A War that Continues to Pave the Way for Future Wars in Europe and the World
(«communist program»; Nr. 10; September 2024)
More than three months have passed since the beginning of a plundering war waged between Russia – the closest and most interested imperialist power – and Ukraine – the regional power, politically, economically and militarily supported by the Western imperialisms, led by the United States, in conjunction with Great Britain, Germany, France and Italy, and which is instigating yet another massacre of proletarians, both Ukrainian and Russian, with the sole aim of defending and/or dividing up a strategic territory brimming with energy and food resources.
Our position on who is the aggressor and who is the attacked is well known. Bourgeois war in the imperialist phase of capitalism is always a plundering war, regardless of who fired the first shot. Bourgeois politics, which is always a politics of defending the interests of national capitalism and exploiting its proletariat, cannot but turn into a bourgeois war under the development of conflicts between states and international competition, whose imperialist characteristic is due to the direct participation of the imperialist powers in order to expand their zones of influence and markets for their goods and capital. There is no doubt that the famous statement of the Prussian general von Clausewitz still applies : war is the continuation of policy with other means, namely military means. And since war always means the clash of two opposing armies or two opposing armed blocs, it means that the policy conducted up to that time by the respective governments has failed to resolve the disputes arising in the permanent competitive commercial war in which capitalism operates throughout the world ; it means that the policy conducted in the period of imperialist peace which precedes the period of imperialist war is a policy of war and not of peace. A competitive war, no doubt, but also a war that each bourgeoisie systematically wages against its own proletariat because it must subordinate it to the demands of capitalism, which it itself embodies and from which it derives exclusive benefit, while at the same time preparing it – by the various political means at its disposal, from repression to class collaboration – to submit to the demands of open warfare. This is true not only for Marxists, for Lenin and for all revolutionary communists of all epochs that capitalism inevitably leads to war ; the same point of view applies to the bourgeois, and it is for this reason that every state tends to become more and more advanced and powerful in its armaments. Every bourgeoisie knows that the time will come when competition will turn into war. The economic crises of overproduction that characterize the development of capitalism teach us precisely this : markets that have reached a certain level can no longer transform commodities into money and can no longer be profitable for surplus capital. Capitalism and its gigantic increase in the production of commodities goes into crisis, has to free up markets for further commodities, and therefore intensifies competition between enterprises and between states to the level of political and therefore military confrontation. War, and the destruction that characterizes it, is the only political solution that the bourgeoisie adopts to overcome the crisis of overproduction ; but to wage war, each bourgeoisie must subject its proletariat to its strict discipline ; the proletariat which at the same time represents both the mass of labour power unusable by capital in crisis and the army of soldiers that must fight in defence of bourgeois power. And as long as classist and revolutionary tendencies do not emerge in the proletariat, the bourgeoisie in every country will have an easier way of deceiving it, diverting it from its own interests and bringing it into its national and imperialist military formations of National Defense. The proletarians are thus transformed from wage slaves in the capitalist galleys into cannon fodder for the benefit of His Majesty Capital.
There have always been pacifist movements which believe and continue to delude themselves that the same rulers who have carried their policies to the point of war can hold it back before it breaks out or stop it after it has broken out by returning to « peace » negotiations in which a compromise satisfactory to both belligerents can be found. The fact is that bourgeois politics is always made up of compromises because it is essentially a politics of mercantile exchanges, of blackmail, of acts of force, of traps set at every diplomatic level, of quid pro quo proposals that in « negotiations » usually benefit the strongest, the best equipped economically and militarily. But there are situations – and inter-imperialist conflicts constantly generate them – in which war is not decisive but becomes the norm, in which there may be periods of low, high or very high intensity, yet it is always war. Just think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a territory where neither the victorious imperialisms of the Second World War, nor the Jewish people nor the Palestinian people have ever succeeded in resolving the problem of a national settlement that would satisfy the two peoples ; or the conflicts in which the Kurdish nation is systematically attacked by the Turks or the Syrians, by the Iraqis or the Iranians, with the sole purpose of depriving it of control over the mountains and valleys of Kurdistan (rich in energy and mineral resources and fertile land for grain production). And the more the imperialist powers take an interest in these conflicts, the more the conflicts become long-lasting, festering wounds of mutual and continuous slaughter with no possibility of resolution to the benefit of the peoples involved, but with the open prospect of either permanent oppression or genocide. The real solution is not in the hands of the imperialist powers, which live off the oppression of weaker peoples and countries, but in the hands of the proletarian movement and its class struggle, whose historical objective is the overthrow of every bourgeois power and every bourgeois state through revolution, i.e. class war, the only war that can put an end – on the basis of victory at the international level – to all bourgeois and imperialist wars.
THE FIRST 100 DAYS OF WAR IN UKRAINE
The Russian-Ukrainian plundering war, by the very fact that besides the two countries concerned, other states, the USA and the EU, and indirectly China, India, Turkey, are directly involved in it, is not a local war, even if it is taking place only on Ukrainian territory, but a stage in an impending war of global proportions. At stake are not only territorial issues and the question of the « border » between Ukraine and Russia, but much broader aspects : raw materials for energy and agricultural commodities such as gas, oil and cereals ; furthermore, strategic areas for Russia regarding the control of certain sea and land trade routes ; political and military dominance over geopolitical areas over which the opposing powers are in direct tug of war (from the Black Sea to the eastern Mediterranean, as well as the entire 4 800 km strip of European territory, stretching from the Barents Sea and the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea) and in which the Euro-Atlantic military alliance NATO has gradually installed itself since the collapse of the USSR, aiming to integrate Ukraine (and Georgia), thus threatening Russia with its missiles not from afar but from a distance of several tens of kilometres. It was inevitable that this would greatly escalate tensions with Russia. Ever since the collapse of the USSR, Eastern European countries from the Baltic States to Bulgaria, except Belarus and Ukraine, have been integrated into NATO in the five years from 1999 to 2004. And the fact that NATO was created with an explicitly anti-Russian purpose and at the behest of the United States is well known. However, it is important to emphasize the fact that the 30 countries that are members of NATO today are all European, except the United States and Turkey. This does not mean that in every war in which a NATO country is involved, this entire military alliance is set in motion. In 1982, for example, there was a war between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Falklands-Malvinas, which, apart from the political support of the United States for the United Kingdom, ended in an Anglo-Argentine military clash ; this clash, however, took place far from Europe and its immediate borders, whereas, by contrast, as in the case of the wars in the former Yugoslavia in 1991–‘ 2001, the military intervention of NATO forces was forceful, or in the case of the war unleashed by NATO against Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011. Let alone the war unleashed by the coalition of countries of the democratic West against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which invaded Kuwait (1990–1991), or the war against Bashar Assad’s Syria (supported by Russia, Iran and even China), which was fought by Syrian rebel forces supported in turn by an international coalition led by the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, etc.
