Some points on the historical circumstances that also led to the Russian-Ukrainian war

(From ”Il comunista”; no. 172 ; March 2022)

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1) With the defeat of the proletarian revolution in Europe in 1918–1923, and with the degeneration of the Bolshevik power in Russia finding itself in the most bitter isolation during the following years, and faced with the profound backwardness of the economic and social structure in Russia, the measures towards socialism which the Bolshevik power had begun to adopt were gradually abandoned and replaced by measures which were distinctly mercantile and bourgeois. Among these measures were, of necessity, political-economic interventions designed to develop state capitalism as far as possible – the only way of directing and controlling the development of capitalism in Russia during the proletarian dictatorship –, and to support, through the Communist International, communist movements throughout the world with the prospect of the proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries; revolution which, in the event of victory in even one of these countries, such as Germany, would also accelerate the development of the economy in Russia.

The international communist movement suffered not only an “ideological”, but also a political and social defeat, which can be summed up in the theory of “socialism in one country” (which would pave the way for bourgeois democracy, “national paths to socialism”, in essence, briefly, bourgeois nationalism); as far as the international proletarian movement is concerned, it suffered a tragic setback on the terrain of the class struggle and the immediate defensive struggle of its living and working conditions. It did not prevent the proletarians in Berlin from rising against the new bourgeois power in 1953, as well as the proletarians in Budapest in 1956 and the proletarians in Prague in 1968 to stand up against the armed intervention of “brotherly” Russia, by which Moscow affirmed its imperialist domination in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

While the proletarians of the advanced capitalist countries were to some extent protected from falling into the worst misery by the application of the policy of social shock absorbers (inherited directly from fascism) in exchange for a commitment to class collaboration, the proletarians of the countries on the periphery of imperialism were subjected to the most cruel consequences of the intense exploitation by international capitalism and national capitalisms, the most brutal colonialist repression of their attempts to revolt, together with the most adverse consequences of the economic and social crises that cyclically hit the advanced capitalist countries.

 

2) The post-World War II capitalist world was not a “world of peace”. Interimperialist rivalries erupted in the immediate aftermath of the war in a struggle to define the boundaries of the zones of influence of the various imperialisms involved in the war, to the detriment of the defeated countries – Germany, Japan, Italy and their allies– as well as directly between the Allies themselves because victors, such as France and Great Britain, had to experience the inevitable diminution of their own power owing to the evident superiority of the two “superpowers”, the United States and Russia, the real winners of the war.

The political and economic upheavals caused by the war disrupted the existing colonial equilibrium and set in motion social forces – the bourgeoisie, the peasantry and the proletariat – that had not yet shown their full revolutionary potential. It was especially the cases of India (1947) and China (1949) which, in different and apparently contradictory ways, but always firmly linked to the capitalist and bourgeois development of their states, influenced, via Gandhism (with its pacifism, above all in the Western countries) and via Maoism (with its guerrillaism, above all in the independence movements in the East and Africa), the subsequent struggles for national liberation throughout the Asian Far East and Africa. The Korean War, which broke out in 1950 and which threatened to become World War III only five years after the end of the Second World War, had anticipated the clash between Russia and the United States, which was conducted through “national liberation” struggles (in this case, the unification of the two Koreas after Japan, the former coloniser of Korea and China, was finally defeated in the World War); in the face of that threat, our party held the motto of revolutionary defeatism, summed up in the slogan “Neither with Truman nor with Stalin”, which was in line with the positions taken by the Communist Left in Italy in the face of the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 and the First World War of 1914–18, and fully corresponded to the positions of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin in relation to the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and the First World War.

 

3) The thirty-year period after the Second World Imperialist War, vaunted as a period of great capitalist expansion, was, in addition to being characterised by a kind of “new youth” of capitalism, also a thirty-year period in which the old European colonialism collapsed in many parts of the world due to the influence of the national-revolutionary movements that followed the ones in India and China, for example in Algeria, Congo, Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos), etc., which put the old powers on the ropes (France, Great Britain, Holland, Belgium and, of course, Germany and Japan, while Italy had already lost its African colonies during the war), and also inflicted severe defeats on the new superpower, the United States of America (Cuba, Vietnam).

