The Russian invasion of Ukraine, being a war of national aggression by a military power against an attacked nation, involves other forces and other interests beyond this direct conflict. As Leon Trotsky puts it in The War and the Fourth International the right of sovereignty of the nation oppressed in the war cannot be defended to the last consequences without locating «the fundamental forces that act in it… its development, and by the consequences to which it finally leads.
By Florence Open, originally published in Marxismo Vivo Nº 18, May 2022.
The backdrop that feeds the conflict is the rivalry between two blocks, that of NATO and that of Russia (with the support of China), for the economic, political and military dominance of the region. This partly explains the great debates that are taking place in the world left, both about the nature of the war and about the politics that revolutionaries should have in it.
In the decadent imperialist system, these types of wars are recurrent, and the war in Ukraine is a different scenario from the war carried out by the US in Iraq, although both are aggressions of the same nature. And in a setting very similar to the Russian aggression against the Ukraine, it took place in the second part of the 1930s, when two wars were fought: the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1936) which only lasted six months, and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). The latter began, like the Ethiopian war, as a national liberation war, then spliced up with World War II and with the entry of the United States into the conflict with Japan in 1941, combining the Chinese national war with the inter-imperialist confrontation. between the US and Japan, and in 1944, with the direct military intervention of the US, the inter-imperialist conflict became the main axis.
In 1934, the aforementioned text by Leon Trotsky explains that the current economic and social crisis of imperialism and the rapid rearmament of the main powers herald a new imperialist conflict. In said text, he also explains how the revolutionaries must combine in the wars of that period the fight for the tasks of national liberation and defense of the USSR, with the fight against all imperialisms, and also explains how the tasks can vary according to which one is in a colonial or semi-colonial country, in an aggressor imperialist country, or in an imperialist country that acts in a war in favor of a national liberation struggle or for the defense of the USSR, that is, an imperialism aligned militarily with the progressive field of a “just” war but to defend their own interests. This last case occurred both in the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935, when England sought to intervene against Mussolini’s Italy that was invading Ethiopia, or when the US intervened militarily to support China in its national liberation struggle against Japanese imperialism. .
The texts in this dossier are just a very initial selection of the great political accumulation that world Trotskyism has in the analysis and direct intervention of both wars of a combined nature, or with multiple contradictions, and that is very useful today.
Trotsky understood the second Italo-Ethiopian War as the place of articulation of a double contradiction or confrontation. It was, of course, about facing the priority struggle to ensure the national sovereignty of a country in the face of imperialist aggression from Italy, and that was definitely the main contradiction of the conflict. But this war was also taking place against a background of rapid rearmament and growing economic warfare between the different imperialist powers, both triggered by the brutal economic crisis of the 1930s, by the unresolved imperialist rivalries after the Treaty of Versailles (1919), and, obviously, due to the structural need of imperialist capitalism to constantly increase its profits, which requires the conquest of new territories that provide both resources such as labor and markets to realize surplus value. It was, therefore, a national liberation war waged in a context of a prologue to a new imperialist war.
Trotsky entered into a direct discussion with the group of Trotskyists who were active in the ILP (Independent Labor Party), grouped in the Marxist Group, where CLR James was a militant, of which we present two texts. The ILP Trotskyists took a clear stance in support of the Ethiopian resistance against the Italian invasion, even though Ethiopia was led by Haile Selassie, a tremendous dictator. For them they organized a great campaign of solidarity, promoting boycotts of the Italian arms industry and Italian imperialism in general, in what they called “worker sanctions”, to oppose the imperialist sanctions of the conservative government of Baldwin and the United Nations, which the ILP rejected it outright. Trotsky fully supported the policy of the Marxist Group, both the firm rejection of any kind of support for imperialist sanctions, since the jingoistic social pressure had to be combated and the separation of the British proletariat from its own bourgeoisie, and the active support of all activities of solidarity with Ethiopia and worker sanctions. On this second front, the GM Trotskyists had to face the social-pacifist pressures of sectors of the British social democracy that preferred neutrality in the war. CLR James’s texts show how the British Trotskyists mobilized a solidarity campaign with Ethiopia at the same time as, or rather, following a clear denunciation of their own imperialist government and its opportunistic policy of sanctions.
In relation to the second conflict, in the letter to Diego Rivera (also in the dossier), Trotsky explains the nature of the Sino-Japanese war and what should be the policy of the Chinese revolutionaries and the rest of the world: fight against Japan for national liberation and at the same time politically confront the Chiang Kai-shek regime. Any stance of neutrality in that war would be a disaster. At the same time, Trotsky was also in discussion with the American SWP, which even carried out a great campaign of active solidarity with both the Chinese Trotskyist party and the resistance movement, collecting direct aid funds and promoting workers’ boycott actions against the Japanese arms industry, while criticizing the bourgeois leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and, of course, the real interests and the hypocrisy of the Roosevelt government that intervened in that war against Japan. The text “The War in the Far East” demonstrates that the policy of Trotskyism is always to seek an independent solution for the working class, which does not trust any bourgeois leadership and even less imperialist.
In both cases, then, the challenge of the revolutionaries was twofold: first, to analyze the character of the concrete conflicts by their objective tendencies in the class struggle and the consequences, and not simply by their directions, taking into account the totality of the contradictions , and, second, to develop a consistent political intervention in each country. Both in Ethiopia and China, the leaderships of the anti-imperialist struggle were neither workers nor socialists, but rather bourgeois and reactionary, but Trotsky and the revolutionaries explained the progressive character of one military front before the other, the importance of democratic slogans of national liberation and that the victory of the Ethiopian people as well as the victory of the Chinese people against the aggressive imperialisms would unleash a new wave of massive struggles and revolutions of the oppressed. But, at this juncture, the Trotskyists did not stop for a second from delimiting themselves politically from the supposed “friendly” imperialisms that sought to intervene in said conflicts to defeat their imperialist competitors and increase their own colonial dominance. Klement’s 1937 text, which is a commentary on a key part of Trotsky’s 1934 text, analyzes the tasks of revolutionaries in imperialist countries when their own governments intervene in progressive wars to help them, and is of great importance today, for it explains how the task of revolutionary defeatism is accomplished according to the specific nature of each war and according to the role of each imperialism in it.