The Russia-Ukraine war: key to the world situation

By Central Committee of the Partido Revolucionario de las y los Trabajadores (PRT) Costa Rica, Central America.

“The catastrophic commercial, industrial, agrarian and financial crisis, the breakdown of international economic ties, the decay of the productive forces of humanity, the unsustainable sharpening of contradictions between classes and between nations signal the decline of capitalism and confirm the Leninist characterization that ours is an era of wars and revolutions.”

Leon Trotsky (1934)[1]

The above quote dated June 10, 1934, seems to describe in its broad strokes the current situation of decomposition of the imperialist capitalist system and is very useful to understand the war that has been unleashed with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

With the aim of contributing to the elaboration and debate in view of the II World Congress of the LIS, we believe it is necessary to specify and process the discussion on the nature and scope of the war and collectively establish the most appropriate orientations for our political intervention.  We will go from the general to the particular, using the hypothetical deductive method.

1. Wars impose great tests and challenges on us.

Wars, as well as revolutions and counter-revolutions, are colossal trials and tests for revolutionary organizations.

If in addition these wars are world wars or tend to be so, the demand is raised to the nth power. The First World Imperialist War consummated the opportunist (“social-patriot”) degeneration of the Second International, due to the shameful adaptation of the social-democratic parties to their respective imperialisms, to the point that Lenin called the Second International a “stinking corpse”. At the same time, the revolutionary position without concessions to the imperialist sides of the Zimmerwald left, allowed the decanting of a handful of revolutionaries in 1914, who lay the foundations of a radical reorganization of the workers movement, under the powerful influence of the victorious Russian Revolution of October 1917 (only three years later), which leads in 1919 to the creation of the largest revolutionary leadership and with the greatest mass influence to date: the Third International.

In the heat of World War II the scarce forces of the Fourth International, we believe, did not grasp in its full dimension the double nature of the war, not only as an inter-imperialist war, but also as a ferocious war of extermination of Nazi-fascism against the USSR, as a workers’ state, even if bureaucratically degenerated by the Stalinist apparatus. We do not doubt that the project of Nazi-fascism, had it triumphed, would have implied an enormous historical setback. This incomprehension of the dual and combined nature of the war, as well as the premature assassination of Trotsky at the beginning of the conflagration, is a factor that made it impossible, among other reasons, for the young and inexperienced Fourth International to postulate itself as a mass alternative in the second post-war period.

Nahuel Moreno, indicates in this respect: “(…) Hitler’s phenomenon has not been studied in depth by Marxists. In Hitler’s racism we have the embryo of a new slave society, with the extermination and labor camps where Hitler sent Jews, Poles and also leftists. It is the beginning of a new relation of production, with new forms of slavery”.[2]

We make this brief account to reaffirm that the correct characterization of this war is fundamental for our construction as LIS.

2. The Russia-Ukraine war is key to the world situation.

We agree that, from the objective point of view, the world situation is marked by the prolonged economic-social crisis, more and more acute, which has shaken the imperialist capitalist world system since 2008, aggravated by the pandemic. But it is not a crisis of the magnitude of the one that shook imperialist capitalism in 1914 and 1929. It is qualitatively more serious and complex because it arises in a framework of substantive deterioration of the global ecosystem; it is a fact that climate change threatens a great extinction of species and of humanity itself. Add to this the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated weapons of mass destruction, including the possession of declared nuclear weapons by the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea, in a scenario of accelerated tension between world and regional powers and their lesser partners.

Not coincidentally, from the political point of view, today the most outstanding phenomenon, which expresses and synthesizes to the highest degree the refraction of that objective crisis is the war in Ukraine, fruit of the exacerbation of the inter-imperialist and inter-bourgeois contradictions shaking the planet. Without ignoring in any way the fact that it is specifically provoked by the ruthless invasion of Russia, a lesser imperialism, in order to seize the territory of Ukraine, trampling on its national self-determination.  Likewise, this war is evidence of the rapacious role of NATO, which is hiding behind the reactionary government of Zelensky to advance its strategic positioning in Eastern Europe. In order to design a correct policy we must take into account the combination of these elements, prioritize them and understand them in their dynamics.

