Russia ‒ Ukraine war

Not “peace” but plans for war are at the heart of the interests of the global imperialism increasingly mired in contrasts that can only be resolved by war

(From ”Il comunista”; no. 178 ; June-August 2023)

 Back Sumary

 

 

While we are preparing the publication of a pamphlet devoted to this war and compiling the articles that will be included in this pamphlet, we would like to look at the so ‒ called “peace plans” that have been reported in the world press. Currently, there are two new “official” peace plans: the one drawn up by Mr Zelensky and agreed with the Americans and the British, and the one drawn up by China. A third 'peace plan' has been put forward by Indonesia, but has been shelved by all concerned.

Already back in 2014 and then again in 2015, faced with the long-running conflict in Donbas between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian forces, the Russian and Ukrainian governments, mediated by Germany (Merkel) and France (Hollande), worked out peace agreements in the Belarusian capital Minsk. These agreements essentially provided for self-government for the two disputed regions ‒ Donetsk and Lugansk ‒ including a 15 km “buffer zone” between the two borders and control by OSCE representatives. However, these agreements were not respected by both Ukrainians and pro-Russian political forces. In fact, after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, constant clashes between the Ukrainian army, neo-Nazi troops (such as the Azov Battalion) and pro-Russian Donbass forces erupted. After eight years in which the Ukrainian government continued to oppress and repress pro-Russian civilians in the Donbas regions, the Donetsk and Lugansk Oblasts (regions) declared themselves independent people's republics, naturally supported by Russia and only recognised by it, just like the Republic of Crimea.

In various articles we have published, we have also recalled how in the 1991–1992 agreements between Russia and the United States at the time of the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of new “independent” states, including Ukraine, the United States promised not to place NATO military and missile bases on Russia's borders. And as it is the case with all agreements between brigands, sooner or later, one or the other of the participants will break such agreements by their actions; as their strategic interests and the balance of power between them change, the attitude of the states towards the agreements made changes over time.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine was expected by the United States. The British newspaper The Guardian revealed ‒ according to agi.it of 8 May (1) ‒ that Putin told former US President Clinton in 2011, three years before the annexation of Crimea, that he did not consider himself bound by the Budapest Memorandum (signed not by him but by Boris Yeltsin), in which Russia guaranteed to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for the surrender of all Ukrainian nuclear weapons. It was Clinton himself who revealed this a few days ago at a conference at the Jewish Center in New York.

So the US knew that sooner or later, Russia would attack Ukraine ‒ just as it had already done with Chechnya and Georgia, which Putin has always considered an integral part of Russia. But by virtue of its strong position in NATO, which controlled almost all of Russia's border with Western Europe (after almost all former “socialist” countries had joined it), the US waited for Russia to make the “first move” to have the propaganda argument par excellence in its favour: by military aggression in Ukraine, Russia was tearing up agreements and endangers the whole of Europe!

Since the overthrow of the pro-Russian President Yanukovych, the Americans and the British have engaged in supporting various political movements and provocations that would serve them to open up Ukraine to “Western” political influence. Ukraine was the last European country still teetering between the Euro-American West and the Russian East; too tempting a morsel for NATO and the EU to leave under Russian influence. On the other hand, in the long imperialist phase of capitalism that we are going through, no country is left free to act in the world market according to exclusively national interests. Let alone a country like Ukraine (and like Poland), which represents a strategic nerve centre in the confrontation between Euro-American imperialists and Russian imperialism. The strongest imperialist powers decide the fate of peace and war according to their own imperialist interests and based on economic laws which they are, in fact, unable to control, as the constant crises that are shaking the economies and stock exchanges demonstrate. The “freedom” and “democracy” that supposedly represent the “values of Western civilization” are a smokescreen, a useful myth to confuse and deceive the world proletarian masses and break them under the demands of bourgeois domination as well as wage conditions. The foreign policy of the most powerful imperialist countries does not always pursue purely their economic interests; in inter-imperialist conflicts, economic, financial and foreign policy are so closely intertwined that some “policies” actually anticipate economic and financial goals in their outlook. If it is true that war is a continuation of foreign policy pursued with military means, it is also true that the conditions under which adversaries enter into war are not clearly determined in advance, they do not correspond to a precise script in which all the various hypotheses under which the conflict will unfold and develop are considered. As in the case of major economic crises, imperialist policies do not precede but follow events; therefore, imperialism is not and will not be able to prevent the outbreak of an economic crisis or the outbreak of war. The only thing it can do, and does do, knowing from experience that sooner or later, the capitalist crisis of overproduction will break out, is to prepare itself, above all on the military level, to face the crisis and thus the reactions of rival states, to exploit every weak point of its adversaries to gain an advantage for its own power interests.

The Russian giant could not have expected, even though it knew that Kyiv counted on the political and military support of the West, such tenacious resistance to the military invasion, nor could the Americans have expected such a proud conduct from a people which, from the very beginning of the invasion, has been shamelessly sacrificed not only to the interests of national capitalism, but also to the domination interests of the imperialist powers, which have no other objective than to advance from one massacre to the next, and thus to bring it out from the domination of a rival imperialist power.

