Ukraine is the Whole World
Lies of war
War is first and foremost the war of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. In Ukraine, the line‑up against the working class is vast: from openly bourgeois parties to the myriad opportunist and Stalinist formations to anarchist and trotskist factions. The result, and it matters little if it is conscious or unconscious, is to lead the proletariat to side with one of the opposing sides, to shed blood for the interests of their masters.
Various pretexts are used to drive the proletariat to war under one of the bourgeois fronts; these are lies that communists must expose and combat.
Defend the aggressed?
The first lie is that there is an “aggressor” and an “aggressed” in the current war.
The question makes no sense. Whichever army first crossed the other’s borders, every capitalist state is both aggressor and aggressed. The fact is that all bourgeoisies prepare for war because the capitalist system that feeds them needs war to survive, to get out of the economic crisis that strangles it. No one has been able to say whether Germany and Japan in 1939 were aggressors or aggressed. The victimhood of the aggressed serves only to justify imperialist war, on either side of the front.
From a general and historical point of view, the only real “aggressor” is the international proletariat, the bearer of the communist mode of production, mature and ready to replace capitalism by violently demolishing all its rotten structures, economic, social, ideal, political, military. The bourgeoisie, every bourgeoisie, rightly feels that it is being attacked, and is indeed being attacked, by communism, by the working class, as well as by the competing bourgeoisies, like rats in a cage, all of them in the same agonizing situation.
In Ukraine all classes are now being mobilized against Russia in a “total defense”, which for Ukrainian proletarians means death and destruction.
In the West, too, the powerful media available to the ruling class popularize the aggressor thesis. This is functional in identifying the “Russians” and their “dictator” as the cause of the worsening living conditions of the European and American population, thus attempting to direct the inevitable eruption of social discontent toward the Russian “enemy” instead of against the bourgeois order.
Russia, on the other hand, justifies its military intervention based on the crimes of the Nazis in Ukraine, who have been guilty since 2014 of genocide of the Russian-speaking peoples of the Donbass, which tends to foster popular solidarity with its imperialism and to make people bear the economic consequences of the war and the bloodletting it requires.
In reality, the alleged Ukrainian “aggressed” and the Russian “aggressor,” as well as all the bourgeois states in any war, are united and in solidarity in the struggle against their common enemy: the proletariat.
Defend democracy?
The other lie is that we are facing a war that would pit the “democracy” of the Ukrainian state against the “dictatorship” of the Russian Federation, the “free world” against “autocracies”. But even in the war underway, as in all imperialist wars, the true content of any bourgeois state formation is revealed, which abandons all democratic trappings and reveals dictatorial methods of government.
Ukraine is a case in point. The champions of human rights and liberal democracy in Europe say they would like it to be included in the European Union immediately. The democratic and “resilient” Ukraine, while nurturing and protecting neo‑Nazi criminal groups such as the notorious Azov battalion, outlaws opposition parties and arrests opponents accused of serving the enemy; it imprisons deserters and those attempting to leave the country, and is set to enact a law against emigrants who do not return to be drafted; it conducts a ruthless hunt against “saboteurs” by punishing them without trial, an example of which is the summary execution of one of the members of the commission in charge of negotiations with Moscow; it prohibits the use of the Russian language, spoken by one‑third of the population; censorship is imposed on the media and even social media, under penalty of imprisonment, silencing any dissent toward government policy.
The repression is accompanied by an increasingly dire economic situation, with very low wages for those who still have a job, in the face of soaring prices and without the government having intervened to secure basic necessities: the Ukrainian government’s only request to allied countries is “weapons, weapons and more weapons”.
The current Ukrainian regime, moreover, is no different to that of Moscow, two bourgeois states whose primary function is to maintain the subjugation of the proletariat.
Of course we do not weep over broken bourgeois liberties and violated democracy. Whether the bourgeois state keeps the democratic mask or uncovers the fascist face, its content remains unchanged, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the working class.
Defend self‑determination?
Another deception comes from the “left”: on the one hand sanctifying the “resistance” of “a people” to the invader; on the other the struggle “for independence” of the Donbass.
In reality, for the proletariat of both Ukraine and the Donbass, it is entirely indifferent whether their masters speak Russian or Ukrainian or are affiliated with one national band of capitalists or the other. The commodity labor power, like all commodities, has no homeland. Nor does capital, for that matter. Which, on both sides, would like to enslave the working class in military uniform to fight “to the last man”, to bleed in a long war, the partner but competitor in world trade.
Anarchist formations have also taken part in the war in Ukraine, arrayed against Russian aggression, further confirming the counter-revolutionary role played by anarchism, which, utterly unable to decipher historical forces, as in the Spain of the Civil War, always ends up supporting one bourgeois front against another. On anarchists, Trotski’s judgment is definitive: extreme left of the bourgeoisie.
The same function is played by the organizations of the Fourth International that support the Ukrainian resistance. These failed Marxists invoke the duty of communists to submit to the patriotic front in the name of Ukraine’s national self‑determination against big‑Russian imperialism. Similar arguments are advanced by the advocates of the “national rights” of the Russian-speakers of the Donbass, with trotskists and Stalinists united in claiming the right to their self‑determination. Such a position has the sole result of sowing the poison of national ideology among the working class, diverting it from the revolutionary path.
