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Russia-Ukraine War : Imperialist Peace on the Horizon…
It is not known when the Russian-Ukrainian war will end to make way for a peace – that can only be imperialist, that is, a peace that does not resolve the deep-seated causes of the conflict that has erupted in Crimea and the Donbas since 2014. A peace that will suspend this particular conflict for a time, but which will not be definitive; it will reshuffle the cards and “local” interests with the prospect of far more decisive contradictions in far wider and more global areas. The imperialist peace is just a period of cease-fire between an armed conflict that has gone silent and an armed conflict that will flare up again. The history of imperialist capitalism has presented nothing but proof that the ruling bourgeoisies of the economically and financially most powerful countries are incapable of eradicating military conflicts from their future. The will of the ruling bourgeoisies, even of the most powerful ones in the world, has no power over the fundamental laws of capitalism, of which they are a mere political representation, projected into state organisations with the task of defending first and foremost the interests of their own national capitalism, and furthermore the interests of capitalism in general, on which every national capitalism depends. So, apart from whether or not the Ukrainian or Russian bourgeoisie and their individual supporters wish to reach “peace”, the fact remains that this war, like any war in the imperialist phase of capitalism, is one of the responses that the bourgeoisie systematically opts for when faced with a deep economic crisis. As Marx and Engels' Manifesto states, the means the bourgeoisie uses to overcome its economic crises – which are crises of overproduction in which ever greater quantities of goods, means of production and wage labour forces are destroyed – is to exploit more thoroughly the old markets for ever greater and more varied quantities of produced goods, and to conquest new ones. It is the fall in the average rate of profit of capital that systematically puts capitalism in crisis and prevents it from developing without limit and peacefully. If in certain areas of the world the bourgeois states coexist in peace – for example, in Europe from the division of Germany into two until the collapse of the USSR – other areas of the world suffer the consequences of the severe pressure exerted by the conflicting imperialist interests of this or that power, of this or that power bloc.
With the various phases of war that hit the republics of the former Yugoslavia in the first five years of the 1990s, a period of systematic instability of peace in Europe began. It is no coincidence that the wars in Yugoslavia coincided with the collapse of the USSR and the reunification of the two Germanies. This reunification, which was in a sense a difficult morsel to digest, not only for Russia but also for the United States, marked a turning point in the European – and therefore also in the world – arena; this in the sense that Germany, as an industrial power reborn after its defeat in the second imperialist war, tended to regain in Europe and in the world the role that had been denied to it by both the United States and Russia precisely because of its defeat in the second world war. Germany, however, has always had a very ambiguous relationship with Russia: economically, Russia has always been an important supplier of raw materials for Germany and a market for its own industrial production (all the more so when the Russian empire dominated the countries of Eastern Europe); politically, however, it was an adversary against which it was twice pitted in world wars. After the collapse of the USSR, and the inevitable extrication of the Eastern European countries from Moscow's grasp only to fall into the clutches of US and Western European imperialism, Germany has remained subject to US military domination through NATO; it is well known that military domination is the most important means of political domination.In contrast, Russia, for essentially economic, commercial and financial reasons, could not and generally cannot do without very close relations with Germany; and it is because of this common interest that since the 1990s Russia has become the main supplier of natural gas and oil to Germany and, through it, to Europe (gas from which Italy, which has become the second European importer after Germany, has benefited greatly). Could the United States have allowed a relationship to be cemented between Germany – and therefore, whether we want to admit it or not, also between Europe – and Russia that would have constituted a non-negligible obstacle in anticipation of a clash of imperialist interests with Russia?
NATO and US dollars thus became the means by which the privileged relationship that existed between Russia and Germany was to be broken. It is no coincidence that 1999 marked NATO's advance across Eastern Europe, starting with Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and then, between 2004 and 2020, continuing with the integration of all the Eastern European countries, including the Balkan countries of Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and Northern Macedonia, and, as we know, now reaching out for Ukraine and Georgia. Today, following the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO, Russia finds itself not only surrounded but actually besieged along its western borders.