 

4) In the absence of an independent proletarian movement, previously destroyed by the bourgeois counter-revolution which dealt the final blow with Stalinism to the revolutionary movement in Europe and China in the 1920s, even the most powerful anti-colonialist movements in the thirty-year period 1945–1975 could not pave the way for the resumption of the revolutionary proletarian movement in Europe and America. Capitalism was thus provided the opportunity to renew the ruling classes and strengthen their power both in the imperialist countries and in countries where its national development had lagged far behind, and thus brought on the stage new bourgeoisies who undertook a double task: to accelerate the development of internal markets and the concomitant national industrialisation under the aegis of the imperialist powers, led by the US, and simultaneously to rule dictatorially over the proletarian classes there, both to maximise their exploitation to accelerate national capitalist development and to make them impossible – usually using targeted repression – to struggle and organise as independent classist forces. It must be stressed that the primary role in all this was played by the distortion of Marxist communism, its principles and objectives, the degeneration of communist parties starting with the Bolshevik one, and the physical liquidation of revolutionary communists everywhere. The illusion that the national-revolutionary bourgeois movements could as such and without proletarian class struggle lead to the victory of socialism over capitalism was part of that distortion of Marxism, which has been named Stalinism – and which in turn has been the basis of hundreds of “national” variations in both advanced and backward capitalist countries (from Maoism to peaceful coexistence, from Guevarism to ecosocialism, from self-management socialism to Christian socialism, etc.).

 

5) With the world economic crisis of 1975, international capitalism, after thirty years of “economic expansion” on the ruins of the Second World Imperialist War, unquestionably demonstrated the harsh reality of this society, which has nothing to offer the proletariat and the populations of the world but a world of crises and wars.

The inter-imperialist contrasts which, as in 1914, had been the cause of the outbreak of world war in 1939, reasserted themselves among the Allies themselves already at the end of the war, and became more acute as time went on with the arrival of the renewed economic power of old imperialist countries (i.e., especially Japan and Germany) and new economic powers such as China. The overcoming of the world crisis in 1975 did not open the way to a period of peaceful development, but rather to a period in which the inter-imperialist contrasts were destined to escalate and spread their destructive consequences on all continents, thereby confirming what Marxism had already predicted one hundred and seventy-five years ago: “And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx-Engels, 1848).

An endless series of social tensions were thus intertwined with crises of a political-economic and military nature, in the face of which the various bourgeoisies, on the one hand, constantly sought to sharpen their rivalry with all the political, economic-financial and military means at their disposal, and on the other hand, acted politically and militarily in an attempt to suppress any possible social revolt; an attempt which has so far been successful, even though the proletarian masses have shown signs of great militancy in the Middle East as in Europe after the 1975 crisis: for instance, the Palestinian masses, tormented, repressed and massacred by Israel as well as by their Arab “brothers” in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon; the massive strike movement in the Polish shipyards in Danzig; the big strikes in the German Ruhr, as well as the strikes in Fiat or the strikes of the French railwaymen. The militancy of all these proletarian movements has been intoxicated, and therefore suffocated, by myths of parliamentary democracy, nationalism and electoral “change” of the regime; this was also the case with the recent movements of the so-called “Arab Spring”, in which the old state power, represented by generals such as Ben Ali (in power from 1987–2011; Tunisia) and Mubarak (in power from 1981–2011; Egypt), have been replaced by representatives of the modern sell-out bourgeoisie, whether in a democratic (as is currently the case in Tunisia) or openly authoritarian form (as is the case with the current regime of General el-Sisi in Egypt).

 

6) Russian imperialism, given the territorial vastness of Russia itself, which covers a large part of the Eurasian continent, is forced to defend its borders and its immediate zones of influence both to the west and to the east, and all the more so against an emerging power like China, which itself is interested in expanding its influence in Asia, i.e. to the west, which inevitably brings it into clash with Russia. The clash between China and Russia began immediately after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at which Khrushchev delivered his famous “secret speech” on Stalin, thus initiating the so-called “destalinization”. Mao's China, in its efforts at capitalist industrialisation of the country, supported by Stalin's Russia, needed to mask these efforts with arguments which served Stalin to falsify Marxism and which passed off the development of capitalism in Russia, as well as in China, as the “building of socialism”; hence the clash with Khrushchev and his successors and their accusation (well, well, well, from what a pulpit it was uttered!) of “revisionism”. Let's move from words to facts: in 1969, on the banks of the Ussuri River, the border military conflicts between the two “socialist” countries came only a step closer to open war (with the threat of the use of atomic bombs on both sides, moreover), to which the White House, with which China had already maintained diplomatic and commercial relations for several years, could not be an uninvolved observer. It took more than twenty years for China and Russia to normalize their relations by demilitarizing their borders. Meanwhile, as a confirmation of the alliance, albeit temporary, between China and the United States as part of the anti-Russian strategy, the battlefield was expanded in 1979–1989 to Afghanistan, which the USSR invaded under the pretext of, that it had come to the aid of a pro-Soviet Afghan government under attack by various mujahideen tribes, which were in turn supported and financed by the United States, Pakistan, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the ubiquitous United Kingdom. As we know, the USSR failed to break the Taliban even after a decade, so it was forced to leave in disgrace. The fact is that US imperialism suffered the same fate, which, under the pretext of the “war on terror”, after the al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001, invaded in turn Afghanistan with the aim not only of eliminating the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, but also of establishing bases in the country, thereby providing itself with a military presence on the borders of both Iran and Russia, at that time declared enemies of the United States. This move was not successful for Washington either, and so the Americans and their NATO allies had to leave Afghanistan after a good twenty years of war, massacres (such as the shooting of civilians in Shinwar in 2007 and the massacre in the Dasht-i-Leili desert in 2001) and the use of the most heinous torture methods against prisoners (such as waterboarding), leaving the country, like the Russians before them, once again at the mercy of an unending civil war between the various factions and tribal clans.