At the time of writing this article, we are approaching 500 days of war, bombing, destruction, with tens and tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands wounded on both sides of the fronts, with huge masses forced to starve and flee their homes. And while this horrible tragedy unfolds ‒ Russian imperialism accuses the West of not respecting mutual security agreements, the American and European imperialists shift the blame for the wartime massacres to the Russians, accusing them of wanting to invade, after Ukraine, the whole of Europe ‒ the champions of “freedom” in the same moment foreshadow that this war will last a long time and that it is not conceivable to “negotiate” either a ceasefire, a truce or even “peace”

That does not mean, however, that to feed the current warmongering and “pacifist” propaganda, the world media are not spurred on to report that “someone” is seeking peace and is making “plans” to be presented at more or less narrow or more or less broad meetings. The same persons whose hands are stained with the blood of soldiers sent to slaughter and of civilians bombed by missiles of all kinds, repeating their NO to ending the war except by “victory” ‒ and on this Zelenskyy and Putin are unanimous ‒ are the ones writing “peace plans” or replying “we will not discuss this”!

 

PEACE PLANS

 

Zelenskyy's ten-point “peace plan” was officially announced and presented at the G20 meeting in Bali, Indonesia in November 2022, of course after discussion with Biden.

Briefly, this plan provides the following: withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine; compensation for war damage; guarantee of nuclear, food and energy security; release of all prisoners and deportees; restoration of the integrity of the state's territory (including Crimea) and prevention of possible escalation. Of course, the call for the creation of a special court for “crimes” related to Russia's aggression against Ukraine could not be missed. Finally, it is provided that the signing of this “peace document” will take place only after all these requirements have been met.

The Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, of course, replied dryly: unrealistic.

Like all peace plans drawn up while the war is going on, this document ‒ if we assume that it would become the basis for negotiating a ceasefire and an “end to the war” ‒ will undergo changes that will depend on what the actual circumstances of the suspension or end of the war will be. For now, it remains Zelenskyy's unwavering position, and therefore that of the Americans and British, that the war will continue until Russia is sufficiently weakened ‒ through a combination of ever tougher economic sanctions and continued and wider international isolation, the military reversals brought about by a strong Ukrainian counter-offensive backed by some of the most effective and advanced Western weapons, and the political-military crisis of Putin's government, and perhaps also some weakening of friendly relations from China, or for yet other reasons ‒ and will thus be forced to start negotiating a “peace” which, like all the peace deals made so far, will be just a truce between one war and the next.

China's 12-point “peace plan”, put forward by the Foreign Ministry with Xi Jinping's approval, was officially announced on 24 February 2023, exactly one year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This plan does not contradict the position China has previously taken on this war.

It begins by reaffirming respect for the sovereignty of all countries (which, with reference to China itself, implies Beijing's sovereignty over Taiwan as well) and appeals to “international law” recognised by the UN. It also stresses that the security of any country cannot be guaranteed by strengthening or expanding military blocs (hence no to Ukraine joining NATO, but also no to the expansion of the military bloc organised in the Asia-Pacific by the United States).

The call for peace talks to be initiated through a ceasefire and a series of meetings to find mutually acceptable compromises is therefore obvious; the implication being that the US, UK and EU should stop fuelling the war and use their political influence to reach a “political solution” to the conflict. There is no shortage of talk about the “humanitarian crisis”, “the safety of civilians” and the role of the UN as a “guarantor” of humanitarian aid and of the exchange of prisoners of war between Russia and Ukraine. Naturally, it wants to ensure the protection of nuclear power plants, to prohibit the use of nuclear weapons as well as biological and chemical weapons in the conflict “by any country and under any circumstances”.

Another passage touches on the export of grain, both Ukrainian and Russian, so that the war crisis does not multiply into a food crisis of global proportions. No unilateral sanctions “not authorised by the UN Security Council” (of which Russia, lo and behold, is also a member). Since this is a “peace plan”, a call to “protect the current world economic system”, to “stand up against the politicisation, expediency and use of the world economy as a kind of weapon” and to “jointly mitigate the side effects of the crisis and prevent disruptions to energy, finance, grain trade, transport and other international cooperation, which would be detrimental to the recovery of the world economy” could not be missed. And here is the rallying cry of capitalism with a human face, today in Chinese style: the world economic system must not be touched, we must fight against the war crisis that is disrupting trade, business and putting the stock markets in crisis! Signed… Communist Party of China!!!

China's concerns about a war that puts not only Russia but also Chinese trade in trouble are obvious. The appeal is addressed in particular to the United States and the European Union, two vital markets for Chinese capitalism.

The Wall Street Journal of 26 May has a fresh update: Li Hui, the Chinese president's special envoy, has quickly landed in several European capitals (Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, Brussels) to convince Kyiv's European allies to seek a ceasefire and to agree to proceed to recognise the territories Russia has already occupied in Ukraine, namely Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk. Beijing is, of course, trying to detach the Europeans from Washington. It cannot be excluded that an argument has been used to do so, but which we have already anticipated, namely, that the United States, in reality, wants to weaken Europe with this war so that it can better dominate it and counter the Asian giant from a much stronger position than at present.