The war that Ukraine and Russia have been waging against each other, indirectly since 2014, directly since 2022, has certainly had among its objectives joining or not joining NATO, but not only that. That Ukraine was waging war against Russia primarily for the benefit of the United States, and secondarily for the benefit of Western Europe, was clear from the very beginning: that is, from the moment that in April 2022, roughly two months after the invasion by Russian troops, Zelensky's Ukraine was ready to negotiate with Moscow to end the conflict, the focal point of which was Crimea and the Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas (1). It was the United States and Britain who persuaded Zelensky to accept an armed confrontation with the Russians, a confrontation for which they guaranteed him financial, political and military support throughout the war. The objective of the US, led by Biden, and of Europe following London and Washington, was to weaken Russia economically, and thus politically, to such an extent that it would be forced to accede to the terms the western powers would naturally impose.
The move was certainly risky given Russia's military strength, but Ukrainian pride and the interest of Ukrainian bourgeois factions linked to the US and Western Europe played in favour of continuing the war, all the more so because of the constant assurances of support for Ukraine “until victory”. It was clear from the beginning that the Western powers would not send their own troops to Ukraine to support the Kyiv army, given the numerical strength of the Russian troops deployed on the battlefield, but the promise was support in billions of dollars and euros and in armaments from all NATO members. This was not excluding that the Americans and British would send their specialists to Ukraine to train Ukrainian soldiers to operate the supplied weaponry and their intelligence officers.
From 24 February 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, to today, 19 November 2024, a thousand days of war, bombing, massacres, displacement, poverty, hunger and cold have passed for millions of Ukrainians; and for tens of thousands of Russian soldiers it has been no better: they too are prisoners of the war into which they have been thrown, and in which the practice of desertion and bribery has become rampant even among them in an attempt to avoid being sent to the front, so much so that Putin's government has been pushed into sending soldiers to Ukraine from the Asian regions of Russia, and even North Korean soldiers, whom Kim Jong Un has generously offered as cannon fodder.
The terrifying mass of illusions and false hopes with which the NATO powers pushed millions of Ukrainians to endure destruction and massacres collapsed horribly a few months ago, when the Ukrainian “counter-offensive” was supposed to push Russian troops back across the border. The desertions on the Ukrainian side, the martial law, the pressure by the Zelenskyy government on European countries where millions of Ukrainians fleeing the massive bombing of their towns and villages have found refuge, to send these people back to Ukraine where they would become cannon fodder, all testify to a very different reality from that promoted by the Western and Ukrainian bourgeoisie. And not only that; the war that perhaps only Moscow initially assumed would be short-lived, and which later turned out to be much more difficult and longer, both because of the strong resistance of the Ukrainian army and because of the strong financial and arms support of the Western powers, starting with the US, demonstrated that it was not at all a far-sighted policy.
