A socialist statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine
During the Vietnam War, Country Joe and the Fish sang “What are we fighting for; Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, The next stop is Vietnam”. They sang it to the crowd at the Woodstock festival some of whom had been fighting in Vietnam. The punch line was that the soldier obediently going to war only came home “in a box”. As in Vietnam in 1968, so it is too in Ukraine in 2022. “What we are fighting for?” has the cruel answer: “a body bag”.
Socialists do not fight in capitalism’s wars. Socialists reject the naive liberal political view that nation states can coexist in international harmony with an agreed system of laws. Such a view is nothing more than utopian idealism. Capitalism is a global system of class exploitation in which war is a natural outcome.
Competing nation states and the ruling class within them articulate conflicting class interests around territory, trade routes and resources. Nation states all aspire to be “top dog” and impose their will, economically, politically and militarily on other nation states. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February this year is no different to wars fought over the past four centuries or so.
The method of war, shown by the systematic destruction of towns and cities by Russian forces in the Ukraine, is to annihilate or disperse the armed forces of its Ukrainian army; destroy its armaments and means of supply; starve, terrify and undermine its civilian population with bombs and missiles, and by propaganda to spread panic and defeatism.
Socialists have always held that conflict and war are inevitable features of life under capitalism and that their abolition can only be accomplished by the establishment of socialism.
“The First Casualty of War”
There is a cliché that the first casualty of war is the truth. However, the second casualty of war is the loss of critical analysis and historical context. And it is singularly a more important loss than the truth. All governments lie and all use deceitful propaganda. When war breaks out do not believe government pronouncements. Do not believe a servile media.
For the capitalist media propaganda is everything and there can be no dissent, no questioning and no interest outside the national interest and obedience to political leaders. Any criticism of NATO or the capitalist politicians that run NATO then you are “pro-Putin” and fair game for smears, innuendo and disinformation.
This stupid reasoning can be found in the speeches of Kier Starmer and in the writings of the journalist Nick Cohen.
In the war between Russia and Ukraine the world is black and white. Russia is the aggressive invader while “plucky” Ukraine is beyond reproach. It is a fight between good and evil. Monsters are in mortal combat with angels. We are encouraged to boo the baddies and cheer the hero like attending some festival pantomime. The conflict is portrayed like a 1950s Western where the sheriff wears the white hat and the baddies wear the black hat. It is a childish politics that conveniently omits sound reasoning, questioning and critical analysis of history and events.
The media have located the monster as Vladimir Putin. It is Putin’s war, Putin’s missiles and Putin’s fault. Does not Putin have support? Is everything down to him alone? History is full of monsters whose narratives are told without historical context, the actions of others and the play of economic forces. Historians become moralists. And they give more power and influence to evil dictators than they deserve. No serious questions are posed and none answered.
Well, Putin like ourselves, lives in a world capitalist system which has violent international rivalry and competing interests built into its very structure. Capitalism has a history. Nothing comes out of the blue. Defenders of capitalism want their system to be seen as natural like the air we breathe. This was Blair’s view of Globalisation and its future. Tony Blair co-architect with George Bush of the Iraq war. Liberal capitalism is supposed to be beyond question. So are its politicians. And so are the capitalist class they represent.
It should not be forgotten that Ukraine is a capitalist country in which the means of production and distribution are privately owned, where the interests of the capitalist class and the working class are diametrically opposed and where there is a day-to-day class struggle. Workers in Russia have identical class interests with workers in Ukraine. They have no class interest in fighting each other. They have so much more in common than the capitalist class in Russia and Ukraine and their political representatives. Workers in Russia and Ukraine should be struggling together for socialism.
Marxists do not lose their critical thinking during times of war. We do not roll over and surrender our analysis of a world system riven through with class interest, class struggle and the exercise of class power and privilege. We refuse our consent.
And we have nothing to do with the capitalist left, who do take sides in capitalism’s war. They do so by the use of a political scale. US imperialist atrocities are weighed on one side of the scale and Russian Imperialist atrocities on the other. The scales always tip heavily towards the US.
There are those on the capitalist left who want Putin to win in Ukraine in order to humiliate western capitalism and the United States in particular. Putin might be a totalitarian thug but for the capitalist left the US and its allies are far, far worse. The capitalist Left use the doctrine “The enemy of my enemy are my friends”. Historically, it has meant siding with genocidal maniacs.
Socialists do not take sides in capitalism’s wars. We say a plague on both your houses. We may be damned by both sides but our socialist principle against capitalism’s wars remains the same, such wars nothing to do with the interest of the working class.
