Ukraine, Russia and the importance of questions

Source: https://barbaria.net/2022/03/04/ukraine-russia-and-the-importance-of-questions/

As in every conflict between capitalist states, the ideological debate and propaganda revolve around law and national sovereignty. Whether Russia has the right to claim its security space, whether Ukraine is a sovereign country to decide its alliances, whether it is fair and legitimate for the United States to extend the borders of NATO, whether the European Union has to maintain strategic autonomy, whether the European bourgeoisie itself is clear about what that means.

But just as important as the answer is the terrain on which the question is situated. And all the above questions are placed on a bourgeois terrain, the one that makes us end up supporting one capitalist state against another, against the basic principles of internationalism and class autonomy that have historically defined the proletarian movement.

Because what is disputed in the current conflict between Russia and NATO is the distribution of our exploitation and the domination of the territory. The development of capitalism implies, on the one hand, the contradiction between the need to exploit labor and the need to expel it with new technologies, which introduces it into a permanent economic crisis, of exhaustion of its own mechanism to produce wealth in the terms of the commodity. On the other hand, this same development makes the capability of a capitalist power to maintain its hegemony over the rest, or even over a stable and robust bloc, even more doubtful, at the same time as it drives the different countries to fight among themselves to become regional powers. The result we are facing is not, as is sometimes said, the trend towards the replacement of the USA by China in the world gendarmerie, but the geopolitical fragmentation of the different powers to ensure their control over the region.

It is in this effort that Russia finds itself in opposition to the US and NATO in the current conflict with Ukraine. The US is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain its world hegemony, as demonstrated by its withdrawal from Afghanistan. They have, in fact, even more difficulties to keep control over their own territory, which is affected by a social polarization that not even the drums of war are managing, at least for the moment, to keep sutured. For its part, Russia exercises its imperialist control over the states surrounding it to guarantee itself a “strategic depth” –a belt of cushion states to militarily soften its own pretensions of hegemonic power-, even at the cost of the bloody repression of the proletariat, as has been seen in its military intervention to crush the revolts in Kazakhstan. The European Union, that conglomerate of old powers in search of lost glory and without the capacity to unite an economic and military policy of its own, has been caught in the train wreck: Germany divided between its energy dependence on the Russian gas pipeline and its alliance with the US, France frustrated by its attempts to sweep under the rug its defeat in Mali by leading European diplomacy autonomously from the US, whose tragicomic end was the failure of the negotiations between Putin and Biden with the arrival of Russian tanks in Donbass.

War is part of the nature of capitalism, and of the nature of every national State. In this sense, every state is imperialist: be it the US, Russia or Ukraine, every state tries to line up the proletariat behind its own bourgeoisie to serve as cannon fodder in the imperialist war. The result of the current escalation of tension and the entry of Russian troops into eastern Ukraine has been, once again, the exacerbation of Ukrainian nationalism and pro-Western on one side, pro-Russian on the other, which only serves to hide the class nature of this conflict under the slogans of democracy, sovereignty and international law.

That is not our terrain. Our terrain is that of the defense of class interests outside and against all national and imperialist interests. The only way that the current conflict in Ukraine can be understood is through the basic principles of revolutionary defeatism: class unity across all borders, class war against the bourgeoisie itself, world proletarian revolution.

War in Ukraine: cat and mouse

Text translated with www.DeepL.com

The cat and mouse game is over. And the mouse ate the cat. Daylight had not yet broken when Russian armored vehicles and combat corps entered Ukrainian soil. This time with their faces uncovered, with the insignia corresponding to their battalions and the Russian tricolor flag visible. The 2014 farce no longer made sense this time. Russian capitalism has launched its entire army, all its capacity for fire and destruction, to remind the whole world that it is ready to compete with the rest of the capitals to take as much of the spoils as it can, in a historical period of distribution and reconfiguration of leaderships of world capitalism.

Naturally, the booty in dispute is the globally understood surplus value, the sum total of that part that each one of the workers of the world is sucked by the capitalist vampire, immersed in a mortal crisis. From Kiev to Moscow, passing through Madrid, Dakar, Bombay, Chicago, Lima, Seoul, through the four cardinal points of the globe, the program of capitalism in crisis (and what a crisis: economic, ecological, social, energetic, all of them worsening without stopping) is the same: imperialist war between nations and unlimited increase of the exploitation of the working class.