The objective of breaking Russia economically and isolating it internationally has not been achieved and will not be achieved by continuing the war for another 1000 days even if the West wanted to. The fourteen economic sanctions plans with which the Western powers have tried to break Russia have not produced the expected result: have they weakened it economically? Yes, mainly because it could not accumulate billions of dollars in profits from exports of gas, oil, food supplies, advanced technology, etc. as it did before the war, and because its capital deposited in Western banks was frozen. However, these sanctions have had a particularly negative impact on the economies of the Western European countries, which have had to bear the brunt of the rise in the price of energy supplies, which are the basis for the industrial fabric of all countries. But see who benefited? The United States, of course – thanks to liquefied natural gas, for example, which is much more expensive than the natural gas supplied by Russia – and secondly Norway, which has suddenly become the first and irreplaceable supplier of natural gas to several European countries, despite the gradual reduction in fossil fuel consumption…
Which European country has suffered the most from this war and sanctions against Russia? It is Germany, which has already experienced a significant decline in economic dynamism in the second decade of the new century compared to the previous decade, and which – like most advanced capitalist countries – has suffered a further slowdown with the Covid-19 pandemic, temporarily entering into positive figures in the post-pandemic period only at the beginning of 2022, but falling back into recession from the end of 2022. It is evident that higher energy costs and an inflation rate of +8.7% have contributed decisively to the recession. And 2023 was no better, as German GDP fell by 0.3% and GDP growth for 2024 is essentially similarly negative. This situation certainly does not help further efforts to support Ukraine in its war against Russia, which is increasingly taking the form of a war of attrition in which Russia resists and defends itself much better than Ukraine. On the other hand, German “aid” to Kyiv has already been dramatically reduced in 2023. If Germany – a strong economy that has itself acted as a positive driving force for the European economy and for other national economies over the last 30 years – is in crisis, as it is, this crisis will inevitably be transmitted to the whole of Europe over time. And the crisis means rising costs of living, rising unemployment, cuts in social safety nets, increased competition among proletarians, increased social tensions. And who knows, perhaps the German proletariat will wake up from the long slumber into which it has fallen for decades…
After 24 February 2022, Germany could not stand in a position “equidistant” from Russia and Ukraine. Its commitments as a NATO member and pressure from most other EU countries, the US and the UK have pushed it to side with Ukraine against Russia, even though it had established superb economic and political relations with it for years. It is evident that Germany has acted against its national interests in this war. It even had to endure the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline – a pipeline that carried Russian natural gas across the Baltic Sea to Germany and from there to Europe; this destruction was initially even attributed to the Russians (?!), but later turned out to be the work of the Ukrainian secret services and the Americans and the British certainly knew about. This has added to the serious damage that Germany is suffering in connection with the lucrative commercial relations it had with Russia before 24 February 2022; it is certainly something that the German bourgeoisie will not easily forget and that will be added to the humiliation to which it has been subjected since the end of the Second World War and which has been softened in part, but only in part, by the reunification of the country after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the thirty-fifth anniversary of which is being celebrated these very days.
The desperate Ukrainian invasion across the border
On 6 August, Zelenskyy's military ground incursion into Russia's Kursk region, north of Belgorod and bordering Ukraine's Sumy region, surprised Russia with a very risky action, even though it took place in a region that is not crucial to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. At this time Russian troops were slowly but steadily continuing to conquer square kilometres in the Donbas, and winter was approaching in Ukraine, which is seriously affected in energy supplies necessary not only for production but also for heating homes; this invasion was thus intended to boost the morale of Ukrainian troops by way of “hitting the Russians on home soil” in the hope that it could later use the occupied territories in the Kursk region as a bargaining chip in negotiations over Russian-occupied territories in the Donbas.
That Ukraine has no chance of winning this war – apart from Zelenskyy's boasting about a counter-offensive leading to “victory” – is a fact that has been obvious for some time. And it is certainly not the tons of weapons and billions of dollars and euros that Western imperialisms have paid and are still paying out to the Zelenskyy government that would provide a decisive turning point for Ukraine. It is becoming increasingly clear that in the face of Russia's objectives on Ukrainian territory (to re-occupy Crimea and the Russian-speaking areas of the Donbass), Ukraine's goals of restoring full sovereignty over the entire state territory equivalent to what was the second Soviet republic of the former USSR (including Crimea and Sevastopol) were and are far from being realised. The tensions between the Kyiv government and the majority Russian-speaking population of Crimea and the Russian-speaking population of Donetsk and Luhansk, inevitably escalated into clashes between Russian nationalists and Ukrainian nationalists (one against the other, purposefully instigated by Kyiv and Moscow), so that the autonomy of Donetsk and Luhansk promised by Kyiv and ratified by the Minsk agreements was never implemented.
