Above: John McDonnell with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (left) at a Stop the War Coalition protest in August 2021 Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA
By John McDonnell MP, first published at Labour Hub:
On the question of Ukraine, we all come to it with a bit of history.
For me, I have a history of opposing, speaking against and voting against illegal invasions of countries from Iraq to the sending of troops into Afghanistan and the bombing of Libya and Syria.
So, with such a consistent track record of opposing illegal wars launched by imperial powers, it is completely understandable why I have opposed and condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and why I have supported arming Ukrainians fighting the invasion of their country.
Solidarity with the Ukrainian Miners
My involvement in Ukraine goes back nearly a decade.
Over the last 50 years I have supported trade union struggles both here and across the globe. I have become known for this solidarity work.
So, it was no surprise that I was approached nine years ago to offer support to the Ukrainian miners striking in opposition to the 50% fall in the real value of their wages that had been imposed by the mining companies.
Mining companies that had fallen into the hands of the profiteering, tax-dodging Russian oligarchs.
I met delegations of miners from the Independent Union of Miners and convened a briefing session for MPs, Labour activists and trade unionists in the Commons.
We picketed the mining company’s AGM hosted by Abramovich, its top shareholder, at the Chelsea Football ground and I raised their cause in Parliament.
The determined campaign by the miners secured a breakthrough with a 20% wage rise.
At this stage a number of us founded the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign and then over the years worked together on trade union campaigns through the Confederation of the Free Trade Unions of Ukraine.
The miners’ union and the federation worked to show that workers’ power, not military power, was the force to overcome chauvinist nationalism and to unite all workers in the struggle to secure social justice and promote a united and multi-ethnic Ukraine.
Founding of the Ukrainian Social Movement
Through the miners I came into contact with Ukrainian socialists, anarchists and anti-fascists, who went on to form the Social Movement.
These, mostly young, people had linked with the independent trade unions in the Maidan protests to back the toppling of the corrupt Russian-backed presidency of Yanukovich and to oppose the growth of the fascist groups.
Active trade unionists formed the base of this putative new socialist party, Sotsialnyi Rukh, joining militants from a variety of left groups, from social democrats to Marxists, feminists, eco-socialists and human rights defenders.
Defining itself as a broad left coalition, the Social Movement’s stated aim is to replace the existing system of oligarchic capitalism with democratic socialism.
Its programme includes socialising the economy through nationalisation and workers’ control, tax justice, equality for all and opposition to imperialism from whatever source.
Opposed to Ukraine joining NATO, nevertheless many of the trade unionists making up this progressive movement are attracted to the legal protection of workers’ rights and human rights that EU membership would provide them.
From Maidan onwards, it was this formation of free trade unions and the Social Movement that has consistently been at the front of supporting progressive, trade union and environmental campaigns, strikes and demonstrations, and has mobilised against any moves by the Zelenskiy government to curtail employment rights, trade union freedoms and civil liberties.
After the annexation of Crimea by Putin and the rise of the separatist campaigns in areas in the Donbas, the Miners Union rejected any nationalist sectarianism and campaigned for workers’ solidarity to overcome division.
When violence took hold in these areas, many of the miners and their families were forced to flee.
Officials of the union were arrested and imprisoned.
Listening to Ukrainian Socialists
As these developments took place, It was natural for me to turn to these comrades and fellow trade unionists to listen to their views on the situation and they were clear about the growing threat from Russia.
Although effectively there had been fighting in the Donbas for eight years, nevertheless before 24th February 2022 when the media was reporting intelligence reports of Russian troops and tanks massing on Ukraine’s borders, I remained sceptical that Putin would be so reckless as to risk launching a full scale invasion.
Events on 24th February 2022 proved me and many others seriously and tragically wrong.
The question then for the socialists and trade unionists in Ukraine was straightforward and immediate.
Do they defend themselves or allow the invasion to succeed?
Calls for a mass mobilisation of an international peace movement to halt the invasion sadly were unrealistic given the speed and ruthlessly violent drive of the invasion and the continuing harsh and brutal repression of a nascent peace movement in Russia.
Ukrainians were faced with the realistic prospect of the subjugation of their country by an imperialist aggressor.
So, they did what I believe many of us also would be forced to do in these circumstances and which we have supported elsewhere where imperialist wars are waged.
My Ukrainian socialist and trade unionist comrades, who believed in nothing more than internationalism, solidarity and peace, joined the territorial force to halt the aggressor.
What else could they do?
For those who question their decision, I simply ask the question what else could they do?
Where non-violent protests against the invaders were attempted, they were met with brutality, arrest, and deportation to filtration camps.
From the evidence emerging, the brutality escalated into indiscriminate killings, torture and rape.
Defence to stem the tide of violent aggression was judged to be the only option for members of the Social Movement and Free Trade Unions to save themselves, their families and their country.
Socialists, trade unionists and peace campaigners in the UK rightfully condemned the invasion and called for peace and for the supply of humanitarian aid, including supporting the opening up of the pathways for Ukrainians fleeing the war and seeking asylum.
Our regret was that successive governments had not recognised the need for opening the borders and providing succour to asylum seekers from the many other warzones across the globe.
This still left the question open whether the left should support the provision of weapons to Ukrainians to defend themselves.
From the outset I could see no other realistic option but to support their right to defend themselves.
Attempts at securing a peace deal, drawing upon those states that had a relationship with Putin, Turkey or India failed to even secure a ceasefire.
The armed resistance by the Ukrainians surprised most commentators by halting the momentum of the immense Russian military.
However, the cost in lives and human suffering, both Ukrainian and Russian, has been appalling.
The War a Year On
The war has now dragged on for a year and the Spring is nearly here and a new Russian offensive is inevitable if it hasn’t indeed commenced already.
With no peace deal in sight and Russian missiles raining down upon Ukrainian towns and cities again, I met on Zoom this week comrades from the Social Movement and the Miners Union once more to ask them their views.
What I have found depressing at times has been the tendency amongst some armchair strategists in the UK to ignore the voices of Ukrainians, especially Ukrainian voices from our own socialist and trade union movement.
In Zoom meetings in which you can hear the sirens sounding the alarm of an incoming missile, I listened to the assessment of the current situation by our socialist comrades and trade union brothers and sisters.
All so firmly want peace, but they do not believe peace can be achieved until the invasion of their country is prevented.
All wanted a Ukraine that was a reunited country based upon respect for the languages and cultures of all its citizens.
They reject what they describe as the imperialism of East or West.
All that I heard from them was a basic argument for self-determination, and for Ukrainians to be allowed to decide their own future.
But to achieve that they had a simple plea, that is to be given the weapons to fend off the next wave of attack from Russia with its missiles and mass land army.
For them this is a defensive war that if successful could force a negotiated settlement.
They see no other way of achieving the political space for an agreement.
They want to return in that peace to ridding their country of the oligarchs that have profiteered from the exploitation of the workers and natural resources of their home.
They aim to put socialism on the agenda of Ukraine.
There is nothing they said that I could disagree with.
That is why I have supported the provision of arms to Ukrainians to maintain their defence of their country.
Arguments about What to Do
Many have argued against this and there’s been a bit of the traditional social media vitriolic trolling, but I haven’t heard a convincing argument against supplying the weapons that our Ukrainian comrades need to protect their freedom.
There is the straightforward pacifist position that relies upon people from all sides refusing to fight.
I respect this view but gently say that at present I deeply regret that there is no prospect of that call being listened to in sufficient numbers to halt this war, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to argue the case that no wars would take place if people refused the call to fight.
Some have argued that this is just a proxy war between two imperialist powers, NATO and Russia, and that socialists should have no part in it.
I understand the point but as Taras Bilous has pointed out, it can be argued virtually every war since the Cold War can be seen as a proxy war between imperialist powers, but that hasn’t stopped the left making a judgement about the individual cases and supporting liberation struggles in this context.
For example, the left supported the Vietcong resistance to the American dominance of Vietnam, though the Vietcong were armed by China and Russia.
Others have argued that sending more arms risks escalating the war.
It is true that the arms that are sent are certain to be used.
However, for Ukraine this is a defensive war and the arms argued for are for defence.
What is certain is that a refusal to provide the weapons the Ukrainians need to defend themselves means that the chances of the Russian invasion succeeding are significantly increased.
There would be a peace secured but it would be an unstable peace imposed by the Russian occupying force.
There has been a renewed call for peace negotiations that I wholeheartedly support. Despite attempts by various interlocutors, no talks have been brought about and the prospects of both sides coming together are pretty bleak.
Already years of negotiations over the numerous Minsk protocols demonstrated how difficult it is to secure adherence to a peace agreement.
Nevertheless, every opportunity should be pursued, no matter how unexpected, including the recent offer from President Lula of Brazil, as long as it is explicitly clear that it will be for Ukrainians to determine the acceptability of any peace agreement.
In the meantime, with no acknowledgement by Putin of even consideration of a ceasefire and with a build-up of Russian troops and weapons and the return of missile fire over Kyiv, the Ukrainians need the weapons to defend themselves against renewed attack, if only to secure the breathing space for talks to start.
There is also a strong pragmatic argument that Putin will not negotiate whilst he sees the prospect of military victory and yet he will also want to avoid the humiliation of a defeat.
In addition to Arms
Ukraine needs more than arms.
The war has devastated its economy and many consider that a Marshall Aid-scale plan is needed to provide basic immediate humanitarian support and to rebuild its physical, industrial and environmental infrastructure when peace is restored.
