To: Detroit/Seattle Workers' Voice mailing list
March 18 2022
Re: The two-faced stand of certain anti-war coalitions

• The crisis in the American radical left
• A description of the mass resistance in Ukraine and of the capitulationist stand of much of the Western left from the French journal Contretemps
  

The war in Ukraine is a crisis for the American radical left

by Joseph Green, Detroit Workers’ Voice

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is not only causing immense damage to the Ukrainian people, but it has given rise to a crisis in left-wing circles. The socialist and anti-imperialist left is supposed to be against aggressive war, but a number of left-wing demonstrations refused to support the Ukrainian resistance to the invasion or even claimed that what was going on was a war on Russia. Some other supposed “anti-war” demonstrations sought slogans that slurred over the difference between condemning the invasion or condemning support for the Ukrainian resistance. Some of these demonstrations included speakers who denounced Ukrainians as fascists, or who presented the Ukrainians as powerless pawns in a war between Russia and NATO.

As a result, the left-wing demonstrations about the war in many places have been quite weak or simply token actions. In Detroit, the organizers met on Saturday, one day before the demonstration of Sunday March 6, and the main concern of most of them was just to paper over differences between groups with conflicting views on the invasion. There wasn’t organizing among the masses about the demonstration; some of the speeches at the rally were “hate-Ukraine” speeches, or tried to tar the resistance as fascist, or were long histories of the CIA and Western imperialism. No one directly said support the invasion, but almost all the speeches echoed Putin’s reasons for the invasion, denied any agency to the Ukrainian masses, and ignored what was really going on in Ukraine. Only a couple of groups present, such as the anti-racist group BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) and the Detroit Workers’ Voice, advocated solidarity with the Ukrainian people. (1)

This was not a local aberration. The websites of the International Action Center and the United National Anti-War Coalition don’t demand Russian troops out of Ukraine. UNAC says “No US/NATO war in Ukraine”, and is concerned, not with the invasion of Ukraine, but with “war threats on Russia”. IAC claims to be going beyond the “dominant narrative” with presentations on things like “Stop the war on Russia”. This is support for the invasion, not opposition.

Other groups are showing more of the stress of supporting an outright aggression and the burning of Ukrainian cities. Until the invasion, the CPUSA carried article after article denouncing the Ukraine. It now carries articles that say things like the invasion is a “war of aggression”, but then defend Putin’s justifications for war at length and denounce much of the anti-war demonstrations throughout Europe as pro-war because they support the Ukrainian resistance. The same stand as before, but slightly hidden. (2)

Monthly Review refuses to talk about a Russian invasion, but instead pretends that Russia “intervened in the ongoing civil war in alliance with Donetsky and Luhansk”. It doesn’t support Ukrainian resistance, but give a call to “give peace a chance” by giving Russia what it demands. It admits at the end of the article that Russia is capitalist, yet it still covers for Russian aggression and recommends doing what the Russian government wants. (3)

The Global Ecosocialist Network declares that it condemns the Russian invasion and has solidarity with the “suffering people” of Ukraine, but also apparently condemns providing them any weapons, regarding this as “NATO escalation”. The statement, however, is designed so that it can be read the way anyone wants. (4)

The equivocations come because groups are afraid that the issue of Ukraine may lose them all credibility or may tear them apart, as the issue of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 helped tear the CPUSA apart back then. But the result is failure to oppose Russian imperialism, the paralysis of the anti-war movement, and the turning of the socialist label of various groups into a toothless platitude that can accommodate any atrocity.

This crisis over the invasion of the Ukraine is the result of a sickness that has spread among sections of the radical left for years. For decades, a section of the left has given “military but not political support” to dictators like Saddam Hussein, or has opposed democratic struggles when they are against regimes who have some differences with Western imperialism, or has regarded the insurgent people as simple pawns of this or that big power. Working people fighting for their rights are denounced by some groups as tools of US imperialism or agents of “regime change”. One of the most notorious examples was the bitter opposition of part of the left to the democratic uprising against the bloodstained Syrian dictator Assad, in which even the worst atrocities, including gas attacks by the regime, were denied; the White Helmet medical workers were slandered as terrorists; and the methodical destruction of towns and cities by the Russian air force was shrugged off on the grounds that Russia was invited to do these things by the Syrian government.