The Minsk agreements (I and II) were promoted by Hollande for France and Merkel for Germany, who intended to play the role of “peacemakers” to allow the best possible flourishing of business activities of the two countries and to demonstrate to Putin's Russia (who has been in power since 1999) that they had a determining influence in easing the tensions that were growing throughout Eastern Europe. But it should be recalled that they were, in fact, a mockery, as both Kyiv and Moscow continued to act in a way that continued to inflame nationalism on both sides. The armed clashes between Donbass pro-Russian separatist militias and the Ukrainian military forces and army were a pretext for Russia to send troops 'in defence' of the Russian-speaking population; but the real aim was to reclaim Crimea and the Donbass. Leaving aside the Ukrainian and Western propaganda accusing Russia of seeking to restore the old tsarist empire, starting with Ukraine, which has not yet joined either NATO or the European Union, the fact remains that – like all imperialism – Russian imperialism covets economic territories, a population of wage workers to enslave, and mineral and agricultural wealth, which is certainly not lacking in Ukraine. And there is nothing easier than to use the leverage of nationalism, exacerbated on both sides, to turn political and economic confrontation into the politics of war. On the other hand, it is obvious that this war was wanted and prepared by Russian imperialism, as well as by European and American imperialists.
But what will be the end of this war?
All the “peace plans” drawn up and put forward by the various world governments, including Ukraine, have been nothing but systematic initiatives to deceive, first of all, the Ukrainian and Russian proletarians, who are being systematically massacred on the war fronts and in the cities, and the proletarians of Europe and America into accepting the worsening living conditions that this war entails for them too; these “peace plans” turned into piles of paper doomed to gather dust and be quickly forgotten (2). They were all based on the assumption that Ukraine – financially, politically and militarily supported by the Western powers – could 'win' the stake of regaining the territories occupied by the Russians, putting Russia in serious trouble even with the economic and financial sanctions that the West was announcing at machine-gun speed. However, after two and a half years of war, the situation on the ground demonstrates that all this propaganda was just a giant house of cards: the reality was hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded on both sides (3), the destruction of many towns, factories and infrastructure, the flight of millions of Ukrainian families to Western European countries and the gradual consolidation of Russia's military occupation not only of Crimea but of almost the entire Donbas.
Despite these facts, Zelenskyy, anticipating future negotiations with Russia, announced his “Victory Plan” (4) in his evening speech on 18 September: “All the provisions, all the main points, the necessary annexes with the details of the plan have been defined. Everything has been worked out. The most important thing now is the determination to implement it. […] There is and can be no alternative to peace, no freezing of the war or other manipulations that would simply take Russian aggression to the next stage, we need reliable and lasting security for Ukraine and thus for the whole of Europe. That is what we are working for.”
This “plan for victory” includes: immediate membership of Ukraine in NATO and deployment of modern defence systems in Ukraine, use of long-range weapons on Russian territory, support and continuation of military operations in Russia's Kursk region, refusal to create “buffer zones” in Ukraine, replacement of US troops in Europe with Ukrainian troops, and other points that are kept secret for now. It was this “plan” that Zelenskyy presented to both candidates for the US presidency and to the UN assembly in the hope that if Trump became the winner of the election (which he did), he would embrace it in continuity with the Biden administration's existing support.
The war is lost for Ukraine
And while Zelenskyy was still babbling about the future victory, present-day British and American military experts emphasise the impossibility of victory over Russia, and the need to work towards an end to the war and a post-war period in which it will be in the West's interest to find an agreement with Russia that is not extremely damaging to Ukraine. It is clear that, even in future negotiations, it will be the Americans who will dictate the terms that Ukraine will have to accept, blindly supported by the British, while the EU will have to feign complacency in the face of adversity.
Trump's reaction did not take long. He accused Zelenskyy of being responsible for the war with Russia: he should never have allowed this war to start. That it is a lost war (5), and he accuses Biden of having provoked it. And he suggests that Ukraine may have to cede some of its territory to Russia in order to reach a peace agreement. This suggestion is sharply contested by Zelenskyy, who, especially towards the Ukrainian population and its soldiers who are instead experiencing the worst moments of the war, repeats with a raised voice: the territorial integrity of Ukraine is non-negotiable (6). But even from the UK, which along with Washington was instrumental in knocking down the negotiations in April 2022 (the real instigators of the war against Russia), comes a warning.
