03.03.2022

Here we stand

Not only must social-imperialists and social-pacifists be denounced: Jack Conrad calls for absolute clarity, when it comes to war and peace

Communists have always condemned wars between countries as bloody, barbarous and brutal. Our attitude towards war is, however, fundamentally different from that of pacifists - not only the bourgeois variety, but also the socialist variety - who simply plead for peace.

We understand the inevitable connection between wars and the class struggle - that war cannot be abolished unless socialism is established. We also differ from pacifists, in that we view civil wars - ie, wars waged by an oppressed class against an oppressor class, by slaves against slaveholders, by serfs against feudal lords and by workers against the bourgeoisie - as “fully legitimate, progressive and necessary.”

Communists, therefore, consider it essential to study each war historically (from the standpoint of Marxism) and take into account all class forces and interests involved. There have been many wars, despite all the horrors, atrocities and suffering, which were decidedly progressive: ie, they benefited the development of humanity by helping to sweep aside outdated, reactionary, oppressive social formations (eg, an autocracy or a serfdom).

The Great French Revolution “ushered in a new historical epoch”. From that time onwards till the Paris Commune - ie, between 1789 and 1871 - one type of war was of a bourgeois-progressive character: a war waged for national liberation. In other words, the overthrow of absolutism and feudal remnants and ending foreign rule. That formed the main content and historical significance of such wars. These were, therefore, progressive wars; and during such wars, all honest and revolutionary democrats, as well as all socialists, wished success for that country (ie, that bourgeoisie), which was fighting against absolutism, feudalism and foreign rule.

For example, while the revolutionary wars waged by Jacobin and Napoleonic France contained an “element of plunder and the conquest of foreign territory”, that does not “in the least alter the fundamental historical significance of those wars, which destroyed and shattered feudalism and absolutism in the whole of the old, serf-owning Europe.” In the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war too, “Germany plundered France”, but this, likewise, “does not alter the fundamental historical significance of that war, which liberated tens of millions of German people from feudal disunity and from the oppression of two despots: the Russian tsar and Napoleon III.”¹

Aggression

The period of 1789-1871 seared itself into the consciousness of revolutionaries. Doubtless, there could be no development of the proletarian struggle for socialism prior to the overthrow of absolutism, feudalism and foreign rule. So, when writing about such ‘defensive’ wars of this period, socialists always had in mind revolution against medievalism and serfdom. By a ‘defensive’ war they understood a ‘just’ war in that particular sense.

It was in this spirit that Marx and Engels - as opposed to August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, who, rightly in my opinion, abstained when it came to voting on war credits - treated the first stage of the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war as a “defensive war” waged by the reactionary-progressive Junker, Otto von Bismarck. Perhaps if the armies of Napoleon III had put up a better show at Sedan that might have stayed the case, but instead his regime collapsed and Germany went on to annex Alsace-Lorraine and extract huge indemnities.²

As Lenin and Zinoviev explained in their pamphlet Socialism and war (1915), “socialists consider wars to overthrow absolutism, feudalism and foreign rule” as “legitimate, progressive and just”.³ With that in mind, in terms of recent history we communists in Britain rightly considered the struggle conducted by the IRA in Ireland, the Mau Mau in Kenya and the National Liberation Front in South Yemen as ‘just’ and ‘defensive wars’: we wanted the victory of the anti-colonial struggle and the defeat of the British empire. Of course, such a position need not involve any illusions in organisations such as the IRA, the Mau Mau and the NLF.

That does not mean that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. We certainly do not take the side of a rising imperialist power in a war conducted against the dominant, or hegemonic, imperialist power. Eg, Germany in 1914. Victory for such a country would represent nothing more than rearranging the imperial hierarchy and a redistribution of colonial spoils. That is why the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Bulgarian Narrows and the internationalist left were right to oppose their ‘own’ side in the ‘war to end all wars’ and call, instead, for turning inter-imperialist war into civil war for revolution and socialism.