We emphasize that this is a war that marks the world situation as a whole, not only because it aggravates the elements leading to a world conflagration, but also because it deepens and reatroaliments the economic-social crisis and the world order/disorder, since it directly impacts on the following aspects:

i.- The food crisis, related to the shortage of grains that unleashes terrible famines in the southern hemisphere (particularly in Africa).

ii.- Global inflationary and recessionary trends, which point to stagflation (barely contained for now).

iii–The energy crisis that is hitting Europe hard

iv.- The acceleration of the arms race, together with the intensification of trade wars, particularly between the United States and China in the microchip industry, artificial intelligence and the military industry in general.

We insist on the decisive nature of the war in Ukraine, as it constitutes a watershed that we need to gauge in detail, since everything indicates that it opens a new stage in the world situation.

In order to discuss the hypothesis as to whether or not the war in Ukraine opens a new stage of the world situation and whether or not it tends inexorably towards a war of global dimensions, it is not enough to describe the concrete situation today, it is necessary to analyze the dynamics of the war conflict, the tendencies it incubates, where it is going.

Some bourgeois and reformist analysts have considered that we are facing a new Cold War We disagree. The Cold War of the second post-war period does not modify the bipolar order of Yalta and Potsdam, rather it is its consequence. The bureaucracy of the former USSR and the Western allies that triumphed in the Second World War agreed on the division of the world into zones of influence. It was an agreement of peaceful coexistence, a counterrevolutionary division of labor between the Stalinist apparatus and Western imperialism, leading to the establishment of the dollar-gold standard at Bretton Woods and resulting in the long political stability that catapulted the economic boom. This world order is based on very specific political, economic and military institutions of each bloc: the bloc dominated by Yankee imperialism with its NATO, World Bank, IMF, and the bloc dominated by the former USSR with its Warsaw Pact and Council for Mutual Economic Support (CAME).

The war on the Korean Peninsula is the fundamental fact that intensified the Cold War, but it was not even subverted by the 1961 Cuban missile crisis, rather, it was later strengthened. It is only the disintegration of the USSR and the capitalist restoration that is the monumental event that liquidated that order. That is why the current situation resembles rather the Armed Peace that preceded the previous world wars, an Armed Peace that opens the dynamics towards a war of world proportions.

Bearing in mind, we maintain that a new world stage is opening up, by virtue of the decline of Yankee hegemony, as well as the emergence and struggle of new imperialisms that seriously threaten that hegemony, in the first place, China (as we shall see). This stage is marked by the collapse of the unipolar political order following the fall of the USSR, giving way to a multipolar order/disorder which, due to its own correlation of forces, tends towards growing instability.

3.- On the double character of the war.

In the LIS we agree that the war in Ukraine is a complex and contradictory phenomenon comprising two wars: an inter-imperialist war (on one side led by NATO and on the other by Russia) and a just war of the Ukrainian people against the invader for the democratic right to their national self-determination. But being just the war for national self-determination of Ukraine against the Russian imperialist invader, when combined with the inter-imperialist element, it is also instrumentalized by NATO commanded by Yankee imperialism, which is hiding behind the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder for its colonizing advance in Eastern Europe.

This dual nature is not immutable. If we analyze the most recent events we can verify that the military conflict is not only escalating, but that inter-imperialist clashes and frictions are worsening and different flanks are opening up.

To date, if we make a concrete analysis of reality, there is certainly no world war for the time being, since there is no direct military conflict between the troops of US-NATO imperialism and Russia. NATO-Biden continues to hide and send to the slaughter the Ukrainian troops under the command of its puppet Zelenski, but it is still trying not to get involved in a global war. But it is also very true that there is a growing military escalation in Ukraine, which adds to the aggravation of Washington’s tensions with Beijing, while there are sharp disputes in other parts of the world geography, rearrangements of regional powers and countries, in terms of trade agreements, military and zones of influence.