Other second-tier countries such as Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia have appeared on the horizon, offering themselves as “peace mediators” or “peacemakers”. Brazil and South Africa, along with Russia, China and India, are members of BRICS, and this close economic alliance is the backbone of a potential political alliance of paramount importance, so much so that in the perhaps not too distant future it could constitute the third player among the imperialist blocs that decide the fate of the world: i.e. the United States, the European Union and BRICS.

China is, in fact, the economic and financial pivot around which the other members revolve, but their close alliance allowed the formation of the New Development Bank (NDB BRICS) in 2015 to finance infrastructure and projects in water, clean energy, energy efficiency, transport, and social and digital infrastructure. Of course, there is no lack of ambition to create the third major global capitalist pole, which still has a long way to go to start seriously worrying the United States and the European Union. However, these are capitalistically “young” countries with a massive proletariat that can be exploited in a way that the old European imperialists never had the opportunity to do, and already today, 20 years after their formation, the BRICS countries account for 40% of the world's population, 25% of the world economy and 17% of trade on a global scale.

All the countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America that are defined as “developing” and that bear with displeasure the historical and oppressive white dominance of the US and Europe look to the BRICS as a viable alternative. Iran, Algeria and Argentina are among the first to formally apply to join BRICS, and many others are on the waiting list: from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Indonesia to Pakistan, Mexico, Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Belarus, Zimbabwe and Tunisia (2).

Brazil and South Africa, as part of such a group, therefore feel much less helpless than they used to when confronting and expressing their positions vis-à-vis the “giants” of the world. For example, in April, before a visit to China and the United Arab Emirates, Lula, in a meeting with Romanian President Iohannis after “condemning Russia's violation of Ukraine's territorial integrity” and criticising the enormous arms supplies from the US and Europe to Ukraine, said that it would be important for a group of neutral countries to get together to pressure Moscow and Kyiv and persuade them to negotiate peace. Needless to say, the United States and the European Union rejected Lula's proposals because, in his view, both Russia and Ukraine were the culprits of the war, while their position, on the contrary, was to blame only Russia for the aggression against a “free and sovereign” country…

As far as South Africa is concerned, relations with Russia have been very close since Moscow supported the ANC's (African National Congress) struggle against apartheid, i.e. since the USSR still existed. However, apart from a few periods of cooling, relations have generally been very good, both in terms of trade and investment in South Africa's security apparatus, so much so that South Africa joined the BRIC group of countries in 2010 when its joining gave rise to BRICS. Already at the time of the West's armed operations against Gaddafi's Libya, South Africa had held back from supporting the attack on Libya; it again demonstrated its “neutrality” at the UN by abstaining in April 2022, along with 35 other countries, from a vote that formally called for Russia's withdrawal from Ukraine.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa did not want to be overshadowed by Lula regarding the Russia-Ukraine conflict. He took it upon himself to act as “Africa's spokesman” to Putin and Zelenskyy, who recently agreed to meet him in Moscow and Kyiv along with five other African leaders (Senegal, Uganda, Egypt, Congo and Zambia). This is a mission in which two countries, South Africa and Senegal, abstained from voting at the UN on the official recognition that Russia had committed military aggression; other two, Uganda and Congo, did not take part in the vote; and the remaining two, Egypt and Zambia, voted in favour (3). Thus, the democratic game, in which “mediators” from three different political lines are acting, is well respected.

It is interesting to observe how countries aspiring to assert themselves in international relations are flocking to the role of peace mediators, knowing full well that they will not be the ones to turn the warmongering positions of Russia, Ukraine, the United States and the European Union into pacifist ones. It is a classic scramble to participate in the talks that will get underway when the war is over, to gain some political and economic advantage that only “great powers” can make sure of.

They are appearing now, after a year full of Russian-Ukrainian massacres, which they have stood idly by, when a small glimmer seems to be appearing not so much for “peace” as for future political (and therefore economic) relations in a world order that has for years been volatile by the influence of the most powerful imperialisms and in which reasons are beginning to be found for strengthening or altering existing alliances in the perspective of a third world war.

At every summit that takes place in the world, the subject of the war in Ukraine is, of course, a must.

So this was the case at the very recent summit at the beginning of June at the IISS Asia Security Summit: The Shangri-La Dialogue (SLD) in Singapore. The annual summit, organised by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), is held at the Shangri-La Hotel complex in Singapore on the theme of “Asia-Pacific Security” and is attended by some fifty countries. This year, 600 delegates from 49 countries gathered; the prevailing theme could not be anything other than the conflict between two superpowers that are involved in everything that happens in the Pacific: the United States and China. We will have to deal with this conflict at another time and another place, with all the implications concerning Taiwan, the position of the Philippines, the alliance between the US, Japan and South Korea, the involvement of Australia, etc. Here we come back to the issue of Ukraine, which, of course, could not go unmentioned at this level. And it is Indonesia that is the major protagonist.