In such cases it matters not who attacked first and who acted in defence. Such justifications were, and still are, used by the imperialist media mouthpieces to con and deceive - first and foremost their own citizens, who are, typically, worked up into a chauvinist frenzy. That said, even an inter-imperialist war can become a combined war. World War II began as a more or less straightforward rerun of World War I. But with continental Europe in Nazi chains, with the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad and with a swelling popular determination to resist, inter-imperialist war became combined with wars of national liberation and wars of national survival.

Note, here, we take it as axiomatic that imperialism corresponds to the highest stage of capitalism: ie, monopoly and the domination of finance capital, the carving up of the globe by a few big powers and, crucially, the export of capital. With the American century, the old colonial empires were dismantled and replaced by US hegemony over western Europe, Japan, the UK, etc. Imperialism took the form of the dollar, unequal alliances and military bases: in a word, superimperialism. The Soviet Union and its bloc, plus China, were all that stood against total US domination. But, paradoxically, the existence of bureaucratic socialism allowed a cold war system, whereby the US could incorporate much of the labour movement in the west through anti-communism. In return the US facilitated the social democratic settlement and agreed to substantial concessions to the working class.

Continuation

“War is a mere continuation of policy by other [violent] means” - this is the famous dictum penned by Carl von Clausewitz, perhaps the most profound writer on the question of war ever.⁴ Marxists have quite rightly regarded this proposition as providing the basis of their approach to each and every war. It was certainly from this viewpoint that Marx and Engels regarded the various wars that happened during their lifetime.

Apply this dictum to the present conflict in Ukraine. We could go back to medieval history and Kievan Rus, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the expansion of tsarist Russia. But the best place to begin, for our purposes, is with the collapse of bureaucratic socialism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in 1989-91. From that point onwards the US state department was busily plotting and promoting its new American century.

There was a popular disenchantment with the dead end of bureaucratic socialism. There was also a wish from amongst the elite to go over to capitalism. They wanted to enjoy the security, privileges and fabulous wealth of the billionaire class in the west. State and party officials, plus the newly emergent mafia, grabbed whatever they could. Meanwhile, the masses were promised German living standards and Swedish levels of social security. In fact what they actually got were crashing living standards and grinding poverty. There was a counterrevolution within the counterrevolution. (The counterrevolution against the October 1917 revolution began with the first five-year plan and the birth of an unstable, freak, ectopic, unsustainable social formation).

Under Boris Yeltsin, the Russian Federation faced the definite prospect of being reduced to a mere US neo-colony. Shock therapy, as advised by Jeffrey Sachs and his Harvard boys, deindustrialised Russia and left it in thrall to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Hence, in desperation, the choice of Vladimir Putin - first as prime minister, then as Yeltsin’s replacement as president.

The present war in Ukraine owes little, if anything, to Putin’s mind, his megalomania, his 5’ 7” stature, etc. Psychobabble. No, we must understand Putin as the chosen representative of the KGB/FSB elite, which is set on restoring the great-power status of Russia/the Soviet Union. It is a state regime, in which the oligarchs occupy a subordinate, not a dominant, position (so it is no oligarchy).

Economically, Russia is a decidedly second- or even third-rate power. Despite its near 150 million population, it ranks far behind Germany, France, the UK and Italy. But, primarily because of gas and oil, it is able to maintain itself as a great military power. Exports of oil and gas allow a first-rate arms industry and correspondingly powerful armed forces. So we have a giant oil and gas station with a giant arms industry attached to it: a fossil-fuel, arms-industry complex.

War aims

What are the war aims of Putin’s Russia?