 

7) If in Europe in 1989–1990 West Germany took advantage of the situation when the power of the Soviet Union was collapsing and annexed East Germany, thus reunifying Germany after the victorious imperialist powers of the second imperialist war had split it in two, these upheavals in Russia directly affected also the Balkan region. Yugoslavia ended up in pieces: 1991–1999 saw a series of wars between the various federal republics, wars supported by Russia on the one hand (Serbia, Montenegro) and NATO on the other (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo), which were slaughtering each other not only for nationalist motives (Croats against Serbs and Bosniaks, Serbs against Slovenes, Croats, Bosniaks, Kosovars of Albanian ethnic origin, Slovenes against Croats), but also for religious reasons (between Muslims and Catholics, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina), accompanied by massacres, such as in Vukovar and Srebrenica by the Serbs and in Belgrade by NATO bombing, as well as the multiple use of depleted uranium by NATO forces. Similar bombing was carried out by the British and Americans in Iraq in 2004, including the use of phosphorus bombs in Fallujah.

There is no place in the world today where the long arm of the imperialist powers, either alone or in alliance between them, does not seek to change the situation in its favour through economic and financial pressure and war: these changes are nothing other than the expression of contrasts between capitalist states and, within these states, of interests which at first sight may appear to be merely “national”; but in reality they take place within the imperialist phase of capitalism, i.e. the phase which Lenin identified as the epoch dominated by finance capital and monopolies, the phase with which capitalism has historically done away with its opportunity for development, and after which only the proletarian and communist revolution on a global scale, is next: a revolution whose task is not to reform the capitalist mode of production and its production and property relations in a different guise, but to destroy it completely, and thus to free the productive forces that capitalism tends to destroy again and again after having developed them, solely to preserve its existence.

 

8) What has happened meanwhile to the countries that were once part of the USSR and Eastern Europe subjugated to Moscow?

Most of these countries, which had been trading with Western European countries for years, quickly begged for economic protection from the EU and military protection from NATO. In fact, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia joined NATO in 1999–2004, Croatia and Albania joined in 2009, Montenegro in 2017 and Northern Macedonia in 2020. As is well known, Ukraine has applied not only to join the European Union as a member state, but also to join NATO. It was clear that Russian imperialism could not sit on its hands when NATO missiles were on its doorstep. The Eastern European states that once formed the “Iron Curtain” protecting Mother Russia have, within twenty years, become the security zone of the Western imperialists, ready to have to play the role not so much of holding back any Russian advance towards Western Europe as of a springboard for the advance of NATO forces towards Moscow. In fact, the countries of the old Warsaw Pact, which Russia organised in 1955 to also militarily confront the Western imperialists organised in the North Atlantic Alliance, that is, in addition to Russia, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, were rather used for internal repressive operations within the Russian Empire – as the tanks in Budapest and Prague testified – than for an attack on any of the European countries “behind the iron curtain”.