Indonesia (with Jakarta as its capital) is a country of more than 270 million people, almost 90% Muslim, divided into some 300 different ethnic groups and made up of more than 17 500 islands, of which more than 15 000 are uninhabited. It is ranked 7th in the world ranking of countries by GDP-PPA (gross domestic product based on purchasing power parity), with China, the United States, India, Japan, Germany and Russia in the top 6 positions; behind Indonesia in the top 20 are Brazil, the United Kingdom, France, Mexico, Italy, Turkey, South Korea, Spain, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt and Thailand. As can be seen, many countries defined as “emerging” economies have made it into the top twenty of the global GDP rankings; although GDP-PPA is considered a rough figure, it is in any case indicative of the economic development of different countries, especially when compared over the last ten or twenty years.

For example, in 2011 Indonesia was ranked 16th, China 2nd, India 10th, Brazil 6th, while in 2021 Indonesia rose to 7th, China 1st, India 3rd, Brazil 8th; while Japan and Germany dropped one position: 3rd and 4th in 2011, 4th and 5th in 2021. This confirms that, in the imperialist phase of capitalism, although the old powers tend to maintain a decisive economic and financial position in the world, they cannot prevent the younger and more aggressive capitalisms from rising the ladder and asserting themselves in world relations, not only economically, but above all politically and therefore militarily.

Returning to Indonesia, at the Singapore summit its Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto surprised everyone precisely on the issue of Ukraine.

”I propose,” he said in his speech, “that we sign a joint document calling for an end to hostilities”. And he outlined a “Korean-style” peace proposal, analogous to the Korean War in 1950, as follows: “First: a cease-fire. Second: the establishment of a demilitarised zone of 15 km on both sides. Third: the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force. Fourth: a referendum on the disputed territories, allowing them to choose which side they would take” (4). The immediate rejection of such an idea by Ukraine and the European Union was predictable, while the United States did not make its position clear, as it was interested in maintaining a “dialogue-friendly” position in this forum, especially in relation to China, which of course could not but appeal to those present to consider not only its but also the Indonesian proposal.

The fact is that there is increasing pressure from many non-Western but important countries, not only on Ukraine and Russia to bring them closer to negotiations, but especially on the United States and the European Union. Why?

There are many war zones in the world, in Africa, the Middle East, and now Europe, while tensions are rising in the Pacific due to initiatives by both the United States and China; state arms budgets are increasing precisely at the prospect of more direct involvement in local wars or future world wars. Thus, for the umpteenth time, a clash between the West and the East looms on the horizon, but this time with the involvement of many more actors from the so-called “Third World”. The main players are no longer just the United States and Russia, as they were in the forty years following the end of the Second World Imperialist War; China has joined in, and on the stage of this world drama we see Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the ever-present United Kingdom, Germany and France, each with its own interests to negotiate in the perspective of the next decisive war alliances.

 

THEY TALK OF PEACE BUT PREPARE FOR WAR

 

The United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union itself, which are giving maximum support to Ukraine's war against Russia ‒ with numerous billions and a quantity of armaments never expended in a single year on a war in which they are not directly involved ‒ have never proposed any “peace plan” of their own, but come up with continuous war plans every month. Why did all the major world powers get involved in this particular war, immediately after it was unleashed, between two states that are in conflict intrinsically over territorial issues and have already reached a formal compromise twice ‒ with the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015?

The sequence of economic and financial crises since the 1990s has tended to increasingly exacerbate inter-imperialist contrasts, this is an undeniable fact. And inter-imperialist contrasts inevitably give rise to even stronger crisis factors, making them potential factors of general war.

The war in Ukraine, more than the war in Yugoslavia in 1992‒1999, has global implications. Yugoslavia began to disintegrate in the early 1990s, and the imperialist powers of Europe, America and Russia, although they competed for political and military influence, never reached such a clash as today in Ukraine.

The Europeans and the Americans were concerned with getting their hands on most of the territory of the former Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo); the Russians were concerned with maintaining a solid influence and alliance with Serbia; and while Slovenia and Croatia managed to settle their territorial interests with the direct help of Germany, the greatest horrors of the war were concentrated in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.

The war was of global relevance, as Western imperialisms (through NATO) were involved in the defeat of Russia-supported Serbia, which was not about to give up its territorial ambitions in despite such a powerful enemy as NATO. The bombing of Belgrade, in which Italy (whose government was led by Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema, a former prominent member of the Italian Communist Party, while the vice-president was the very Catholic Mattarella) actively participated, under the pretext of stopping the “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo, practically ended the war. However, the result of the war, which started within one country and quickly continued as an international war under the baton of the main existing imperialisms, was not peace: Bosnia and Kosovo have remained and remain a hotbed of disputes and political and armed confrontations. Such is the legacy of imperialist war.

And such a legacy could also apply to Ukraine once the so-called “end of the war” is achieved.

Unlike in the former Yugoslavia, where different ethnic groups and nationalisms mixed, there are only two strong nationalities in Ukraine, Ukrainian and Russian (although both historically from the same base), but the population is all “Ukrainian”. It resembles a bit the population of Korea, which, at the end of a national war in which the United States and Russia intervened supporting one or the other of the opposing sides, and which neither side actually won, found itself divided into a North and a South that have existed solely owing to extra-Korean interests, represented at that time primarily by the United States and Russia, and at present by China, the superpowers that are trying to divide the world.

