UKRAINE: FLASHPOINT FOR INTER-IMPERIALIST WAR?
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2021 AT 10:11AMThe bourgeoisie of all countries … covers its predatory aims with “national” ideology, [which] inevitably creates … revolutionary sentiments in the masses. Our duty is to help make these sentiments conscious.
--Vladimir Lenin, “Turn Imperialist War Into Civil War” (1915)
Russia’s massing of troops on the border of U.S.-backed Ukraine is one more step toward World War III. Notwithstanding the Joe Biden-Vladimir Putin video conference “in an effort to defuse a growing military crisis” (New York Times, 12/7), the U.S. and Russia are on a collision course. Politicians represent the capitalist ruling class interests behind them, the biggest banks and corporations. Since there are limited markets to control and limited resources and workers to exploit, the U.S. and Russian capitalist gangs are locked in a constant, deadly competition.
The U.S. has called the shots for the old liberal world order for the last 75 years. But with a rising China and a resurgent Russia, and U.S. rulers weakened by a deep split in their own ranks, their days of supremacy may be numbered. As in the run-up to World War I, the decay of an established order creates extreme volatility. Finance capital, the U.S. bosses’ dominant wing, has less and less control over world events. A seemingly minor confrontation could spark a bloody big-power conflict and a nuclear war.
Only a communist revolution can end these devastating imperialist rivalries by smashing nationalism and replacing it with working-class internationalism. Only a communist society, where money and profit are abolished and production is geared to workers’ needs, can serve the interests of our class.
Russia strikes back
Russia’s massing of 120,000 troops on the Ukraine border may be a warning to stop the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization from bringing Ukraine and Georgia into its military alliance. Russia is also responding to “plans by some NATO members to set up military training centers in Ukraine” (AP, 11/24) and reported U.S. military drills just 12 miles from Russia’s border (The Sun, 11/26). Ukraine is a critical export corridor into Europe for oil and gas, the main source of wealth for Russian capitalists.
After the collapse of the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, U.S. rulers settled on a policy of “containment” to encircle Russia and prevent its re-emergence as a global superpower. The U.S. pushed NATO to absorb former Warsaw Pact (World War II Soviet-led, anti NATO alliance) states like Poland and Hungary, and, in 2004, the former Soviet Republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Strategically located Ukraine is a lynchpin of this U.S. strategy.
But in the name of profit, Russian imperialist rulers have struck back. Along with a series of military incursions—from Georgia and Syria to the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014—Russia has aggressively courted U.S. rivals like Iran and Venezuela. It has engineered the massive Nord Stream 2 pipeline to export its oil and gas to Europe via the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine—so much for containment! U.S. bosses have continued to back Ukraine’s nationalist ruling class, sending $2.5 billion in military assistance since 2014, a time when Ukraine’s government was stocked with ministers from the openly Nazi Svoboda Party (Reuters, 3/18/14). Along with a dozen other NATO countries, the U.S. has significant numbers of military advisers in Ukraine.
As Russia continues to threaten an invasion, the limited U.S. response—possible economic sanctions—exposes its ever-weakening position. In their imperialist proxy war, the bosses killed tens of thousands of lives in Eastern Ukraine with Russian-backed separatists. As the conflict in this region expands, it’s the working class that will be fighting and dying for the bosses’ profits.
Nationalism: dead end for workers
After the great communist revolutions in Russia and China, workers were freed from capitalist exploitation on one-third of the globe. At one time, the old communist movement vigorously promoted proletarian internationalism. But because of concessions to rotten capitalist ideas like higher wages for “experts” and an emphasis on production over politics, the international working class was left wide open to nationalist ideology. Nationalism is an essential tool for rulers to convince workers to be slaughtered in imperialist wars for “their country.” The world’s bosses, a tiny minority of the population, must rely on the working class to win their battles for them. Following the example of Russian soldiers in World War I, internationalist class consciousness can lead working-class soldiers and sailors to turn their guns around—and fire on the ruling-class warmakers!
Since the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the threat of an imperialist alliance between Russia and China has petrified the U.S. ruling class. The U.S. bosses would be left at a huge numerical disadvantage in troops, tanks, and warships, as well as in nuclear weapons (Sun, 11/26). Over the last decade, China’s capitalist rulers have seen growing U.S.-Russia tensions as an opportunity to forge closer ties to Russia’s bosses. Joint air and naval exercises last month, including “bomber flights into Japanese and South Korean air defense zones,” led to “a new pact to further deepen defense ties” (Al Jazeera, 11/25). Russia is the number-two exporter of oil to China, after Saudi Arabia, while China has been a lead investor in Russian natural gas projects in Siberia (Al Jazeera, 11/25).
U.S. ”democracy” flimflam
On December 9, Biden hosted a virtual “Summit for Democracy” to try to rally its allies against the so-called “autocracies” (or dictatorships) in Russia and China. In reality, all capitalist “democracies” are dictatorships of the capitalist bosses that will fight each other to the end for maximum profit. As the Council of Foreign Relations, the bosses’ top research and strategy institute, recently acknowledged, capitalist ruling classes “have little choice but to compete for power in what is at root a zero-sum game” (Foreign Affairs, November-December 2021).
If the past is any guide, the U.S. ruling class will deploy a media frenzy of nationalism and patriotism (and likely a 9/11-type provocation) to win workers to fight and die for JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil’s profits. But the U.S. bosses have an uphill battle to achieve their vision of all-class unity. The vicious split between the liberal racist Democratic bosses and the gutter racist Republicans has divided workers as well. Without a unified, multiracial armed forces and mass acceptance of a military draft, the U.S. rulers will be hard-pressed to prevail over the more disciplined rulers in Russia and China.
Communist revolution is the only solution!
The implosion of the Soviet Union and China’s return to capitalism are both direct results of the poison of nationalism. Only with internationalism--the end of all borders, patriotism, racism, and sexism--can workers truly be freed. Progressive Labor Party needs to fight harder and more creatively to win masses of workers to our ideas on inter-imperialist rivalry and the inevitability of war under capitalism--in mass organizations, at our workplaces, with our neighbors, and especially in the military. As the ruling class prepares for World War III, we must organize to turn their imperialist wars into wars of communist liberation from capitalist savagery. Join us