All military analysts predict that the war in Ukraine will come to a head in the spring and summer of the current year. In order to correctly position ourselves, we must be very attentive to the rhythms and intensity of the war in order to accurately answer the question: What is more important in this combined and contradictory phenomenon today: the just war or the war between imperialisms? 

4. Are we heading towards a Third World War?

In terms of the open process, what is central is that the world imperialist system is in such a deep crisis that, in this situation, it has no alternative but to launch itself more and more into regional military adventures, in a growing magnitude on the part of each particular imperialism (with its different rhythms), since as a whole they are in a hurry to take over or control territories, states, natural resources, businesses, trade routes, infrastructures and military emplacements.  The monstrous irrationality of world wars derives from the very essence of imperialism.

We are not saying anything new. Since Lenin we know that imperialism in its decadence, necessarily leads to the relations of production, resources, markets, are increasingly constricted within narrow national borders. That is the reason for the most bloody wars for the division of the world between the imperialists and their vassals, which is clearly becoming more and more heated today.

We do not have a crystal ball to guess the exact moment when we will find ourselves in World War III, but rooted in the Marxist theory of imperialism, we have no doubt of its inevitability. In the imperialist epoch the destructive forces (and not the productive ones) grow, and the world crises of capital accumulation are recurrent, prolonged, without solution of continuity, triggering wars at a level never seen before of barbarism and holocaust, as it was evidenced in the past world wars.

In the text: “The War and the Fourth International” Trotsky is brilliantly correct in the prognosis of World War II, on the basis of these same Marxist considerations.

“The reasons which provoked the last imperialist war, inherent in modern capitalism, have now reached an infinitely greater tension than in mid-1914. The only factor holding back imperialism is the fear of the consequences of a new war. But the effectiveness of this brake is limited. The weight of internal contradictions pushes one country after another down the road of fascism, which in turn will not be able to hold on to power without preparing international explosions. All governments fear war, but none is free to choose. Without a proletarian revolution a new world war is inevitable.“[3]

That is to say, beyond the serious fears of the imperialists, they are forced into the fierce struggle for markets, resources and reservoirs of labor power increasingly over-exploited; they are compelled to launch themselves into the gamble of war and put the whole of humanity on the edge of the precipice. In this sense we must arm ourselves theoretically and politically, conceiving the inexorable course of the military collision between the powers. It is also another thing to be precise about the moments, rhythms, times and modalities of such a collision. Just as denying the inexorability of world war is a mistake, it would be inversely erroneous to dilute in this general perspective the concrete situation today, which must be adjusted millimetrically, day by day, as the processes associated with this war accelerate.

In the international IV heritage of the second post-war period it is correct in determining that the driving cause of the long wave of growth and economic expansion that follows World War II (the economic boom) is, on the one hand, the product of the colossal destruction of an enormous mass of fixed or constant capital and living or variable capital, and on the other hand, of the role of the Yankee locomotive, which with the Marshal Plan and the imposition of the gold dollar standard agreed in Bretton Woods allowed the reconstruction of capitalist Europe devastated by the war. Furthermore, a determining factor of the class struggle in this recomposition of the system and the lasting stability of the order agreed in Yalta and Potsdam is the consequent betrayal by Stalinism of the revolutionary processes in Italy, France, Greece and its efforts to abort it in Yugoslavia.

The war meant the death of hundreds of millions of human beings, of the labor force that makes up the living capital, as well as the massive destruction of fixed or constant capital, i.e.: factories, bridges, hospitals, power plants, infrastructure. Any resemblance with the war in Ukraine is not a coincidence, it is a glimpse of what is to come.

To sum up, it is only on the ashes of the second war that the imperialist capitalist capitalist system of the post-war period is recomposed. And in this crucial hour we must be very attentive because only the independent action of the mass movement and the correctness of the revolutionary policy and its organizations that connect with it, will be able to avoid a war of atrocious proportions and consequences.

5. The use of historical analogies

 Although for Marxist logic the principle of identity does not exist, in other words, no situation or process is identical to another, it is useful to resort to some historical analogies for comparative purposes.