 

9) The economic power of Western Europe, added to the economic power of the US and its closest allies such as the UK, Canada, Australia, is unattainable for Russia, and Russia is predestined, for historical reasons from which it cannot extricate itself, to function primarily as a powerful reactionary military force in favour of the dominant capitalist power or powers, and to secure the capitalist and imperialist world order: so it was under the Tsars, when it played a role against the bourgeois revolution in Europe and the world, and, strangely enough, in concert with the highly bourgeois England, fulfilling its role against France and Germany; so it was under Stalin, when it was instrumental in the liquidation of the international Bolshevik and communist movement, which enabled the development of Russian national capitalism and dealt a death blow to the proletarian communist and revolutionary movement; this was the case in the period of so-called “destalinization”, “people's democracy”, “peaceful coexistence” up to Gorbachev, in a distinctly anti-proletarian role, both inside and outside its own empire, and not only from an ideological point of view; and this is still the case today, under Putin, who, in his imperialist eagerness to conquer – like any imperialism after it finds itself in a major economic crisis – new economic territories lost after the collapse of the USSR, seeks to wrest them from the clutches of the imperialists of Western Europe and America, as in the case of Ukraine. Having lost its European colonies, Russian imperialism has begun to set its sights on territories further south and east, which are in a sense less difficult to penetrate, such as some countries in the Middle East (especially Syria) and, of course, the countries of the Caucasus, counting on that from the former Central Asian republics belonging to the old USSR, at least until they are tempted by offers of more favourable economic and political relations, for example from China with its new “Silk Road” project…, there should come no great danger.

 

10) The present Russia is caught in a vice – on the west, Germany, systematically rearming, and the European Union, protected by the US-led NATO, on the east, China, Japan and India, which also intends to participate in the partition of the world between the superpowers – from which it is difficult to escape, not only because of its geopolitical position; but also because of an important conditioning of its finance capitalism directly linked to raw materials (oil, natural gas, coal, cereals, timber, weapons, precious metals, fertilisers, equipment for nuclear power stations, etc.), which is based on a generally obsolete industry, except for the space and nuclear industries, which make it a dangerous rival to all the other nuclear powers, the United States in the lead.

 

11) Russia is still a large importer of manufacturing products, especially high-tech products, that it does not produce domestically. Its most important partner is China, which accounted for 13% and 14.8% of its exports in 2019 and 2020, respectively; while it accounted for 22% and 22.9% of its imports in 2019 and 2020. China, along with Belarus (ranked fourth in imports, fifth in exports), does not participate in unilateral sanctions. However, the sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States are having a serious impact on Russian trade and on some assets held abroad by oligarchs who are part of Putin's “magic circle”, as well as on some banks, as they have been shut out of the Swift system, which is used for international payments; but the sanctions have exempted trade in Russian oil and gas, on which Europe is very dependent, particularly Germany and Italy, but also the Netherlands and Poland, which would be in an immediate crisis if these supplies were suddenly interrupted.

 

12) The so-called period of Russian-American politico-military co-domination over the world, the Cold War period, in which the “balance of terror” (the terror of nuclear war) prevailed, ended in principle with the collapse of the USSR and its colonisation of the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia; this brought about the spread of world chaos, which until then had affected only some “stormy areas”, but not Europe. Europe was shaken by the wars in Yugoslavia, followed by the two Gulf wars, the wars in Yemen, Afghanistan, Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Nigeria, Central African Republic), Libya, Syria and Kurdistan, and the never-ending war in Palestine. While the world media discussed the Cold War between America and Russia, capitalism was massacring far from the imperialist metropolises. For thirty years, the factors of war crises have been accumulating in prosperous Europe; first the Yugoslav wars, then the war in the Mediterranean to remove Gaddafi and to fight each other over parts of Libya, and today the Russian-Ukrainian war, all this envelops peaceful, Christian and humanitarian Europe like a ring of fire.

 

13) Against the bourgeois war, whether provoked originally by national or imperialist interests, there is no diplomacy that can pacify the belligerents: the brigands negotiate after they have struck each other with the greatest possible force, and the negotiations are conducted by the strongest until the weakest yield and are ready to capitulate. Until then, the bourgeois war is not interrupted; until the course of the conflict gives no indication of which of the belligerents will be victorious, the force of inertia with which the belligerents fight forces them to continue the slaughter until the side which has already won the war militarily has definitively subdued the other side. This happened in the first world imperialist war, again in the second, and in every war since. Like the Hydra of Greek mythology, the bourgeoisie defeated in war can be reborn, re-develop and re-compete with others: what allows it to be reborn is the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois relations of production and property formed by capitalism. There is only one path to definitively overcoming this hydra-capitalism: it is not the negotiations between imperialist brigands, it is not the appeal to a humanism that deceptively pretends to stand above social conflicts and conflicts between states, it is not nationalist heroism culminating in extreme self-sacrifice. It is the class struggle, the transformation of the imperialist war into class war, which the proletariat is historically called upon to wage foremost against its own bourgeoisie, in the perspective of the world revolution.