The aim of the trade unions and the socialists of the Social Movement is to ensure that a peace is created based upon trade union rights, workers’ control and public ownership.
There is a great opening for socialists and trade unionists in the UK to work in solidarity to back our Ukrainian comrades campaign for and build this new Ukraine.
Above all else now though, our duty is to provide the material means by which they will secure that opportunity.
John McDonnell MP was Labour’s Shadow Chancellor from 2015 to 2020.
Shiraz Socialist (Second Run) 
Superb. Absolutely superb. If only Corbyn could see things this way.
The more time goes on, the more I respect McDonnell far more than Corbyn, precisely for the reasons that have the Grayzone set calling McDonnell a “sell-out” (c.f. McDonnell’s unequivocal praise of the EU here which I cannot imagine from Corbyn, and indeed the 2019 piece about a “pro-Brexit smear campaign against John McDonnell” which is, as a sad reminder, linked to here.
Certainly if both Trump & Corbyn were leaders of their respective countries now I should imagine that supporters of both men, but especially Corbyn supporters obviously, would be disappointed by how much they were agreeing with each other in terms of taking a pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine position.
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“For example, the left supported the Vietcong resistance to the American dominance of Vietnam, though the Vietcong were armed by China and Russia.”
There was, of course, a lot to criticise about the Stalinist Viet Cong, and its attacks on Vietnamese revolutionaries, none of which could be separated from its links to and dependence on arms and support from the Stalinists in Russia and China. Similarly, there was a lot to criticise in the uncritical support for that struggle led by those Stalinists by “The Left” elsewhere.
The difference, however, is that at least the Viet Cong was comprised of those worker and peasant forces, seeking a revolutionary transformation of society against landlordism and the rule of capital. That is not the case in Ukraine where the war is being fought by a corrupt and reactionary Ukrainian capitalist state backed by NATO, against another reactionary and corrupt state in Russia. No matter how much John McDonnell might want to dress it up, those are the warring parties not Russia v a revolutionary Ukrainian social movement. The latter are wholly subordinated to the Ukrainian state, itself heavily influenced by the Nazis of the Azov Brigade and Right Sector that Zelensky has promoted into prominent positions in the military and state apparatus.
Its more like, say, the Chinese Revolution in 1927, and in that case, Trotsky pointed out the basic Marxist position of insisting that the workers and the communists remain organisationally and politically separated from the KMT, which ultimately were as much its enemy as was the Japanese imperialism they were opposing. There is no such separation in Ukraine, only complete subordination to the forces of the Ukrainian state and its reactionary anti-working class nature.
Or to give another example, when the US occupied Iraq, Marxists could not support the anti-working class forces of the clerical fascists, simply on the basis of their “anti-imperialism”, because that did not mean that those forces were not the immediate enemies of the Iraqi workers. As Marxists our main concern is not anti-imperialism, national liberation or self-determination, but the interests of the working-class, and its independence from its class enemies at all times. That is the basis of Permanent Revolution.
In Libya in 2011, and in Syria in 2014, the US with the aid of its feudal Gulf allies financed and armed jihadists to overthrow Gaddafi and Assad. Neither Gaddafi nor Assad were friends of the workers, but that did not make US imperialism or the jihadists it promoted, thereby, friends of the workers. My enemy’s enemy is not my friend. Similarly, Yanukovich and his Russian backers were not friends of the workers either, but that did not make US imperialism, nor those it promoted in organising the 2014 coup in Kyiv the workers friends either. As Irish Marxism pointed out some time ago.
“The right wing US think-tank The CATO Institute has an annual ‘Human Freedom’ index, a combination of separate indices for personal and economic freedom. Its 2021 report shows that Ukraine is the third worst country out of 22 in Eastern Europe while the Russian Federation is the worst. Over 165 countries Ukraine is number 98 while Russia is 126. The freest country at number 1 is Switzerland, which scores 9.11 for human freedom while Ukraine scores 6.86 (75% of the Swiss score) and Russia scores 6.23 (or 68% of the Swiss score). We are expected to support the war of Ukraine with 75% of the ‘human freedom’ of the freest against Russia with 68%. The war of 7%. It is relevant to note that while in 2021 Ukraine ranked 98th, it ranked higher at 82nd in 2008, so that relatively it has gotten worse, but so has Russia from 112th to 126th.
The second index is that of ‘Transparency International’ which reports the perceived levels of public sector corruption in 180 countries/territories around the world. It scores these countries out of 100, with the lower the score the more corrupt a country is perceived to be. The 2021 publication reports that the least corrupt countries included Denmark, Finland and New Zealand, scoring 88 each. Ukraine is 123rd on the list while Russia is 139th. A better indication of the difference is that Ukraine scores 32 out of 100 while Russia scores 29, meaning that the former scores 36% of Denmark etc. while Russia scores 33%. Not a pile of difference; 3 to be exact.”
Add to that the attacks launched by Zelensky’s corrupt anti-working class regime on Ukrainian workers, trades unions, political organisations and even the liberal media, add to it its essentially Holocaust denial in whitewashing the role of Ukraine and Ukrainian nationalists during WWII, and its lauding of Ukrainain Nazis such as Bandera, its raising of statues, and naming of streets and public spaces after those Nazis, and the true nature of that reactionary regime can be seen. Its no more a friend of the workers that socialists should be supporting than, say, the Iraqi, Libyan or Syrian jihadists or ISIS. Trying to portray its struggle as a struggle by a revolutionary proletaian liberation movement is an abomination.
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Two suggestions, Arthur:
1/ Learn to read
2/Learn to think
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I can, I do, I have, which is why I’m not left repeating mantras as you do, and its why I am able to provide reasoned arguments and responses, to others rather than relying on abuse and invective, and meaningless ripostes such as the one you have given here.
But, I have to also say that I’m a bit surprised at you citing McDonnell’s statement about “The Left” supporting the Viet Cong, because, of course, the mentors of the AWL, Burnham and Schachtman didn’t. Burnham and Schactman followed the route that Trotsky had predicted, rapidly to the right into the camp of pro-imperialism that the AWL has now also traversed, having adopted the same anti-Marxist ideology. Bunham became the epitome of the US Cold War Warrior, and Shactman refused to oppose the US invasion of Vietnam.
And, given your support at least for Shachtman, and what flows from his ideas, I guess that creates a problem for you in reconciling your own pro-US, pro-imperialist positions with that described by McDonnell too. But, then reading and thinking never was your forte, and your organisation zigs and zags in typical bureaucratic-centrist fashion from one event to another, making its justifications up as it goes along without bothering to have to think too much about whether it is at all consistent in doing so.
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Ever heard of Hal Draper, Arthur?
And while you ponder your next tedious reply, I’ll add a third piece of advice to points 1 and 2 (above):
3/ Stop being taken in by Putin’s propaganda.
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Yes, I have heard of Draper of course, but 1) Your organisation’s pro-imperialist stance flows from the heritage you belatedly adopted from Burnham and Shactman, and everything progressive in Draper compared to them, you have mostly rejected, as part of your collapse into moral socialism and pro-US-imperialism.
Its what leaves you all over the place when it comes to such events. So, you said, for example, that you would not defend Cuba against a US invasion as a deformed workers’ state, but only as weak country. You would do so presumably despite its Stalinist regime, whose military would be fighting such a war. When it came to Libya, however, not only did you refuse to oppose the invasion and bombing by the US, as Burnham and Shactman had done in Vietnam, but you dressed up the jihadis (many of whom were the same jihadis that had been fighting in Iraq whose reactionary nature was your (correct) reason for not supporting that “liberation struggle” who had now moved into Libya) that were acting as the US’s allies against Gaddafi, as being revolutionary liberation fighters! One of your supporters even claimed that the feudal Gulf Monarchies that were financing and arming those jihadis was the means by which bourgeois-democracy was now being brought to the region! And, when what everyone could see happening was that Libya was being turned into a sectarian hell-hole by those jihadis, with worker, particularly black workers being murdered and tortured, as it collapsed into warlordism, your organisation denied what was apparent – https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-did-awl-take-down-this-post.html.
Everyone with a brain has seen the only consistency in your approach, which is that where US imperialism is engaged in a war you take a wholly supportive attitude to the clerical or other fascists and reactionaries aligned with it, dressing them up as liberationists, and take the opposite attitude to any such forces engaged in a struggle against that US imperialism. Your position is one in which you have simply become cheerleaders for the camp of US imperialism in global events, incapable of learning to thing, or present an independent class position. That is why you are left simply shouting school yard abuse at your opponents, because you cannot come up with a single rational, Marxist defence of your positions.
Its why you make the inane comments such as those you have made above, which shows that so deep up the arse of US imperialism, and its allies such as the reactionary, racist, Zionist state in Israel that any opposition to your camp is presented as being support for the opposing bourgeois camp. You have lost all perspective of there even being an independent proletarian camp. So, the real question here is, have you heard of Hal Draper, because it certainly seems as though, if you have, you certainly haven’t read him recently, and certainly never understood him. More importantly, you certainly don’t seem to have read or understood Marx and Engels on the 1848 revolutions and permanent revolution, nor Trotsky’s development of Permanent Revolution, Lenin’s Letters on Tactics, nor their position on self-determination, or Trotsky’s position on the Chinese Revolution and Spanish Civil War.
