03.10.2024

Establishing a principled left

CPGB’s Provisional Central Committee calls for others on the left, individuals and organisations, in Britain and internationally, to discuss and agree this statement with a view to cementing principled unity and furthering the struggle against war and capitalism

1. There is a real danger of escalation in Ukraine and the possibility of war between Russia and Nato.

2. We are told that in their September 13 White House meeting Joe Biden and Sir Keir Starmer agreed a “strong position”, which everybody takes as reference to British Storm Shadows - and other Nato-supplied missiles that Volodymyr Zelensky wants to use to strike into the territory of the Russian Federation.

3. Putin has warned that, if this happens, it means that Nato would be “at war with Russia”. After all, Ukraine could not use such missiles without Nato technical and military back-up - crucially US satellites. Dmitry Medvedev, former president and prime minister, ominously talks of reducing Kyiv to a “giant melted spot”. Sabre-rattling, perhaps - till the moment when it is not.

4. Looking at the situation objectively, it is impossible to imagine Storm Shadows being a winner for Ukraine, as Zelensky and the whole pro-war liberal propaganda machine claims. Yes, they will make a marginal difference, but they will not - cannot - turn the tide of the war. Russia has already moved most important command posts, airforce bases and major storage facilities inside Russia, beyond their 155-mile range.

5. Their importance lies in how the dial is being turned up. For instance, the Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, has been hawking the possibility of Nato protecting Ukrainian nuclear facilities. But, of course, it is Ukrainian forces that have been recklessly shelling the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia power plant - not the other way round, as crazily suggested by large parts of the western media.

6. That alone is reason to be extraordinarily concerned. According to UN observers, with grossly “inadequate” staffing levels due to the war, this has “significantly increased the risk of a nuclear accident” in a country which already witnessed the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Zaporizhzhia is unlikely to explode - it is under cold shutdown - but shelling or a missile strike could still release significant amounts of deadly radiation. Depending on the prevailing winds, this could badly effect people in neighbouring Turkey, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria. Clearly nuclear power is inherently dangerous.

7. Owing to the sensitivity and significance of giving the go-ahead for Ukrainian use of Storm Shadows and other such missiles, there has been an elaborate kabuki dance. The US administration does not want to be seen to be taking the lead in upping the ante. So Biden called in his favourite yap dog, the UK, to come to Washington and lobby him. The same kabuki dance was then repeated in various European capitals. We saw exactly the same kind of performance with supplying main battle tanks and then F-16 fighter-bombers.

8. If others join the UK warmonger, as the US presumably wants, then not only will Kyiv be given permission to use Storm Shadows against Russia. France, Italy and, most importantly, the US will follow suit in giving permission for using the missiles they have supplied; ie, Scalps and Himars.

9. Lifting western restrictions on using missiles inside Russia would mark yet another escalation - not a pivotal military moment. Storm Shadows are tactical, not strategic, weapons, but unlike drones they move fast and carry enough of an explosive payload to penetrate bunkers and knock out command posts.

10. Germany is already under intense pressure to supply Ukraine with its Taurus cruise missiles. We note that Germany has suffered enormously, with cheap Russian gas being cut off and public opinion swinging against underwriting the war in Ukraine. However, testifying to the failures of the left, this has largely been to the benefit of the far-right AfD.

11. The war in Ukraine has antecedents long predating February 24 2022. Directed by the CIA and spearheaded by the forces of extreme chauvinism and the organised far right, the Maidan coup deposed the ‘neutral’ Viktor Yanukovych government in Kyiv. Ukraine was shunted into the western camp with the stated ambition of joining the European Union.

12. The Russian response hardly came as a surprise. Crimea was annexed and Russian-Ukrainian separatist forces were encouraged and aided - in particular the armed rebellions in the Donbass. However, faced with a Nato membership plan, significantly increased Ukrainian Armed Forces attacks against the Donbass and the threat of heavy western sanctions, the Putin/FSB regime gave the go-ahead for a full-scale invasion. The aim was, at the very least, to force Kyiv into compliance and break it from the western camp. A trap.

13. Phase one of Putin’s so-called ‘special military operation’ failed abysmally. Zelensky’s government more than survived. With Nato military, propaganda, diplomatic and financial backing, it mobilised the Ukrainian population and mounted stiff resistance. Since then we have seen advances and retreats on both sides. Despite all that, the war is essentially a stalemate. Tens of thousands have died, many more have been horribly maimed and millions have been displaced in what is a reactionary war on both sides.

14. There is nothing remotely progressive about the Putin/FSB regime. It is fighting to preserve Russian independence, true. However, that goes hand-in-hand with a clampdown on democratic rights, the chauvinist aim of a greater Russia, promoting orthodox Christianity and annexing foreign territory and populations. Economically Russia is dominated by a combination of Kremlin insiders and pliant so-called oligarchs (‘so-called’ because they do not rule, do not govern). Suffice to say, then, Russia is not anti-imperialist. Russia wants to, dreams of, joining the top ranks of the imperialist club, not overthrowing imperialism.