Until now, the powers grouped in NATO, and hence the West, led by the United States, have waged and supported wars against smaller countries (Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.), in which they have carefully avoided a direct attack against the great military and nuclear power, i.e. Russia. In today’s Russia-Ukraine war, unlike the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Russia is the direct protagonist, while the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and other NATO allies have declared from the beginning their intention not to get directly involved ; but they have guaranteed economic, financial, political support to Ukraine by pledging to send massive amounts of weaponry so that the Ukrainian army, already amply supplied by NATO countries with weaponry of all kinds for years, can wage war against Russia on behalf of NATO and the « democratic » West. This war, not only for Russia but also for the US and its allies, was anticipated and was to be confined to Ukraine alone. The Western chancelleries knew perfectly well that Russia, after amassing more than 100,000 troops on its border with Ukraine and after supporting pro-Russian forces in the Donbas in an eight-year low-intensity « war », would decide to cross the Ukrainian border with its own tanks. Russia’s intention has been clear from the outset : to join to Crimea, annexed in 2014, the entire coastal strip on the Sea of Azov, thereby securing a territorial continuity between Crimea and Donbas and thus gaining the entire south-eastern territory by dividing Ukraine in two – roughly as it was in the Korean War in 1950 – and, based on this territorial partition, preventing Ukraine from joining NATO.
Could the Western powers have prevented Russia from carrying out this its plan ? No, because it would have meant starting a war with their own military forces against Russian troops and thus starting World War III at this time. It would have meant mobilising hundreds of thousands of soldiers to join the two hundred thousand of the Ukrainian army to militarily occupy Ukraine and invade Belarus, which is Moscow’s ally and its western outpost. But before mobilising NATO forces against Russia, the US must have been certain that European countries would plunge into a world war with the risk of it becoming a nuclear war, benefiting who the most ? The United States, of course ; which country would sacrifice itself for the American cause ? Certainly, not Germany or France, but not even Great Britain, no matter how closely tied to Washington it may be. Europe would thus become for the umpteenth time the epicentre of a world imperialist war that would destroy it a hundred times more than the Second World Imperialist War. If war is the continuation of policy with military means, there is no imperialist bourgeoisie which would voluntarily renounce its imperialist interests, defended on all fronts by its own imperialist policy, in order to exclusively favour the interests of a rival imperialist country or coalition.
That is, no to direct military action, yes – but with all due distinctions – to economic and financial sanctions. However, regarding the various sanctions packages with which Western countries have sought to subdue Russia financially and commercially, it turns out that if they agree on a course of conduct in words, they do not so easily agree on its application ; one only has to remember the supply of Russian gas and oil, on which 40% of Europe’s energy depends, and particularly Germany and Italy, to understand that Russian imperialist power can rely on the disunity of interests among European countries themselves, even if anti-Russian sanctions would cause real damage to the Russian economy anyway (damage which, as capitalism commands, will be largely paid for by the Russian proletarian masses).
The international media repeatedly cried about « the attack on democracy », « the violation of national sovereignty », sang the praises of the values of Western civilization as the opposite of Russian totalitarianism and barbarism ; for these values the supply of huge amounts of weaponry to Zelenskyy’s Ukraine is justified because « Europe is being defended » there. But they cannot fail to see that the sanctions that the EU, US and UK have adopted against Russia are undoubtedly causing damage to Moscow, but also to Europe, but not to the United States. If, therefore, the West thought that it would get the current Russian government into trouble with economic and financial sanctions (Biden even went so far as to say that the Russians would do well to overthrow Putin), to make it desist from continuing the war in Ukraine, we need only look back to the past to understand that the balance of power between states does not revolve solely around economic pressure. According to the Instituto per gli studi di politica internaziole (ISPI), even though the US embargo on Cuba has lasted for 60 years, but no one, at least so far, has got into government in Cuba that is distinctly pro-American ; likewise in Iran, with its government of Shiite clerics (43 years of sanctions), in North Korea (16 years of sanctions), in Maduro’s chavista Venezuela (8 years of sanctions) or in Putin’s Russia (8 years of sanctions, i.e. since 2014 as a result of the annexation of Crimea).
The policies of the various bourgeois governments do not always correspond to the purely « bare » laws of capitalism ; in the power relations between states – economically, financially, politically and militarily – the internal balance of forces between the classes and the social relations that have become established over time must always be considered for each state. Each bourgeoisie tends to govern its own country based on its own history, the natural resources at its disposal, the economic strength it has attained over the years and, of course, the political, economic and financial support of other countries, but not least based on the cooperation between the classes, which must be obtained and maintained employing ad hoc political and social measures and employing repressive methods whenever the proletarian masses rebel against the established order.
The current Russia-Ukraine war is taking place at a time when the United States is fresh from a political and military debacle : after the rapid and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the image of the world’s gendarme of Western imperialism has been damaged ; another defeat has followed, and that in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad, who should have been overthrown thanks to domestic uprisings supported by the US and its allies, is, on the contrary, stronger than before ; and Iraq, where the US army became engaged up to after the liquidation of Saddam Hussein, which continues to be beset by internal conflicts, is in the process of rapprochement with Iran, the arch-enemy of the Middle East. And it is not so much about the Obama, Trump or Biden presidencies. It is US imperialism which has to deal with global competition that makes it no longer able to be present militarily and with the same repressive potential in every corner of the world as was once the case with England and, at the end of the Second World War, with the United States itself. The collapse of the USSR did not mean a clear-cut victory for US imperialism, although it has allowed it to strengthen itself, especially in Europe, which is not negligible.
The United States, however, looks not only towards the Atlantic, but also towards the Pacific Ocean, on the other side of which is China, a new imperialist power with as yet unfulfilled conquest ambitions (and it is not just Taiwan, which for mainland China is historic Chinese territory that is one day to return to Beijing’s rule). The fact that the anti-Russian sanctions have forced Russia to trade its oil with China and India, which as good traders are surely interested in buying Russian oil cheaply (their imports have doubled since last year), proves once again that it is the market that dictates certain « policies » and not the smiles or strict faces of the rulers. On the other hand, the competition that China in particular poses to the United States is not limited to the Far East, although Japan, South Korea and Vietnam are the countries that, after the United States, form the centre of gravity of China’s trade relations, with Germany being the country with which China has by far the most important trade relations in Europe. It is worth noting that for Ukraine, China was the country with the highest share of imports and exports in 2020, followed by Russia, Poland and Germany.