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A further piece of advice, Arthur, following points 1,2 and 3 (above):
4/ Don’t quote the likes of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, when you clearly have no grasp of even the basics they espoused, and have retreated into the anti-imperialism of idiots and the socialism of fools.
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I would ask you to provide even an attempt at an argument to support your ridiculous assertions that amount to nothing more than schoolyard taunts, rather than adult discussion, but I know that you have never been capable of such a requirement, and now after 50 years of acting as a mindless drone for Matgamna, a footsoldier in what amounts to a gang, you are even less capable of independent thought and reasoning.
Last time I looked, it was the Thornettites that were guilty of idiot anti-imperialism, in arguing that it was necessary to defend the right of self-determination of Argentina, and I was one of those in the WSL Majority arguing against them, writing IB’s, being asked to speak at conferences, and even invited to your own Birmingham Branch to speak on the issue. The idiot anti-imperialism was defined as supporting the bourgeois liberal right of self-determination over and above the requirement to produce an independent working class position, and only to support such struggles where they were conducted by truly independent revolutionary forces against an imperialist power.
It was also a description of those, your fellow moral socialists and supporters of the camp of the petty-bourgeoisie, in the SWP, that argued support for the clerical fascists of Hamas and Hezbollah, despite their anti-working-class nature, or similarly those who wanted to support the clerical-fascists in Iraq on that basis. I have opposed such positions one and all, whereas you only supported them in those cases, whereas in Libya, you presented these reactionary clerical-fascists as being revolutionary forces, and supported them. The difference being that, in this latter case they were in alliance with US imperialism.
You are obviously quite willing to adopt the position of idiot anti-imperialism, where it means supporting US imperialism. And, that is precisely the position you hold in Ukraine. Your position is that of class idiot anti-imperialism, in that on the spurious grounds of “anti-Russian imperialism”, you have given uncritical support not only to thoroughly reactionary forces in Ukraine heavily influenced by fascistic forces such as the Banderites, Azov Battalion, and Right Sector, which as we speak are engaged in attacking Ukrainian workers, trades unions and socialist parties, as well as the liberal media, in a way highly comparable to that of Galtieri, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iraqi jihadists, but forces that are not part of any kind of liberation movement, let alone revolutionary liberation movement, but are the forces of the corrupt, reactionary, oligarchic Ukrainian ruling class and its state, massively back by the global hegemonic power of US imperialism. If that is not idiot anti-imperialism, even according to your own previous positions than nothing is, but then consistency is anathema to your organisation, as it gets in the way of your opportunistic obeisance at the feet of US imperialism and the capitalist state, which for you – in contrast to Draper as set out in The Two Souls of Socialism – is your vehicle of historic change not the working class, which is why, of course, your organisation wholly engulfed by bourgeois statism specifically rejects that work by Draper.
The reality is that you have simply swapped position with the Thornettites of 1982 in order to justify your own idiot anti-imperialism as cover for your campist position in favour of US imperialism, much as did your mentors Burnham and Shactman as they lit the path ahead for you into the realm of reaction. Its you that is the idiot anti-imperialist as the fake justification of your support for the reactionary nationalist and fascistic state of Zelensky, as Thornett did in supporting Galtieri, the SWP did in supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, whereas I hold to the position I had in 1982, and which the WSL Majority had of a plague on both your houses, against a war that is reactionary on both sides and against the interests of the working-class.
But the interests of the working class long since disappeared from the ideology of your gang, which simply comes out periodically to jump up and down as cheerleaders for the latest policing action of US imperialism.
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Don’t you geddit, do you, Arthur? Your ridiculous posturing and idiotic, objectively pro-Putin “anti-imperialism” (never mind inability to recognise antisemitism when it stares you in the face) is only worthy of “schoolyard taunts”. Why should any serious person spend time on replies to a petty bourgeois, ignorant, onanistic, time-wasting sect of one?
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Oh I get it alright Jimbo. You and your jetset of pro-Zionist, pro US imperialist gang are incapable of any kind of rational thought, and so when someone challenges you, you can only respond with abuse, and crude invective, much as Lenin described Stalin in his testament.
A look at all of my posts attacking Putin, arguing the need for exposing the links between his vile regime and the Tories in Britain and so on, give the obvious lie to your posturing and simply ridiculous comments about my supposed pro-Putin stance. Your gang are a disgrace, and quite honestly I don’t care whether you reply or not, because even when you do attempt to reply, its just the same old lies, bowdlerisation and nonsense that shows that you do not have a clue, as pretty much everyone on the Left now recognises.
But, the truth is that your abuse and invective are not an indication of your not being bothered to respond, but an indication that wherever you have tried to do so in the past, you have simply embarrassed yourself with the display of your total ignorance of the principles of Marxism, or else your willingness to pervert them to suit your current political positions.
Its that which defines you not just as a sect, but as an ossified sect.
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… but not an “ossified sect” … of one.
You can dish it out but you can’t take it can you, Arthur?
As you become increasingly hysterical. And irrelevant.
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I think the fact that you haven’t produced a single rational argument in your defence, that your responses amount to just childish, schoolyard shouty taunts, based on clearly obvious lies about my position being even remotely pro-Putin, indicates who is increasingly hysterical and irrelevant. The fact that I can come back with arguments, and facts rather than your stream of abuse, invective and lack of anything even approaching a rational response indicates who it is that can dish it out but can’t take it, and its you!
As for ossified sects, remind us again how many members you have compared with the number you had half a century and more ago? Then, remind us how many votes you got in 2010, when you stood a candidate in the General Election? 75!!!! I scored more votes than that in a Parish Council election, let alone a General Election. In fact, I’ve scored more votes than that in union elections, for Branch Secretary, or Trades Council President. Even in a County Council election I scored 3,500 votes, or more than 40 times the number your gang could muster in a General Election.
So, as with all things, when it comes to hysterics and irrelevance, you have simply drawn attention to how much that is a description of your motley crew, not me! No wonder you steer clear of trying to pretend to be an adult, let alone an intelligent adult, by setting down some kind of rational defence of your reactionary, wildly fluctuating positions, and your collapse into social-imperialism, which in fact, is closer to being just pro-imperialism pure and simple, as there is little social in any of your arguments, which rely purely on abstract bourgeois ideology, and campism, placing you firmly in the camp of US imperialism against the other campists in the pro-Putin camp.
Beyond all hope, and typifying the sectarian, unable to even recognise your error, your response is not to self-criticise, but is to simply lie and respond with bluff, bluster and insult. No wonder your gang has not only failed to move forward numerically in over half a century, but has regressed politically at an accelerating rate.
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Arthur: here’s a reply to some people who put forward your “arguments” and who, at least represent *something* (not much, but *something*) in the labour movement:
In the 1938 article “Learn to think”, Leon Trotsky argued that if fascist Italy sent weapons to aid – for its own malign reasons – nationalist rebels against France in Algeria, socialists in Italy should not oppose and even help that. Opposing such military aid would, he argued, mean betraying the Algerians’ liberation struggle. The relevance to Ukraine now is clear. The Socialist Appeal group, consistent opponents of Ukraine’s war of self-defence and consistent though not uncritical apologists for Russia, has objected to this comparison – at length and with theatrical rhetoric. What are the issues?
In fact Joe Attard’s November 2022 polemic, hotly denying the relevance of this argument in “Learn to think” to the Ukraine conflict, recapitulates exactly the kind of position Trotsky was criticising – opposing aid to a just struggle against imperialist violence on grounds of opposing the ruling class in one’s own country.
The argument in “Learn to think”
Trotsky:
Let us assume that rebellion breaks out tomorrow in the French colony of Algeria under the banner of national independence and that the Italian government, motivated by its own imperialist interests, prepares to send weapons to the rebels. What should the attitude of the Italian workers be in this case? I have purposely taken an example of rebellion against a democratic imperialism with intervention on the side of the rebels from a fascist imperialism. Should the Italian workers prevent the shipping of arms to the Algerians? Let any ultra-leftists dare answer this question in the affirmative. Every revolutionist, together with the Italian workers and the rebellious Algerians, would spurn such an answer with indignation. Even if a general maritime strike broke out in fascist Italy at the same time, even in this case the strikers should make an exception in favour of those ships carrying aid to the colonial slaves in revolt; otherwise they would be no more than wretched trade unionists – not proletarian revolutionists.
At the same time, the French maritime workers, even though not faced with any strike whatsoever, would be compelled to exert every effort to block the shipment of ammunition intended for use against the rebels. Only such a policy on the part of the Italian and French workers constitutes the policy of revolutionary internationalism.
Does this not signify, however, that the Italian workers moderate their struggle in this case against the fascist regime? Not in the slightest. Fascism renders ‘aid’ to the Algerians only in order to weaken its enemy, France, and to lay its rapacious hand on her colonies. The revolutionary Italian workers do not forget this for a single moment. They call upon the Algerians not to trust their treacherous ‘ally’ and at the same time continue their own irreconcilable struggle against fascism, ‘the main enemy in their own country’. Only in this way can they gain the confidence of the rebels, help the rebellion and strengthen their own revolutionary position.
Note that Trotsky advocates a coherent and consistent internationalist policy for workers’ movements around the world – not the idea that the only or dominating task in every given situation, at every given moment, is opposing action by the government of one’s own country.
