Iran to enter negotiations; ignoring that Iran had never left them, that Isreal and the US had torpedoed existing talks, and that both had just escalated attacks that were against the sacred international law the European leaders said they were defending in Ukraine.  While media focus was on Iran Zionism continued its genocide in Gaza.

There would seem no reason to believe anything the imperialists say, except of course part of the left has accepted their rhetoric in relation to Ukraine, fully supporting the imperialist proxy and the provision of massive financial and military resources.

These wars are hardly unconnected and it is widely understood, even to the consumers of the dumbed-down coverage of the BBC and RTE, that behind them lies the growing conflict between the United States and China, also expressed in the trade war by the US intended to weaken China and its allies and further subordinate its allies in Europe etc.  The eruption and now sudden attempt at ending (or rather suspension) of the war against Iran is inexplicable without understanding this.

This has not prevented sections of the left taking the side of one camp or the other in the inter-imperialist conflict while still claiming either to be against ‘campism’ or against all imperialism.  The really stupid find themselves both supporting the actions of Western imperialism while verbally denouncing it for not doing enough in Ukraine and doing too much in Palestine and Iran.  Apparently imperialism can play a progressive and reactionary role at the same time. Some reached the bottom with their opposition to the dictatorship of Assad leading them to welcome the victory of a new dictatorship of western backed Islamist terrorists.

The attack on Iran was thus one consequence of this conflict with the support of US imperialism vital for Israeli action against its regional rival, which is aligned with Russia and China, if not in the formal or tight relationship that the West has with Israel and Ukraine.  Of course, Israel has its own agenda but it is subordinated to that of US imperialism, with differences mainly arising over secondary issues of method and presentation.

Left supporters of Ukraine among the left will share in its defeat by Russia, having abandoned an independent position, while the left supporters of Russia and China have suffered their own through the defeat of Hamas in Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Assad in Syria and the weakening of the Iranian state, again without signalling a socialist position in relation to them.

The attack by Israel, agreed and supported by the US, was intended to remove the potential for Iran to recoup some recent losses to its ‘axis of resistance’ and to degrade its position so that it could no longer present as a potential rival hegemon in the region.  Having done this it might be possible to enable regime change, or more likely simply wreck and ruin the country.  The pivot to China, which has been declared as US policy would thus go through west Asia.

US interests require that war with Iran should be a stepping stone and way station to pressing on China and not an obstacle, while for Israel the point about Iran is that it is its immediate and main rival.  The interests of the US and Israel are not therefore identical.  For the US, weakening Iran weakens the alliance that encompasses Russia and China, in doing so revealing its lack of coherence and strength, but Iran is not a threat to the US and there is no principled reason that an accommodation could not be found with it, where Iran to accept its role as a subordinate to the United States.

It is quite possible that the US strike on Iran’s nuclear sites have not achieved the complete success claimed by Trump but that this is less important than the Israeli weakening of Iran’s overall military capability and the deterrence to further escalatory response by a chastened regime.  Claims have been made that the US attack took something of the same form as the retaliation by Iran on US bases – that they were telegraphed and performative to prevent escalation but enough to allow Trump to claim victory while Iran could claim to maintain the credibility of its military deterrence.

The initial attack by Israel achieved significant effects but it has not neutered Iranian capacity to strike back, while the Iranian response has been to demonstrate this capacity while seeking not to provoke a US intervention.  The difficulty is that Israel, just like Ukraine, has an incentive to seek such escalation in order to further involve the US in the war; so we are left with the media obsession with the decision making process of the moron that is Donald Trump and his administration about what exactly it intends to do.

Iran is a very large country with nine times the population of Israel.  That Israel can attack it is solely due to its client status of the US.  While the US could provoke a war with Russia by using the bodies of Ukrainians, Israel cannot invade Iran and neither can the US, not without a war on a scale dwarfing that of Iraq.  Even a campaign of missile strikes and bombing would weaken the US in relation to the resources it can leverage against China.

In this dynamic the unambiguous losers are the people of Iran, oppressed by a brutal theocratic regime, and assailed from outside by imperialist sanctions, missiles and bombs.  They had no say in starting the war or in responding to it but, like the rest of us, can immediately only seek to protect themselves and seek a way to deal with their own ruling class and its state.