The Ukrainian war, the longer it lasts, the more it could develop into a state similar to the Korean one. The two main imperialist powers involved, the US and Russia, are the two nuclear powers. The war between them could, for the first time in history and given the development of so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons, be a nuclear war in which the “market imperatives” that usually govern the interests of any imperialism would completely go awry, causing every move by one bloc and every counter-move by the opposite bloc to get out of control.

Neither Russian nor US imperialism are really prepared for this “future”, so as far as either is concerned ‒ even with the entry of the “third troublemaker”, China ‒ this war is not on the agenda. In fact, the third world war is not even on the agenda yet, although we are getting much closer to it than in 1950 (Korean War), 1962 (Russian missile crisis in Cuba), 1975 (world economic crisis) or 2008 (world financial crisis).

The Western imperialists have mandated Zelenskyy's government to wage war in Ukraine against Russian troops on behalf of America and the European Union as well. Thus, all kinds of weapons are being tested, while their supply is being kept within certain limits so as not to instigate Russia to escalate the confrontation to the point of threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons; new missiles, new drones, new anti-aircraft guns, new military operations are being tested in a terrain that is no longer a classical training ground but a real war.

Who suffers the consequences of this? The Russian proletarians and the Ukrainian proletarians and, very obviously, the Ukrainian civilian population, which is constantly being bombed.

Who benefits from all this? Behind the Russian-Ukrainian military clash are strategic interests of great importance to Russian and European-American imperialism. Ukraine is an economically important territory, both from the industrial and agricultural point of view, and it represents a key area on the boundary separating the European West from the European and Asian East. This entire boundary represents a total of 5 019 km of borderline, of which 959 km goes to Belarus (today still a close ally of Moscow) and 409 km to Crimea and the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, which are currently under Russian occupation. On the remaining 3,651 km of the border NATO has placed or is planning to place (Finland) and would like to do so also in Ukraine its missile bases. Russia, of course, does not like this…

In 1962, when the Russians brought their ballistic missiles to Cuba, the Americans threatened nuclear war. Neither of them yearned for war; the Russian move seemed to be above all a reaction to the installation of American missile bases in Italy and Turkey, very close to the USSR's borders, and to the American attempt to invade Cuba in 1961 (the Bay of Pigs Invasion); indeed, the warning was: we may find ourselves about 90 miles from your southernmost coast and from that point hit you on your own territory, including the White House…

The whole affair ended with an agreement reached within days: the withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba was accompanied by the withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey and Italy, and the Americans promised never to invade the island of Cuba again. Cuba was not attacked, so was the promise kept? Not invaded, but subjected to a crippling embargo that has plagued the Cuban population with hunger for decades. Have the medium-range Jupiter missiles with nuclear warheads in Turkey and Italy been removed? Yes, to be replaced by air bases and aircraft equipped to carry atomic bombs and in time replaced by more modern missiles such as the Polaris and a range of cruise missiles, intercontinental and nuclear multiple warhead missiles. The evolution of armaments is much faster than any “civilian” technical innovation and is an incentive for disrespecting “peace” agreements.

 

THE PROLETARIANS HAVE NO COUNTRY!

 

This is what we have always repeated and will always cry whenever the bourgeois competition and war waged for the sole purpose of capitalist domination of the world is brought into play to subject the proletarians of all countries to the interests of the national capitalisms.

The proletarians, precisely because they are born, live and die in the same conditions as the wage workers, represent an international class. It is capitalism that drives them to be “internationalist” precisely because their position as workers exploited for the capitalist profit unites them under every sky, within every state, no matter their age, gender or nationality.

But the proletarians, precisely because they are being exploited in this way and organised for ever more effective exploitation, must discover for themselves that they belong to a class which is potentially international, but which is guided, influenced, organised by every bourgeoisie for the exclusive national capitalist interests. The proletarians will not discover their internationalist and classist dispositions except through the struggle which they are forced to wage against the capitalists, against the bourgeoisie, which in every social conflict always reveals itself as a class that dominates, that oppresses, which represses to maintain its domination so that it can continue ‒ one generation of bourgeois after another ‒ to exploit wage labour, that is, the workers, to increase its profits by extracting ever more surplus value from it.

The bourgeoisie in every country, in the first place through democracy ‒ but it does not disdain to do so through authoritarianism and open dictatorship, to prevent the proletarian struggle (inevitable in capitalism) from being transferred from the narrowly economic, corporate and national sphere to the general political terrain ‒ has adopted a very simple but very effective system: putting the proletarians in competition with each other, just as it does with the commodities it brings to the market. On the other hand, wage labour is actually a commodity, a particular commodity, but a commodity that can be bought and sold and, if no longer needed, discarded or destroyed.

The periods of crises that result in warfare ‒ in the case of hard workers' struggles into social one, in the case of wars waged against enemy states into armed one ‒ clearly demonstrate that the bourgeoisie cannot avoid its crises; it takes advantage of them to exploit the proletariat even more, either by shifting the greater burden of the crises onto its living conditions, or by conscripting it ‒ if necessary ‒ to become cannon fodder.