Might is Right
Under capitalism might is right. If you are a world power you use your power to get your way, so, as it has always been will and until capitalism is replaced by common ownership of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
The capitalist media from the safety of their armchairs want a no-fly zone introduced in Ukraine. That would lead to a Third World War and a nuclear one to boot. This is not what the capitalist politicians in the West want. Their number one responsibility is to defend the profit system not to destroy it. They might have power but so does Putin and they cannot be sure that he would fire a nuclear strike at the first NATO country who ordered jets into Ukraine to enforce a no-fly zone.
In an article “Threat of Nuclear war is greater than ever before” (i,8/3/22), Patrick Cockburn argues that a weaker Russia means Putin would be more likely to push the button. He writes:
“Putin will increasingly look to his tactical nuclear weapons to even up the balance against NATO”.
Those workers who think and act for themselves rather than being saturated with the propaganda coming from the capitalist media do not want to become toast or die of radiation poisoning during a long nuclear winter.
When workers open their newspapers or turn on the television a blast of uncritical hot air blows into their face. Any old propaganda from Ukraine is given out in the media with little analysis or criticism, first it was 4000 Russian soldiers killed then it was 10,000. When Russia attacked the maternity hospital in the city of Mariupol a similar attack by NATO laser-guided bombs at the university Hospital Centre Dr Dragisa Misovic in Belgrade in 1999 was conveniently forgotten.
There is supposed to be no criticism of NATO or the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He is canonised a political saint to Putin’s devil, a President who can do no wrong, rather than just another capitalist politician.
He tells inexperienced workers to carry guns in to attack crack Russian troops, he wants NATO to start a Third World War by introducing a “no-fly-zone” over the Ukraine and his government has banned men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country so that they can be conscripted into the armed forces. Putin is not the only one with blood on his hands. Save us from sacred cows.
Putin the Monster
What of Putin the monster? Marxists reject the Great Man theory of history. However, we also reject its mirror image; the “evil” man theory of history.
Individuals do exercise choice, but they are also constrained by historical circumstances. As Marx wrote:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past”.
So, what are the circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past? Does Putin have the power a Marxist critique of “Great Men” shows to be incorrect? Why are politicians like Starmer so worried that NATO might be called into question, its aggressive actions remembered? Even if Putin was not in power in the Kremlin, Russia’s geo-political interests would still not want to have an EU country and a NATO member along its border? If Putin falls and is replaced by some other leader will the international rivalry disappear? Of course not.
Socialists are members of the working class and struggle with our fellow workers for a world without war, conflict, countries and borders, instead, a social system in which production just takes place to directly meet human need. We do not take sides in capitalism’s wars and we are sick to death of the nationalism and religion in which workers immerse themselves and do terrible things to each other. You will not find that sentiment in the capitalist media; not in the capitalist west or in capitalist Russia.
Has History Ended?
We were promised “The End of History” and an era of peace, growth and enrichment for everyone. According to the author, Francis Fukuyama, the worst fate we faced after the fall of the Berlin Wall was “boredom”. Fukuyama has now been reduced to desperately defending “liberal capitalism” in the pages of the Financial Times (5/5/2022).
And here is another intellectual snake oil salesman. In his 2011 book ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined’, Harvard University psychologist and rock star-intellectual, Steven Pinker, argued that human beings are now living in the most peaceful era in the history of our species. Globalisation was to be the future: universal free markets and free trade, enrichment and rising living standards for all – a capitalist utopia. Instead, the last thirty years have been one of economic crises, wars and conflict.
The media, which supports of a capitalist world order, is preventing serious questions from being asked. We do not know, for example, if the outcome of the Ukrainian war will trigger a Third World War with nuclear destruction as the outcome. The Second World War ended with two nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945; the Third World War could well begin with hundreds of nuclear missiles fired from underground silos and submarines.
Confronting these possible outcomes, where all sides are culpable, will avoid being dragged into the media world of good and evil: the capitalist West versus Putin the monster. It means acknowledging and understanding the global system in which we find ourselves. World capitalism, a social system of class exploitation and rapacious plunder of the earth’s resources in which the means of life are privately owned to the exclusion and detriment of the majority. A world divided into competing nation states over trade routes, spheres of strategic influence and oil and gas and land.
It means a clear and reasoned response to understand the circumstances of where we are and where we want to go. It means accepting that the past does have an impact on our political actions. That we cannot just do as we please. And history, at least a critical history which is informed by Marx’s materialist conception of history, has a revolutionary route out of the mess we currently find ourselves in.
How to end war and a potential nuclear holocaust? To end war means to end capitalism and to replace the profit system with socialism. It requires a democratic politics by a socialist majority. It requires the formation of principled socialist parties throughout the world and for a socialist majority to send delegates to parliament to gain control of the machinery of government including the armed forces of the state. Until socialism is established wars will continue to plague the working class from one generation to the next.