We stated earlier that the current inter-imperialist conflict, which is taking a leap in Ukraine, is very similar to the context of the so-called Armed Peace, especially to the period preceding World War I. The national empires, as now, were overwhelmed by the deep structural crisis that erupted with the recession of 1914. The national empires, as now, were burdened by the deep structural crisis that erupted with the recession of 1914. In these conditions, the various imperialisms moved around, arming themselves in advance in a kind of war of positions, in which regional conflicts were unleashed in crescendo, until a local event: a conflict on an apparently regional scale: the assassination of the prince of Sarajevo, triggered World War I.

As a general rule, in the run-up to world wars, the imperialist countries with less access to the imperialist booty (i.e. with less colonial surplus profits), are the ones who are most desperate to dispute with blood and fire part of that booty with the hegemonic imperialisms.

For example, the phenomenon of Nazism cannot be understood without starting from the imperialist distribution that was consummated with the Peace Treaty of Versailles (which ended World War I and left the wound open for World War II). The Treaty imposed onerous conditions on Germany (onerous compensations and loss of territories with the annexation by France of Alsace-Lorraine). The German capitalists, troubled by the economic depression that opened in 1929 and willing to recover the ground lost in Versailles, ended up in the arms of Nazism, promoting war as the only way out.

Today we have the USA, an empire still hegemonic, but in decline, seconded by a weakened and fragmented Europe and confronted by the emergence of powers such as China and Russia, with whom disputes and frictions are deepening. The US is similar to England before World War II. 

On the other hand, the Russia of the butcher Putin, which today struggles to dispute and expand its area of influence, looks more like Germany in the run-up to World War II. For Russia it is of vital geostrategic interest to protect the exit to the Black Sea and to stop NATO expansion. The invasion of Ukraine (which has been going on for more than a year) reflects the nervousness and desperation of the Russian empire, and it is not by chance that it is resorting to the most nefarious features of Great Russian nationalism and xenophobia as an ideological recipe book.

6. A consistent anti-imperialist position.

We are the champions of Ukraine’s right to national self-determination, but we often warn of the danger of falling into the capitulation of “democratic” imperialism that includes a wide arc of “progressives”, reformists and centrists: from United-Power, which has approved the war credits, to “liberal democratic” figures such as Bernie Sanders or Hollywood actor/director Sean Penn. Time and again we have to hammer home a position categorically confronting every imperialist side, without bowing to the pressures of the prevailing “public opinion” in the West. We must denounce that the executioner Putin has nothing to envy to the executioner Biden who supports brutal dictatorships that are akin to him, such as that of Erdogan in Turkey, supports the coup of Boluarte and the massacre in Peru, the theocratic dictatorships such as that of Saudi Arabia that suffocates Yemen and the Nazi-Zionist Netahanyahu that bleeds the Palestinian people.

Likewise, despite placing ourselves today in the strictly military camp of Ukraine, internally we must be the most implacable political enemies of Zelensky and the Euromaidan regime, because it aims at the colonization of Ukraine by Western imperialism and has an anti-working class and not at all democratic nature, as well illustrated by our Ukrainian comrades of the LSU. Never the defense of an oppressed nation implies support for its bourgeois leadership.

In this context, we must also ask ourselves whether our defense of Ukraine means that we promote the delivery of weapons and what kind of weapons by Western imperialism to Ukraine, or rather whether the boycott and mobilization against the war in NATO countries is put on the table as a fundamental task. For example, do we agree with the dispatch of F16 fighters, or in general, weapons of high range and mass destruction? The answer we give depends on how we gauge the course, escalation and expansion of the war on a global scale.

On the other hand, it is worth noting that in the West pacifism tends to be progressive, just as it is totally correct inside Russia. The abstract and general preaching of peace in the theater of war where today the just war of the Ukrainian people is being waged is not the same as in the face of the imperialisms that depredate and stir up war.