Frank Ledwidge, an officer and advisor to the British mission in Afghanistan in 2007–2008 and in Libya during and after the war in 2011–2012, has always been an advocate of Ukrainian and Western interests since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, believing that Western weaponry supplied to the Ukrainian army outweighed Russian troops. But as early as May 2023, when asked: Does the West really want Ukraine to win the war? He replied: If so, it must increase military support. In September 2023, he warned: Time is running out for a Ukrainian counter-offensive. Its allies will be decisive for what happens next. But a year later, on September 24, 2024, he published this comment in The Conversation magazine: Ukraine cannot defeat Russia. The best the West can do is to help Kyiv plan a secure post-war future! (7).
In this case, planning for the post-war period does not mean planning for success, but for the defeat of Ukraine, and therefore of the West. It is a flight to safety, given that the war for Kyiv is lost, and before the same embarrassment occurs as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. The credibility of the American superpower would be further weakened by this, and many countries in the so-called «global South» would join China and Russia via BRICS. It is unlikely that Western governments would not have learned at least some lessons from their defeats in the disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. In the case of the Russo-Ukrainian war, it has become increasingly apparent how the attempt, particularly by the US and Britain, to significantly weaken Russia and thereby force it to accept a subordinate role not only in Europe but also in the world has failed, if not completely, at least in part; what has been achieved is the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and the destruction of half the country. The United States has so far spent $85 billion in financial aid and weapons on the war in Ukraine, while the European Union has spent $118 billion (roughly equivalent to the annual European budget). This is not, of course, donated money, but long-term loans, for which Ukraine will pay dearly not only today, but especially tomorrow, through political and economic and financial subordination to Euro-American capital. In fact, the much-touted “national sovereignty” went to pot the day after the collapse of the USSR and Ukraine's declaration of independence: first owing to Moscow's influence, then Washington's.
The motives of the most powerful imperialisms have nothing to do with the welfare of weaker countries, with democracy and humanity, with the defence of 'national sovereignty' and 'rights'; they have much more pragmatic and cynical reasons: to extend and strengthen their domination over as many countries and markets as possible, and to face the inevitable clashes with opposing imperialisms by all available means, political, economic, financial and, not least, military, with a view, if the opportunity arises, as in this case, to compel other nations to wage factual war.
But even if, as in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya and other parts of the world, the imperialists who waged the war do not directly gain the expected benefit and walk away disgraced, it does not change the fact that they still achieve an important (but usually hidden) result: the fact that the proletariat of the countries involved in their wars does not revolt against the established capitalist and imperialist order, does not organize itself on class terrain, does not go over to confront the bourgeoisie of its own country by the class struggle, on the only revolutionary terrain, transforming the imperialist war into civil war for the conquest of political power. Whether the war against the enemy state or states is won or lost, the fact remains that if the proletariats of the belligerent countries do not rise up against their own ruling bourgeoisie, but take part in the war, even out of conviction, as was the case in the 1939–1945 war, be it on the Nazi-fascist side or on the “anti-fascist” side, the bourgeoisie wins on the international scale and builds its post-war, its imperialist peace on this class victory.
What will change with Trump in the White House?