 

14) In the history of the proletarian movement, the class struggle has already provided formidable examples. With the Paris Commune of 1871, the class struggle, spontaneously led by the most militant and conscious layers of the proletariat, showed that this is the path to take if we want to fight against bourgeois war and at the same time revolutionise society. It is the first historical example of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the counter-pole of the bourgeois dictatorship, the confirmation of the material and historical perspective outlined by Marxist theory. It is an example of the first stage of maturity of the proletarian and communist movement, which has not been followed by any other proletariat in Europe or North America, and which was not led by the class party, the revolutionary communist party, and was therefore destined to be defeated. Along with the October Revolution in 1917, the class struggle of the proletariat was organised and directed by the class party, the revolutionary communist party, which at that time was named the Bolshevik Party. Based on the lessons of the workers' struggles in Europe since 1848, of the Paris Commune and its failings and mistakes, and of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Lenin's party interpreted very accurately the historical period brought about by the First World Imperialist War and, despite the tragic failure of the Second International in the face of the war, sensed that the historical conditions in which Russian Tsarism found itself, even though it was engaged in the imperialist war alongside and supported by the democratic capitalist powers, spelled the end of its existence: the war itself set in movement the Russian social forces, bourgeois, peasant and proletarian, and set them on the path of the anti-tsarist bourgeois revolution.

So, the magnificent historical perspective that Marxism had interpreted from the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 – when the bourgeois revolution, which had already triumphed in France and before that in England, was then on the agenda in Germany, Italy and Spain –, that is, the concrete possibility of the proletariat, by its participation in the bourgeois revolutions, to make them turn into proletarian revolutions, if they were led by the class proletarian party (the communist party, see the Manifesto of 1848), was absolutely valid for backward Russia; backward, but already penetrated by the capitalist mode of production spreading from Europe with big industry to Russia and Asia.

Hence, Lenin's peremptory instruction: to transform the imperialist war into civil war, into class war; a watchword that applied to every European country and to Russia itself, where in fact, in the midst of the imperialist war, the revolution broke out, whose bourgeoisie was at the head in February 1917 and which in October 1917 was transformed into the proletarian revolution, i.e. anti-bourgeois, anti-imperialist, and therefore fundamentally anti-capitalist. The class dictatorship of the proletariat, which took shape in the Paris Commune more as an immediate necessity to defend Paris against the Prussian troops and later to defend it against the bourgeois counter-revolution of the Versailles under Thiers, was consciously set up in Petrograd with the precise knowledge of what its immediate and national tasks were and what its international tasks were, for which the Russian Marxist Party, the Bolshevik Party of Lenin, had been preparing the proletariat for the previous fifteen years.

 

15) The class party, the revolutionary communist party, has, in fact, the task of preparing the proletariat for its revolution, of preparing it for the struggle against the bourgeois state on the basis of the experiences it spontaneously makes in the struggles of the defence of immediate economic interests, and on the basis of the evaluations of revolutions and, in the first place, counter-revolutions. The class party represents the class consciousness, the historical aims of the class struggle which the proletariat is impelled to wage against the ruling bourgeoisie to overthrow its political power and dictatorship and to establish its own class dictatorship, since the latter is the only political means by which the bourgeoisie can be deprived of its control over the economy and thus over society.

The class party, on the other hand, does not arise overnight, it is not a political form maturing within the proletariat; it is the organic result of the whole history of class struggles, in particular of the struggle of the proletariat against the ruling bourgeoisie, and of everything that modern civilisation has created that is positive for the development of the productive forces, the material and necessary basis of the economy of any class-divided society, and all the more so of the classless society which Marxism has called communism. The class party, together with Marxism, has existed on the historical level since 1848; it has existed as the theory of the communist revolution, as the lead of the revolutionary proletariat on the world level; on the formal level, obliged to act in concrete situations, sometimes favourable but often unfavourable to the class struggle, the party can also be narrowed down to its two representatives, as Marx and Engels were for many years, or as was the small group around Lenin in 1914–1916, or even disappear, as happened in 1927–1945 as a result of the Stalinist counter-revolution.

 

16) The present Russian-Ukrainian war is nothing but the continuation – on both fronts – of the bourgeois policy pursued by military means. It is not a question of who is the aggressor or the attacked. The bourgeoisie of a country always fights against foreign bourgeoisies, that is why aggression is reciprocal, it is part of the competitive struggle that moves from the outlet of commodities and capital to the military sphere. The proletariat has nothing to share either with its own bourgeoisie or with the foreign bourgeoisie because whichever bourgeoisie wins the war, its lot will not change in its essence: it will still remain wage slaves, it will still be the class of workers from whose exploitation the bourgeoisie extracts surplus value; it will still be the workers who produce the wealth of each country, a wealth which the bourgeoisie completely appropriates compelling the workers, the proletarians, to buy on the market what they need to live; it will still be the class that is forced to sell its labour power to the capitalists and to suffer directly and severely from every market fluctuation, every economic and financial crisis, every war crisis.

