Stop Putin's war! Stop Putin's war!
We publish the following article written by Ashley Smith and originally published inTempest.
Vladimir Putin's barbaric invasion of Ukraine is the most important geopolitical event since the end of the Cold War. It is a turning point in world history that will shape all relations between states within the imperialist system., as well as the social and class struggles within them.
The left and the anti-war movement must rise to these circumstances and present clear positions and demands. We must condemn Putin's horrible war, build solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance and the anti-war movement in Russia, and oppose the United States and the powers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (I'LL TAKE) They turn this conflagration into an inter-imperialist war between powers with nuclear weapons.
A criminal and catastrophic war
almost two weeks ago, Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine with the expectation that they would be welcomed as liberators from a government that, according to him, did not have popular support. He promised a quick victory. Clearly, His expectations were catastrophically wrong and led him to deploy an inadequate number of troops and insufficient weaponry to quickly conquer and subdue the country..
Ukraine has waged heroic military and civil resistance against Russia's invasion. Forced to regroup by resistance, Putin and his generals appear prepared to resort to the scorched earth strategy they used in their previous wars in Chechnya and Syria., endangering the lives of millions of people.
The Russian invasion has already led to 2 millions of Ukrainians to flee their country in search of refuge in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and beyond. The almost 40 Millions who remain in the country face a humanitarian catastrophe. Russia is bombing civilian areas, endangering access to water, foods, medicines and electricity.
The US and NATO powers have responded with everything except direct military intervention. They have launched an economic war against Russia, imposing sanctions on trade and the country's financial system. While the United States has imposed an embargo on Russian oil and gas, the European Union (EU) he hasn't done it, as it remains heavily dependent on Russia for its fuel.
The sanctions are not only aimed at Putin, its state bureaucracy and the country's ruling class, but to the entire economy. They will have a devastating impact on the working class and the oppressed of the country, who already suffer extreme inequality amid the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of oligarchs.
The United States and NATO powers also accelerated the deployment of troops to member countries bordering Ukraine and Russia and increased shipments of military aid to Ukraine.. State after state is preparing to increase its military budgets to equip itself for great power rivalry., with Germany leading the way and promising to double its war spending next year.
International resistance to Putin's war
The hope in the midst of this horror is the emergence of an international resistance from below against the war. The most important component is, Of course, the Ukrainian resistance in all its military and popular forms.
That resistance has inspired anti-war organizing around the world and, significantly, within Russia itself. There, Anti-war activists have defied government repression by protesting in their thousands across the country. More than 13.000 people, subjected to brutal treatment at the hands of Putin's political police. Even in the face of such intimidation, hundreds of thousands have signed an anti-war petition, Artists have risked their careers in government-funded institutions to raise their voices against Putin, Moscow University professors have spoken out against the war and members of parliament have called for it to stop.
Such anti-war sentiment will intensify further as Russian recruits lose their lives., limbs and sanity in a war of imperial conquest. That will fuel anti-war action in the country and even among the troops. Facing the military and civil resistance of Ukraine, soldiers are seeing the reality behind Putin's lie that invaders would be welcomed as liberators. There are already reports of troops refusing to fight, They sabotage their own team and some desert.
In addition to the Ukrainian and Russian resistance, An international anti-war movement has begun to emerge against Putin's war. The shares have varied in size and composition, but some have reached thousands, with one in Berlin exceeding the 100.000.
The politics of war in Ukraine
This international resistance is politically heterogeneous, with all kinds of currents that present ideas both good and bad. The key question for socialists is what positions we should adopt to educate, guide and build the movement.
Given that, as Carl von Clausewitz argued, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.”, We must first understand the politics of this war and its different combatants.
Russia is waging a war of imperial aggression. As Putin has expressed clearly in speech after speech, His goal is to rebuild his state's former empire in Eastern Europe and he sees Ukraine as a stepping stone in that project.. He intends to install a puppet regime throughout the country or divide it, preserving Russian control over Ukraine and the breakaway “states” of Lugansk and Donetsk.
Ukraine is involved in a war of national self-determination and, in fact, of national liberation against an invading and occupying imperial power. The struggle encompasses military and popular dimensions, which will continue as an ongoing insurgency even in the event of Russian victory.
The United States and other NATO powers seek to defend their sphere of influence, which have increasingly expanded into Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War. Washington has made clear that it is organizing its allies for the great power rivalry with Russia, and behind her, and much more important, with China, to reinforce its hegemony over the global capitalist system.
Against false anti-imperialism
In this war there are three traps that the international left and anti-war activists must avoid at all costs. First, we should not adopt the policy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and support Putin's Russia as a kind of anti-imperialist state.
Although it sounds strange to most people, This position is in fact held by sectors of the left. They are numerically few but have great influence on broader layers of anti-war activists who rightly despise US imperialism..