The responsibility of socialists is to oppose the imperialist attack on Iran and to demand that their own countries stop supporting it, including the ending of all support to the Zionist state.  This is true in the US, UK, and EU; and also in Ireland where the weasel words of the Irish government are simply a different flavour of hypocrisy to the rest of the imperialist bloc it belongs to.

The point of solidarity with Iran is not to support the reactionary regime and its state but to protect its people and to create the conditions in which the Iranian working class can carry out its own regime change.  Only the working class around the world has a united interest in ending imperialist war, which cannot be done by supporting any of the rival capitalist powers, which in doing so surrenders its political independence. Ending the war through such a movement would have very different consequences to a temporary reprieve arising from any imperialist imposed ‘peace.’

A ceasefire designed not to work

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If Ukraine was winning the war Trump would not have humiliated Zelensky in Washington and probably claimed the victory as his own, through originally arming Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank missiles.  But Ukraine is not winning, and its defeat would also be that of the United States.  Besides his egotistical aversion to being a loser, he has admitted that the only alternative to ending the war through negotiations with Russia is to escalate with the increased risk of a world war.

Thus, we got the ham-fisted proposals for a temporary and unconditional ceasefire forced upon Ukraine without meeting its demand for what it calls a security guarantee – the promise of direct Western intervention.  The promise of such an intervention would require a capacity to quickly attack Russia that the US has rejected but the British and French have supported without, however, having the capacity to do it.

At most, while it would incentivise Ukrainian belligerence and Zelenskyy’s propensity to provocation, it would involve a combined Ukrainian army fighting alongside the British and French.  Such a war would have a natural dynamic to rapid escalation and Russia is no doubt wary of a temporary ceasefire that might allow the Western ‘coalition of the willing’ to openly put its troops into Ukraine, leaving another ‘ball in Russia’s court’ on whether to attack or accept their presence.

The proposal for a temporary and unconditional ceasefire is an obvious trap and consistent with the months of speculation in the Western media that the best outcome is to freeze the conflict and thus freeze the Russian offensive.  Since this is Minsk 3 and, like the previous two, is a proposal to give Ukraine a breather until it is better prepared to reengage in war, there is no reason for Russia to accept it.  Even some in the Western media have admitted that there is little reason for Russia to agree.

Ukraine has anyway made it clear that while it wants a temporary ceasefire, it wants a longer one, and also wants all its pre-2014 territory back; will not reduce the size and power of its large armed forces and will still pursue membership of NATO.  With such red lines any sort of truce is doomed and pointless from a Russian point of view.

There is still scope to tighten sanctions that will hurt Russia, especially if they successfully involve reducing the demand for Russian energy exports from India, for example.  The incentive for India would be to avoid US sanctions itself while gaining US support, for what that’s worth, while the disincentive in geopolitical terms is the greater dependence of Russia on China with whom India seeks to balance against.

The EU with the support of the US could seize Russia’s frozen assets but if this was clearly legal it would have happened already.  The West, especially but not only the US, has however demonstrated that ‘the international rules based order’ means whatever it says it is.

The assets could thus be confiscated but this would require getting someone to buy them.  If Russian bonds were bought by Western central banks it would be equivalent to printing money with inflationary effects while securitisation guarantees to commercial banks to buy them would be expensive.  Germany is already seeing the cost of selling its bonds increase due to its plans to massively increase borrowing and Britain is in an even more parlous situation as Starmer’s ‘growth’ agenda is flailing.  Seizure would weaken the confidence of third countries in the security of holding Euro assets, and while it is claimed that there is no indication of concern, reluctance to do it is evidence of it, while this would have massive confirmation if they were actually taken.  Robbing a state of hundreds of billions of financial assets in no small thing.

Keeping the assets frozen is therefore a useful means of continuing to put pressure on Russia to accept a deal although there is no indication that it is sufficient to deliver what is demanded.  The short pause in supply of weapons by the US was of little consequence, while it’s not clear that the denial of intelligence was complete or even real.  Trump demanded that European states start paying more for constraining Russia and their consternation and outrage propelled them to agreeing – under the banner of independence from the US!  Europe is now just as subordinated to the US as before by taking an aggressive stance against Russia, led by Britain under Starmer, who stupidly thinks he can balance the US against the EU.  Britian is now in competition with France and Germany to lead the continent.  But lead it where?