 

7. NATO’s expansion is long-standing and intensifying

Russia is a regional power, but a power nonetheless, with a peculiar characteristic: as a legacy of its past as a global power during the Stalinist period. Russia has an army that can oppose, at least in terms of military technological development, the U.S. army, especially in firepower, being the second nuclear power.  On the other hand, a low-intensity war has been going on in Ukraine since 2014, when the Euromaidan events occurred and Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula.

Putin has repeatedly accused NATO of waging a “proxy” or indirect war against his country and warned that it could trigger a nuclear conflict. Beyond Putin’s propaganda and bluster, this accusation is not without a significant dose of truth. It is also true that U.S. imperialism has been using NATO expansion for decades to corner Russia and in particular today is arming and financing Ukraine to strike and weaken Russia.

It is very significant that NATO’s eastward expansion began in 1999, coinciding with its military occupation of the former Yugoslavia, when it incorporated Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in parallel. Then Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Latvia joined at the Istanbul summit in 2004. Albania and Croatia, joined at the 2009 Strasbourg summit.Between 2017 and 2019, NATO incorporated Bosnia-Herzegovina, Georgia and Macedonia. Today’s projected expansion includes aspirants Sweden, Finland, Serbia and Ukraine itself.

 

8. The facts confirm the virulence of the conflict.

Although it is true that the U.S. government has been moving forward in a cautious manner, since it has not wanted to get involved with troops in the war for the time being, this does not imply that it is the imperialist power most interested in deepening the war spiral.  As a declining power in Washington, they understand that at this moment their main advantage continues to be that they have by far the most powerful army in the world, and they know that it is therefore the moment to take advantage of this advantage to reposition themselves and above all to stop the Chinese giant, which is their main threat in the background.

It should not be forgotten that the conflict in Ukraine has to do with the issue of gas pipelines and the energy importance of Russian gas in Europe. It is no coincidence that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is taking place immediately after the United States put diplomatic pressure on Germany to delay the implementation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Nor can we lose sight of the fact that the conflict in Ukraine broke out in 2014, when there was a change of government and the entry of Ukraine into NATO began to be promoted; it is precisely because of the loss of Russian control over Ukrainian territory, through which the main gas pipelines passed, that the construction of the new maritime gas pipeline through the Baltic began.

It is clear that the United States has been fanning the flames of the conflict, but it is also clear that, for now, the Yankees are trying not to involve their troops directly in the conflict, more so the European Union which has much to lose.  Washington and Pentagon strategists have learned the lesson of how dangerous it is to get bogged down in a military conflict by using their own troops, by virtue of the experience of their long occupation and withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, if they could control Russia and China, without fomenting a major war, they would play that card.

However, this is highly unlikely. Multiple facts indicate the escalation of the conflict; we can detail them exhaustively. But it is not a question of a mere quantitative count. It is about understanding the current turbulent scenario, in which World War III can break out at any moment with any excuse.

What is the red line that if crossed would detonate the global war? It is not the surrender of long-range fighter-bombers as some analysts have said. It is the direct involvement of NATO troops in Ukraine or against Russia and its Eastern European allies. Putin has repeatedly said that just one NATO country sodding or firing against his positions in Ukraine would be the start of a global war. It is also a possibility that his Belarusian puppet Lukashenko would lend himself to a false flag attack. During the Munich Security Conference 2023, from which Russia was excluded for the first time in 20 years, it is revealing that Putin met with Lukashenko in Moscow at the same time and Lukashenko repeated exactly the same script.  Shortly before that, high-level meetings were forged between Russia and Iran, the latter being accused by the US of supplying Putin with drones.

As for China, although it has been moving for decades with great cunning and caution, advancing stealthily in industrial espionage and rearmament, since it is aware of its vast military inferiority vis-à-vis US imperialism and NATO, it is now under intense pressure. It cannot be ruled out that Xin Jing Ping will take advantage of the war spiral in Ukraine to take action against Taiwan, or that some serious incident will be generated on the Korean peninsula or in the China Sea.  Nor can it be ruled out that the wayward Kim Il-Sung might let loose a rocket against South Korea, which would put Japan, which has joined the coalition against Russia with arms and equipment, in serious trouble.