Of course, Ukraine’s entry into the European Union would greatly benefit it from a commercial and financial point of view.
What was to be demagogically propagated in Russian declarations as a « special military operation » to « demilitarize and denazify » Ukraine immediately turned out to be a war to oppress a smaller and weaker nation, perfectly in line with all the wars that Western imperialist countries, from the US to the UK to France, have always waged in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Europe itself since the end of the Second World Imperialist War. Nothing new under the sun for us Marxists, for this is the inevitable course of capitalism and its insurmountable contradictions. In addition, these wars have served as an example to various regional powers, such as Israel in the struggle over the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights, Turkey in the struggle over the Kurdish territories and Syria, Morocco in the struggle over Western Sahara, Saudi Arabia with the US, UK, France, etc. in the war between Sunnis and Shiites in Yemen, Iran in the same Yemen war, etc., etc.
All this proves that the Russia-Ukraine war is an integral part of the phase of a war that has global dimensions, even if it has not yet brought the major imperialist countries to a head-to-head military confrontation. The war in Ukraine could last much longer than Russia would like because the aim of the Western imperialist bloc, given that it has no intention of going to war against Russia, is to exhaust it economically and isolate it politically until the « peace negotiations in Ukraine » have matured to a state where all the powers involved can benefit from it to the maximum.
The other dramatic aspect of this war, like all wars preceding it, is the systematic slaughter of the civilian population, for which all the world’s democratic media always raise plaintive cries, but always use them to spread horrors in favour of pacifism and class collaboration, and plead for peace as if it were the conclusion of every war, when in fact it is merely a period of run-up to the subsequent wars. The demagogic Russian objective of the « de-Nazification » of Ukraine served to present this military expedition to Ukraine as if it were a repetition of the over-glorified « patriotic war against Nazism », which Stalinism used to justify itself for having dragged more than 27 millions proletarians into the slaughterhouse of the Second World War. But all did not go smoothly for the Russian military leadership. According to what the international media has reported so far, it has been not uncommon for Russian soldiers, very young, inadequately prepared, duped and sent to « war », to respond by damaging their own tanks and destroying their own ammunition. Examples of desertion have been recorded which signal deep discontent, even if they are not a portent of real rebellion against the war. However, if the war is much longer than Moscow, and Washington and London, had initially anticipated, such cases could be repeated, and on their wave, a not so toothless opposition to the war could gain momentum,
The resistance of the Ukrainian population to the Russian invasion has so far been under the banner of strong nationalism. The Ukrainian proletarians, as far as can be read from various international media, have not had the strength either to oppose the oppression of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas by Kyiv over the past eight years, or to organise strikes and demonstrations against the war with Russia, which has been maturing for some time. Trapped in the politics of class collaboration with the national bourgeoisie, they were confronted with the horrors of war, literally as meat for slaughter. Whether the butcher speaks Russian or Ukrainian was and is of relative importance from the class point of view : both these butchers pursue anti-proletarian objectives, in Ukraine and in Russia because the war into which the proletarians have been plunged has nothing historically progressive or revolutionary about it ; like the previous wars in the former Soviet republics, i.e. in Chechnya and Georgia, this war is reactionary, plundering. The proletarians of the Donbas or Crimea will continue to be exploited, oppressed and subjected to repression for the benefit of capital ; whether capital is in the hands of Russian or Ukrainian capitalists and landowners, the social situation of the proletarians does not change. Besides this war will not be short-lived precisely because of the conflicting imperialist interests at stake here ; and when there shall be « peace » negotiation – which will probably be taken up by a bunch of capitalist bandits who appear at present to be outsiders, such as China, Turkey, if not the crumbling UN – the factors of war that are present today will not vanish ; they will continue to foment the same contrasts that provoked it, and they will fuel the opposing nationalisms, until the outbreak of a much wider, global war.
A LOOK INTO THE PAST FOR A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE FUTURE
Capitalism in its initial period of development, after the anti-feudal revolutions and the wars for the establishment of nation-states, needed, at least in Europe, a long period of peace to develop more rapidly and on a larger scale ; it was a period when the bourgeoisie, while plundering the continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America, tried to maintain social peace « at home » through supeprofits from the intensive exploitation of the colonies. This was the epoch of the so-called peaceful development of capitalism and at the same time the epoch of the development of the workers’ movement, whose struggles won it a series of concessions from the rich bourgeoisie in terms of wage levels and trade union and political organisation. It was the epoch of socialist reformism, which, after the terrible and bloody defeat of the Paris Commune, asserted itself as a pacifist and parliamentary route to a proletarian emancipation that was considered indisputable due to the very development of capitalism. At the same time, however, capitalism, while developing to its maximum, was producing all the crisis factors that would lead to the clash of the most modern, civilised and industrialised states in the first great imperialist world war, which caused the collapse of the Second Proletarian International whose overwhelming majority of reformist social democratic parties became social chauvinists overnight.
Despite this immense tragedy of war, the international proletarian movement has shown that it still possesses a great classist energy, thanks to which it opposed the war with strikes and mobilisations that even reached the war fronts, where cases of fraternisation between « enemy » soldiers were not rare. A classist energy which proved to be powerful even in the most backward and reactionary state of Europe, Tsarist Russia, and which, under the leadership of the class party headed by Lenin, fuelled not only the national bourgeois revolution, but above all the proletarian revolution as the first foothold of the international revolution, which called to arms not the citizens, and not only of Russia itself, but the proletarians of Russia and of the whole world.
The events of history revealed the historical backwardness of the class party in the very civilized Europe and the still strong grip of opportunism over the broad masses, who, despite their fierce struggle during and after the war, could not shake off the paralysing weight of social democracy and, after their physical and political defeat, once again surrendered themselves to the ruling bourgeois, whether they were democrats or fascists. The storming of the heavens, following the example of the Paris Commune, succeeded only in Petrograd and Moscow, not in Berlin, Paris, Rome or London. The metropolises of European imperialism were still laying down the law and preparing for the subsequent imperialist war, in which the involvement of the states took on a planetary dimension, the same dimension as the imperialist development of capitalism, which, despite its crises and its terrible effects on the broad proletarian and popular masses, was once again finding the strength to restart its deadly cycles of exploitation, competition and war. Proletarian and communist Petrograd and Moscow did not fall as a result of the civil war that the tsarist White troops and their Anglo-French-German-American supporters unleashed against Soviet power – a civil war, in which the Russian proletarian-revolutionaries, organised in Trotsky’s Red Army, were victorious on all internal fronts – but because of the isolation and appalling economic backwardness in which Bolshevik Russia found itself in those decisive years for the revolution, not only in Russia but in the world. That fatal blow to the revolution in Russia and in the world – which was Lenin’s throwing down the gauntlet to world imperialism, declaring that proletarian power in Russia would endure for twenty years waiting for the next revolutionary situation, and Trotsky, never succumbing to Stalinism and the theory of socialism in one country, at the Enlarged Executive of the Communist International in November and December 1926, threw in the face of Stalin and his lackeys the prospect that proletarian and communist power would defend the Russian revolutionary fortress for fifty years – this fatal blow, as we have said, was dealt by the Great Russian chauvinist opportunism. This chauvinism, defeated by the Bolsheviks led by Lenin, before, during and after the war, dramatically eroded the theoretical and political foundations of the Communist International and the Bolshevik Party itself, then passed off the failed victory of the revolution in Western Europe as an opportunity to start « building » socialism in Russia, thereby counterfeiting Marxism as the theory of the international communist revolution into Marxism as the theory of socialism in a single country.