Britain still wants to believe that it can be the favourite vassal of the US and carry the rest of Europe behind it, while the EU has selected a foreign policy diplomatic representative, Kaja Kallas, who declared the break-up of Russia as a good idea just before she got the job.  Diplomatic or what?  Further she blurted out the complaint that how could Europe defeat China if it could not do so to Russia?  So defeating China is now a goal of the EU?   European independence from the US plus hostility to Russia and China is not a recipe for strategic independence but for isolation.

The blunt demands of Trump and belligerent approach to Russia have put the question of European unity to the fore, which pulls against the historic and current role of a Britain that hopes it will suffer a different fate than the EU in Trump’s tariff war.  The unity of Europe is historically a progressive task that would erode the petty nationalisms that fed two world wars and currently feeds the rise of the far right. However, under capitalism this is being done through the promise of the militarisation of Europe upon the backs of its working class who will pay for it through austerity.

No doubt this will propel the statist left to seek refuge in petty nationalisms under the rubric of a ‘national sovereignty’ that Trump is proving illusory.  The Irish state is vivid demonstration of this as its Taoiseach grovelled before Trump, applauding his idea that the housing crisis is a good problem to have and staying stum about his plans for ethnic cleansing in Gaza.  Ireland is only the most obvious example of the power of US capital in Europe and the difficulty of achieving any sort of autonomy from it.

The European powers are committed to continuing the war, unless Trump decides to make them desist, which will depend on the circumstances of the war and its prospective resolution.  In this the ruling parties in Europe will find willing allies in the petty bourgeois left for whom the righteousness of the Ukrainian cause is absolute, regardless of the reality of the war, its current and potential consequences, and of the ethno-nationalist character of the Ukrainian version of bourgeois democracy.

 

Carving up Ukraine

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Two years ago, the Ukrainian Defence Minister Alexei Reznikov, admitted during an appearance on local television that “Today, Ukraine is addressing [the] threat (of Russia). We’re carrying out NATO’s mission today, without shedding their blood. We shed our blood, so we expect them to provide weapons.”  Nothing could be clearer – Ukraine was fighting a proxy war for Western imperialism against Russia.

In January this year, it was reported that in a closed-door meeting with the Ukrainian parliament, military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, predicted “If there are no serious negotiations by the summer, then very dangerous processes for the very existence of Ukraine may begin.”

In other words, Ukraine was losing the proxy war.  Despite all the support from the West, it was running out of soldiers while its Western sponsors were running down their own stock of weapons and ammunition; it had either been destroyed by the Russians or had been expended to no avail.

Now, with Donald Trump’s proposals, there is some prospect of “serious negotiations by the summer” and an end to Ukrainians “shedding their blood”.  The US has other concerns and has torpedoed the declared purpose of the war by declaring that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO, will not return to its 2014 borders, and no US troops will be placed in Ukraine at any time, even after the end of hostilities. European NATO countries will have to take up the burden.  He announced that ceasefire negotiations with Russia would start and of course, Ukraine would be involved, although it was not even informed of Defence Secretary Hegseth’s statement about the radically changed objectives of the war.

Zelenskyy’s ‘Victory Plan’ is dead in the water, as is his statement that US troops are essential for Ukraine in the event of a deal.  Having declared that it would be ‘very difficult’ to survive without U.S. military support, and that he doesn’t “want to think about” not having it, he now declares the need for an “army of Europe.”  It is a form of denial.

So is the statement by the ‘High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission’ Kaja Kallas, who said that ‘we must help Ukraine to defend itself against aggression so that there is no wider conflict.   It will be a dirty deal, which we’ve seen before, for example in Minsk, and it just won’t work. It won’t stop the killing. It’s not going to stop the war.”  “Why are we giving them [Russia] everything they want even before the negotiations have started? It’s appeasement. It has never worked.” “It is clear that any deal behind our backs will not work. You need the Europeans, you need the Ukrainians.”