And today the war in Ukraine is bringing to the fore a renewed debate on various issues. If there isn’t to be paralysis again and again on one world development after another, as there has been on the issue of the invasion of Ukraine, the radical left will need to confront a number of questions directly. Some of these are as follows:

• One issue is the nature of the Russian regime and other state-capitalist regimes. The apologists for the invasion of Ukraine usually don’t speak directly to the present character of Russia, but clearly that’s what is behind their parroting of Putin’s justifications for the war. They regard Russia as non-capitalist or non-imperialist or as capitalist but supposedly non-hegemonic. They may talk of a 100-year history of Western antagonism to the Soviet Union and then Russia, as if the present rulers of Russia were not bitter opponents of the revolutionary years of the USSR. They imply that the interests of the Russian working people and the government are identical, although the Russian ruling class and government not only exploit Russian workers unmercifully, but deny working people the most basic democratic rights. Prior to the invasion, there was already a growing discussion of whether Russia and China are imperialist. What’s happened since the invasion shows how needed this discussion is.
  
  
• Another issue is whether the struggles for democratic rights and for the right to self-determination should be supported even when they are not directly linked to a socialist movement. Democratic rights under capitalism don’t liberate the working class from exploitation and are quite limited. But they are important for the development of working class organization and consciousness. Yet we see constant denigration of democratic movements with attention focused only on which outside power benefits from a movement or with the argument that democratic rights supposedly don’t mean much until socialism. The Russian regime, and those supposed “communist” groups which support it, denigrate democratic movements as “color revolutions”, CIA-organized imperialist plots, attempts at “regime change”, and so forth.
  
  
• The issue also arises that it is not an accident that so many popular uprisings, democratizations, and other mass struggles have been denigrated by a large part of the left. It is a sign that some of the main trends in the left aren’t really revolutionary, but have seriously wrong overall views of what revolution is about. Stalinism is making a comeback, and the former Stalinist “communist” parties are attempting to present themselves as anti-imperialist and righteous opponents of liberalism; these parties are responsible for many of the lies told about the popular uprisings around the world. Trotskyist groups have a variety of stands. Some, like WSWS (World Socialist Web Site), join in the Stalinist hate-Ukraine campaign, and denounce the Ukrainian resistance. Some, like the RCIT (Revolutionary Communist International Tendency), declare support for the Ukrainian resistance, but only if it were a revolutionary resistance opposed to all imperialist powers and fighting NATO as well as the Russian invasion, thus no support for the existing resistance. This is reminiscent of the stand of many Trotskyist groups on the Arab spring, where they could support the democratic uprisings only as long as they imagined that they would be the start of workers’ revolutions.
  

So if there is to be a real change in the anti-war movement and the radical left, there needs to be attention, not only to having a correct stand on the invasion of Ukraine, but also to the assessment of the overall strategy and theory put forward by the present radical trends. Otherwise every crisis would see a repetition of the radical left’s paralysis as has happened in the case of the Ukrainian war.

It is our view, that of the Communist Voice Organization, that the problem doesn’t lie in Marxism-Leninism, but in the distortions of Marxism made by the trends which either seek to apologize for the state-capitalist regimes or which imagine that only struggles that lead directly to workers’ power are of value. Too many would-be revolutionary trends speak in the name of the great revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, and elsewhere, but continue to defend capitalist regimes that represent the death of these revolutions and the rise of new forms of capitalism. They hope, by closing their eyes to what these regimes have become, they can repeat the great days of the past. In contrast, the Communist Voice Organization declared at its birth in 1995 that: “We do not lament the fall of the fake ‘communist’ regimes. This is clearing the way for a rebirth of real communism. It would have been better if the workers could have replaced false socialism by real socialism, but one way or another, the fraud had to be punctured. … The collapse of revisionism will help clear the way for the real ideas of Marxism-Leninism, as opposed to such tragic parodies as Stalinism and its twin brother, Trotskyism.” (5)

Notes

(1) For the Detroit Workers’ Voice leaflet at the demonstration, see https://www.communistvoice.org/DWV130.pdf.

(2) For example, “The left must continue to condemn Russia’s invasion—and NATO”, March 15, 2022, 

(3) “Notes from the Editors”, Monthly Review, April 2022 (Volue 73, Number 11).

(4) Global Ecosocialist Network Statement on the Ukraine War. I wrote to Ian Angus, the editor of the “Climate and Capitalism” website, inquiring about what this statement actually meant, did it support the Ukrainian resistance to invasion or not, but received a reply that different groups in GEN had different viewpoints, without specifying those viewpoints.

(5) “The rebirth of communism”, April 15, 1995. The CVO stems from the communist trend that published The Workers’ Advocate from 1969 to 1993.