It is symptomatic that just before the Munich Security Conference (CSM), which was dominated by the Ukrainian issue, the incident of the downing of the Chinese balloons, with which the US imperialism has gone on the offensive, took place. Despite China’s efforts at the CSM to play the role of mediator in the search for peace, the head of the U.S. State Department Anthony Blinken, prior to his secret meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, indicated that Washington had confidential reports on the supply of Chinese arms to Russia.

The backdrop of the war in Ukraine is the inter-imperialist tension between China and the United States, rather than the Russian offensive itself and the NATO counter-offensive, in the sense that they are only the current episode of the conflict, the tip of the iceberg. Washington is aware that in a few years China is likely to replace it as the main world power, a goal declared by Xin Jin Ping.

We provide two examples.

The scramble for microchips: As BBC News reports: “(…) The world’s two largest economies are fighting over another precious resource: semiconductors, the microchips that literally power our daily lives, made from tiny bits of silicon. (…) they are at the heart of a US$500 billion industry, a figure expected to double by 2030. And whoever controls its production chains – a tangled web of companies and countries that manufacture the microchips – will hold the key to becoming a dominant superpower. China wants the technology to produce the microchips, which is why the United States, the source of much of the technology, is isolating Beijing.[4]

The plan to reorganize the Yankee Marine Corps to confront China. “The United States made clear its priority interest in the Pacific region during a recent meeting between U.S. and Japanese leaders at the White House. Marine Corps Commandant General David H. Berger said the plan aims to prepare the Marines for a hypothetical conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific region, leaving aside other possible scenarios such as counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The new project envisions the Marine Corps fighting in operations spread across island chains. Units are smaller and more dispersed, but with much greater impact thanks to a variety of new weapons systems. “. [5]

9. Our political orientation:

I. We are in favor of Ukraine, a nation oppressed and invaded by the Russian imperialist power. We stand on the side of the Ukrainian people without a hint of support for the reactionary Zelensky government and the bourgeois regime: This implies that we are in favor of supporting the Ukrainian people with arms, wherever they come from. This as long as the conflict does not escalate into World War III, which would happen the moment another country gets involved in the conflict or a similar conflict breaks out in another area, for example, China-Japan or China-Taiwan.

II. We understand that the backdrop is the global inter-imperialist conflict. In this sense we repudiate all imperialist powers, we denounce the imperialist character of the conflict and we are consequently against war. The only war that will emancipate the peoples of the world and all humanity is class war, that of the proletariat and its popular allies taking up arms against the bourgeoisie. Therefore, we are against war credits and we are against the arms race, we are against the use of nuclear weapons in the conflict, if the conflict becomes a nuclear conflict the disaster would be of immeasurable magnitude.

III. The fact that we support the Ukrainian people does not prevent us from mobilizing against the war, differentiating ourselves from bourgeois and petty-bourgeois pacifism. In these mobilizations we denounce in the first instance the imperialist character of war, above all in Europe, Russia and the United States. Just as we demand the dissolution of NATO and peace without annexations, the ISL must agree and promote, without sectarianism, broad movements against war.

IV. In Russia the struggle against forced conscription is of particular importance and we call on the Russian soldiers at the front to fraternize with the Ukrainians, to refuse to fight, so we encourage and welcome desertions, in order to generate an agitation that will lead to the rebellion of the rank and file soldiers against their officers and eventually direct their arms against the Putin government. In Ukraine it is necessary to have a policy for the formation and development of workers’ and popular militias, independent of the Zelensky government.

[1] Trotsky, Leon. “The War and the Fourth International” and, Writings, Volume V, Volume 2, pages 201-250. Editorial Pluma.

[2] Moreno, Nahuel. Conversations on Trotskyism. Digital edition: http://www.nahuelmoreno.org/escritos/conversaciones-con-nahuel-moreno-1986.pdf

[3] Trotsky, L. Op.cit.

[4] Suranjana Tewari BBC News. 30 January 2023

 https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-64297108

[5] Jonathan Marcus Institute for Strategy and Security, University of Exeter, UK. 17 February 2023