The capitalist is never unemployed: his “occupation” consists in exploiting wage labour, paying the labour force as little as possible, saving as much as possible on all costs of production and labour, accumulating money, investing capital in real estate, industry, trade and speculating on the stock exchange. The proletarian, a man without reserves, owns nothing, and his life-long “occupation” is to find work, in which he will be exploited and receive a wage; if there is no job, the proletarian starves, lives in the worst misery.

 

17) In times of peace, to survive, the proletarians are forced to sell themselves to the capitalists; they are deployed and forced to discipline in all sorts of factories and enterprises, but they are always plunged into insecurity because at the slightest fluctuation in the market or the slightest change in the interests of the capitalists, they are dismissed, their wages are reduced, they end up on the breadline. In times of war, proletarians are incorporated into the army and war production; they become cannon fodder, whether they are part of the armed forces or remain behind the lines as workers. War in the imperialist epoch no longer takes the form of a clash of armies, trench warfare. War is increasingly passed on to the civilian population; carpet-bombings, massacres, the use of gas and chemical and bacteriological or nuclear bombs are expected, as they were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What the European colonialists carried out far from their metropolises, in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, when they destroyed entire villages and massacred entire peoples, imperialism has transferred to the metropolises in modern war; the civilian population is being massacred… to demoralise and weaken the soldiers at the front. That's why the American atomic bomb was used, to break Japan and force it to surrender; the bombing of Dresden in 1945 and its razing to the ground induced the Germans to surrender, while the destruction of Warsaw in 1944 by the Germans to put down the Polish uprising against them was watched without any intervention from afar by Soviet troops waiting for the Germans to finish their dirty work and then be able to take Warsaw with much less resistance from the Polish side. Examples of this kind could be given in abundance, but these alone show how in imperialist war none of the vaunted “military honour” of nineteenth-century generals and strategists is even a shred of realistic.

 

18) The aim of the war propaganda disseminated by the bourgeoisie is always to bend its proletariat to national unity. In Russia, even before the invasion of Ukraine, the Kyiv government was portrayed as a “Nazi” government that wanted to eliminate the Russian-speaking population that had lived in the Crimea and the Donbas since a long time ago; something that Russia could not stand idly by. It is true that in 2014, Russia militarily occupied Crimea and supported pro-Russian groups in the Donbas in the creation of autonomous people's republics in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. These eight years have seen the continuation of what the media have called a “low-intensity war”, in which the Ukrainian army has sought to recapture the territory of two Donbas provinces that have proclaimed themselves people's republics, while the armed militias of these two pro-Russian republics have been repelling attacks. At the same time, part of the Russian-speaking population that remained in the part of the Donbas controlled by the Ukrainian army was compelled to flee to Russia to escape repression. In the same period, after the overthrow of the pro-Russian President Yanukovych following the violent Euromaidan demonstrations, Poroshenko, a Ukrainian oligarch, former Minister of Trade and Economic Development during Yanukovych's presidency and former head of the Council of Ukraine's National Bank, was elected to the presidency. He left a strongly nationalist imprint on his successor, Zelenskyy; his slogan was “armija, mova, vira” (army, language, faith), as he used the army to push pro-Russian forces in the Donbas further east into two autonomous regions, as he privileged the Ukrainian language over Russian, and as he supported the separation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the Russian one. He has promoted Ukraine's association with the European Union, while passing laws against Russian and communist propaganda, providing recognition to all those who fought for Ukrainian independence in the 20th century, including the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which took part in the extermination of Jews in Ukraine and the massacre of thousands of Poles during the Second World War. It is therefore not surprising that Zelenskyy's entourage includes members of his bodyguards who are former neo-Nazis.

 

19) So, easy pretexts for Russia to intervene militarily in Ukraine. Something that already took place in 2014 in Crimea in defence of the referendum that gave 90% of the vote to its annexation to Russia, and which has been taking place since 24 February this year, after the two people's republics of Luhansk and Donetsk were officially recognised, in the form of a prepared invasion both from the east, from Crimea and therefore the Black Sea, and from the north, guarded by Belarus, a close ally of Moscow. And another pretext: the governments in Kyiv have never implemented the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015, co-signed by Ukrainian and Russian delegates, enshrined in UN resolutions and adopted in the presence of OSCE delegates. In fact, this is further proof of the ineffectiveness of UN resolutions: they are nothing more than scraps of paper.