Of course, Russia hasn’t been given everything it wants, and what the US administration has accepted is something it does not have the power to deny. Pretending you can go into negotiations demanding the impossible as a bargaining chip undermines your position from the start and subverts credibility.  It is a recipe for continued and ‘wider conflict’, which is what the EU and the British are proposing.  All the sanctimonious snivelling about ‘stopping the killing’ and ‘stopping the war’ is just so much hypocritical and cynical lying.  It is also a form of denial because the European arm of NATO cannot impose its will on Russia and cannot even police an eventual settlement with any degree of certainty.  Neither can Ukraine continue the war without avoiding defeat and the longer it goes on the worse it will be.  The so-called friends of the Ukrainian people in European governments are happy to continue to shed their blood even when NATO’s mission is dead.

If the European ‘friends’ of the Ukrainian people are false, so they are also betrayed by their own political leaders who, having declared the need to shed blood in a war for NATO and need for US military support, are now determined to continue to shed more blood without the declared objective and without this support.  Meanwhile Zelenskyy fends off the US emissary seeking his signature to Trump’s deal for his takeover of 50% of Ukraine’s mineral deposits.

Any observer with any appreciation of the reality of the war has noted that the first impact of Trump’s initiative is to further demoralise Ukraine, already suffering from exhaustion, desertion and draft-dodging.  Many Ukrainian workers are voting with their feet and see no sense in following orders that risk their lives on behalf of NATO or to allow the plundering of the country’s natural resources.  On top of these we now have the glaring reality that they cannot win.

In the absence of working class political opposition, the proxy nature of the war has imposed itself anyway, and many Ukrainian workers will not fight and die for it.  Despite this political absence the resistance to the war has weakened the West’s project and that  of the Ukrainian state and this can now can only increase.

Some observers have already noted the repeated attempts by the Zelenskyy regime to escalate the war with the latest being the false flag attack on Chernobyl nuclear power station, blamed of course on the Russians, who could blow it up if they wanted, have no interest in doing so, and especially at this time when it suits only Ukrainian attempts to drum up support.

It is by no means obvious that the road to ending the war is clear.  Not only the Zelensky regime but also the far-right Banderite factions stand in the way.  The nonsense that the West is fighting for democracy has again been exposed by Zelenskyy sanctioning his political rivals in preparation for elections that will come sooner or later.  The Banderites are another obvious threat to his regime and any attempt by it to negotiate a less damaging and humiliating peace agreement.  

Kaja Kallas, has stated EU opposition to “a dirty deal . . . for example in Minsk” and that “you need the Europeans, you need the Ukrainians.”  Her and the EU’s demands are and will be unacceptable to Russia while the Minsk agreements failed not least because Ukraine had no intention of implementing them and Germany and France had no intention of making it.  What this means is that Russia will itself not accept an updated version of Western promises that might not last longer than a change in the US administration.

Russia therefore has its own problems in enforcing a deal that cannot be unravelled later, including the extent of its territorial acquisitions and the nature of the rump Ukrainian state; the scale of its armed forces and the need to exclude NATO troops from it under the pretence of being ‘peace-keepers’.  It also needs the removal of sanctions, which the EU can stymie.  These point to pursuit of a definitive Ukrainian defeat and Russian victory which is not yet imminent, but which endangers any arrangement with Trump and provides more opportunity for Ukrainian provocation and European intervention.

The task of socialists is clear – no support to Trump and whatever plans he has, which can radically change; opposition to the attempts of European imperialism and the Ukrainian state to continue the war, and advance its end by explaining its reactionary character to the workers of all the combatant states, including Russia.  If the pro-war left in the West is consistent with its existing policy it will row in behind Starmer, Scholtz and Macron etc. in seeking to continue the war and in doing so increase the risk of a wider conflict with Russia.  It will leave European workers politically disarmed in opposing rearmament, the militarisation of their society and the austerity and repression that will be required for its implementation.

One supporter of the Russian invasion has stated that “we need to organise a mass movement to demand a just and democratic peace in Ukraine”, as if any peace agreement arising out of negotiations involving Trump, Putin, Zelenskyy and von der Leyen could possibly embody a democratic solution.  The only possible democratic solution to this war and to capitalist war in general is a working class revolution but neither the social-imperialist left in the West, or the so-called ‘anti-imperialist’ left that supports Russia, will contribute to this.  Instead, they will look to their favoured reactionary state to triumph.