DeNazification of Ukraine is a nonsense. Yes, there are fascists in Ukraine, not least those incorporated into its armed forces: eg, the Azov Battalion. No wonder African refugees fleeing Ukraine face “shockingly racist” treatment from local militias and border guards.⁵ But there are plenty of fascists on Putin’s side too. And Putin will, quite possibly, seek to recruit Ukrainian fascists to his post-invasion settlement (if it happens). The same goes with saving the Russian national minority from genocide. Yes, there was increased fighting along the line of control in the Donbas, but who was responsible for the escalation of shelling is unknown and hardly decisive. There is discrimination against Russians in Ukraine, even cases of savage persecution. But talk of genocide has as much truth to it as talk of genocide of the Uyghur population in China.

Then there is the equal nonsense about Ukraine not being a ‘real’ nation. Perhaps the original Slavic root of the term ‘Ukraine’ meant ‘borderlands’ - interesting, but nothing more. Marxists will investigate the Norman origins of the Kievan and Muscovite Rus states, the religious-ideological influence of the Byzantine empire, the impact of the Mongol invasion, the expansionism of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Brest-Litovsk treaty, etc. But what really matters is what the mass of Ukrainians actually think today - and they surely think of themselves as fervently Ukrainian. That for us is what decides whether or not there is a Ukrainian nation … a historically constituted people, which occupies a common territory, speaks a common language and is united by a common economic life.

So what are Putin’s war aims?

We take seriously enough the goal of “decommunisation”, which, presumably, means rejecting the Bolshevik commitment to national self-determination and federalism that gave birth to the modern Ukraine. Instead of using salami tactics and slowly extending direct Russian power over the whole of Donetsk and Luhansk, establishing a Kharkov ‘people’s republic, etc, Putin ordered a full-scale military invasion. Whether that is intended to achieve complete conquest, put in place a pliant puppet regime or negotiate an unequal settlement is an open question.

As the old saying goes, initial military plans are always abandoned with the “the first encounter with the enemy’s main force” (Helmuth von Moltke⁶). So, whatever Putin’s original intentions, the actual result will be decided in the battles to surround and take towns and cities. Urban warfare, it should be added, is a great equaliser; eg, Paris 1871, Stalingrad 1942-43, Berlin 1945. High-tech superiority is much reduced during the course of street-to-street combat.

Wrong?

Did we get things wrong when it came to the February 24 invasion? Yes, of course. But we have never claimed any unique insight into Kremlin thinking. And, quite rightly, along with countless others, we do not trust what the US and UK governments say about the threat of war. Truth is the first casualty - even before the outbreak of war. No-one should forget the lies told about Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in 2003 and how they would only take 45 minutes to reach Europe. How Muammar Gaddafi’s army was about to slaughter the entire half-million population of Benghazi in 2011. Etc, etc. It is certainly right to have a sceptical attitude to establishment propaganda (even if it is true).

No less to the point, why did we doubt the claims coming from the Pentagon of an imminent full-scale Russian invasion? Because militarily, while it was quite conceivable that the Russian army could successfully drive all the way to Kiev, we doubted that Ukraine would easily be taken or held. Ukraine 2022 is no Czechoslovakia 1968 or even Hungary 1956. If an analogy is to be drawn, it would be with Afghanistan 1979. Even then the Soviet Union had the Afghan government, army and ruling party onside (well, that is after executing Hafizullah Amin and 97 other leading Khalq cadre). Hardly the case with Ukraine. Economically and socially it is much more advanced than Afghanistan, but the mass of the population - the 18% Russian minority aside - seems no less resolved to resist an army of foreign occupation.

Surely Putin’s generals will have told him what to expect, and that explains why we thought - and still think - that a full-scale invasion risks creating a quagmire and potentially a regime crisis in Moscow. So why did Putin give the go-ahead? We shall now proceed to discuss that question by looking at Ukraine’s place in US grand strategy.

Grand strategy

Ever since the February 2014 Maidan coup successfully overthrew an elected president (the ‘neutral’ Viktor Yanukovych) and installed a pro-western regime, Ukraine has been firmly placed in the American orbit. Constitutionally Ukraine is committed to Nato and the European Union. Through a membership action plan it is an associate member of Nato, it is armed by Nato and, in effect, acts as a Nato surrogate. But, quid pro quo, as a result of the Maidan coup there were widespread disturbances in the Russian-inhabited south and east of Ukraine, and the Kremlin swiftly moved to annex Crimea and back the Donetsk and Luhansk breakaways.