What does Russian imperialism want to gain from this military operation? Certainly, not the annexation of Ukraine to Russia, but a government, if not entirely pro-Russian, like Lukashenko's in Belarus, at least one that will make Ukraine a non-member of NATO and perhaps not even a member of the European Union. And that is at the end of this special military operation – as Putin has called it – a de facto real war, which, given the support that the current Ukrainian President has received from the United States and Europe, could last for a good few more months. It has already been stated many times that neither Washington nor London nor Paris, nor Berlin nor Rome nor any other EU country has any intention of “dying for Ukraine”, while China stands by and watches. What interests all governments, from Moscow to Washington and all the rest, is the preparation of their proletariat for a war situation in which national cohesion becomes a determining factor. The more the war sees atrocities applied by each of the belligerents to inflict a wound and defend itself, the more each bourgeois power needs national cohesion. In Russia today, national cohesion has been sought through “anti-Nazi” propaganda against the government in Kyiv and the danger of a NATO invasion of Russian territory. In the Ukraine, national cohesion has been sought through classical propaganda about the attacked country, about the defence of the homeland and territorial integrity, with the mobilisation not only of the usual nationalism, but above all the heroism of a people who have been forced to make their women and children flee from the constant bombing, and that every town, every village be turned into a trench, into a barricade against the enemy who has suddenly invaded their homes.

But the same thing is happening in all the countries of Europe, where various governments are exploiting the horrors of the war in Ukraine, persistently filming every crater caused by a rocket, every building hit by artillery, every cellar where people run to hide, to awaken live the fear of war. Just as they have done hitherto regarding Covid-19, through wartime summaries of contagions, hospitalizations, deaths, they are doing so with the current war in Ukraine, as if it were the only war deserving of being documented, filmed, described, commented on. In this way, they are trying to arouse in the minds of the proletarians the desire to take revenge on a visible, recognisable enemy, in this case Russia, whose brutality in bombing cities should make them forget the everyday brutality of a society in which people die daily at work, are fired from their jobs from day to day, and suffer constantly from abuses, oppression and violence, and all this in a time of complete peace, in conditions of full democracy and “freedom”.  The devastation in Mariupol should make us forget about the permanent devastation of our environment, should make us forget about the cluster bombs that the fine democratic countries dropped on the Serbs in Kosovo, and about the use of phosphorus bombs in Fallujah. It is as if the brutalities and massacres that capitalism has been perpetrating with increasing violence for over a hundred and seventy years have not taken place.

 

20) All this war propaganda is a preparation for a world war, towards which the imperialist powers are heading inexorably. The enormous means used by the bourgeoisie for this propaganda confuse and cloud the mind; the proletarians are disoriented, paralysed, a vast amount of patriotism, nationalism, class collaboration is pumped into their heads without any hint of even a minimum of defensive struggle; they have no antidote which only class struggle can produce. Like a huge herd, they are repeatedly and unconsciously led to accept that they will eke out an existence where and how the bosses-their shepherds wish. But the imperialist bourgeoisie makes greater demands than one thinks: it wants the proletariat to participate, to fight in the ranks of a warmongering democracy, to be convinced that it is fighting for “freedom”, for a “better future”, for a “fairer” society, for peace! And this demand can only be achieved if the proletarians, at least the vast majority of them, collaborate, give their labour, their skills, their arms, their lives to the service of the fatherland; the proletarians who, as history itself proves, have no country, must transform themselves into ardent patriots… And if the bourgeoisie has to show itself humanitarian to achieve this goal, then behold, promptly – even though it drives away immigrants from Africa or the East from its frontiers, builds walls and fences, with guards ready to shoot them and leave them to die of hunger and cold in the mountains, or of thirst and heat in the deserts, or to drown in the seas, which has turned from paths to salvation into cold and deep graveyards – opened its doors to Ukrainian refugees, found the means to take them in, gave them food, the necessary papers to go to any country, a roof over their heads, hospitals to care for them, schools to send their children to, and playgrounds to play in.