Many hypotheses have emerged and are emerging with respect to Trump's electoral victory in the US presidential election. In his election campaign, which has already begun since the mass attack on the Capitol in January 2021, Trump, boasting that America has not gone to war with anyone during his presidency, announced that “within 24 hours” the war between Russia and Ukraine would be over. Beyond the blustery talk characteristic of a smug figure like Trump, it must be said that personal relations with Putin may also play a role in the context of this war. But it is obvious that the international interests of US imperialism far outweigh the personal relations between the heads of the White House and the Kremlin. In the background, however, one can see the difference between the bourgeois factions that supported Biden and the war in Ukraine and the bourgeois factions that support Trump. The latter have a priority interest in halting Chinese expansionism and preventing the strengthening of the anti-Western alliance between China and Russia, which would create many headaches for America and Western Europe. According to Trump, the war between Russia and Ukraine may not have broken out, but he has not said how and has not made it clear how he intends to end it
One thing is certain, however: the real enemy, present and future, of the United States is not Russia, but China. And Washington's real problem is to ensure that China and Russia do not join forces. This outcome, according to Biden, could have been achieved by the economic and financial weakening of Russia through the war in Ukraine, for which the European countries compacted and submitted to/accepted the US-British dictate imposing sanctions on Moscow and bringing Ukraine into NATO. Such an outcome would weaken Russia so much that it would no longer represent a “reliable” ally for China, thus distancing Moscow from Beijing and bringing it closer to the West again. On the other hand, it was clear that, apart from former Prime Minister Medvedev's outbursts about using the atomic bomb against the West if the war in Ukraine turned into a NATO war against Russia, the real interest of the Western powers in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war was never to wage war against Russia. One only has to look at the arms stockpiles in the United States, the United Kingdom and the EU countries, starting with Germany and France, to realise that none of these powers is currently prepared for a third world war. But that does not mean that they – as are Russia, China and even 'peaceful' India – are not preparing for a world war.
In fact, the Russo-Ukrainian war has served far more than the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya to test the military, political and organisational capabilities of the various protagonists on the real war field. Though it has in a sense emptied the Western arsenals, it has also provided an opportunity to get rid of old and outdated weaponry, to test new generation weaponry, to field and test unmanned aircraft – the famous drones – and to test on the battlefield the resilience of ground troops in a war that has rapidly turned into a war of attrition, a trench warfare, proving that it is on the ground that war is ultimately won or lost.
With Trump in the White House, aside from his unpredictability, a number of issues are coming back to the fore that are decisive for the future of the imperialist powers. The question of Europe, i.e. of the attempts at political and military cementation that EU member states would or could implement, and the interest on the US side in keeping Europe in general subordinate to Washington's policy. The question of Germany, which in a united or non-united Europe, is and always will be of great importance. The question of Russia, i.e. whether this power will become a weak or strong link in the Western bloc led by the United States or in the Eastern bloc led by China. The question of NATO, that is to say, the question of a military organisation that will or will not hold up in the face of the escalating contrasts between the various imperialist powers, contrasts that will inevitably lead to the disintegration of the current alliances and their regroupment. The question of the Middle East, where economic, financial, political and military contrasts are concentrated, which can at any moment turn into an occasion for war, both for the local and for the world order – as is already happening in the case of Israel's activities not only against the Palestinians, but also against all the forces and all the countries under the influence of Iran, that 'enemy at the doorstep'. The question of the Indo-Pacific, a region which will have an ever greater weight in the relations and contrasts between all the imperialist powers, and which is likely to acquire the importance that the Atlantic had in the last century. The question of Africa, a continent brimming with natural wealth, coveted by the advanced capitalisms, and in which China and Russia have been asserting themselves for some time now, acquiring for themselves territories formerly under the influence of the old colonial powers, and for which the United States has not formulated a major investment and intervention plan; on the contrary, with the first Trump administration and then with the Biden administration, it has substantially reduced its economic and diplomatic engagement on the continent. The protectionist policy that will characterise the Trump administration, in line with its election promises, will likely tend to keep Africa increasingly marginalised from US priorities.
And finally, domestic questions in the United States, for which Trump, in an effort to win the votes of the working class and middle class, has pushed hard for the need to improve their living conditions by fighting inflation, i.e. the rising cost of living, and by increasing tariffs against imports from abroad (especially from Germany, Europe in general and China).
The other aspect of the problem concerns immigration, towards which the Trump White House will adopt a much more directly repressive policy than Biden; the announced large-scale deportation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, which was one of the main themes of his election campaign, will most likely be severely curbed, since the US economy – like that of any other country – needs to exploit large layers of proletarians illegally residing on US territory whose price of labour is considerably cheaper compared to that of resident proletarians: firstly, because they are blackmailable not only economically, but also socially, and secondly because they are used as a weapon to put pressure on the price of labour of regularly employed and unionised proletarians.