The whole article is valuable reading. This is how Trotsky explains its fundamental idea:
In ninety cases out of a hundred the workers actually place a minus sign where the bourgeoisie places a plus sign. In ten cases however they are forced to fix the same sign as the bourgeoisie but with their own seal, in which is expressed their mistrust of the bourgeoisie. The policy of the proletariat is not at all automatically derived from the policy of the bourgeoisie, bearing only the opposite sign – this would make every sectarian a master strategist; no, the revolutionary party must each time orient itself independently in the internal as well as the external situation, arriving at those decisions which correspond best to the interests of the proletariat. This rule applies just as much to the war period as to the period of peace.
Attard
The quality of Joe Attard’s polemic can be measured by the claim at the start of his article that US socialist John Reimann (who has cited “Learn to think”) “says socialists should support strengthening NATO”. The article by Reimann Attard quotes – but doesn’t link to – says nothing even vaguely like that.
Attard tries at some length to tar all those who support Ukraine with supporting NATO, increased UK military spending and so on. He evidently found doing that easier than tackling the arguments of those who oppose Western militarism while supporting Ukraine.
He dismisses the issue of “the right of nations to self-determination” in connection with Ukraine on the grounds that “this democratic right should always be contingent on the wider interests of the working class”. His explanation why this invalidates the need to defend Ukraine’s right to self-determination hinges on declaring, in defiance of facts, that this is an “inter-imperialist war” – and suggesting that the bloodshed and wider global misery caused by the conflict are therefore somehow Ukraine’s responsibility as much as Russia’s.
“… we would point out that choosing not to block arms shipments is not the same as calling on one’s own reactionary government to send arms.” The difference, when what is involved is weapons being sent to a national-rights or democratic struggle rather than direct military action by an outside imperialist state, is hardly one of principle. Moreover demands for military aid to, eg, the UK of today are not quite the same as demands on the Italian (or UK) regime of the 30s, ruling over a colonial empire it was seeking to expand in the world of colonial empires. The UK and other big states allied to Ukraine are capitalist and imperialist and rapacious – but they are not trying to “lay their hands” on Ukraine in the same sense as Russia.
Attard falsely claims that socialists supporting arms for Ukraine refuse to talk about the fact that the Western powers are (of course) supporting Ukraine for their own self-interested reasons.
“.. the imperialists have not required any encouragement from the left and labour movement to send” arms, he claims. In fact Ukraine’s imperialist allies – even the most eager – have consistently dragged their feet over providing it with the kind of weapons and equipment it needs to win, because they do not want Russia to win but fear how Putin might respond and are nervous about a clear-cut Ukrainian victory. This reality disappears beneath Attard’s puffing about “war-mongering hysteria”.
When Attard accuses Ukraine’s allies of “dragging out this conflict”, his implication is that without support for Ukraine there would have been some sort of preferable situation of peace – as opposed to the establishment of “peace” because Putin had successfully subordinated Ukraine (as a prelude to new wars in Ukraine and elsewhere).
Zelensky
He makes great play of the fact Trotsky also imagines a Belgian workers’ state receiving weapons from capitalist France because of a threat from Germany. But the Algerian example Trotsky starts with makes it clear he was very much not only considering military aid to working-class regimes.
Attard then blurs it all together: “What is happening in Ukraine is not a revolutionary uprising by an oppressed colony or a case of self-defence by a proletarian regime.” So there seems to be a broad, inclusive “good” category, into which however Ukraine does not fall.
His justification for this is that Ukraine has a “reactionary bourgeois government”. Attard’s explanation of why it is reactionary is larded with misrepresentation and exaggeration. But Zelensky’s government is certainly bourgeois and right-wing.
Zelensky is, as Attard points out, attacking Ukraine’s unions (we doubt that he or Socialist Appeal have done anything about it – AWL and other pro-Ukraine socialists have, in cooperation with our comrades in Ukraine). But the Algerian national liberation movement that eventually overthrew French rule created a repressive one-party regime. Should the left have not supported it against France? The Stalinist movement that led Vietnam’s war of national liberation against US imperialism murdered thousands of revolutionary socialists and suppressed all working-class organisations. Was it wrong to support the Vietnamese against the US, and their arming by the Soviet Union and China?
Attard would not argue that. Such inconsistency exists for different reasons in different parts of the left. In the case of the quarter-Stalinist Socialist Appeal, it has extensive illusions in authoritarian or totalitarian “socialist” movements and regimes. Such forces were or are part of the “world revolution”; they constitute “revolutionary uprisings” even when they thoroughly suppress working-class and democratic rights and work for authoritarian dictatorships. Meanwhile Socialist Appeal paints pro-Western neo-liberal Ukraine in the grimmest possible colours, simultaneously ignoring the elements of popular organisation in the Ukrainian struggle.
Why and how Marxists pick sides
This is how Trotsky advocated military support for Spain’s Republican government in the Spanish civil war:
We accuse this government of protecting the rich and starving the poor. This government must be smashed. So long as we are not strong enough to replace it, we are fighting under its command. But on every occasion we express openly our nonconfidence in it…
“… we are fighting under its command”. And this in a situation where Spain, unlike Ukraine now, had a mass revolutionary workers’ movement not far off the possible conquest of power – a movement the Republican government attacked and ultimately suppressed.
Socialists should support the defence and preservation of Ukrainian independence and self-rule just as we supported the defence of even bourgeois democracy against Franco’s fascism. In neither case does that imply political support for the government leading the struggle. The point is to preserve and expand the spaces in which the labour movement and its socialist wing can exist and grow and fight.
Attard admits that a reactionary and undemocratic government can lead a legitimate and liberatory struggle, citing Ethiopia in the 1930s (far more reactionary and undemocratic than Zelensky’s Ukraine). But he dismisses out of hand, with no actual consideration of the issues, the idea that Ukrainian victory could have significant positive consequences.
The defeat of an aggressive and bloody military imperialism, and an increasingly reactionary and repressive Russian regime, one that sponsors dictatorships and far-right movements in many parts of the world, by a mobilisation of its victims could clearly have positive consequences.
Of course Ukrainian victory will not change the basic conditions of global capitalist exploitation and crisis. Yes, “only the independent struggle of the working class is capable of bringing an end to the nightmare of war, national chauvinism, and economic misery in Ukraine, Russia, and throughout the world.”
But the idea that independent working-class politics and struggles can or should advance by dismissing resistance to the kind of oppression and militarism that characterises Russia’s war in Ukraine is ludicrous. And that is exactly what Attard does when he blindly declares “this is a reactionary war on both sides”.
A proxy war?
Instead of thinking seriously about the consequences of various outcomes, Attard pivots to Socialist Appeal’s favourite theme, that Ukraine is a proxy of US and other Western imperialisms: “Ukraine’s domestic and foreign policy is entirely dictated by western – and particularly American – imperialism.”
Ukrainian socialists are fighting the subordination of Ukrainian society to Western capitalist-imperialist interests, as well as fighting the Ukrainian ruling class. Unlike Socialist Appeal, they understand that the conquest or subordination of Ukraine by Russian militarism is an even greater and more immediate threat.
The fact is that Socialist Appeal is not very interested in Ukraine or its people, except as a proxy for talking about Western imperialism. Its politics are miles from Trotsky’s insistence (elsewhere) that “what characterises Bolshevism on the national question is that in its attitude to oppressed nations, even the most backward, it considers them not only the object but also the subject of politics”.
Concretely, the Ukrainian struggle is less of a proxy for the US or anyone else than, say, the Bangladeshi war of independence (1971) was for the Indian government in its struggle against Pakistan (to a lesser extent the Soviet Union in its struggle against the US and China). Indira Gandhi’s regime supported and helped organise the Bangladeshi resistance to Pakistan from the start, and it only finally triumphed when India invaded.
So would Socialist Appeal dismiss one of the most significant anti-imperialist struggles of the 20th century as fundamentally a proxy for Indian imperialism? If not, why not? Would it have called for India to stop its military support for the Bengalis?
Many other examples could be cited. Attard cites the Kurds; but in doing so demonstrates the opposite of what he seems to want. If he is applying his arguments about Ukraine to the Kurdish struggle, his comments would seem to imply that Kurdish alliances with – and betrayal by – Western imperialists mean the Kurds have forfeited their right to support from the left. Or that international socialists, rather than advocating distrust in Western imperialists, should have simply opposed imperialist help for the Kurds. If he is not suggesting those things, he is not saying very much.
In 2014, when the US bombed ISIS forces besieging the Kurdish city of Kobane in northern Syria, Socialist Appeal did not oppose it or call for the US to stop – perhaps that would have been too embarrassing. In fact it leant towards implying the US was not doing enough… As with so much here, Socialist Appeal seems unphased by inconsistencies and contradictions.
Indifference
“In the abstract”, Attard declares, “ordinary Ukrainians facing Russian military aggression are indeed entitled to take weapons from whomever they want… [however] the bulk of the fighting in Ukraine is not being done by ordinary volunteers, but by the official armed forces, whose leadership has an extremely reactionary character.”
I doubt Attard is very knowledgeable about the Ukrainian armed forces, but let’s accept their leadership is reactionary.