Everything that was denied for decades to migrants, who were also fleeing the devastating wars, misery and hunger caused by capitalism itself, is now being “humanitarianly” offered to contemporary migrants from Ukraine. Is it not because those were dark or yellow-skinned and these, on the other hand, are white-skinned? Is it not because those people carried and carry with them a fighting spirit passed on from generation to generation, thanks to which they survived hunger, poverty and war for decades, whereas today's Ukrainians have not had time to experience the brutality of capitalism as is the case in Africa, the Middle East or Asia? Is it not because the few million hands of young women and young men who are in a state of having to take any job to survive are useful to replace the domestic workforce that is not as flexible? Is it not perhaps because in this way it is better to put into the mind of the domestic proletarians that they are different from those who are worse off than they are, since they have lost everything, and for that reason, the forms of collaboration with the bourgeoisie typical of the labour aristocracy, thereby strengthening the social and political ties that bind them to the fate of national capitalism? It is probably all these aspects combined; which does not represent a state of affairs of the European proletariat worthy of following, one which could boast of a history of revolutionary struggle before which the whole world trembled, whereas today it is the bourgeois world which frightens the proletariat itself…

 

21) Despite such a depressing and unfavourable situation for the proletariat, we revolutionary communists are sure that the proletarian class will awake from the long sleep into which it has fallen. And it will wake up because it will be the approaching war crisis which will shake its capacity to endure it any longer, its whole organism, and push it, even if unconsciously, onto the path of classist struggle because that will be practically, factually, materially the only path, on which it will be able to recognise that it is alive, that it is capable of fighting for its own class interests and of being in solidarity with proletarians of all other categories, sectors, sexes, nations, in a struggle which today more than ever presents itself as a struggle without frontiers, a struggle that knows no homeland, that is, an international struggle.

Then the classical communist slogans of revolutionary defeatism, i.e. of the struggle foremost against one's own bourgeoisie, of fraternisation with the proletarian-soldiers of enemy countries, of class solidarity, will acquire their true meaning: they will be words that tread the terrain of classist struggle, a struggle that will make the proletarians realise that their strength does not lie in the ballot paper, that it does not lie in the delegation of bourgeois politicians and deputies to look after the lives of the proletarians, that it does not lie in the practices of a now rotten democracy that only serves to stupefy the proletariat; a struggle that does not consist in demanding peace from those who prepare imperialist war and the massacres that imperialist war brings with it, but that is in the hands and hearts of a class that through its work produces real social wealth, goods that truly serve the needs of human life and not the needs of the markets.

On this road, the proletarians will not only gain the necessary experience to refine and develop their struggle, but they will meet the class party, they will recognise it as their party, as their lead, as their weapon, so that the struggle they will engage in against the forces of social preservation, does not dissipate its precious forces and strikes the class enemy where the blows do the most damage – on profits, on social control, on class collaboration – and then, in a dialectical intensification, assaults the most important bastions of the defence of the bourgeois regime: the state, the political, economic, financial, administrative and military structures.

Peace, i.e. the termination of the warfare that characterises the conflict between the imperialist powers, can only be achieved when the proletarian revolution triumphantly comes to political power, even at the cost of economic and territorial sacrifices – as happened immediately after the Bolsheviks seized power, that is, with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918 – which demonstrates that the proletariat really wants peace, but is compelled to prepare to wage war in defence of its conquered power because the bourgeoisie, which has just been overthrown in one country, is reorganising its forces with the help of the bourgeoisies of other countries in an attempt to re-establish its domination. That is why that great watchword of transforming the imperialist war into class war, into civil war, does not mean stopping the struggle once power is conquered, but waging another struggle, one to defend the victorious revolution and to help not only politically and economically but also militarily the proletarians of other countries in their revolution against their national bourgeoisies.

The communist proletarians do not delude themselves, nor do they delude the broad masses, that a victorious revolutionary uprising will mean the winning of a lasting peace. It is the bourgeois class that never gives up after defeat, for it too is an international class and every national bourgeoisie can count on the political, economic and military help and support of all other bourgeoisies in the event of a proletarian revolution. It was so during the Paris Commune, it was so during the proletarian revolution in Russia, it will be so in the future in the face of any conquered proletarian power.

After the overthrow of the bourgeois political power, the difficulties of which are proportional to the economic strength of the bourgeoisie with which the conflict is waged, the task of the proletarian revolution does not end, it only begins because the real objective of the proletarian revolution is not only to assert itself internationally, but to bury the capitalist mode of production, its relations of production and ownership, and to transform the economy, not of one country but of all countries, from the capitalist economy to the socialist economy and thence to the communist economy. This is a historical trajectory that will not end in a few months or years, as anarchists believe, although the technical and industrial development of the economy will objectively accelerate this process. It will be a path of struggle, with advances and setbacks, with successes and failures, with destructions and reconstructions, but it is a path marked out by the historical development of capitalism itself, in which economic and war crises inexorably confront the international proletarian class with mutually exclusive alternatives: war or revolution.

 

 

International Communist Party

www.pcint.org