For America, as for Europe or China, the coming years do not appear to be years of economic expansion, but years in which the fight against the overproduction crisis will be even tougher than before. The long-awaited growth, which is increasingly indicated to be more or less around zero compared with the previous year…, will not be the common denominator of the most advanced economies; what is more, it will be the concern of all the advanced economies, and will force the ruling bourgeoisie to put more and more pressure on the proletarian class to extract more and more surplus value from its labour, and to fight foreign competition by all means, including military ones. And since social tensions will tend to increase, war will become a permanent reality not only in areas outside Europe or North America, but also within them. The various bourgeois factions will be forced to fight against each other in order to overwhelm the rival interests; that does not mean that there will be a war of all against all, but that just as monopolies, trusts, multinationals have developed in the economic field, so the blocs under the aegis of the prevailing imperialism are developing and will develop in the political-military field.
One bloc, which the media has taken to calling “Western” and which was formed since the onset of the Second World War around imperialist England and France, has grown been taking shape under US domination. The other imperialist bloc, which opposed it, was formed around Hitler's Germany and Hirohito's Japan; the Mussolini's Italy, which always was an unreliable partner, proved it once again when the war turned in favour of the Allies. Another bloc was the Stalinized Soviet Union.
These three blocs fought each other, first in the field of political and economic rivalry, then directly in the military field; with Russia's move away from an agreement with Germany to an agreement with the United States, after Germany suddenly attacked it, it was effectively reduced to two opposing blocs. It is not excluded that this will not be repeated in a future world war conflict, quite possibly not in the same form. And it is with this latter prospect in mind that Trump's America may be seeking a future switch of sides: it would, in fact, be far more advantageous for America to confront China by having Russia on its side than to face China and Russia in a solid enemy bloc.
After the imperialist war, the imperialist peace
The imperialist peace that Trump says he is striving for in the Russia-Ukraine war could go in this direction: to lure Russia into the Western sphere of influence with the aim of withdrawing it from China's sphere of influence. Of course, to pull Russia towards the West, given its inevitable lust for economic territories that drove it to war with Ukraine, and given that the war is going in Russia's favour and against the oft-proclaimed Ukrainian and Western “victory”, the armed conflict must be brought to an end in order for negotiations to begin. For peace negotiations to have a chance of success, and since neither the US nor Europe, let alone Russia and China, are interested in an all-out war today, only those pieces of Ukraine that Russia has already annexed are at stake: Crimea and part of the Donbas.
We are entering the third year of the war, and the West is the most bogged down and without a winning way out; the Americans, the British and the Germans admit this more or less openly. Ukraine has, in fact, played a minor role in all this from the very beginning; its illusion was that it might one day sit at the table of the powerful as an equal, given the hundreds of thousands of dead on the scales and the considerable amount of the country that will have to be reconstructed to the benefit of the Euro-American capitalists who have already set about dividing the cake. There is nothing better than reconstructing a ruined country to give breath to the capitalist economy.
So what happens next is more about how than when to end this war. It is obvious that it will be the Americans and the Russians who will dictate the terms; they are the ones who must find common ground, and this can only be to the detriment of Ukraine; the only thing for it to do will be to “rejoice” once again in its “independence”, “territorial sovereignty” and in its economic and “peaceful” economic revival on a truncated territory compared to 1991.
It could probably end up like the 1953 war between North and South Korea, when a red line was drawn that neither side was allowed to cross; more likely, however, it will resemble a split that will be continually explosive and that will neither be accepted in the Donbass by Ukrainians nor by the Russian-speaking population, and which the Russians might treat like the Israelis treat the Palestinian territories. A Russian-Ukrainian peace will be a war truce rather than a period of peaceful development for both countries.