This drama has always repeated itself in every crisis situation during the 200 years of the bourgeois age, but the bourgeoisie does everything possible to pass it off as something exceptional that can be stopped or avoided on the condition of ever closer class collaboration, i.e. on condition that the proletariat renounces its specific class interests and takes on the defence of the general, national, common interests which concern all classes, all social strata, in short, the famous people and the eternally praised nation.

The scene of the Ukrainian war is no different from the scene of all other wars in which the bourgeoisies throw their proletarians to slaughter each other to defend the so-called national interest, national sovereignty, national independence, national economy. The scene in which the capitalist and bourgeois crisis unfolds takes place in several acts: the preparation for war, the war and the obligation to participate in it, the massacre and enormous destruction of the productive forces, the negotiation of the end of the war or surrender, the post-war reconstruction. In all the acts of this drama, the bourgeoisie has to count on the participation, whether by conviction or not, of the proletarian masses in the war effort, both in the rear and on the fronts; it relies ‒ using without scruples even repression ‒ on the resilience of its army throughout the duration of the war, promising that “victory” will be to the benefit of all, thus including the proletarian masses.

It has never happened and will never happen, even in the countries that emerge victorious from the war, that the proletarians will be less exploited, that they will work less and earn more, that they will be able to build in peace a future for themselves and their families, and that the result of class collaboration, the war effort and the massacres and hardships that it had brought about will be prosperity and not misery.

If the proletarians look back and let the older generations tell them how it all unfolded, they will not be able to but conclude that their lives are constantly hanging by a thread that can be broken at any moment. It may well be that it will not be the boss of the company or the government that causes the breaking of that thread and the plunging of the proletarians into unemployment and despair, but the consequence of an economic crisis in which companies are closing down, the market no longer absorbs the extremely unbridled production driven by the previous period of expansion, wages are falling, and wage workers can no longer sell the only commodity they own, the labour power.

However, the economic crisis is determined by the capitalist mode of production, by the fact that all production is the production of commodities and that every commodity must be sold at a price that contains the average rate of profit; otherwise capital will not complete its cycle of valorisation, and by the fact that the objective of capitalist production is not the satisfaction of the needs of human social life, but the needs of the market, hence of capital, and that this production responds to the laws of capitalist competition and to the economic system organised based on enterprises which in turn compete on the market, taking into account the pursuit of their own profit and not the necessities of life of the human species.

All of this takes place within the distorted environment of capitalist profit, in which there are no human beings living socially, eating, dressing, devoting themselves to acquiring knowledge about the world and life, knowing that just a few hours a day of organised and planned work, in which everyone participates, is enough for all humanity to live well; in which there are only consumers, buyers and sellers. But labour-power is a commodity which the workers can only sell to the capitalists; if they sell it, they can get a wage, which in this society is the only means for the proletarian, a being who owns nothing, to survive, to become simultaneously a seller and a consumer. But when they cannot sell it because the capitalists, for all sorts of reasons, do not buy it, the proletarians starve to death.

Such is bourgeois society, a society that promises prosperity for all, but maintains prosperity only for a minority, the bourgeois minority, which accumulates all the wealth produced by human labour, and takes possession of all the wealth of nature, exploiting it in the same way as it exploits human labour power: until its exhaustion.

Is this the society the proletarians want to fight for? For this society they allow themselves to be massacred at work and in war?

What are the Ukrainian proletarians called up to defend against the Russian proletarians? And what are the Russian proletarians called up to defend against the Ukrainian proletarians?

National sovereignty? Homeland? The values of the bourgeoisie that oppresses them, exploits them, leads them to slaughter each other in wars just to strengthen its own power and domination over the territory and the proletariat that inhabits it?

The proletarians, if they do not want to become the instruments of their own oppression, their own exploitation, and if they do not want to be slaughtered in peace and in war, must regain confidence in their own class forces, must aim their individual struggle for survival at objectives which the bourgeoisie, even the richest, most democratic and most religious bourgeoisie, will never be able to satisfy: the objectives of eradicating all oppression, all exploitation and all wars.

A distant goal? Yes, certainly, a very distant one, but the only one for which the struggle of the proletariat has a purpose, which has a historical mission; the only one which the proletariat can actually achieve only by breaking the ties and bonds which bind it to the fate of capital and the bourgeoisie.

That thread on which proletarian life hangs is entirely in the hands of the capitalist bourgeoisie, and it has no scruples about breaking it to protect and preserve its economic and political domination. The thread which, instead, the proletariat of the present and the future must and will have to follow up again is the historical thread which connects it with the struggles of the past, with its revolutions and its class doctrine: it is the thread of time which we, a small, cohesive group tenaciously linked to these struggles, these revolutions and this doctrine, continue to bring to life in our daily activity, in the confident prospect that the proletariat will once again march onto the terrain of the class struggle, of the struggle, which will make the class antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat the pivot on whose basis the fate of the historical and international struggle will be decided, which will lead to the emancipation of the proletariat and to the classless society, to the society of the human species, in a word, to communism.

The ongoing war in Ukraine must teach us that the bourgeois classes ‒ as Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto states ‒ are always at war with each other because they are adversaries in the competitive struggle in the markets and in the conflict between states; they are always at war against the proletariat, their own national proletariat and the proletariat of other countries, for one thing to maintain and strengthen their own class domination within their own nation, and for another to subjugate and exploit the proletariat of other nations.