The mass resistance in Ukraine and
the equivocation of much of the Western left

Below are excerpts from the article The war in Ukraine and the dilemmas of the Western left by Darya Saburova, which is her contribution to a discussion in the French journal “Setbacks: a journal of communist analysis” of what stand to take towards the war.

Introduction from the journal Contretemps:

This article describes clearly the war as seen from Ukraine and the way in which a part of the Ukrainian population joins the resistance, in particular the territorial defense units: a vast popular mobilization. And then Daria Saburova … addresses a number of questions to the anti-imperialist left, in particular on military aid for popular resistance. Otherwise, according to her, the internationalist salute and the solidarity shown to the Ukrainian people risk remaining abstract.

Introduction to the article from Michael Karadjis on Facebook:

Leftist voice from the Ukrainian resistance: describes a genuine mass, grass-roots people's movement of resistance to the Russian blitzkrieg on the ground, and discusses the right of this resistance to receive arms from whoever they can get them from. (Western leftist response: probably "Azov, Azov", new word they just learnt and now quack like ducks). Read and learn from the front lines and those under the bombs and missiles.

Excerpts, translated from French:

But if Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol and other cities are resisting the Russian army, although it has a very clear military advantage, it is because, in the face of this invasion, a vast popular mobilization has risen up which goes far beyond the state apparatuses, even in the Russian-speaking cities which should, according to the logic of both Putin and a certain Western left, welcome the liberation army with open arms. This mobilization takes multiple forms: in Energodar and in other cities, unarmed people go out to form human chains to prevent the advance of Russian tanks; in the already occupied cities, in Kherson and Melitopol, large demonstrations took place to protest against the invader. In other cities, territorial defense groups and self-organized solidarity groups ensure the security and supply of the population. According to the words of a friend who remained in Kyiv, everyone is involved in one way or another in the solidarity groups through thousands of specialized Telegram channels: it is a question of organizing distribution points and the delivery of food, medicine or other basic necessities, especially to isolated and vulnerable people; find or offer accommodation; request or indicate the availability of places in cars to evacuate people to Western Ukraine. Each city offers a list of places (churches, gymnasiums, restaurants) that can accommodate free of charge refugees and people in transit. The Telegram channel “Help to leave” now has 94,000 members, drivers and passengers alike. All these initiatives are horizontal and do not depend on the State: a symptom both of the bankruptcy of the Ukrainian State, taken aback by a war of such magnitude, but also of the outpouring of solidarity and resistance of the Ukrainian people against the invader.

In this situation, I was truly struck by the persistent inability of a good part of our comrades in France and elsewhere to go beyond a vision of the world where the power responsible for all wars, in the final analysis, is the United States and NATO. This is the reason why many analyzes of the situation in Ukraine focus, surprisingly, on something else: it is a question of going back to the “root causes” that are quite remote, historically and geographically. Such a geopolitical approach masks in part the ignorance of the political and social processes of the post-Soviet space, fueling in particular the idea according to which, basically, all the oligarchic governments of this part of the world are equal, whatever the degree of repression that they inflict on their own population and the populations of neighboring States. It is in the name of this reductionist vision of complex realities that the Ukrainians are practically invited to capitulate, either directly, or — more indirectly and under the guise of revolutionary anti-militarism — by opposing any military aid to Ukraine provided by NATO member countries. While addressing an internationalist greeting to the Ukrainians, it suggests that they should accept the military occupation and a government imposed by Putin.

Certainly, since the invasion, few comrades allow themselves to deny that we are dealing with a military aggression nourished by the imperialist pretensions of Russia. But the campist positions nevertheless remain legible in different positions through the order in which the arguments are presented (yes, it is an unacceptable aggression against Ukraine by Russia, but even so it is encirclement of Russia by NATO), and which continue to uphold the image of Russia as a subaltern and essentially reactive imperialist power. Last Saturday, in the Facebook announcement of the demonstration "for peace" organized by the young people of the NPA [New Anticapitalist Party], which was separate from the large demonstration in support of the Ukrainian people which was taking place in Republic Square, we could read that the military invasion of Ukraine by Russia was a Russian reaction to NATO's aggressive policy. We could read that the organizers support those who "in Ukraine as in Russia", "fight against the war". However, the Ukrainians are not fighting against the war: they are, despite themselves, at war against Russia. Is this then anything other than an invitation to capitulation?"

March 14, 2022

Full text

Picture: Ukraine burning.

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