The class struggle of the proletariat is missing
No agreement between ruling and imperialist bourgeoisies has brought or is bringing benefits to populations dragged into conflicts between states, let alone the peace and prosperity hypocritically touted as the fruit of the good will of the rulers. Only the class struggle of the proletariat of the countries going to war and transnational proletarian solidarity have a chance of stopping the imperialist war and turning it into the only war with which real peace can be achieved: the civil war, the class war of the proletariat against its own bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisies of the other warring countries. The proletarian revolution in Russia in October 1917, in the midst of the world imperialist war, proved precisely by proletarian class struggle and civil war against the warmongering classes at home, by the successful conquest of political power, that it could impose peace on the “enemy” even at the cost of territorial loss; a peace which, on the other hand, had to be strenuously defended against the constant attacks of the imperialist armies, calling on the proletarians of all countries to revolution in their own countries.
The present historical situation, with decade after decade of wars being waged in all corners of the world, is quite different from that in which the European and Russian proletariat fought on revolutionary terrain against their ruling bourgeoisies in the first two decades of the last century. The Russian, European and world proletariat, betrayed in those years by Social-Democratic and Stalinist opportunism, was systematically subordinated to the interests of its national bourgeoisies – be they fascist, democratic or falsely “socialist”.It accepted even the supreme sacrifices as every war requires under the illusion that it could access the general well-being by virtue of the greatness and economic strength of the “fatherland”. After the carnage of the Second World War, benefiting from the crumbs that the most powerful imperialists decided to bestow on them to satisfy their most urgent needs, the proletarians of the most developed capitalist countries, no longer had the strength to reconnect with the great class and revolutionary traditions of previous proletarian generations. Constantly confirmed in the illusion of the peaceful development of democracy and enjoying the benefits of all sorts of social shock absorbers, generation after generation they got used to not only and not so much thinking like the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, but also having the same ambition to build individual future on their personal careers; they got used to regard proletarians from other industries, other enterprises, other nationalities, as competitors against whom the same means have to be applied as those used by capitalists and the bourgeoisie in general in the competitive struggle against their opponents and other bourgeoisies. Not only has the sense of belonging to the same class been obliterated and buried by decades of inter-class collaborationism, but the proletarian solidarity that once united proletarians of all conditions and nationalities has been completely lost. The millions of proletarians bombed and maimed in the bourgeois wars seem to belong to other worlds; they are shut up between the four walls of their homes, carefully guarding their individual interests. Nothing worse could happen to the international proletarian class, before which all the governments of the world trembled in the 1920s.
But the war, with its horrors and disastrous consequences for the daily life of the proletarians, will mercilessly gnaw at their apathy and impel them to react for the sake of mere survival. Their vanguards will have to re-find the connection with the class struggle of the last century, and it cannot be ruled out that this will not happen thanks to the young proletariat from the East or Africa.
(1) The Donbass region can be found written with either two final s's or one; with the two final s's it is the translation of the name into Russian, with a final s it is the translation of the name into Ukrainian. It simply means Donetskyi basein (lit. ‘basin of the Donets’, i.e. the river that flows through the region).
(2) On this subject see Guerra russo-ucraina. Sono i piani di guerra, non di «pace», al centro degli interessi dell'imperialismo mondiale, sempre più immerso in contrasti irrisolvibili se non con la guerra (Il comunista, No. 178, June–August 2023).
(3) Last September, the Wall Street Journal wrote that, as of 2022, the number of Ukrainians and Russians killed and wounded in the war, which has been going on for two and a half years, had reached approximately one million people; this is an estimate, as neither Moscow nor Kiev provide precise information. https://www.rainews.it/maratona/2024/09/kubilius-nuovo-commissario-ue-alla-difesa-mosca-e-una-minaccia-aumentare-le-spese-militari-59d309f5-1bd9-453e-939e-07380f72827b.html. September 18th 2024.
(4) Ibid , 18.09.2024.
(5) See https://www.panorama.it/news/dal-mondo/trump-accusa-Zelensky-guerra-ucraina, October 18th , 2024.
(6) Ibid.
(7) See il fatto quotidiano , October 27, 2024.
November, 15th 2024
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