Levering Ukraine into the so-called ‘democratic’ western camp neatly fitted into a US grand strategy that can be dated back to Jimmy Carter and his 1977-81 administration. In place of the cold war policy of ‘containing communism’ there came the doctrine of ‘rollback’, mapped out by his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Ideologically this went hand-in-hand with ‘human rights’ and spreading ‘democracy’. Not insignificantly, Brzezinski’s famous book, The great chessboard, envisaged a “loosely confederated Russia - composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic and a Far Eastern Republic”.⁷ In short, three pliant US neo-colonies.

What Carter began, Ronald Reagan completed. After the 1989-91 collapse, both Nato and the EU were pushed further and further to the east, all the way to the borders of Russia itself. Joe Biden’s flat rejection of Putin’s call for a Nato reset and the Finlandisation of Ukraine doubtless made up Putin’s mind about staging a full-scale invasion. So did warnings that any Russian attack on Ukrainian territory would trigger crippling western sanctions - after all, Russia was already in occupation of Crimea and backed the Donetsk and Luhansk semi-states. In effect Putin was given an impossible choice. Either humiliatingly withdraw Russian forces from all of Ukraine or face crippling western sanctions. Boxed in, Putin went for broke.

However, in terms of grand strategy, February 24 played directly into US hands ... championing Ukraine should certainly be seen as a continuation of Carter’s rollback doctrine. Ukraine serves as the equivalent of ‘poor little Belgium’ or ‘plucky little Serbia’. Not only can the warmongers, Biden, Harris, Blinkin, Johnson, Truss and Wallace, put themselves at the forefront of widespread outrage over Ukraine (part real, part manufactured). At a stroke, the US made Italy, France and crucially Germany dependent on oil and gas supplies over which it, the US, exercises ultimate control. Any idea of a Franco-German united Europe vanished with the cancellation of Nord Stream 2.

Quite possibly, Russia has overextended itself, and may get itself bogged down in an unwinnable, protracted war. Putin could easily find himself ‘retired’ by the FSB-state elite. We could, moreover, conceivably see the disintegration of the entire regime under the impact of economic sanctions, military failure and a CIA-sponsored colour revolution. For America, that would be checkmate. Then its focus would shift to decisively dealing with a fully encircled China.

Meanwhile, Russia finds itself diplomatically isolated. Despite its “no limits” alliance, China abstained on the UN security council. Given Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong and Xinjiang, it can give no ground to any violation of territorial integrity. The only danger, as far as the US is concerned, is that a defeated Russia will throw itself into the protective embrace of China, become its Austria-Hungry. Either way, the US project of rebooting its imperial hegemony has been greatly enhanced by Putin’s desperate gamble.

Russia’s protestors

Despite the politically heterogeneous nature of the anti-war street protests in Russia, we cannot but admire the bravery. Thousands have been arrested. Of course, there are illusions in Nato and US-style ‘democracy’. But it is amongst this milieu that Marxists - that is, genuine communists - will seek to win recruits and gain mass influence. In this context it is worth flagging the normally servile Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Along with its Duma deputies, it has condemned Putin’s invasion.

In Russia too, ‘the main enemy is at home’.

Britain’s left

Let us now turn to the main currents on the left in Britain. They can usefully be classified under four broad headings.

Firstly, there is a very marginal, pro-Russian left. Improbably, they picture Putin’s regime as anti-imperialist. Perhaps the most prominent example of this version of the anti-imperialism of fools is the Workers Party of Britain of George Galloway - taking his steer, for the moment at least, from the Brarite CPGB (Marxist-Leninist). Others in that camp include the New Communist Party and, presumably, the equally near moribund Socialist Labour Party (still formally led by that sad ghost from the past, Arthur Scargill). There are various micro-group Trotskyite imitators of this bonkers line, including groups of one, but they need not concern us here.

