Lenin, faced with a war, wondered: “Can war be explained without relating it to the preceding policy of this or that State, of this or that system of States, of these or those classes? [sociales]? Y concluded: “This is the cardinal question, which is always forgotten, and whose incomprehension means that, out of ten discussions about the war, nine turn out to be a vain dispute and mere talk.” These were their questions:What is the class character of the war, why has it been unleashed, which classes support it, what historical and historical-economic conditions have originated it?[1].
Presentation of the dossier on Ukraine in the magazine Marxismo Vivo No. 18, May 2022.
From the LIT-FI we maintain that the occupation of Ukraine by Russian troops, which began in February, is a war of national aggression by the second military power in the world against a much weaker nation, which it wants to subdue by violence, with methods of extreme cruelty. Ukraine, throughout its history, except for the short initial period of the USSR during Lenin’s lifetime, has been subjugated, first by Tsarism and then by the Stalinist bureaucracy, and after the capitalist restoration, the different bourgeois factions that “robbed ” state property, are struggling to stay in the orbit of European imperialism.
The Russian intervention in Ukraine is a continuation of the war and bloody occupation of Chechnya, of the Russian military intervention in Georgia, of direct support for the dictator Lukashenko in Belarus, of the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Donbass, and of the military intervention in Kazakhstan last January.
Putin’s press conferences with the image in the background of Catherine the Great, the great figure of the expansion of the Russian Empire in the 18th century, are quite a declaration of intent. The nature of this conflict is a war of national aggression, whose purpose is the military, economic and political control of a country and of the resources that the Kremlin considers essential for its capitalist project of the Great Russia.
The invasion paradoxically reflects the economic weakness of Russian capitalism, economically dependent and dominated by a handful of oligarchs whose role in the world division of labor is basically reduced to that of energy supplier. However, Russian capitalism is, at the same time, a nuclear military superpower inherited from the USSR which, in order to preserve its interests as a power in what it considers its vital space, must resort to military force, with which it sustains submissive dictatorships. However, Putin’s wars of aggression only add grist to the mill of European and North American imperialism.
Decades after capitalism was restored in China and Russia, field theorists continue to claim that what defines a “anti-imperialist” is to be in “The field where NATO is not”. On the basis of this argument, they support Putin’s war of aggression. But, in truth, these theses are supported by reactionary and anti-popular capitalist regimes such as those of Cuba, Nicaragua or Venezuela, or that of the Iranian theocracy, which seek refuge in Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China, which they some, by the way, have turned into nothing less than a bourgeois struggle in the “real socialism” of our days.
In the face of a war of national aggression, the only legitimate position from the point of view of the interests of the international working class is solidarity and support for the resistance of the Ukrainian people to defeat imperial aggression.[2] Russian. That is why we must be in the military camp of the Ukrainian people.
The first text of this dossier on Ukraine reconstructs the trajectory of the Ukrainian people’s struggle for self-determination, up to the capitalist restoration. Next, the texts by Leon Trotsky and other authors discuss the attitude of the revolutionaries towards the wars of national aggression, the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, and the Italo-Ethiopian war of 1935.
[1]socialism and war1915.
[2] The term “imperial” used above is not to be confused with the category Capitalist Imperialism used by Lenin, in which a few countries, due to the power of their financial capital, have a State policy of subjugating the majority of States. Although Putin’s Russia has an oppressive policy towards the countries around it, it does not seem to us that Russia is involved in a war for a new division of the world, and yes, for control of the historical region of the tsarist empire. As Lenin affirms, in the epoch of capitalist imperialism the international politics of finance capital “gives rise to abundant transitory forms of state dependence. For this age without typical not only the two fundamental groups of countries –those that possess colonies and the colonies– but also various forms of dependent countries…” (VI Lenin. Imperialism, the upper phase of capitalism. Madrid: Editorial Fundamento, 1974.