The Russian bourgeoisie appeared wrapped in the cellophane of the Fatherland and the Flag, an old trick of the decadent classes. But in reality the only thing the bourgeoisie, Russian and non-Russian, defends is its markets. That is why the military intervention is indiscriminately directed against the Ukrainian and Russian working class. Both can only expect the horror of war and police terror that already exists in Russia. As the days go by and the smoke of battle dissipates, the more conscious Ukrainian and Russian workers will have no doubt that, regardless of the color of the flags, the living conditions between them are identical, that the exploitation is the same, that both are the cannon fodder of their respective bourgeoisies. And that when the fray ends and the agreement is reached, the victorious bourgeoisie will represent the totality of exploiters.

In the ideological battle, the “Western” crats (with all their retinue of professors, experts, journalists, as well as their non-governmental organizations) want us to believe that Putin is a crackpot with a desire to be Tsar, that the Russian bourgeoisie is not such but “oligarchs” (as who says lowly bourgeois) and Russia an atavism of bygone times, with its golden domes, flags with eagle and gigantic doors in the palaces. Nothing could be further from the truth. Putin is a faithful and conscious heir of Stalin and his capitalist regime. All his moves are aimed at making Russian capitalism competitive, with an overexploitation of the working class on home soil, and imperialist plunder wherever it is able to impose itself. After the collapse of 1989 it has been putting the pieces back together, to the extent that it has been able to, and it has done so in consonance with world capitalism. For this he has counted on the elites of the European bourgeoisie: if not, ask the Schröder, Berlusconi, Fillon and so many others.

The Russian attack on Ukraine is in the line of imperialist domination of Russian capitalism, the same that crushed with its tanks the revolt in Berlin in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Afghanistan in 1979. Having regained its operational capacity, it has intervened in Georgia, Ossetia, Syria, Kazakhstan and in various parts of the world by means of mercenary forces. It is this renewed capacity to intervene and compete with the Western bourgeoisies that has them horrified. And it does so with the same weapons as they do: imperialist war to guarantee itself the necessary supplies of raw materials and minerals and an increased desire to increase the surplus value of any unfortunate person who falls into its hands, no matter which country he is in. Of course, now it wants to compete if necessary in the same yard of the European bourgeoisies. While Russian fighters were bombing the positions of the Western allies in Syria, nothing seemed to happen. Now, the roar of their engines reminds them that their booty is not safe, and that in the new world situation they are coveted by different capitalist countries.

In an irony of history, which since Hegel we know how much Hegel loves these games, the former leader of the ranks has become subordinate, and the former lackey leader of the ranks. Russia’s new imperialist machinations would be difficult to sustain without all the support provided by China. Those who remain on the surface of political phenomena are not in a position to understand the nature of capitalism as an abstract social relationship: Chinese capitalism needed American support in the 1970s and 1980s to escape the oppression of Russian capitalism, regardless of “political differences”. Now Chinese capitalism is lending its former Russian oppressor the help it needs to become independent. What is essential in all this, what is really at stake, is that capitalism will continue to perpetuate itself without giving a damn about political forms, that nutshell only useful for the ideological game.

In our previous statement we said:

The development of capitalism implies, on the one hand, the contradiction between the need to exploit labor and the need to expel it with new technologies, which introduces it into a permanent economic crisis, of exhaustion of its own mechanism to produce wealth in the terms of the commodity. On the other hand, this same development makes the capability of a capitalist power to maintain its hegemony over the rest, or even over a stable and robust bloc, even more doubtful, at the same time as it drives the different countries to fight among themselves to become regional powers.

In this historical period we are living, which we consider as a hinge, we are doomed to suffer the growing imperialist confrontation all over the world, and to worsen, if possible even more, the living conditions of the world working class. This is all capitalism is capable of offering humanity.

The immediate resolution of the conflict will be resolved by negotiation, always under the threat of new resumption of warfare. The very complexity and intertwining of the world capitalist economy will make the set of sanctions imposed by the EU and the US look like a joke. They cannot punish Russia without punishing, in passing, themselves. It is this feeling of impotence and frustration that runs through the entire European political class.