Among the theoretical and political foundations of Marxism, affirmed by Lenin and the Communist International at its first congresses, were the theses on the national and colonial question, which can be summed up in what was formulated as the self-determination of the peoples oppressed by imperialism, and first and foremost the self-determination of the peoples tyrannised by tsarist oppression. It is essential to grasp the essential points of this position to draw fundamental conclusions from it for today and the future as well.
The writings, speeches and resolutions on this question that arose thanks to Lenin are numerous ; but here it is sufficient to refer to his « Letter to the workers and peasants of the Ukraine apropos of the victories over Denikin » (1), in which Lenin stresses that, in addition to the struggle against the big landlords and capitalists for the abolition of land ownership, there is a specific problem in Ukraine – in comparison with Great Russia or Siberia : the national question. And Lenin emphasizes : « All Bolsheviks and all politically-conscious workers and peasants must give careful thought to this question. The independence of the Ukraine has been recognised both by the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of the R.S.F.S.R. (Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic) and by the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). It is therefore self-evident and generally recognised that only the Ukrainian workers and peasants themselves can and will decide at their All-Ukraine Congress of Soviets whether the Ukraine shall amalgamate with Russia, or whether she shall remain a separate and independent republic, and, in the latter case, what federal ties shall be established between that republic and Russia. »
And Lenin immediately raises the question : « How should this question be decided insofar as concerns the interests of the working people and the promotion of their fight for the complete emancipation of labour from the yoke of capital ? ». The answer, then, must come first and foremost from the interests of the workers in their struggle against the bourgeoisie, i.e. the class that unites landlords and capitalists. Here are Lenin’s words : « In the first place, the interests of labour demand the fullest confidence and the closest alliance among the working people of different countries and nations. The supporters of the landowners and capitalists, of the bourgeoisie, strive to disunite the workers, to intensify national discord and enmity, in order to weaken the workers and strengthen the power of capital. »
The fullest confidence between the workers of different nations, which the workers of the imperialist nation oppressing other nations have to earn through the struggle against their own imperialist national bourgeoisie, and which tends precisely through this struggle to unite with the proletarians of the oppressed countries. It is from this point of view, then, that the demand for independence of Ukraine, like that of every other country oppressed by Great Russia (there were many of them at that time : Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, etc.) was considered.
The vision of the revolutionary communists is internationalist in principle. Lenin indeed emphasised : « We are opposed to national enmity and discord, to national exclusiveness. We are internationalists. We stand for the close union and the complete amalgamation of the workers and peasants of all nations in a single world Soviet republic ». So that these words do not remain merely words, Lenin insists and states that in such cases the communists must give concrete meaning to these words and the first thing to be done is to recognise the right of the oppressed peoples to separate themselves from the nation which oppresses them, the right to political independence, to the establishment of an independent state. But the communists do not stop at this demand, which is absolutely bourgeois. This postulate is closely linked to the class interests of the proletarians of all nations ; that is why the communists call on the proletarians of the oppressing nation to fight together with the proletarians of the oppressed nations against their own bourgeoisie in favour of their self-determination, and thereby concretely show that they are fighting against national oppression and against the advantages accruing to them from this oppression in the form of their corruption, which each bourgeoisie uses to divide the proletarians of different nations.
The national enmity to which Lenin refers is caused by capitalism, which divides nations among a small number of imperialist states that oppress the vast majority of the remaining nations. If the world imperialist war of 1914–1918 accentuated this division, the second imperialist war accentuated it even more.
Lenin defined as the historical goal of the international proletarian and communist revolution the establishment of a single world Soviet republic, a goal which was not achieved at that time for the reasons given above and which remains valid for the future. In Lenin’s time, the adjective « soviet » connoted the much broader concept of « socialist », broader in the sense that it meant both the « pure » proletarian revolution that concerned the advanced capitalist countries, and the « multiple revolutions » that concerned a large number of economically backward countries, where for this reason the revolutionary masses were represented not only by the proletariat, but also by the poor peasantry. As the reader knows, the soviets were organs formed directly by the workers and peasants to defend their interests, not only strictly economic but also political, organs to fight against the reactionary power of the Tsarism, the landlords and the capitalists. They emerged as democratic-revolutionary organs during the 1905 Russian Revolution and remained throughout the era the model organisation of the working-class and peasant masses, joined by the soldiers fighting in the 1914–1918 world war. As immediate organisations they were mostly influenced by social democratic, Menshevik and anarchist political formations ; it was only after their development as democratic-revolutionary organisations, and after long and persistent propaganda, intervention and action of the Bolshevik-influenced proletarians, that the soviets began to be seen as organs capable of forming the backbone of the new state of the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants, a dictatorship which would become exclusively proletarian after the deposition of the socialist-revolutionaries who were the representatives of the peasants and who persistently sabotaged Bolshevik power.
The internationalist vision, which Lenin expressed succinctly in the letter we have quoted, is formulated as follows : « We want a voluntary union of nations – a union which precludes any coercion of one nation by another – a union founded on complete confidence, on a clear recognition of brotherly unity, on absolutely voluntary consent. Such a union cannot be effected at one stroke ; we have to work towards it with the greatest patience and circumspection, so as not to spoil matters and not to arouse distrust, and so that the distrust inherited from centuries of landowner and capitalist oppression, centuries of private property and the enmity caused by its divisions and redivisions may have a chance to wear off. »
National independence, of course, entails the definition of borders between states, and it is inevitable that the national systematisation of different countries goes through the definition of borders between one state and another. How important for communists is the boundary between states ? Lenin replies : « (…) the demarcation of frontiers now, for the time being – for we are striving towards the complete abolition of frontiers – is a minor [question], it is not fundamental or important [one]. In this matter we can afford to wait, and must wait, because the national distrust among the broad mass of peasants and small owners is often extremely tenacious, and haste might only intensify it, in other words, jeopardise the cause of complete and ultimate unity ».