Secondly, we have the out-and-out social-imperialists. By that designation we refer not to Sir Keir and his front-bench team, nor the massed ranks of the Parliamentary Labour Party. There is nothing ‘social’, nothing ‘socialist’ about them or their politics. They are Blue Labour Brit nats and openly pro-imperialist, pro-capitalist and pro-market. Indeed Sir Keir has been doing his darnedest to be even more bellicose over Ukraine than the bellicose Boris Johnson.

No, we refer to those who hide their pro-imperialism behind socialist phrases and excuses and even references to Marxism. Hence Chris Ford’s dreadful Ukraine Solidarity Campaign (USC). Under its blue and yellow umbrella we find, of course, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty: an organisation that has long acted as a Totstskyoid sub-department for Her Majesty’s Foreign Office. Then there is the Labour Representation Committee and Anti-Capitalist Resistance. Together they picket the London HQ of RT, uphold the so-called principle of territorial integrity and, all in all, serve as US pawns.

Under the cover of defending ‘brave little Ukraine’, we see them abandoning the class struggle and going over to the bourgeois establishment. Logically that leads to calls for a “stronger, not a weaker, Nato” (Eric Lee in the AWL’s Solidarity).⁸ Such social-imperialists alibi crippling sanctions on Russia, increased arms spending and extending Nato. That should trigger any honest, or even half-honest, socialist in the ranks of the AWL, LRC or ACR to immediately, openly, rebel - in short, to split. When it comes to the struggle for socialism, those who do not do that consign themselves to the ranks of the living dead. They become renegades.

Thirdly, there are the much more influential social-pacifists, branded as “fifth columnists” and “Putin apologists” by the Labour front bench. Stop the War Coalition, Counterfire, the Morning Star, the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, Momentum, etc in fact champion diplomacy, the Minsk accords, international law and the notion that there can be peace while capitalism survives. Plaintive calls for a Nato reset combine with plaintive calls for Ukrainian self-determination and territorial integrity.

The cowardice of the 11 ‘left’ Labour MPs cannot go unmentioned. Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Richard Burgon, Ian Lavery, Beth Winter, Zarah Sultana, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Apsana Begum, Mick Whitley, Tahir Ali and Ian Mearns all signed up to StWC’s ‘Self-determination for the Ukrainian people’ plus respect for Russia’s ‘legitimate security concerns’ statement.⁹ But they immediately withdrew their names after nothing more than being threatened by Sir Keir with the loss of the Labour whip.

They put unity with the pro-imperialist right wing and their silly little careers above the principles they claim to hold dear. Instead of defying Sir Keir, organising a long overdue fightback in Labour’s ranks and pledging to stand in the next general election as unofficial Labour candidates, they pathetically collapsed. Proving it, many of them eagerly rushed to condemn Putin’s invasion and display their state loyalty in the House of Commons.

So, whereas August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht bravely opposed the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and were willing to serve two years of Festungshaft (‘imprisonment in a fortress’) we had a classic display of opportunist spinelessness. Condemning Sir Keir is right, but really misses the point. It is the cowardly 11 who really deserve our odium.

John McDonnell needs special mention here. Contradictorily he has a foot in both the USC and StWC. Apart from political incoherence, the explanation probably lies in his identification with the Irish struggle for reunification. Chris Ford too, but with the addition of Scottish nationalism. Yet, though they see Ukraine through the distorting lens of petty nationalism, they both end up doing the work of Nato and the US global hegemon. Horrible.