But we do not forget. The Russian uniformed rogue is bombing cities, streets. Thousands of people fleeing for their lives. On the horizon of all this are negotiations between the two governments. Ukrainian and Russian workers have nothing to gain in all this, and although we are far from a situation where the class is clear about its own interests, it is important to note the demonstrations that took place all over Russia yesterday against the war and which have left 1,800 arrested. Let it be the Russian working class that prevents its soldiers from leaving Russia, let it be the Ukrainian workers who take the reins of the country. Down with the Russians and Ukrainians, long live the joint action of the proletariat!

Since 1914 the workers of the whole world can only fly one banner: that of revolutionary defeatism. Against imperialist wars, the need to strike down first of all the bourgeoisie itself. International solidarity among the workers. There is no other task, however enormous and distant it may be at this moment, than to overthrow capitalist social relations. Any other way out is a mockery of the present situation.

Against those who raise the banner of peace in the present social conditions, we tell them that it is to perpetuate the conditions of war and exploitation. It is to continue the degradation of world capitalism. Contrary to this vision of peaceful coexistence in capitalism, we raise the banner of class against class, exploited against exploiters, communism against capitalism, revolution against reaction!

Barbaria is a small grouping without the capacity to influence the struggle of events. But we are deeply committed to the proletarians who at this moment suffer the fire and shrapnel of two armies in combat. Our thoughts and hearts are with them all.

February 24, 2022

Some fundamental positions of proletarian internationalism

Text translated with www.DeepL.com

Imperialism is not the international imposition of the strongest State on the rest of the national States, it is a historical phenomenon linked to the world development of the Capitalist Mode of Production. Capitalism is competition and struggle of all against all. The globalization of the economy, the world expansion of capitalism, the exhaustion of the production of value by the expulsion of living labor intensifies the capitalist crisis, which reaches its internal limits, and the world market is incapable of assuming a countertendency to the crisis. All this exacerbates competition and converts war, rather than as a phenomenon overcoming cyclical crises, in the continuation of the economy of capital by other means, trying to grab resources, raw materials, markets, competitive advantages in relation to other national States. In wars, the proletariat is deceived and embarked to become cannon fodder. There is no national State that is not imperialist, or as Lenin said: “they are all worse”.
Internationalism is a fundamental principle of the proletariat, which is international and internationalist. The revolution will be international and internationalist or it will not be. The proletariat as a class defends the interests of humanity as a whole above any national division imposed by the bourgeoisie and its national states. Internationalism is linked to class autonomy, the need for the class to develop its consciousness, unity and organization independently of the bourgeoisie and its political apparatuses. There is no possibility of tactical coalition with any fraction of the bourgeoisie (all imperialist) that does not entail a betrayal of the proletariat and the principles of the revolutionary program.
Leftism is the ideology that defends capital from arguments that suppose the degeneration of the revolutionary program, putting tactical questions over principles and approaching reality from the defense of the lesser evil or of the weakest bourgeoisie. It is the ideologization of the historical betrayal of social democracy, of the defense of bourgeois and imperialist blocs, of the defense of rampant interclassism. Again and again leftism calls us to re-sign the “war credits”, to confront our class brothers and sisters in defense of the national economy in the face of the defense of human needs.
War and militarism are therefore inseparable from the same dynamics of capitalism. There are no good wars, they all respond to the interests of capital and its bourgeoisies. The historic response of the proletariat to war is world revolution, which implies affirming our human needs above all imposed divisions. The consequences of war come to us in the form of death and misery and are immediate. The rise in prices and the precariousness of living conditions are an immediate fact that affect us all, also those workers who are not (yet) under its bombs.
The class struggle expresses itself, at the present moment of weakness of the international proletariat, in the defense of living conditions. Recently in Kazakhstan, the workers confronted (massive strikes, urban revolts, etc.) their own state against the rise of gas and all commodities, defending their lives against capital. The revolt (undoubtedly weak for its lack of perspective and organization) was drowned in blood by the armies of the Russian federation, in collusion with the Kazakh state and the Western imperialist bloc. The movement in Kazakhstan (one more of the many that mark our history as an exploited and revolutionary class) shows how the various bourgeoisies and their imperialist blocs do not have the slightest problem to unite against the workers. As some comrades said, Kazakhstan is today the world. With its undoubted weaknesses, it expresses in a photographic way the perspective of the future: imperialist war and/or revolution, capitalist catastrophe or communism.

Against all wars!

Against all imperialisms!

Against all capitalists!

For the defense of human needs!

Proletarians of all countries, unite!