This position views the United States as the only imperialist state in the world and supports any and all states that supposedly oppose it., no matter how disgusting they are, like Putin's Russia and Bashar al Assad's Syria. In the process, Its adherents explain and/or excuse the multiple crimes of these states, including wars and counterrevolutions, like the realpolitik of what they call anti-imperialism.
Actually, This position has nothing to do with anti-imperialism. They support, in the case of Russia or China, to states that exploit workers, oppress other nations and peoples, and aspire to become great powers.
About Russia's war against Ukraine, These false anti-imperialists adopt various positions. Some support the Russian war, others soften their criticism and others reduce the tasks of the anti-war movement to only criticizing the United States and NATO.
Whatever its form, false anti-imperialism fundamentally compromises an anti-war position in Ukraine. Does not strongly oppose Russia's invasion and occupation of the country.
Even worse, His refusal to oppose Russia's war violates solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance. Instead, sees it as a proxy war under Washington's control.
It also violates solidarity with the Russian anti-war movement. False anti-imperialists have long dismissed internal opposition within so-called anti-imperialist states as “color revolutions” entirely orchestrated by the United States..
Fundamentally, false anti-imperialists violate the internationalism of the working class and support for the right to self-determination of oppressed nations. They see the world divided only between states and support those they believe are anti-imperialists, even when they exploit workers and oppress people.
The adoption of such false anti-imperialism will fundamentally compromise the anti-war movement.. It will alienate people, especially Ukrainians, who have taken to the streets in opposition to Putin's war and will tarnish the left as an apologist for it.
Against support for the intervention of the United States and NATO
The second trap, and perhaps the most dangerous, is for the left and the anti-war movement to support the United States and NATO as a means to stop the war and secure the liberation of Ukraine. That would lead the movement to side with the greatest imperialist power in the world., whose objectives are totally predatory.
No one should forget Washington's long and bloody history from the Spanish-American War to the two imperialist world wars., Vietnam, their invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and his current support for Israel's occupation of Palestine and Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen. This history led Martin Luther King Jr.. to call the United States “the largest purveyor of violence in the world”.
Washington's NATO alliance is part of that imperial history. The United States created it, as its first secretary general said, Lord Ismay, to “keep the Russians out”, “Americans in and Germans down” in Europe. In other words, It is a vehicle of US imperial domination over European capitalism.
Most other NATO and EU states have their own sordid history of colonialism. And many have been complicit in Washington's wars, most recently in Afghanistan, where NATO played an important role in the “pacification” of the country, committing numerous war crimes in the process.
further, The decision of the United States and European powers to expand NATO and the EU into Eastern Europe is one of the causes of the war in Ukraine. It triggered Putin's growing determination over the past decade to regain Russia's lost sphere of influence..
The United States and the EU offer no alternative to Ukraine other than subjection to their imperial interests and neoliberal economy.. In fact, through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, The United States is one of Ukraine's oppressors. These international financial institutions have locked Ukraine into a debt that now exceeds $129 billion. The workers and oppressed of the country have paid a huge price to service these loans.
As they have done throughout the Global South, International financial institutions have demanded that Ukraine reduce social programs, privatize state industry, fire state workers and reduce workers' salaries and benefits in exchange for more loans. Ukraine's annual payments divert billions of dollars that, otherwise, could be used for much-needed social reforms to improve the abysmally low standard of living of the majority.
The United States and NATO aim to defend and, in fact, expanding its military dominance over Eastern Europe and implementing neoliberal economics. They have no solution to the difficult situation of the majority of Ukrainians fighting for their liberation.
Despite all this, many people horrified by Putin's war wrongly demand that Washington and Brussels intervene directly or establish a no-fly zone. That would lead to military confrontations between the United States/NATO and Russia., with the risk of a Third World War between nuclear powers.
For peace, not for pacifism
The third trap is to adopt a position of pacifism, opposition to all war and violence. While understandably attractive amid Putin's invasion, It is a wrong position that would lead to the betrayal of solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance.
Pacifism elevates nonviolence to a principle for all circumstances. Actually, Nevertheless, not all forms of violence and war are reactionary. They can be means of liberation from oppression.
The Vietnamese liberation struggle that defeated French and American imperialism, It was a progressive use of military force that ensured the country's independence. The US Civil War. UU., which involved both the conquest of the South by the Union army and the general slave strike, ended slavery in the United States.
It would be a profound mistake to equate Vietnamese violence with that of American imperialism or the violence of slave owners with that of people who were enslaved and judge that both are evil.. One side defends the maintenance of violent systems of oppression and the other side their abolition.
Instead of abstract morality, which can lead to a position of frankly immoral neutrality in the struggle between oppressors and oppressed, We should approach the issue of violence and war politically and as a tactical issue. We must oppose wars that impose domination, oppression and exploitation, and support wars that free people from those structures.