Fourthly, there is what we might call the more principled left. We shall just mention the Socialist Party in England and Wales and the Socialist Workers Party here (through there are more than a few others). More principled, because they, SPEW and the SWP, do link the question of peace with the struggle for socialism. But ‘more principled’ does not mean consistently principled. For example, SPEW calls for a pre-1989-91 Nato reset but, strangely, not the abolition of Nato itself. Then there is the SWP. Its leader, Alex Callinicos, rightly points a critical finger at the cowardly Labour 11 MPs, attacks Nato expansionism and candidly admits that the left is pitifully weak and is in no position to do much in the way of meaningful action. Good.

Naturally, comrade Callinicos explains the Ukraine conflict as being down to imperialism. However, by this he means nothing more than the “rivalry of states”. If that was the case, then we have had imperialism since the rise of cities such as Sumer, Kish, Uruk, Ur and Larsa in the 4th millennium BCE. True, there was imperial Rome, imperial China, etc, but in the 20th century Marxists, as noted above, give the term ‘imperialism’ a much narrower, specific, definition.

The problem for comrade Callinicos arises, of course, from the insistence that, with the first five-year plan, the Soviet Union saw the birth of what the SWP’s founder-leader, Tony Cliff, called ‘bureaucratic state capitalism’. Not that capitalism operated within the borders of the Soviet Union, but rivalry with outside powers imposed the compulsion to accumulate capital for the sake of accumulation and to behave in an imperialist manner abroad. According to Cliff, external, not internal, contradictions provided the system’s laws of motion.

Hobbled by this rotten theory, the SWP could not admit that something fundamental happened in 1991. History did nothing more than “move sideways” (Chris Harman).¹⁰ The Soviet Union was imperialist, so Putin’s Russian Federation must be too - despite the fact that, characteristically, what its oligarchs export is not capital - ie, self-expanding value - but money, which is used to purchase luxuries: properties in Manhattan’s Upper East Side or London’s Mayfair, Hampstead and Highgate … that and rare art works, super yachts and football clubs.

But the real giveaway, when it comes to comrade Callinicos, is his centrism, his conciliationism with the social-pacifists and social-imperialists. Take his reply to the “leftwing” writer, Paul Mason, a former member of Workers Power, but now a regular columnist for the New Statesman, an active supporter of the USC and an advocate of a beefed-up Nato. According to Mason, the world is nowadays divided between democracies (the west) and imperialism (Russia). The US, UK and EU are described as “former imperialist powers”.

How does comrade Callinicos begin his reply to this turncoat?

Dear Paul,

You know that I respect you. I thought your latest book, How to stop fascism, was excellent, even though I disagree with your argument that a modern version of the popular front - an alliance of liberals and the left - is the way to beat the fascists.¹¹

Why respect Mason? Why respect a social-imperialist who advocates a popular front between the working class and the liberal bourgeoisie? Leon Trotsky furiously denounced ‘official communism’ and its promotion of such class-collaboration in the late 1930s, branding the turn as an act of class treachery on the scale of August 1914 - when ‘official’ social democracy went over to their own bourgeoisies in ‘defending the fatherland’. We all know how Lenin responded: polemical salvo after polemical salvo and call after call for splits. He also rounded on centrists who opposed World War I, but refused to countenance a complete break with the social-imperialists: Julius Martov, Henriette Roland Holst, Leon Trotsky and, above all, the former ‘Pope of Marxism’, Karl Kautsky.

Could comrade Callinicos’s criminal softness be due to the SWP’s guilty past and the Respect farrago? Quite possibly. The SWP established Respect in 2004 so as to unite socialist leftwingers with Muslim radicals: ie, the Muslim Association of Britain (a recognised branch of the Muslim Brotherhood). Or maybe Callinicos’s respect for Mason is with an eye to getting him to grace the platform of the next Stand Up To Racism demonstration or the next Marxism school? After the ‘comrade Delta’ scandal, the SWP is still desperate to court such mainstream figures.

Either way, Callinicos ends his reply “in comradeship”. Unless I am badly mistaken, this is not meant ironically. As far as I can detect, there is not a trace of a sneer in what comrade Callinicos writes. He means it. Shame on him.