“Ordinary Ukrainians… ordinary volunteers” seems like code – sloppy, confused or deliberately obscuring – for a working-class-based resistance movement. In so far as he has a clear point here, Attard seems to be suggesting defensive or liberation struggles by oppressed or vulnerable nations only have validity if they are dominated by working-class forces. Again, apply this to the Vietnamese struggle, whose leaders aimed not only to win national freedom but to create a totalitarian state without a labour movement…
Attard ignores small but real initiatives by Ukrainian socialists, anarchists and trade unionists to organise their own (not at all ordinary!) units and networks within the Ukrainian military struggle – unsurprisingly, given Socialist Appeal does not care what Ukrainian (and Russian) left-wingers think about the war. More fundamentally it suggests that, since the Ukrainian resistance is dominated by regular bourgeois armed forces, whether the Ukrainians can defend themselves against slaughter and oppression is of no real interest. The idea that it is of little interest – what Trotsky called “nose-picking” in the face of massacres – permeates Attard’s whole article and Socialist Appeal’s whole attitude to the war in Ukraine.
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So what’s the reason for my comment posted in reply to this yesterday not appearing this time?
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Now a further day has passed, and my reply has not appeared. A little technical difficulty is it again?
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Arthur: I realise you are quite disturbed and almost certainly mentally ill: I can assure you that I’ve checked and your reply has not been received and is not in any spam traps, etc.. I am sorry and can only suggest you try sending it again. I have no desire to further upset or distress you and I genuinely wish you well, with contetment and the peace you require. and that may, one day, bring you some happiness.
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Odd then that it showed and was visible to me after I posted it and quite clearly saying that it was in the moderation queue, and would be visible following approval by the moderator. Strange how frequently this happens on your site, just as the AWL frequently disappear posts too. But, no matter, I always take the time to copy whatever I post to your blog, for this very reason, and will indeed post it again, along with being doubly sure by posting it in an expanded form on my own blog.
But, its good to see that having failed to actually write your own response to my arguments, but having resorted at least to posting a response from someone else to someone else, you are back to your old methods of personal abuse and disablism.
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Well Jim, at least you have attempted a reply rather than just more silly schoolyard taunts, even if it is a reply you have copied from someone else, to someone else, rather than, yourself, bothering to read what my actual arguments are, and so providing a rational response to them. The consequence of the latter is that, because you clearly don’t know what my arguments are, you have done the usual Stalinoid thing of just presenting my arguments as being the totally different arguments of someone else, arguments with which I disagree, and so, as Sraid Marx has also pointed out to you, in the past, leaving you providing no actual response to the arguments you claim to be responding to, in this case mine.
In fact, as I’ve set out elsewhere, Trotsky’s “Learn To Think”, could be argued as justification for Putin sending weapons to the Russian separatists in DPR/LPR, fighting against the Ukrainian government, and for Russian workers not opposing it. What all such comparisons miss, is the fact that, Trotsky’s argument is based upon a “truly revolutionary” (in the words of the Theses on The National and Colonial Questions) being involved, and not either an existing bourgeois state, or some reactionary force, for example, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraqi, or Libyan jihadists, or in the words of the Theses pan-islamists, khans and clergy. In addition, what Trotsky was trying to get over, as with his argument that he would support fascist Brazil rather than democratic Britain, was his opposition to the idea that we should support imperialism with a democratic mask as against imperialism with a fascistic mask, which again is relevant to the basis upon which you have formed your positions.
The response states, “The Socialist Appeal group, consistent opponents of Ukraine’s war of self-defence and consistent though not uncritical apologists for Russia”, and as you state that this is also “my argument”, the implication is that I too have been a “consistent though not uncritical apologist for Russia”, a lie which you have repeated several times. I have in fact, consistently opposed both Putin’s regime, and Russia’s invasion. I have also argued equally vociferously against those such as Gerry Downing, who has ridiculously argued an idiot anti-imperialist line in favour of defending Russia. I even defended Sean Matgamna against Downing’s claims, in a letter to the WW, that, in 1982, he and the WSL Majority supported sending the navy to the Falklands, whilst pointing out the contradiction between the line then, of a war that was reactionary on both sides, to the AWL’s current idiot anti-imperialist position in defence of Ukraine, which is the same line that Thornett et al took to defend Argentina, in 1982.
I have also opposed similar pro-Russian positions as argued by, for example, Sandy McBurney, in a series of comments on Irish Marxism’s blog, for example – https://irishmarxism.net/2023/01/25/the-war-in-ukraine-truth-will-out/#comment-23301
The response also states,
“Note that Trotsky advocates a coherent and consistent internationalist policy for workers’ movements around the world – not the idea that the only or dominating task in every given situation, at every given moment, is opposing action by the government of one’s own country.”
But that is a perversion of what Trotsky actually says, even as cited. Trotsky makes clear that the Italian workers, in ensuring the weapons got to Algerian revolutionaries (note not Algerian reactionaries or an independent Algerian capitalist state) would not in the least diminish their primary task of fighting against their own ruling class and its state, not because it’s fascist, but because it is bourgeois, and that, they would be sure to make clear to the Algerian revolutionaries the point that they should not, in any way, trust the Italian rulers who were equally their enemy! He most certainly was not supporting the idea that the Italian workers would support Italy sending advisors, trainers and so on to Algeria, let alone troops to “support” the Algerians, just as he had also opposed the calls of Russian liberal interventionists to send forces to oppose the Ottomans during the Balkan Wars!
The Theses make clear that Marxists only support truly revolutionary forces engaged in such a struggle, and to the extent that they recognise their role in opposing their own bourgeois-democratic forces, and are not in any way merged with them, let alone subordinated to them. That is wholly different to the situation in Ukraine, which is a war being fought not by a truly revolutionary independence movement, or even such a movement in alliance with bourgeois-democratic forces, but by an existing bourgeois-state, massively backed by NATO imperialism! Compare your position, here, with your fanaticism, a few years ago, not to have Venezuelan workers threaten their independence by even joining Chavez’ PSUV!!!
“third, the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc.
the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form;”
(Theses On The National and Colonial Struggles)
That is far from the condition in Ukraine, of a war being fought by an existing capitalist state, and backed massively by NATO imperialism to do so! Note that Lenin and the Theses emphasise the need for such truly revolutionary forces to maintain their organisational and independence, even where they do form some temporary alliance with bourgeois forces, which is also the position Trotsky adopted in relation to the Chinese revolution, and criticism of Stalin’s position of merging the Chinese Communists with the KMT. Yet none of that is present in Ukraine, and your support for the Ukrainian state in its war makes not even the slightest requirement for it. You just give undying, uncritical support to the war being waged by that state, and by its NATO backers!
Trying to claim that this war is not one in which NATO is actually at war by proxy requires gargantuan effort at self-deception, given that the scale and quality of the advanced weapons plus the billions of dollars that NATO is pumping into Ukraine is far and away different to what Trotsky was describing in relation to arms shipments to Algerian revolutionaries, let alone the fact that NATO is providing specialists, invariably special forces, not to mention the use of spy satellites, cyber warfare capacity and so on, and not to mention the global economic war that it is conducting against Russia and China. I have no doubt that were Trotsky to be viewing that today, he would have no doubt about what it actually is which is a proxy war of NATO against Russia, using Ukraine as its vehicle.
The response says,
“But the Algerian national liberation movement that eventually overthrew French rule created a repressive one-party regime. Should the left have not supported it against France? The Stalinist movement that led Vietnam’s war of national liberation against US imperialism murdered thousands of revolutionary socialists and suppressed all working-class organisations. Was it wrong to support the Vietnamese against the US, and their arming by the Soviet Union and China?”
It was certainly wrong to give uncritical support to either the Algerian forces, or to the Vietnamese Stalinists, as opposed to support for truly revolutionary forces, representing the interests of workers, which is precisely Trotsky’s argument in relation to China, in 1927, and to Spain in the 1930’s. The same mistake was made by sections of the left in relation to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which focussed on overthrowing the Shah, and failed to take into account the balance of forces, and likely consequence of the coming to power of such reactionary forces led by Khomeini. As Trotsky points out in “Learn To Think”, my enemy’s enemy is not my friend, and that is precisely the point in analysing idiot anti-imperialism, which you still do not seem to have grasped, as you have just felt a requirement to “pick a side”, to attach yourself to one or other contending camp, rather than to advocate the independent third camp of the proletariat against both bourgeois camps, in a war that, like the Falklands, is reactionary on both sides.
Because you have been too lazy to actually read, or try to understand what my argument is, much of the response to Attard you have copied and pasted is totally irrelevant, showing yet another aspect of your inability to Learn to Think, as opposed to just being a parrot of the views of others in your organisation, in this case parroting words set down by someone else, in response to the arguments of someone else, and not to my arguments. All of the comments you have cut and pasted about Attard’s and Socialist Appeal’s quarter-Stalinism certainly have no relevance, whatsoever, to my position. Indeed, your own organisation’s statism, and looking to nationalisation by the capitalist state, is far closer to Attard than any position I advocate.
The response says,
“Meanwhile Socialist Appeal paints pro-Western neo-liberal Ukraine in the grimmest possible colours, simultaneously ignoring the elements of popular organisation in the Ukrainian struggle.”
That is just another example of you seeing only what you want to see, just as you whitewashed the nature of the jihadists, in Libya, fighting with the backing of US imperialism and the Gulf Monarchies, to overthrow Gaddafi. Irish Marxism has cited the data from even bourgeois western sources on the nature of Ukraine as both corrupt and illiberal. Before the war started, western media made no secret about that nature of Ukraine, only changing position in relation to the role of the Azov Battalion, and Right Sector, after the war began. Will there be popular organisation in the Ukrainian struggle, undoubtedly, but firstly “popular”, i.e, struggle by an abstract “people”, is not revolutionary struggle, necessarily, and if, as with the Chinese communists, subordinated to the KMT, those elements are not independent, it does not change the nature of the struggle itself.