It is a distrust that disappears and is overcome very slowly, as Lenin points out based on his direct experiences from the same years of the civil war, in which the close union of workers and peasants in a common struggle against the Russian landowners and capitalists supported by the capitalists of the Entente Powers, i.e. a coalition of the richest capitalist countries – England, France, the United States, Japan, Italy – was the strong point of the very young Red Army ; a distrust against which the communists had to be very patient, had to make concessions and seek solutions because intransigence and inflexibility had to apply to Ukraine as well as to any other country « in the underlying and fundamental questions which are the same for all nations, in questions of the proletarian struggle, of the proletarian dictatorship ; we must not tolerate compromise with the bourgeoisie or any division of the forces which are protecting us against Denikin ».
But the union between Great Russian and Ukrainian workers was not to be taken for granted ; it was not enough to proclaim it and want it, it was necessary to take concrete steps to achieve and maintain it, and the necessary basis for achieving and maintaining it was full identification with Lenin’s viewpoint : to stand firm on the fundamental questions, not to split over secondary questions (the boundaries of the state to be established, complete independence or complete unification of Ukraine and Russia, etc.); « only the Ukrainian workers and peasants themselves can and will decide at their All-Ukraine Congress of Soviets whether the Ukraine shall amalgamate with Russia, or whether she shall remain a separate and independent republic, and, in the latter case, what federal ties shall be established between that republic and Russia ». That is, be patient and persistent in this and « one thing, or another, or a third may be tried » to achieve a close union of the Great-Russian and Ukrainian workers. And if this union cannot be consolidated and maintained ?
Again Lenin : « But if we fail to maintain the closest alliance, an alliance against Denikin, an alliance against the capitalists and kulaks of our countries and of all countries, the cause of labour will most certainly perish for many years to come in the sense that the capitalists will be able to crush and strangle both the Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia ».
Lenin’s dialectical acumen is indisputable : in the face of a problem such as the national question, so complicated and delicate, in which centuries of nationalist dissensions, particularisms, divergences and regroupments stemming solely from the interests of the ruling classes persist, and hatred between nations fomented deliberately to divide and subjugate peoples, it was, is and will be important for revolutionary communists to be intransigent on the fundamental questions of the anti-capitalist class struggle, the proletarian revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the rejection of any collaboration with the bourgeoisie. This intransigence makes it possible not to lose the theoretical-political compass of the class party and to understand that in dealing with questions such as the national question it is necessary to consider the real situation in which the masses, proletarian and peasant, live and the influence to which they are inevitably subjected by the ideology of the ruling classes. The habits, prejudices, relations of economic, social and cultural dependence that have taken root over the centuries (just think of private property) persist even in periods when the revolutionary storm is knocking at the door and subverting the existing order, and thus constitute a material foothold for the restoration of the old social system and the old political power.
Lenin’s last sentence we quoted was also a prediction. With the downfall of internationalism – and the admission of bourgeois categories (private property, wage labour, commodity production, money, commercial competition, etc. ) as categories compatible with socialism, beyond the necessary « steps backwards » with regard to socialist incentives even in the economic sphere that revolutionary Russia had to take due to the failure of the proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe – the established proletarian dictatorship also collapsed, and with it the Bolshevik Party, which it had been called upon to exercise. The specific political characteristics of the proletarian dictatorship began to falter, and it gradually changed into a dictatorship of capital, i.e. a bourgeois one, which much more directly represented the force of the emerging national capitalism, i.e. a kind of state industrialism, which found its representatives and defenders in the same Bolshevik Party that had originally directed and guarded its advance, orienting it towards the international revolution.
The delay of the proletarian revolution in Western Europe and, above all, the hesitations and vacillations of the European communist currents and parties increasingly marked a negative period for revolutionary revival. Lenin’s magnificently thrown down gauntlet in respect of « twenty years of good relations with the peasants in Russia », which was linked to the strengthening of the Communist International, could not rest its success solely on the shoulders of the Russian Bolshevik Party and an economically backward and beleaguered Russia. Among the Western communists, only the Communist Left of Italy had assured itself the firm and solid theoretical and programmatic foothold that had allowed it over the years to accumulate valuable experience in the struggle against bourgeois democracy, against reformist and « Maximalist » opportunism ; experience that it had sought in every way and in every international forum to have adopted by the other parties, and particularly by the Bolshevik Party.
But its contribution was not enough to overcome the resistance that maximalism and reformism exerted through the dominant position of the German and French parties. The revolutionary achievements in Russia were overwhelmed by opportunism, which took on the characteristics of Stalinism and ate away at the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International from within like a deadly infection.
And so Russia, once proletarian, revolutionary and communist, was transformed from the beacon of the world proletarian revolution into the worst enemy of the Russian and international proletariat, and was preparing – as was inevitable – to participate in the second imperialist war as the eastern pillar of the imperialist bloc of the « democratic » West, which had organised itself against the imperialist bloc of the « totalitarian » Axis powers, with Nazi Germany at its head. The participation of the Stalinised Russia in the imperialist war of 1939–1945 rested on the prior physical liquidation of the entire old Bolshevik Guard and the systematic suppression of any movement of resistance and rebellion against a power that was not any worse than that of the Tsar.
So much for the voluntary union of peoples : the iron heel of capitalist power was crushing the peoples of all the Russian lands under the oppressive domination of His Majesty the National Capitalism and its imperialist aims both in the East and in the West.
The victory of the « democratic » imperialist bloc in the Second World War, which Stalinist Russia joined after trying to gain an advantage by reaching an agreement with Nazi Germany, will deliver the proletariat of all countries into the hands of the most tragic opportunist wave of all time.
In fact, after the first opportunist wave in the ranks of the proletarian movement, represented by social democratic revisionism, which argued that socialism could be achieved gradually and by non-violent means (Bernstein), and after the second opportunist wave (Kautsky), which brought about the collapse of the Second International and which represented the sacred union of all classes in the face of the 1914–1918 war and the national alliance to defeat the states that could lead society back to « absolutist feudalism », the proletarian movement was hit by a third wave of degeneration. The wave which we have called Stalinist, and which, in addition to incorporating the deviations of the previous waves, also admitted the forms of action of armed confrontation and civil war, in which the « alliances during the Civil War in Spain (during a period of international peace) as well as the entire partisan movement and the so-called ‘Resistance’ against the Germans or the fascist (during World War II) » (2), were the clearest manifestation of the betrayal of the class struggle and another form of collaborationism with the forces of capitalism.