Defeatism

We all know that the Bolsheviks distinguished themselves not merely by condemning the inter-imperialist war that broke out in August 1914. They went much further than platonically calling for ‘peace’ (Keir Hardie) or even ‘neither victory nor defeat’ (Trotsky). No, they stood by the Second International’s call to turn imperialist war into a struggle for socialism: towards that end they adopted a defeatist position. The defeat of one’s ‘own’ side “must facilitate its overthrow”.¹²

A thoroughly realistic strategy. The advanced section of the working class in Europe was deeply imbued with Marxist ideas and there were historically established mass parties. True, most of the MPs, trade union officials and tops of the apparatus had gone from opportunism to full-blown social-imperialism. But, once the reality of the war dawned, the principled left wing would go from being a minority to a majority and could take full advantage of the turmoil caused by the war. Revolution was a real prospect.

In all honesty, we cannot hold out such an immediate strategy. Today, across the whole of the planet, there is not a single workers’ party worthy of that name. There are plenty of little groups that call themselves parties, but no actual party. We in the CPGB are proud to have the name of a party, but there “exists no real Communist Party” (Weekly Worker ‘What we fight for’). By “Communist Party” we mean, part, a mass part, the advanced part of the working class.

So, when it comes to the Ukraine war and the danger of it spilling out into a wider European or global conflict, we can only adopt a moral stance for the moment. We are more in the position of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1870 than Vladimir Lenin and Gregory Zinoviev in 1914. Nonetheless, it is vital that we take our stand.

Peace slogan

When masses of ordinary people call for peace in Ukraine, including in Russia, it would be completely wrong for communists to dismiss, mock or denounce such heartfelt sentiments. We must not lump together the deceptive illusions fostered by the professional social-pacifists - that there can be peace under capitalism, that we should rely on international law and bodies such as the UN - and the fury, the revulsion, the yearning for an end to war expressed by those who have signed petitions, who have marched, who have passed resolutions for peace.

I recall attending one of the StWC’s mass demonstrations against the Iraq war and listening to a new version of the Temptations/Edwin Starr 1970 classic ‘War (what is it good for)’. There were some - thankfully, only a few - leftist idiots who laughed at the powerful, thumping, wonderful, lyrics:

War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, uhh
War, huh, yea
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it again, y’all
War, huh (good God)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing,
Listen to me, oh.

Yes, there is the class war, the national war for liberation, the war to halt exterminating invaders. But that misses the point entirely. It is surely the duty of communists to galvanise widespread pacifist sentiments so as to turn an unjust war into a just war. Those who cannot understand that understand nothing.

Our immediate demands:

• Russian troops out of Ukraine.
• Self-determination for Russian majority areas in Ukraine.
• No to sanctions.
• No to Nato expansionism.
• No to Nato.
• Open borders, against immigration controls.
• The main enemy is at home.

1. I Lenin CW Vol 21, Moscow 1977, p300.↩︎

2. H Draper and E Haberkern Karl Marx’s theory of revolution Vol 5, New York 2005, p125.↩︎

3. VI Lenin CW Vol 21, Moscow 1977, pp300-01.↩︎

4. A Rapoport (ed) Clausewitz on war Harmondsworth 1976, p119.↩︎

5. au.int/en/pressreleases/20220228/statement-ill-treatment-africans-trying-leave-ukraine.↩︎

6. quoteinvestigator.com/2021/05/04/no-plan.↩︎

7. Z Brzezinski The grand chessboard: American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives New York 1997, p202.↩︎

8. Solidarity February 16 2022.↩︎

9. www.stopwar.org.uk/article/list-of-signatories-stop-the-war-statement-on-the-crisis-over-ukraine.↩︎

10. C Harman ‘The storm breaks’ International Socialism spring 1990.↩︎

11. Socialist Worker February 21 2022.↩︎

12. VI Lenin CW Vol 21, Moscow 1977, p312.↩︎