The response says,
“And this in a situation where Spain, unlike Ukraine now, had a mass revolutionary workers’ movement not far off the possible conquest of power – a movement the Republican government attacked and ultimately suppressed.”
This is confused and misleading. The Republican government was a Popular Front government, a government that combined both the bourgeois democratic forces and those of the Stalinists, Anarchists, and POUMists. The “mass revolutionary workers movement” was, in fact, a mass centrist movement, mostly comprised of the Anarchist CNT, followed by the Spanish Socialists and the POUM. The actual revolutionary forces represented by the Spanish Trotskyists was miniscule, which is why they had no alternative but to fight under the command of the Popular Front forces, a Popular Front that Trotsky argued the centrists of the POUM and the Anarchists and Stalinists, who initially were very small, should have not joined! When Trotsky talks about “we are fighting under its command”, he is talking about the revolutionary forces of the Trotskyists. His whole point was that the mass of revolutionaries/centrists of the CNT, POUM etc., did not, and should not, have been fighting under the command of the Republican government as a Popular Front government, but should have broken from it, and formed a Workers Government!
Once again you have bowdlerised history, and Trotsky’s position to suit your current political position. As he put it, in The Transitional Programme, in setting out the difference between this Workers Government that he called for in Spain, as against the Popular Front Republican government,
“The experience of Russia demonstrated, and the experience of Spain and France once again confirms, that even under very favourable conditions the parties of petty bourgeois democracy (SRs, Social Democrats, Stalinists, Anarchists) are incapable of creating a government of workers and peasants, that is, a government independent of the bourgeoisie.”
And, in Ukraine you are not even arguing the need to smash the existing capitalist state, but entirely subordinating that task to the task of defending that very state, as part of its war against Russia!
“Socialists should support the defence and preservation of Ukrainian independence and self-rule just as we supported the defence of even bourgeois democracy against Franco’s fascism.”
But, Trotsky’s position was not to support the defence of bourgeois-democracy in Spain against Franco, and to do so implies a Stalinist stages theory, as opposed to the theory of permanent revolution firsts set out by Marx and Engels, and later developed by Trotsky, and by Lenin in his April Theses and Letters on Tactics. A further example is Trotsky’s position in fighting fascism in France, in The Action Programme.
“Our slogan is not the disarming of the fascist gangs of finance capital by finance capital’s own police. We refuse to spread the criminal illusion that a capitalist government can actually proceed to the disarming of the capitalist bands. The exploited must defend themselves against the capitalists.
Arming of the proletariat, arming of the poor peasants!
People’s Antifascist Militia!
The exploiters, who are but a tiny minority, will recoil before the unleashing of civil war; the fascist and reactionary bands will lose their audacity only if the workers are armed and lead the masses.”
In other words, bourgeois-democracy was to be defended against actual attack by fascists, only on the basis of weakening the fascists, and the means of resisting it were not at all the methods or institutions of bourgeois-democracy, or in any way ceding credence to that democracy, but by the methods of proletarian struggle, and organs of workers power raised in opposition to it! That is a million miles away from your uncritical support for Zelensky’s regime.
The response states,
“The defeat of an aggressive and bloody military imperialism, and an increasingly reactionary and repressive Russian regime, one that sponsors dictatorships and far-right movements in many parts of the world, by a mobilisation of its victims could clearly have positive consequences.”
Which leaves aside that it would equally strengthen not just a corrupt Ukrainian regime, but also the vicious, militaristic and expansionist NATO imperialism that stands behind it, and which is pushing ever closer to a hot war across the globe, not just in relation to Russia, but also to China, and has repeatedly shown its willingness to suppress workers or any other social force that is antagonistic to US interests. What is more, it ignores the potential that if Russia were defeated, something much worse than Putin could arise in his place, as with the defeat of the Kaiser leading to the rise of Nazism, or Russia falling more under the domination of China. Nor does it consider that, in such conditions, Russia might resort to nuclear weapons, leading to all out nuclear war, and the destruction of humanity, and so all possibility of Socialism.
We cannot possibly proceed on the basis of such campist considerations as against the overall interests of the global working-class. As Lenin put it, in such conditions, the interests of the part, i.e. Ukraine, and even Ukrainian workers are subordinate to the interest of the whole.
“The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete casts, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected. It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement…
““But we cannot be in favour of a war between great nations, in favour of the slaughter of twenty million people for the sake of the problematical liberation of a small nation with a population of perhaps ten or twenty millions!” Of course not! And it does not mean that we throw complete national equality out of our Programme; it means that the democratic interests of one country must he subordinated to the democratic interests of several and all countries.”
And in a reference directly relevant to Ukraine today, he continues,
“Let us assume that between two great monarchies there is a little monarchy whose kinglet is “hound” by blood and other ties to the monarchs of both neighbouring countries. Let us further assume that the declaration of a republic in the little country and the expulsion of its monarch would in practice lead to a war between the two neighbouring big countries for the restoration of that or another monarch in the little country. There is no doubt that all international Social-Democracy, as well as the really internationalist section of Social-Democracy in the little country, would be against substituting a republic for the monarchy in this case. The substitution of a republic for a monarchy is not an absolute, but one of the democratic demands, subordinate to the interests of democracy (and still more, of course, to those of the socialist proletariat) as a whole. A case like this would in all probability not give rise to the slightest disagreement among Social-Democrats in any country.”
But, you are doing precisely the opposite turning bourgeois-democracy, and bourgeois democratic demands into an absolute, and thereby subordinating the interests of the global working-class to it. You are risking the whole of humanity being destroyed by thermonuclear war, simply to assuage your moral sensibilities, and the interests of US imperialism!
The response states,
“But the idea that independent working-class politics and struggles can or should advance by dismissing resistance to the kind of oppression and militarism that characterises Russia’s war in Ukraine is ludicrous. And that is exactly what Attard does when he blindly declares “this is a reactionary war on both sides”.”
I do not speak for Allard, for the reasons set out above, but its clearly a non sequitur to go from saying that the actual war being fought between the capitalist Ukrainian state, backed by NATO, and the Russian state, is reactionary on both sides, to then claiming that this means that resistance to Russian oppression and militarism is dismissed! If I say that the Tories are reactionary, and their policies are oppressive, and that Starmer’s alternative to them is equally reactionary and oppressive, my refusal to fall in behind Starmer does not at all mean that I am suggesting no resistance to the Tories! It simply means that I do not see falling in behind Starmer as the means of opposing the Tories, and that an independent, working class alternative is needed. That indeed is the basis of an independent third camp position, as opposed to the bourgeois campist position that your organisation has collapsed into, which is ironic given that you claim to be proponents of the third camp!!!
The response says,
“Ukrainian socialists are fighting the subordination of Ukrainian society to Western capitalist-imperialist interests, as well as fighting the Ukrainian ruling class. Unlike Socialist Appeal, they understand that the conquest or subordination of Ukraine by Russian militarism is an even greater and more immediate threat.”
But, again, this is a non sequitur. I can quite accept the argument that Russian militarism is a more immediate threat to Ukrainian workers than is NATO imperialism or the Ukrainian ruling class, without accepting, in any way, that the actual war being fought is one in which Ukraine is subordinated to NATO imperialism, and that NATO is fighting a proxy war with Russia on its territory. Irish Marxism has set out the arguments against that illogical position – https://irishmarxism.net/2022/11/09/new-left-review-and-the-war-in-ukraine-1/.
The response says,
“So would Socialist Appeal dismiss one of the most significant anti-imperialist struggles of the 20th century as fundamentally a proxy for Indian imperialism? If not, why not? Would it have called for India to stop its military support for the Bengalis?”
I have no idea what Attard would say, but I know what Lenin and the Bolsheviks said, in The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up, as cited above, which dealt not with abstract concepts of “nations” or “peoples”, but with classes, and saw liberation struggles only in terms of permanent revolution, as an imminent aspect of the struggle by workers for Socialism, i.e., “It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement.”
Which seems pretty clear to me.
The response says,
“In so far as he has a clear point here, Attard seems to be suggesting defensive or liberation struggles by oppressed or vulnerable nations only have validity if they are dominated by working-class forces. Again, apply this to the Vietnamese struggle, whose leaders aimed not only to win national freedom but to create a totalitarian state without a labour movement…”
Well if that is what he’s suggesting, he’d be right, as that what the Theses on The National and Colonial Questions also says, and indicates why the left was also wrong in giving uncritical support to the Viet Cong. Its also why Trotsky insisted on the Chinese Communists being independent from the KMT, the Spanish workers from the Popular Front, and so on. It is also the basis upon which the AWL correctly refused to support “the resistance” against US occupation in Iraq, dominated by political Islamists, why they refuse to support the struggle of Hamas, or Hezbollah, and so on. So, which is it to be?
The response says,
“Attard ignores small but real initiatives by Ukrainian socialists, anarchists and trade unionists to organise their own (not at all ordinary!) units and networks within the Ukrainian military struggle – unsurprisingly, given Socialist Appeal does not care what Ukrainian (and Russian) left-wingers think about the war. More fundamentally it suggests that, since the Ukrainian resistance is dominated by regular bourgeois armed forces, whether the Ukrainians can defend themselves against slaughter and oppression is of no real interest.”