Each of these opportunist waves aimed to divert the proletarian movement from its class struggle, from the revolutionary confrontation with the bourgeois ruling classes, and to make it sacrifice its forces in defence of bourgeois and capitalist interests, from time to time, disguised in the veil of « defence of the fatherland », « defence of democracy against totalitarianism », « defence of modern society and civilisation against feudalism », of course for the sake of lasting peace between peoples…
A peace which in reality was and is nothing more than a truce between one war and another, as the history of imperialism itself has shown for at least a hundred and twenty years.
Lenin gives us another lesson about imperialist wars. In October 1921, in an article dedicated to the fourth anniversary of the October Revolution, he wrote :
« The question of imperialist wars, of the international policy of finance capital which now dominates the whole world, a policy that must inevitably engender new imperialist wars, that must inevitably cause an extreme intensification of national oppression, pillage, brigandry and the strangulation of weak, backward and small nationalities by a handful of ‘advanced’ powers – that question has been the keystone of all policy in all the countries of the globe since 1914.
It is a question of life and death for millions upon millions of people. It is a question of whether 20,000,000 people (as compared with the 10,000,000 who were killed in the war of 1914–18 and in the supplementary ‘minor’ wars that are still going on) are to be slaughtered in the next imperialist war [warning : Lenin foresees the second imperialist war !, Ed.], which the bourgeoisie are preparing, and which is growing out of capitalism before our very eyes. It is a question of whether in that future war, which is inevitable (if capitalism continues to exist), 60,000,000 people are to be maimed (compared with the 30,000,000 maimed in 1914-18).
In this question, too, our October Revolution marked the beginning of a new era in world history. » (3)
In fact, the new epoch began with the transformation of the imperialist war into civil war and struggle against all the most cunning chauvinist and pacifist stratagems. With the Brest-Litovsk peace, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party concretely demonstrated the deception of the imperialist peace because no delegation of the warring imperialist countries other than the German and Russian delegations came to its negotiation.
However, this peace, which the Bolshevik power firmly desired and which was signed at the cost of accepting considerable sacrifices, including territorial ones, to wrest Russia out of the imperialist war, showed the Russian proletarians and peasants that the only force that really wanted peace was the Soviet power established by the October Revolution.
And it was also thanks to this demonstration, together with the Bolshevik policy of the self-determination of peoples, that the Russian proletarians and peasants endured with enormous effort to fight against the armies of the Tsarist generals who intended to restore the old Tsarist power and who, for this reason, were supported by the armed forces of all the super-democratic imperialist countries which were waging war against the so-called Prussian power of Wilhelmine Germany.
Rightly, with proletarian and communist pride, Lenin would declare :
« The first Bolshevik revolution has wrested the first hundred million people of this earth from the clutches of imperialist war and the imperialist world. Subsequent revolutions will deliver the rest of mankind from such wars and from such a world. » (4)
The conclusion could not be other than this : « it is impossible to escape imperialist war, and imperialist peace (…) which inevitably engenders imperialist war, that it is impossible to escape that inferno, except by a Bolshevik struggle and a Bolshevik revolution », i.e. only through the class struggle and the proletarian and communist revolution.
The time of Lenin has passed, and with it the epoch of the proletarian and communist revolution at the international level. The threat of the proletarian revolution was thwarted, the imperialist powers were not only saved from the revolutionary onslaught of the world proletariat, they have grown stronger and numerically larger at the same time.
So will the world proletariat, and particularly the proletariat of the imperialist countries, ever again be able to raise its head and recover from the enormous defeat of the 1920s ?
One of the hypotheses put forward by Lenin during the Civil War in 1919, mentioned above, in which the Red Army confronted the armies of the Tsarist generals and the attacks of the imperialist powers, was this : such an eventuality would be lost if the proletarians didn’t succeed in remaining united, firmly anchored in the leadership of the revolutionary communist party, and if the latter in turn failed to remain firmly united on fundamental questions such as the class struggle, the revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the categorical refusal to ally with the bourgeoisie on any political objective, etc.
Therefore, if the communists were divided on « minor » questions (the borders of the Soviet state, autonomous or federal or merged republics, etc.), they would bring their disagreements and quarrels to the level of absolutely key questions, and the very cause of work, the cause of socialism, and hence of the class struggle, the revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, would certainly be lost, not for a short time, but for many years !
Unfortunately, that is precisely what happened, and the capitalists of the imperialist countries and backward Russia succeeded in crushing revolutionary Russia and with it every other Soviet republic, Ukraine or Georgia.
This was a much harsher defeat for the world proletariat, much harsher than the defeat of the Paris Communards, a defeat which broke the neck of another revolution in a backward country, the Chinese revolution of 1925–1927, and which put the world proletariat through the massacres of the subsequent imperialist wars.
It is precisely into this abyss that today’s proletariat has been plunged, and it will not be able to get out of it except through an unprecedented eruption of social upheaval throughout the world, which will subvert any existing imperialist order, and through the action of a revolutionary Communist Party brought back to life throughout the world.
THE PROLETARIAT OF THE PRESENT AND THE PROLETARIAN MOVEMENT OF THE FUTURE
European proletarians and proletarians of all other continents are still victims of the illusions and deceptions that the bourgeoisie constantly produces to divert their social energy onto the terrain of class collaboration. Whether the bourgeoisie uses democratic means (elections, parliament, freedom of the press and organisation, etc.) or authoritarian means (usually justified by the defence of the country against « terrorism » or foreign aggression), the fact remains that without the exploitation of wage labour, i.e. of the proletariat, in its own country and in the countries it oppresses, it does not achieve the aim of its class existence : the valorisation of capital, hence the making of profits. This aim is fundamentally antagonistic to the proletarian class’s own existential aim, which is the defence against capitalist exploitation and the struggle for its elimination.
The class antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is a historical fact, not an ideological or economic « choice » of one class or the other. It arises directly from the capitalist mode of production, which is based on the private property and private appropriation of all social production by one class, the bourgeoisie, and the complete expropriation of all means of production and every product of the wage-earning class, the proletariat, which Marxism has defined as a class without reserves precisely because it has no « property » other than its individual labour power. A labour power that is not enough in itself to make a living, since it must be sold to the owners of the means of production and of production itself, destined to be sold on the market, for which they receive a wage in money, with which they must compulsorily go to the market to buy the necessary goods they need day after day to live. Without wages, and therefore without the possibility of buying the necessities of life on the market, the owner of only his labour power cannot live, and so the proletarian starves to death. In order not to starve to death, the proletarian is forced to sell himself for a lower, more precarious wage, for which he works more hours each day, thus entering into competition with other proletarians. The competitive struggle which the capitalists wage among themselves to win a share of the market in their favour is thus transferred to the proletarians, who have no other immediate aim than to feed themselves from day to day.