No one today is able to predict how this war will end, who will be the winner, or whether there will be a “winner” at all.

It is likely that with the passage of time this war will lead initially to a “Korean solution”, which is not a solution, as the two sides will continue to be in complete contrast in all aspects, economically and politically as well as militarily, and they will still be a detonator ready to explode. In fact, it is very difficult for Russia to surrender Crimea and the zone in the Donbas that connects it to its territory. On the other hand, it is impossible for the Americans and the European Union to send their own troops to wage war against Russia alongside Ukrainian troops, even though, as the New York Times recently revealed, there are several dozen American, British and French soldiers in the Ukrainian battlefield, and there are also Polish fighters, “volunteers”, of course. Ukraine is destined to be between two millstones; the Ukrainian proletariat will continue to be cannon fodder for the Western powers, just as the Russian proletariat will continue to be cannon fodder for the Russian ruling class. On the other hand, it is also in China's interest, as well as America's, to keep the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war under control so that it does not escalate into conflict between the superpowers.

The question of present and future alliances is by no means settled. At present, the United States has succeeded in subjecting Europe once again to its strategic interests (through NATO and the billions of dollars invested in “defending” Europe against possible attacks from the East). As for China, it has failed to subject Russia to its strategic interests, which are increasingly focused on the Pacific. It is a significant fact that Russia and China are linked by a certain type of partnership based on a mutual interest in not having one front uncovered ‒ East Asian for Russia, West Asian for China ‒ while the other fronts are not covered and are the focus of most of the concerns of the two powers. The fact that all three, the USA, Russia and China, are unitary states and nuclear powers is not insignificant; it does not allow them, at least not yet, to move from “nuclear” threats to deeds. Although the United States lies geographically between the Atlantic and the Pacific, that is to say, between Western Europe and China (with Japan being the adversary of the past), they are exposed to more danger on the Pacific front than on the Atlantic one. It is therefore becoming vital for them, as for China, to establish strong positions on this front.

As far as Western Europe is concerned, the United States has had ample time to spread its network of political, economic and financial relations, and its participation in the two world imperialist wars as part of the anti-German front has made it easier for it, to “conquer Western Europe” by using their extraordinary economic power and warring on a continent other than its own, and subsequently to dominate the most strategically important countries, Germany, France and Italy, and for a good forty years to share control of the whole of Europe with Russia in the East.

In the perhaps not too distant future, however, it cannot be ruled out that Germany will at some point make a comeback to reclaim its position in Europe and in the world not only on an economic but also on a political and military level (and this is what the Americans and the English fear above all), and thus challenge the current hegemonic position of the United States in Europe, which would objectively strengthen the position of Russia and consequently also China.

In the decades following the end of the Second Imperialist War, the United States had replaced the United Kingdom in world domination; its fleet and aircraft could reach any part of the planet in the blink of an eye. But in the decades that followed, especially after the great global crisis of 1975, other powers emerged that, while on the one hand representing increasingly important markets for American commodities and capital, also represented increasingly aggressive and ambitious competitors.

The decline of the United Kingdom was followed by the decline of Russia, which, together with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, brought into question the entire world order that had emerged from the Second World War. At the same time, this generated factors that were to challenge the very hegemony of the USA over the world.

In a sense, Russia's military invasion into Ukraine, while certainly responding to a strategic need of Russia, which has historically sought not to have all the gates to the Mediterranean closed, forced the United States to express their readiness to either accept the Russian operation as a local war, or to see it as an attack on the order that they were completing in Eastern Europe through NATO. In Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yugoslavia, the USA directly intervened against the network of influence that Russia was spreading. Not so in Ukraine, where it has preferred to let the Ukrainians, led by Zelenskyy, “defend” themselves with their own forces and weapons, which NATO countries provide them with in abundance.

The slaughter in Ukraine was not meant to look like a slaughter conducted explicitly under American command; it was meant to be and look like a slaughter suffered by the Ukrainians, who in this case have supplied the Euro-American order with a full-fledged army, saving face for the very democratic Europeans and Americans, and who blame all the bloodshed on a single “criminal,” Putin.

This war has objectively affected European proletarians much more than it seems, even though they were not conscripted as soldiers. The supply of weapons of all kinds, which continues this year, is the real involvement of the EU and the USA in the war in Ukraine. The involvement of the proletarians does not take place through a “colonial” expedition, as it used to be, but through support ‒ demanded and imposed ‒ for the war enterprises of the governments; support that is implemented through the acceptance of the “defensive” war on the part of Ukraine and the “offensive” war in relation to Russia; this offensive war, for the moment, is carried out by an endless series of economic sanctions that have negatively affected European countries as well, in the form of an immediate increase in energy prices, which has caused the prices of food, medicines, etc. to rise, in terms of export failures ‒ hence real difficulties for exporting companies with consequences for their employees, etc. ‒ ; a support, therefore, for the warmongering policies of their own governments in the perspective of warmongering policies that will have a direct impact on European countries.