But, how does that differ from the way the AWL argued that the resistance to the US occupation of Iraq was dominated by the Islamists, whatever role actual workers and revolutionaries might have played subsidiary to it, and so it was that concrete nature of the dominance of those Islamists that determined your refusal to support demands for troops out, or for the liberation struggle?
In 1939, Tom Wintringham, on the basis of his experience in the Spanish Civil War, helped set up the Local Defence Volunteers. There were undoubtedly some revolutionaries, like Wintringham, involved in it. But, that could not, in any way change the nature of WWII, as an inter-imperialist war. Indeed, although Wintringham was used to set up the LDV, and train its members at Osterley Park, he was not allowed to be a member due to his previous membership of the Communist Party, and association with the US Trotskyist Kitty Bowker!
It concludes with a reference
“what Trotsky called “nose-picking” in the face of massacres”, but of course, your organisation completely distorted that comment, by Trotsky, in relation to the Balkan Wars, too. You presented it as a justification for liberal interventionism or at least for not opposing such intervention, when, in fact, the comment was made by Trotsky, arguing against the call for liberal intervention in the Balkans, by the Russian Milyukov. Indeed, such systematic bowdlerisation and distortion of the works of Lenin and Trotsky to suit whatever needs your current positions require gives little faith to have any respect for any of your arguments or positions.
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Okay, I’ve posted it again, and its appeared as waiting for approval, again. Time of posting according to you blog was 11:19. So we will see if you post it this time or are still to frit of actual Marxist arguments as against your attempt to set up the Aunt Sally of Socialist Appeal’s arguments to respond to.
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There are no posts of yours that have not appeared, Arthur. I’ve checked the “waiting for approval” section of the dashboard and there are no comments waiting there.
Here’s something for you to ponder, though:
In defiance of the facts, the Stop the War Coalition, the Socialist Workers’ Party, Counterfire, etc, claim the war in Ukraine is primarily an anti-imperialist conflict between Russia and NATO, not a war of Ukrainian self-defence. (Some of Stop the War’s supporters are straightforwardly pro-Russia, as was on display at its 25 February demo.)
Couldn’t the Ukraine conflict be transformed into an anti-imperialist war? Of course. That doesn’t mean it is one now. In his response to Rosa Luxemburg’s 1916 Junius Pamphlet, excerpts below, Vladimir Lenin addressed precisely this kind of issue. (At the time he didn’t know Junius was Luxemburg.)
Lenin’s arguments are even more striking given he was writing in the middle of a clearly inter-imperialist military conflict, a shooting war between great powers of the kind we do not have currently.
The pamphlet [I am criticising] is devoted… to an analysis of the [First World] war, to refuting the legend of its being a war for national liberation, to proving that it is an imperialist war on the part of Germany as well as on the part of the other Great Powers, and to a revolutionary criticism of the behaviour of the official [German Social Democratic] party [in supporting Germany’s war]…
On the whole, Junius’ pamphlet is a splendid Marxian work…
[But when] Social-Democrats [ie socialists] mistakenly repudiate all national wars because the present war is falsely represented to be a national war, we are obliged to deal with this mistake. [The Stop the War leaders do not actually argue that no wars of national liberation are possible: but when dealing with Ukraine, their arguments often carry that implication, however inconsistently. In any case, most of Lenin’s analysis is still relevant.]
Junius is quite right in emphasising the decisive influence of the “imperialist background” of the present war, when he says that behind Serbia there is Russia, “behind Serbian nationalism there is Russian imperialism”; that even if a country like Holland took part in the present war, she too would be waging an imperialist war, because, firstly, Holland would be defending her colonies, and, secondly, she would be an ally of one of the imperialist coalitions. This is indisputable in relation to the present war…
But it would be a mistake to exaggerate this truth; to depart from the Marxian rule to be concrete; to apply the appraisal of the present war to all wars that are possible under imperialism; to lose sight of the national movements against imperialism…
The fallacy of this argument is obvious. Of course, the fundamental proposition of Marxian dialectics is that all boundaries in nature and society are conventional and mobile, that there is not a single phenomenon which cannot under certain conditions be transformed into its opposite. A national war can be transformed into an imperialist war, and vice versa…
Only a sophist would deny that there is a difference between imperialist war and national war on the grounds that one can be transformed into the other. More than once, even in the history of Greek philosophy, dialectics have served as a bridge to sophistry. We, however, remain dialecticians and combat sophistry, not by a sweeping denial of the possibility of transformation in general, but by concretely analysing a given phenomenon in the circumstances that surround it and in its development…
… national wars waged by colonial and semi-colonial countries are not only possible but inevitable in the epoch of imperialism… The national liberation politics of the colonies will inevitably be continued by national wars of the colonies against imperialism. Such wars may lead to an imperialist war between the present “Great” imperialist Powers or they may not; that depends on many circumstances.
For example: England and France were engaged in a seven years war for colonies [in 1756-63], i.e., they waged an imperialist war (which is as possible on the basis of slavery, or of primitive capitalism, as on the basis of highly developed modern capitalism). France was defeated and lost part of her colonies. Several years later the North American States started a war for national liberation against England alone. Out of enmity towards England, i.e., in conformity with their own imperialist interests, France and Spain, which still held parts of what are now the United States, concluded friendly treaties with the states that had risen against England. The French forces together with the American defeated the English. Here we have a war for national liberation in which imperialist rivalry is a contributory element of no great importance, which is the opposite of what we have in the war of 1914–16 (in which the national element in the Austro-Serbian war is of no great importance compared with the all determining imperialist rivalry). This shows how absurd it would be to employ the term imperialism in a stereotyped fashion by deducing from it that national wars are “impossible.” A war for national liberation waged, for example, by an alliance of Persia, India and China against certain imperialist Powers is quite possible and probable, for it follows logically from the national liberation movements now going on in those countries. Whether such a war will be transformed into an imperialist war among the present imperialist Powers will depend on a great many concrete circumstances, and it would be ridiculous to guarantee that these circumstances will arise.
… national wars must not be regarded as impossible in the epoch of imperialism even in Europe. The “epoch of imperialism” made the present war an imperialist war; it inevitably engenders (until the advent of socialism) new imperialist war; it transformed the policies of the present Great Powers into thoroughly imperialist policies. But this “epoch” by no means precludes the possibility of national wars, waged, for example, by small (let us assume, annexed or nationally oppressed) states against the imperialist Powers, any more than it precludes the possibility of big national movements in Eastern Europe…
On the one hand, intervention by the imperialist powers is not possible under all circumstances. On the other hand, when people argue haphazardly that a war waged by a small state against a giant state is hopeless, we must say that a hopeless war is war nevertheless, and, moreover, certain events within the “giant” states — for example, the beginning of a revolution — may transform a “hopeless” war into a very “hopeful” one.
… It would be a very deplorable thing, of course, if [people] began to be careless in their treatment of Marxian theory… But this fallacy is also very harmful in a practical political sense… it is the cause of the still more stupid and downright reactionary indifference towards national movements…
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The post that appears at 11:19 March 2nd, is a copy of the post that I submitted previously, and which did not appear. It varies by only a few words, because having copied the initial post into a document, at the time of submitting it, I have edited the copy for use in another future post on my blog.
When I submitted that original post, it appeared clearly with the usual statement about awaiting approval by the moderator. So, I find it odd that it disappeared, and that you cannot find it. When, yesterday, I submitted the copy of the original comment, it again appeared with the same statement about waiting for moderator approval. By the time I had written the subsequent comment saying that I had resubmitted the original comment, and posted it, the comment appearing at 11:19, had already been published, presumably having had moderator approval. In other words, it appeared within a couple of minutes of submitting it, quite in contrast to the disappearance of the original.
In response to your current argument, and I’m glad that you have presented an argument rather than just more abuse, I will need to read and consider the points raised, and I am currently engaged in other work that has precedence. My initial response, however, which I reserve the right to amend, in a fuller consideration, would be, its always possible that in any war, its character could change, as the balance of class forces change. Lenin saw WWI turning into revolution and revolutionary wars, for example. That didn’t mean Lenin favoured WWI, as a possible route to such revolutions and revolutionary wars. The truth is always concrete, and we have to deal with the war as it currently stands, not as it might possibly be at some future time.
Secondly, in the age of imperialism, it is idealist and utopian to view national liberation outside the struggle for Socialism itself. As I am writing in another document, the logic of the arguments about national liberation for Ukraine, is to accept the premise of the Brexiters, for example, about “taking back control”. Even Liz Truss found the reality of that fantasy. Trotsky made precisely that point directly in relation to Ukraine, in 1939. he wrote,
“This program is in irreconcilable contradiction first of all with the interests of the three imperialist powers, Poland, Rumania, and Hungary. Only hopeless pacifist blockheads are capable of thinking that the emancipation and unification of the Ukraine can be achieved by peaceful diplomatic means, by referendums, by decisions of the League of Nations, etc. In no way superior to them of course are those “nationalists” who propose to solve the Ukrainian question by entering the service of one imperialism against another. Hitler gave an invaluable lesson to those adventurers by tossing (for how long?) Carpatho-Ukraine to the Hungarians who immediately slaughtered not a few trusting Ukrainians. Insofar as the issue depends upon the military strength of the imperialist states, the victory of one grouping or another can signify only a new dismemberment and a still more brutal subjugation of the Ukrainian people, The program of independence for the Ukraine in the epoch of imperialism is directly and indissolubly bound up with the program of the proletarian revolution. It would be criminal to entertain any illusions on this score.”