This does not mean that we should support any type of violence in search of victory. We must support only the media that organizes and improves the collective struggle of the oppressed majority. And that can only be judged in the specific circumstances of a given war..
Principled anti-war and socialist positions
So, What positions should socialists and anti-war activists take on Putin's invasion of Ukraine?? This war combines three elements: Russia's imperial conquest of Ukraine, Ukraine's struggle for self-determination and an inter-imperial conflict between Russia and the United States, the world hegemonic power.
Our guiding slogan must be “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international solidarity from below against war and imperialism”. We must support Ukraine's right to self-determination and its struggle for national liberation from Russian occupation. We must defend the right of Ukrainians to obtain weapons from wherever they can to defend themselves, even as we must point out to the Ukrainians the conditions they will be subject to any weapons and support they seek from the United States and other imperial powers.
We must support the progressive forces—the left, feminist organizations, unions—in the Ukrainian resistance defending the rights of the country's oppressed national minorities, its Russian-speaking inhabitants, the Jewish population and others. Only unity among Ukrainians against any and all oppression can unite the resistance against Russia's attempt to divide and conquer the country.
We must stand in solidarity with the Russian anti-war movement. If it manages to expand in size and scope, can give confidence to Russian troops to refuse to fight and thus end the invasion.
From this resistance an even more radical struggle can be born to challenge Putin's autocracy.. Let us remember that Russian military defeats have historically led to revolutions: his war with Japan led to the revolution of 1905, World War I led to the Russian Revolution in 1917, and Moscow's occupation of Afghanistan in the 1990s. 1980 led to the political revolutions of 1989 a 1991.
While we oppose the Russian war, we should not call for the United States and NATO powers to intervene. We should not support their sanctions, which in this case are war by other financial means. They represent collective punishment of the working class and the oppressed, who already suffer from extreme inequality, for the crimes of their rulers.
This sanctions regime is absolutely hypocritical. The United States opposes sanctions on Saudi Arabia, despite their genocidal war in Yemen, and to Israel, despite supporting apartheid and its decades of occupation of Palestine. The United States uses or refuses to use sanctions to promote its imperialist interests.
Sanctions on Russia are designed to ensure American hegemony, sending a message to China and other states about Washington's geopolitical and economic power and the risks to anyone who defies its edicts. Inter-imperial and regional rivalries intensify for the dominance of global capitalism.
We must also oppose calls for the United States and NATO to impose a no-fly zone, which would transform the invasion of Russia into an inter-imperial war between nuclear powers, putting the world at risk of atomic armageddon. Similarly, we should demonstrate against the new militarization of the United States, NATO states, Russia and other countries preparing for great power rivalry and world wars.
Instead, we have to raise demands that address the immediate humanitarian crisis. What is more important, we must call on the world to open its borders to all Ukrainians fleeing their country and also to all other immigrants, especially Africans and Arabs who, openly racist, They have been pushed to the back of the queue and denied entry to EU and NATO states.
Finally, We must call on the United States and its international financial institutions to cancel Ukraine's debt. Only then, if Ukraine manages to free itself from Russian occupation, will be able to escape the financial shackles of the West and rebuild itself as it sees fit.
Reconstructing working class internationalism
The left and the anti-war movement must rise to the challenge of Putin's war. Will shape world politics for the next generation, will impact every domestic issue and affect all social and class movements.
The war has already shaken the world economy. It has caused sharp contractions in stock markets around the world, inflation has increased dramatically, especially in gasoline and food, and is forcing central banks in country after country to raise interest rates.
This, at the same time, will lead governments to enact austerity measures in social programs and state employment, even as their military budgets increase. They will sacrifice our bread to pay for their weapons.
Its military preparations will exacerbate tensions in the global state system. Each state will try to protect its sphere of influence, tearing apart the structures of global capitalism. And everyone will increase their efforts to secure reliable fossil fuel reserves., which will lead to even greater global warming down the road.
These dynamics will intensify the pre-existing political polarization in each and every one of the countries.. With the establishment presiding over the crisis, cuts and war preparations, Both the right and the left will have the opportunity to offer alternative paths forward.
This will occur in the midst of a probable intensification of social and class struggle, fueled by the austerity measures of our rulers. For example, in United States, Employers will say in every contract negotiation with unions that inflation and high interest rates prevent them from granting increases in wages and benefits and guaranteeing profitability., which will trigger potential strikes.
At this historical moment the left must take advantage of the opportunity, oppose both Moscow and Washington, build social and class struggles, and do everything possible to connect them with similar battles for social and economic justice around the world. More than ever, we must build and rebuild the politics of working class internationalism and organize a fight for a world that puts people before empire and profit.