As everyone knows, every week the Pope never fails to call from his window in St Peter's Square to pray for Ukraine and for an end to the war, even though he knows full well that the war is not an act of the will of Putin, Zelenskyy or Biden. He addresses his heart-rending appeal to the great of the earth and to all people of “good will”; he knows that he plays a very important role in fulfilling both hope and consolation, above all towards that part of the “beloved people” ‒ which constitutes the majority ‒ that lives exclusively on wages and in poor conditions and which, in certain circumstances, could be the protagonist of a violent social reaction against the living and dying conditions into which they have been plunged.

Hope in what? That the great of the earth (among whom the Pope speaks as their equal) would understand that the violence of war, beyond a certain point, can no longer be controlled and could incite the masses to an equally violent rebellion against the established order; an order whose mainstay of preservation is the Church.

Consolation, for what purpose? For the purpose of hindering violent reactions to the violence of war, of influencing the masses to resign themselves from the only struggle that can stop the bourgeois war, the class struggle, the struggle of the proletariat against the existing social system, and therefore against the bourgeois ruling class, of which the organisation of the Latin Church itself is a part.

Like every church, the Church of Rome mobilises its “men”, its “propagandists”, its “messengers”, its “generals”, to defend those “values of Western civilisation” in which it fully recognises itself: the values of capitalism, private property and wage labour, that is, exploitation and oppression, with its specific characteristic of acting as a mitigator of the human suffering that this exploitation and oppression generate. The Church of Rome no longer has its armies as in the days of the Papal States, but with the development of capitalism it has managed to carve out a role not only as a supranational organisation providing religious and social services, but also as a mainstay of social preservation, as a reactionary force of the first order, with the ability, indeed, to change its face according to the situation: from promoting “peace” and “disarmament” to blessing troops going to war…

Apart from the lamentations of the usual pacifists or the Pope, who daily calls for prayers for the “afflicted Ukraine” ‒ as if this is the only war worthy of prayer ‒ there are the promoters of “disarmament”, who demand that the billions spent on arms going to Ukraine should instead be spent on reinforcing social measures aimed at fighting poverty, unemployment, etc.

In reality, the arms industry is as much a part of the national economy as any other industry, and in the current period it is this industry that is booming. In addition, the billions invested in these supplies are billions that subsequently require to be well capitalised sooner or later, both in terms of political ties and in terms of post-war reconstruction, for which all Western governments have been making every effort to draw up various plans and to prepare the indispensable promissory notes with which they will subdue Ukraine and its proletarians because they will have to pay them.

The common interest of the Ukrainian and Russian proletarians is not to be massacred for a war that is not and never will be theirs. And it is the interest of every proletariat in the world. The bourgeoisie unleashes war because the capitalist economic laws offer it this “way out” of the economic and political crises that arise in the development of every country. The thirst for power and domination comes later and depends on the actual balance of power between the various countries. But there is one power relationship that affects any country, even the most economically weak, and that is the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

In capitalism, it is inevitable that the ruling power is the power of the bourgeoisie. To void this ruling power, the bourgeois class in power must be overthrown; there is no other alternative. And there is only one social class which has the potential strength to defeat bourgeois power, and that is the proletariat. But the conditions for the proletariat to be a genuine class, for it to recognise itself as the class antagonistic to the bourgeoisie ‒ just as the bourgeoisie recognises itself perfectly as the class antagonistic to the proletariat and proves it daily ‒ lie on two levels of confrontation, one immediate and economic, the other more general political.

As history teaches us, the struggle between the classes continues even when the proletariat does not physically fight against the bourgeoisie; simply because it is the bourgeoisie that constantly fights against the proletariat, against its interests and against its impulse to react with its struggle. And it does so in a thousand different ways, also thanks to the ubiquitous activity of the opportunist forces of social conservation, which direct the proletarians to the terrain of conciliation, class collaboration and social peace, not to the terrain of confrontation.

The rupture of social peace that took place in 1953 in East Germany and Berlin, when the proletarians rose up against the intolerable conditions into which they had been thrown by the bourgeois forces of the time ‒ disguised, moreover, as “socialist” ‒ is an irrefutable sign that the class struggle re-emerges whenever the social crisis drives the proletarian masses to fight not for “freedom”, not for “national sovereignty”, not for “fatherland”, but against the wage-labour regime, hence against the capitalism present and ruling in every country, whether democratic, authoritarian, dictatorial or falsely “communist”, as the USSR was in its time and China still is today.

The proletarian struggle is not prepared from the table or in conspiracy rooms. It springs insistently from the material conditions in which proletarians are forced to live and die. It will find its own ways of organising itself, different from the present ones, to break out of the organisational criteria of class collaborationist opportunism.

 

---

 

(1) Cf. https://www.agi.it/estero/news/2023-05-08/ucraina_clinton_usa_sapevano_attacco_putin-21283446/

(2) Cf. https://borsafinanza.it/brics-cos-e-gruppo-chi-sono-paesi-aderenti/, 25.04.2023

(3) Cf. https://www.nigrizia.it/notizia/il-sudafrica-annuncia-una-missione-di-pace-africana-in-russia-e-ucraina

(4) Cf. https://eastwest.eu/it/singapore-intenso-e-frontale-lo-shangri-la-dialogue/ 

 

 

International Communist Party

www.pcint.org