And, indeed, Trotsky’s article, discussing the domination of events in Ukraine by the most reactionary elements could have been written about the situation today. He says,
“The worker and peasant masses in the Western Ukraine, in Bukovina, in the Carpatho-Ukraine are in a state of confusion: Where to turn? What to demand? This situation naturally shifts the leadership to the most reactionary Ukrainian cliques who express their “nationalism” by seeking to sell the Ukrainian people to one imperialism or another in return for a promise of fictitious independence.”
To give two other situations to consider. I would suggest thinking about the Iran-Iraq War. Neither were imperialist, though we could discuss whether either or both were “sub-imperialist”. If Iraq were taking Iranian territory, or vice versa, could it not similarly be argued that the country losing territory was having its right to national self-determination removed, and so would have the right to engage in its own self-defence? But, of course, in such wars there is always a to and fro of one country taking territory from the other. Would Marxists be in favour of such self-defence? Of course, not, because it amounts to nothing more than bourgeois-defencism – which is why the Bolsheviks (and even in 1914 most Mensheviks) opposed a policy of defending Russia.
Could, during the course of such a war, a revolution occur, and so material conditions change, so that we change our view on that? Of course, that is what happened in Russia in 1917. Some Mensheviks, as well as Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev believed it had happened in February, but Lenin and Trotsky disagreed, saying it had only effected a bourgeois-democratic revolution, and so it would still amount to bourgeois-defencism. The fact that Germany had occupied a large part of Western Russia did not change their view on that. They only changed their opposition to such bourgeois-defencism, and social-partiotism after the October Revolution. Indeed, in February, as Trotsky described in his History of The Russian Revolution, Lenin fumed from abroad that he would split the party rather than see it descend into social-patriotism of the kind that Kamenev et al were proposing in supporting the Provisional Government’s pro-war position.
In short, come back when the actual material conditions have changed, and we have the war being conducted by a workers state, or the struggle is being conducted by a truly revolutionary force that international socialists can support.
Secondly, take the Falklands War. Its theoretically possible that in Argentina the war might have led to a strengthening, and radicalisation of the revolutionary forces, as they mobilised against the British invasion of the Falklands to drive out the Argentinian forces. Indeed that was probably far more likely given the size of those revolutionary forces, and their on going struggles against the Galtieri regime than anything that Ukrainian socialists are currently engaged in against Zelensky’s regime. Was that a justification, then for supporting the position of Thornett et al of supporting Argentina? No it wasn’t, as both you and I agreed at that time!
There was a difference between opposing Britain’s war effort, and supporting that of Argentina, just as today, there is a difference between opposing Russia’s invasion, and supporting Zelensky. In 1982, we did not see the job of defeating Galtieri being handed to Thatcher, but was the responsibility of Argentinian workers, and vice versa. We argued for the war drive of both to be defeated by their respective workers. Similarly, there is a difference between opposing NATO imperialism and its war against Russia, as against supporting Putin. Socialists in the West have a duty to oppose their own imperialism, but that does not at all mean supporting Putin. On the contrary, our task is also to support Russian workers in them dealing with Putin themselves, and as Trotsky put it in Phrases and Reality, to do that we, indeed, need to have shown our separation from our own imperialism, rather than being seen to be lining up alongside them, which would only drive Russian workers into a reliance on Putin as their defender.
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As an addendum to the above, consider Ireland. British Marxists had a duty to oppose Britain’s occupation of Ireland, and to support a war of national liberation by Ireland to free itself. But, did support for such national liberation mean supporting the reactionary, Catholic-clerical forces that tended to dominate that struggle? Absolutely not, any more than supporting the rights of Palestinians means supporting Hamas.
My enemy’s enemy is not necessarily my friend. British Marxists had a responsibility to oppose British imperialism in Ireland, but also to point out the reactionary nature of the Irish bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists, just as they had a responsibility to do that in relation to the Khomeiniites in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and so on. Marxists only support the “truly revolutionary” forces in any such struggle, as set out in The Theses On The National and Colonial Struggles, and as flows from the theory of Permanent Revolution, going back to Marx’s 1850 Address to the Communist League. As Marx sets out in that address, failure to do so, and to insist on the separation and independence of the revolutionary forces, can only lead to disaster, as happened in the Revolutions of 1848, in China in 1927, and in Spain in 1936.
Does it mean that, as in Ireland a new class state might not arise. Of course, not. But, a look at that state showed that its character from the start was reactionary, imbued with Catholicism, verging on clerical-fascism, and certainly a confessional state, as well as leading to a divided Ireland, with its own reactionary consequences. In Iran, in 1979, it had similar consequences with the coming to power of the anti-working, class, clerical-fascist regime of Khomenie and the mullahs. As Marxists, in developing and setting forth our programme and position we do not do so on the basis of simply what might arise, and certainly not on the basis of seeking some bourgeois – even bourgeois-democratic, let alone bourgeois fascistic – new class state, but of advancing the cause of the working-class, and the achievement of its socialist objectives! To do otherwise is simply bourgeois-liberalism, and stageism/Menshevism/Stalinism
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A consideration of what Lenin says in the text you have quoted, also speaks against your position.
What does Lenin say? He says that national wars and imperialist wars are distinguishable, and the distinction between them cannot be swept aside on the basis that one can be transformed into the other.
“Only a sophist would deny that there is a difference between imperialist war and national war on the grounds that one can be transformed into the other.”
Yet, what you seem to be doing is the opposite of Lenin’s argument, i.e. you are saying that although the war might be characterised as inter-imperialist as StW say, it COULD be transformed into a national war. That seems to be precisely the kind of sophistry that Lenin is describing and arguing against.
“We, however, remain dialecticians and combat sophistry, not by a sweeping denial of the possibility of transformation in general, but by concretely analysing a given phenomenon in the circumstances that surround it and in its development”.
Lenin examines such concrete circumstances, from both directions. So, he talks about national wars for example being waged in Asia against colonial powers. Such national wars he says, COULD become imperialist wars. How, because one imperial power having been embroiled in such a war could find itself being challenged by another imperial power that senses its blood in the water, and seeks to take advantage of its weakness. Indeed, its the danger of such escalation that led Lenin and the Bolsheviks to make the points they did about ensuring that such bourgeois nationalist struggles are subordinated to the overall interests of the working class as a global class, and to avoid such conflicts that would lead to the deaths of millions of workers. The danger of such a development arising in Ukraine is fairly obvious.
Does it mean that Marxists cannot support such a national struggle? No, but the question is how. And, as described, there is a difference between opposing the role of a colonial or annexing power, as against supporting the intervention of some opposing imperial power, or supporting bourgeois-nationalist forces engaged in such a war. Take the Balkan Wars. Trotsky says of course, Marxists wanted to end Ottoman oppression, but, contrary to the assertions made by the AWL, and their bowdlerisation of Trotsky’s comments about “nose-picking”, he vociferously opposed Russian intervention, against the Ottoman’s, as well as opposing the atrocities they and their allies committed.
He writes, in respect of the Balkan Wars,
“But it is not at all a matter of indifference by what methods this emancipation is being accomplished. The method of “liberation” that is being followed today means the enslavement of Macedonia to the personal regime in Bulgaria and to Bulgarian militarism; it means, moreover, the strengthening of reaction in Bulgaria itself. That positive, progressive result which history will, in the last analysis, extract from the ghastly events in the Balkans, will suffer no harm from the exposures made by Balkan and European democracy; on the contrary, only a struggle against the usurpation of history’s tasks by the present masters of the situation will educate the Balkan peoples to play the role of superseding not only Turkish despotism but also those who, for their own reactionary purposes, are, by their own barbarous methods, now destroying that despotism…”
It was in that context of describing the atrocities by “the liberators” that Trotsky made his comment about “nose-picking”. The full quote, the second part of which the AWL always omit, makes that clear. It states,
“An individual, a group, a party, or a class that ‘objectively’ picks its nose while it watches men drunk with blood massacring defenceless people is condemned by history to rot and become worm-eaten while it is still alive.
“On the other hand, a party or the class that rises up against every abominable action wherever it has occurred, as vigorously and unhesitatingly as a living organism reacts to protect its eyes when they are threatened with external injury – such a party or class is sound of heart. Protest against the outrages in the Balkans cleanses the social atmosphere in our own country, heightens the level of moral awareness among our own people. The working masses of the population in every country are both a potential instrument of bloody outrages and a potential victim of such deeds. Therefore an uncompromising protest against atrocities serves not only the purpose of moral self-defence on the personal and party level but also the purpose of politically safeguarding the people against adventurism concealed under the flag of ‘liberation’.” (p 293)”
It is the revolutionary workers we look to as providing the solution, not to bourgeois nationalists, and certainly not to some competing imperial power.
Now, take the transformation in the other direction, from an imperialist war into a national war, which is the direction you refer to. What is the condition for such a transformation? It is precisely that revolutionaries have opposed the imperialist war to begin with! In other words, in WWI, we don’t say, “Oh don’t oppose the war because it has the potential to become a national war of liberation, or because it has the potential to become a revolutionary war, or civil war/revolution”. We say, oppose the imperialist war, and in doing so, we develop the revolutionary forces that are required to bring about that revolutionary transformation as, for example happened in Russia in 1917.
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A response on the question of Imperialist War and National War, and Lenin and Trotsky’s actual position can be found in my post https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2023/03/black-sea-incident-and-coming.html.
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