The competition and antagonism that divide one capitalist from another, one group of capitalists from other groups, one capitalist state from other capitalist states, are all intrinsic properties of this mode of production, due to which they exist as private owners of the means of production and private appropriators of social production. The domination of the bourgeoisie over society derives precisely from its social position. Each bourgeoisie, by entering into competition with other bourgeoisies, mobilises all the forces at its disposal : in essence, the means of production, the capital intended for investment, the labour power intended for exploitation ; all this is not enough because its dominant position derives not only from the economic power it possesses, but also from its political power. For it is precisely political power that gives it the ability to rule socially over the proletarian masses it exploits.
These masses, which are organised within the framework of labour linked to capitalist production and distribution, have matured in the history of their movement to the awareness that they represent not only a labour force, but a social force through which they can counter the scale and scope of capitalist exploitation. The class antagonism materially springs from the bourgeois social and production relations themselves, and the bourgeoisie cannot erase it because to do so would mean the removal of its class domination, its very existence as the ruling class. It must therefore cushion it, keep it within certain limits within which it does not provoke revolts, unrest, insurrections. However, revolts, unrest, insurrections in the course of the development of capitalism and its ever-increasing contradictions have been a warning sign and a threat to bourgeois power, since the struggle for the immediate defence of the living and working conditions of the proletariat tends, when it clashes with the bourgeoisie and its state, to rise to a political struggle, class struggle, which historically sets as its objective for the bourgeois ruling class the defence and preservation of political power by crushing the revolutionary attempts of the proletariat, and for the proletarian class the attack on the privileges and political power of the bourgeoisie aimed at the conquest of this power by the overthrow of its state and the inevitable war for the establishment, in turn, of a proletarian state.
The class struggle therefore means class war because the proletariat will have no other chance to achieve its emancipation from capitalist exploitation than by overthrowing the bourgeois political power ; a power which is nothing other than the dictatorship of the capitalist class and its imperialist policy by which it crushes and oppresses the proletariat in every country and the smaller and weaker nations. Unless the proletarian struggle reaches the level of the class struggle, that is, unless it sets itself the objective of revolutionary change of society by the conquest of political power, starting in a country where the situation is favourable for revolutionary struggle, and then extending this struggle to the international level, the proletariat will remain in the thrall of the bourgeoisie and will suffer the increasingly disastrous consequences of the contradictions that afflict capitalist society. And these consequences are ever more acute crises and bourgeois wars : in the first and second cases, the proletarians pay for the capital’s prosperity with misery, hunger, workplace deaths, ever more intense exploitation, so-called natural disasters, repression and wartime massacres.
How do we get out of this ?
Democratic and peaceful means have long since proved that they are not determining means ; on the contrary, they reinforce the subjugation of the proletariat to capitalist domination. Reformism and class collaboration between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie have proved that they are means exclusively for the benefit of capitalism and bourgeois power ; in fact, they mask the concrete economic dictatorship of capitalism and the concrete political dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. There have been violent reactions on the part of petty-bourgeois groups threatened with ruin due to the economic crises, which have fascinated the proletarian strata with their individual terrorism, such as the Red Brigades, but they have proved to be a pure illusion with an anarchist flavour, believing that they can positively affect social relations in favour of the proletariat by eliminating a few capitalists, a few generals and a few judges. This means too has proved ineffective regarding the emancipation of the proletariat and, on the contrary, has reinforced the propaganda of social peace and class collaboration by all the forces of social conservation, led by the opportunist ones.
The path of the class struggle in accordance with the historical realities, and not with the fantasies of the democrats, is the most arduous path for the proletariat because it has to get rid of all the illusions that electoral and parliamentary democracies produce ; it has to overcome habits that have been taken root during the long decades of the policy of class collaboration through which the imperialist bourgeoisies, in exchange for the social welfare measures in which they have invested, have obtained social peace, ever more brutal exploitation of the proletariat and a free hand in the oppression of the weaker nations. The result of this policy is not universal peace, it is not an end to social inequalities, it is not prosperity evenly distributed among the entire populations ; instead, it is greater oppression, greater repression, the exacerbation of crisis factors and bourgeois war, which is increasingly becoming the norm.
The proletariat of today in the imperialist countries is still completely subordinated to the needs of national capitalism ; and not only that, also to the needs of the international capitalist alliances. The proletariat of the imperialist countries still benefits – in comparison with the proletariat of the more capitalistically backward countries – from certain advantages which are denied to the proletarians of other countries, both in the economic and in the immediate social and political spheres. In fact, the super-rich bourgeoisie pays for these « advantages » not only by the exploitation of its own proletariat, but also by the bestial and slavish exploitation of the proletarians of the countries on the periphery of imperialism. Thus, the proletarians of each country, despite the competition between them fuelled by their own bourgeoisies, are bound to each other by the same chains. Chains from which any bourgeois law, whether democratic or fascist, will never release them, on the contrary, it will tighten them even more.
Like slaves of ancient Rome, the wage slaves of ultra-modern capitalist society must free themselves from their chains by their own efforts. They must unite in organisations independent of all bourgeois institutions ; they must put themselves on the terrain of struggle with objectives that concern exclusively their interests as wage slaves, as proletarians ; they must adopt classist methods and means, i.e. be able to oppose effectively the methods and means used by the bosses and their state. It is the experience of such a struggle, on the terrain of the defence of immediate interests, that will give the proletariat the possibility of taking on the task of going beyond the limits of immediate defence, of immediate interests, and thus placing itself on the terrain of the classist political struggle ; a terrain on which the bourgeois and socially conservative forces will divert it – as they have always done – towards democratic, parliamentary and, of course, anti-fascist, pacifist and law-abiding objectives, demanding further reforms and « fairer » laws.
And what to do at a time like this, when war is knocking at the door ?
How did the Russian and Ukrainian proletarians react to the war unleashed on 24 February ?
What is known is that from late February to early March 2022, pacifist demonstrations against the war were held in Moscow, St. Petersburg and dozens of other cities. The riot police, of course, cracked down on the demonstrators, and it is believed that more than 14,000 people were arrested in various cities (5). There were no strikes, there were no specifically working-class demonstrations, which shows, on the one hand, the natural fear of becoming the target of blanket repression and, on the other, the extreme weakness of the Russian working class : evidently, even at the level of merely defending its immediate living and working conditions, it has not yet expressed the strength capable of producing a class political vanguard that would take on the task of fighting the bourgeoisie, precisely because the ruling class is the class that represents the economic and political power under which the proletariat is crushed, fragmented, isolated and enslaved.