15. Nor, on the other hand, is there anything remotely progressive about the Zelensky regime. It upholds a poisonously narrow version of Ukrainian nationalism - a nationalism that has no place for the Russian language and Russian-Ukrainians. Economically and politically it is dominated by oligarchs and has pursued a thorough-going neoliberal agenda.

16. No genuine socialist, no genuine communist can support either side. Both are reactionary, both are anti-working class. Those socialists and communists who support the Kremlin, or who see something anti-imperialist in its war with Ukraine, have completely lost their class bearings. The same can be said of the social-pacifist left and fostering the illusion that there can be a peaceful capitalism, as long as governments act reasonably and abide by internationally agreed rules and standards. In fact, war and capitalism are inseparable. Peace is only a moment between war, and war is merely the continuation of the same policy previously carried out peacefully through diplomacy, tariffs and sanctions.

17. Naturally, the social-imperialist ‘left’ claims that its support for Ukraine is no different from its support for Palestinian self-determination. There is a wilful refusal to recognise that both Ukraine and Israel are US proxies.

18. We must forthrightly oppose both social-imperialism and social-pacifism. Failure to do so, keeping quiet in the name of ‘left unity’, is treachery in its own right - it is centrism, and perhaps the worst kind of opportunism, because it provides seemingly ‘left’ excuses for blurring principles and finding an accommodation with social-imperialism and social-pacifism and thereby capitalism.

19. Throughout the entire current conflict, the US and its allies have sought to strike a balance between giving Ukraine enough weapons to resist Russia, on the one hand, and not doing anything too overtly provocative, on the other. Naturally this has infuriated the Zelensky regime … and its social-imperialist cheerleaders. They demand “full sanctions” against Russia (ie, siege warfare), claim that the Putin regime is “attacking democracy globally” and that Ukraine should get all the “arms necessary to liberate the country, from wherever possible and without conditions”. Effectively this ‘Arm, arm, arm Ukraine’ line poses a ‘guns or butter’ choice in Europe, with the social-imperialists demanding guns: ie, supplying Ukraine with massively increased supplies of the most up-to-date fighter aircraft, tanks and missiles.

20. If, as it looks, the US has given the UK the go-ahead for the use of its Storm Shadows against targets within the Russian Federation, does this mean we stand on the threshold of nuclear war in Europe or a generalised nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States? Unlikely - well, at the moment - because such a war is unwinnable and would spell disaster for humanity as a whole … but, of course, miscalculations can always happen.

21. Western support for Ukraine cannot be separated from other wars and conflicts, not least Israel’s. The idea that the US, UK, France, etc are supporting a “just war” in Ukraine and an “unjust war” in Gaza and the wider Middle East, is a stupid, hopeless, opportunist muddle. States which are committed to anti-trade union laws, restrictions on civil rights and the continuation of class exploitation at home pursue those same class interests - including by other, violent, means - abroad. If a war is supported by our capitalist state, then it follows that such a war is a criminal war. Those who urge on any such war betray the working class and the cause of socialism.

22. The war between Russia and Ukraine is not a ‘Goliath versus David’ contest, which is how it is near universally portrayed by mainstream bourgeois politicians and the social-imperialists alike. It is a proxy war, being fought in the strategic interests of a declining US hegemon - which does not, of course, face any sort of serious challenge from Russia. China, though, is another matter entirely. From this perspective, the war in Ukraine, and Nato’s steady eastward expansion, is fundamentally directed against China, not Russia.

23. As part of this anti-Beijing drive, it is vital to grasp that the aim of the US is to bring about regime change in Moscow. It wants to replace Putin with someone not unlike the first post-Soviet Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, or the now dead oppositionist, Alexei Navalny.

24. True, this runs the distinct danger, as US state department and military tops must surely know, of producing the very opposite of what they intend - a super-aggressive alternative in the Kremlin, willing to risk Götterdämmerung in the attempt to save Mother Russia from ruin and humiliation. Nonetheless, the US is banking on Putin being eased or shoved aside, either in a palace coup or by a colour revolution which results in ending Russia as a Black Sea naval power and degrading it into either a neocolony or a series of neocolonies. As a result - and this is crucial - that would see China surrounded - to the north by former Soviet republics, to the south by India and to the east by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the formidable American Pacific fleet - thereby potentially strangling China.

25. America would then control Halford Mackinder’s ‘world island’ and therefore have the ability to reboot its domination of the entire globe. A scenario that both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will surely resist using whatever means that they have at their disposal.

26. Under such dire circumstances, which clearly carry the distinct risk of descending into a World War III, it is the duty of genuine socialists and communists to urgently cement principled unity and towards that end to ruthlessly expose social-imperialism, social-pacifism and centrist conciliationism. Clear lines of demarcation must be drawn. This is the necessary condition for developing the political consciousness of the advanced section of the working class and then taking the struggle of the broad masses from the narrow routine of trade unionism and economics to the level of high politics and thereby the perspective of turning what is a war between reactionary capitalist powers into a civil war - a revolution - for democracy, socialism and communism.