If for Marxism national revolutions were a decisive historical factor for the more rapid development of capitalism, and consequently for the full opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, thus maturing the conditions for proletarian revolution, by now the spread of capitalism throughout the world has created a single sphere of bourgeois dominion, and the proletariat no longer has to support any revolution for the formation of nation-states at any latitude; instead, it struggles directly for the overthrow of the bourgeois regime and for its own dictatorship. All calls for the completion of national revolutions, or defense of the independence of states, as is being claimed for the Donbass today, are reactionary.
Partitioning the world market
The lies about the war in Ukraine conceal the two crucial facts: that the current war is an episode in the conflict between the most powerful imperialisms to partition the world market, in a war of all bourgeoisies united against the proletariat. The actual proportions and the historical framework in which the ongoing war in Ukraine fits transcend the borders of this tormented country. The current clash does not concern the shape of Ukraine but that of the entire bourgeois world. Even if a truce were to be reached, on the Korean model, as is assumed, this would soon be called into question by the worsening clash between imperialisms.
“Korea is the world”, we wrote then, in 1950. That war was not to be considered “a contingent or local episode, an accident, a regrettable incident”, but it was “one among many, and certainly among the most virulent manifestations of an imperialist conflict that has no parallels or meridians but takes place on the theater of the whole world, within the international time limits of imperialism” (Prometeo No. 1).
The same assessment applies today to the war in Ukraine. Although it is being fought there for now, it already involves all imperialisms, deployed in the war with the massive supply of weapons, the presence of military advisers on the ground, the green light for the use of mercenary troops, economic warfare measures, and it represents only the beginning of a far‑reaching clash. Just as then the protagonists were neither the North Koreans nor the South Koreans, today it is not the Ukrainians, the Russians, or the Donbass separatists, but the top centers of capital, which have initiated on Ukrainian territory a struggle to redefine European and global imperialist structures. The real stakes are the power relations between the United States, its European allies, and Russia, against the capitalists of Europe, and in the background between the United States and China in Asia. We are facing a war that is the direct result of the contradictions of imperialism, of the conflicts between the major powers over a division of markets and spheres of influence and which reflects the changing power relations between states.
The war fought in Ukraine is associated with a general preparation for war throughout the world, with all the imperialist powers, East and West, engaged in a race for rearmament. The old formula of “guns before butter” is immediately resolved in favor of a massive investment in armaments. Germany is set to spend 100 billion on armaments and Italy is committed to 2 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN quantifies food price growth at 12.6 percent from February to March alone. Millions of proletarians will go hungry while billions will be spent on arms to slaughter more proletarians!
«Military deployments and defense of the international regime are exploiting the proletariat everywhere».
War propaganda now pervades all of bourgeois society and sees a vast united front in favor of war consisting of government and opposition parties, all newspapers and television stations, all of them enlisted in mobilizing the proletariat for the coming slaughter.
World War III is now no longer a taboo for armchair “generals” on TV. While there is already fighting in Ukraine, in the rest of the world proletarians are preparing for the inevitable war to come.
War on war
Meanwhile, governments are strengthening the apparatus of economic intervention and repression. A kind of war economy is already emerging to cope with the consequences of the ongoing economic war, so much so that in Europe there is talk of rationing in energy consumption and cuts in social spending.
Faced with the worsening living conditions of the working class, the bourgeois state will come prepared with all its repressive apparatus, as already seen in the protests in Sri Lanka and Peru, where governments responded with a state of emergency, while in Iran they shot and arrested people in response to protests caused by soaring food prices.
Like the Ukrainians, the proletarians of all countries are predestined to be victims of the third great slaughter. Mariupol, Kharkiv, Bucha, Kramatorsk, Severodonetsk and all the other names of localities that have become infamous for massacres and destruction, for which it matters little to go out and find out who is responsible because the massacre of the civilian population is inevitable in imperialist warfare; they sound a warning to proletarians the world over. Proletarians who want to see what capitalism would like to reserve for them need only turn their eyes to the fate of their class brothers and sisters in Ukraine.
Condensed on the Ukrainian battlefield, as it was on the Korean one, is «the red‑hot explosive potential of a world conflict, and more than in any previous episode of localized wars», the forms that this conflict is necessarily destined to assume throughout the world are projected «as on a tragic screen». Even today, war brings «the economic and political exploitation of the working masses to the point of exasperation, the work of ruthless destruction of goods and labor-power that is the inevitable historical prerogative of capitalism».
But if capitalism forces proletarians to slaughter each other, at the same time, by the very logic of its development, it unites them involuntarily in a common destiny. Thus, if imperialism means crises and wars, which manifest themselves in all their violence and brutality as we see in Ukraine, it also opens up possibilities of world proletarian revolution.
“The atomic bomb may or may not be used by imperialism as a technical instrument of war. What imperialism will not be able to avoid throwing at itself, no matter how great its overwhelming power may appear and be today, is the atomic bomb of the international and internationalist revolution of the working class».