The bourgeois power has no fear of pacifist demonstrations ; they cause annoyance and can complicate the work of social supervision of the Russian bourgeoisie, which has always been accustomed to concealing the dead of its wars while praising their sacrifice. But the repression of pacifist demonstrations at a time when the country is at war is, in turn, a warning to the working class to be aware that power will not spare it if it decides to protest against the war ; the feared effect that workers’ protests against the war could have is to undermine the confidence and discipline of the soldiers sent to war while they have been mobilised for a « special operation » against the government in Kyiv accused of « militarism » and « Nazism ».
The Ukrainian proletarians, for their part, reacted to the military invasion, the bombing, the looting, the massive destruction of villages and towns and the massacres of civilians in the way that any population under attack, unprepared and ignorant of the reasons for the aggression, reacts : taking refuge in basements, fleeing from bombed cities, trying to help the wounded and maimed, and submitting to the decrees of a government which, for the war against the « Russians », has imposed on all men the duty of remaining at the disposal of the army to defend the « fatherland », and which has proved and continues to prove that it sucks the blood of wage labour and devours human flesh exclusively for the benefit of the bourgeois ruling class. In this, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie is no different from the Russian bourgeoisie : the interests that have driven it to war for eight years are equally capitalist, but the interests of a national bourgeoisie that seeks to break out of its alliance – with Moscow – and thereby put itself at the service of the imperialist powers that are Moscow’s rivals because of promises of more lucrative businesses.
The Russian and Ukrainian proletarians are still completely subordinated to their bourgeoisies and presently do not know how to react except through the means and methods which the bourgeoisies themselves systematically use to keep them subjugated : by being conscripted into the armed forces of their own state when their national capitalist interests are threatened by foreign competition ; by being disciplined and policed so that warfare is successful ; by being schooled through war propaganda designed purposely to incite national hatred against the actual « enemy. » And so, peoples of the same group, the same language, the same culture, who under the proletarian dictatorship that arose out of October 1917 experienced real fraternity and union, after having contributed to the fall of tsarist oppression, to the struggle against the tsarist generals who intended to restore it, and to the struggle of the international proletariat against the yoke of capitalist and pre-capitalist regimes, find themselves once again at war in the name of what ? In the name of territorial sovereignty, national capitalism and a regime that has had no scruples about turning hundreds of thousands of soldiers into cannon fodder.
Besides, the Russian and Ukrainian proletarians cannot even count on the classist struggle of the European or American proletarians ; they cannot be encouraged to follow the example of an anti-bourgeois struggle which does not even exist in Europe, the cradle of capitalism, but also the cradle of the proletarian revolution and the heart of the world revolution.
In 1967, we wrote : « Marx said a hundred years ago that industrial England was showing the rest of the then backward world a picture of its own future. Today’s hard-pressed England is showing Europe a picture of its future. Europe (…) despite its relative prosperity today, will never achieve the dominant position that England had in the last century and that the United States has today. Between Europe, even if united, and the United States, the inequality of development will inevitably widen. The problems that England faces today will face Europe tomorrow, and there will be no bigger markets to solve them, no Labour watchdogs to prevent them getting worse. Europe will be the heart of the world revolution » (6).
The economic and political crises of capitalism have never automatically provoked proletarian revolution. It did not happen in the past, and it will not happen in the future. But the objective factors that cause the ripening of the revolutionary situation are inherent exclusively to capitalism, and its inability to resolve them except by amplifying their negative forces. And it is precisely this negative effectiveness of the crisis factors which must reach such a level that the bourgeois ruling class can no longer live as it has lived up to that point, and the dominated class, the proletariat, can no longer tolerate the conditions in which it has lived up to that point.
The objective factors include the proletarian class struggle, i.e. the struggle by which the proletariat trains and prepares itself for the decisive confrontation with the ruling class. And part of this struggle is the presence, activity and influence of the class party, the revolutionary communist party, which has the task of leading the proletariat both in the class struggle and in the class revolution and, after achieving revolutionary victory, as Lenin constantly reminds us, in the exercise of class dictatorship, the only true instrument with the help of which it is possible to transform the society of capitalist exploitation and oppression, its competitive combats and wars, into a society without classes, without class antagonisms, and therefore without national antagonisms, in which the nations will finally live in harmony.
We are under no illusion that this path can be embarked upon tomorrow or that it will be facilitated by the « raising to consciousness » of each individual proletarian. As we have already said, for capitalist society to be shaken at its foundations, a world storm must be unleashed in which not only the bourgeoisie of each country will be confronted with the danger of losing its power, its privileges, but in which the proletariat of each country will see no other way out of the abyss, into which it has been plunged by its own bourgeoisie, than to rise against the established powers, against the class enemies whose actions have finally been recognized as enemies and with whom neither truce nor peace can be concluded. Then the lessons of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the October Revolution of 1917 will prove to the last proletarian in the most remote country that they represent a precious unique heritage of the class struggle, which the proletariat has as its historic task to lead to revolutionary victory, to the world socialist republic.
(Il comunista, nr. 173, April-June 2022)
(1) See Lenin V. I., Letter to the workers and peasants of the Ukraine apropos of the victories over Denikin, 28 December 1919, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 30, p. 292, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965. This letter refers to an earlier letter of August 1919, also sent to workers and peasants after the victory over Kolchak, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 29, pp. 552–560, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965. It should be remembered that in 1919 the war unleashed by the Tsarist generals Kornilov, Kolchak, Denikin, Yudenich, Wrangler, etc. against Soviet power was still in full swing, and that the Red Army had already crushed Kolchak’s troops and liberated the Urals and part of Siberia in the summer of 1919. By contrast, four months later, Denikin was scoring defeat after defeat in Ukraine.
(2) See our Characteristic Theses of the Party of December 1951, published in English in « Communist Program », No. 6, 1980.
(3) Cf. Lenin V. I., Fourth anniversary of the October Revolution, October 14, 1921, in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 33, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973, p. 55.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Cf. https ://www.rainews.it/articoli/2022/03/manifestazioni-contro-la-guerra-in-tutta-la-russia-oltre-300-arresti-a-mosca-27274687-5501-47e7-9535-b104093a85b4.html, 13 March 2022.
(6) See Europe will be the heart of the world revolution (L’Europa sarà il cuore della rivoluzione mondiale), « Il programma comunista », No. 6, 1967.
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