Matthew Strupp argues that revolutionary defeatism, not capitulation to imperialist war aims, must guide the response of the US Left to the Ukraine War.
The following article is based on a talk I delivered to Northern Indiana DSA for an educational meeting they held on the subject of the war in Ukraine on October 28th, which was followed by an interesting discussion that ranged from the movements against the US invasions of Vietnam and Iraq, to the present political climate in the United States, the impact of the war on the European economy and the workers’ movement as well as the environment, and the necessity of an independent working-class political party. Comrades in the chapter who read Cosmonaut and follow Marxist Unity Group requested we send a speaker to help them build consciousness around the role of US imperialism in causing and fueling this war and to help build the foundations for an anti-war movement that can resist the plunge toward nuclear devastation.
I drove down to South Bend, Indiana from Madison, Wisconsin to deliver the talk because, in my view, the relative lack of anti-war activity from the Left with respect to the US proxy war in Ukraine represents a dereliction of duty. Even worse, sections of the Left have capitulated to militarism and become social-imperialists, cheering on US arms shipments to the Ukrainian nationalist government and fascist paramilitaries. In spite of DSA’s admirable statement calling for US withdrawal from NATO and rejection of any form of intervention, militarization, or sanctions, every DSA member in Congress has voted for tens of billions of dollars in arms to Ukraine. Thus far, there hasn’t been a rebellion in DSA’s rank and file comparable to that which occurred over Representative Jamaal Bowman’s votes for military aid to Israel last year. My hope in publishing the text of this talk is to encourage others in DSA and on the Left to follow the example of Northern Indiana DSA in putting anti-imperialism on the table and beginning to organize against the war and to encourage DSA members to challenge our organization’s failure to practically carry out its anti-war position.
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I’d like to thank Northern Indiana DSA for inviting me to speak tonight on the subject of the US proxy war in Ukraine and socialist anti-war strategy. As I understand it, the aim of putting on this event is to help build the foundations of a socialist anti-war movement in the US. As US involvement in the war deepens, the number of arms it sends to the Ukrainian nationalist government and fascist militias grows, and as the war becomes increasingly framed as a direct conflict between NATO and its geopolitical rivals, threats of nuclear war intensify.
Since a socialist anti-war movement is the goal, I will talk a little bit about the position of DSA in relation to the war before moving on to talk about the buildup to and progress of the war and then returning to the history and present state of socialist anti-war politics.
I’ll read aloud DSA’s official statement on the war since it’s pretty short:
The Democratic Socialists of America condemns Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and demands immediate diplomacy and de-escalation to resolve this crisis. We stand in solidarity with the working classes of Ukraine and Russia who will undoubtedly bear the brunt of this war, and with antiwar protestors in both countries and around the world who are calling for a diplomatic resolution.
This extreme and asymmetrical escalation is an illegal act under the United Nations Charter and severely threatens the livelihoods and well-being of working-class peoples in Ukraine, Russia, and across the region. We urge an immediate ceasefire and the total withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine.
There is no solution through war or further intervention. This crisis requires an immediate international antiwar response demanding de-escalation, international cooperation, and opposition to unilateral coercive measures, militarization, and other forms of economic and military brinkmanship that will only exacerbate the human toll of this conflict.
DSA reaffirms our call for the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict. We call on antiwar activists in the US and across the world to oppose violent escalations, demand a lasting diplomatic solution, and stress the crucial need to accept any and all refugees resulting from this crisis. Much of the next ten years are coming into view through this attack. While the failures of neoliberal order are clear to everyone, the ruling class is trying to build a new world, through a dystopic transition grounded in militarism, imperialism, and war. Socialists have a duty to build an alternative.
No war but class war.
Very admirably, DSA’s International Committee has also begun a petition campaign aimed against the tens of billions of dollars in arms the US has sent to Ukraine since February and the sanctions that have been imposed on the Russian people.
However, DSA’s elected officials have acted in a way that directly contradicts the organization’s official policy, with every single DSA member in Congress voting in favor of every new round of funding for arms to Ukraine that has been proposed. This is a serious capitulation to militarism. Tens of billions of dollars to the arms industry is no chump change, and it follows the failure of DSA to effectively discipline its member Jamaal Bowman for his votes in favor of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel last year, with Bowman announcing after the decision not to expel him that he would gladly vote the same way again.
The only members of congress who have rebelled against the bipartisan war policy are a group of several dozen hard-right republicans. This means that the far right, rather than the left, has been able to monopolize the growing anti-war sentiment and frustration with the recklessness of the US ruling class in pursuing a war policy that puts us on the brink of nuclear devastation.
This is a big problem for the Left if it wants to formulate an anti-war politics. The cowards in the Congressional Progressive Caucus used it as their excuse for retracting their mild criticism of US policy in Ukraine and call for direct negotiations with Russia earlier this week, saying they didn’t want to sound like Republicans. In their retraction statement, they replaced their mild criticism with the ultra-hawkish position that negotiations can only follow a total Ukrainian victory. If this means Ukraine taking back the whole of the Donbass and Crimea, which is how both the US and Ukraine are defining victory at this time, it is an extremely bloodthirsty pro-war position that involves significant fighting by a NATO proxy on territory that Russia now considers it’s own.
Now to the war itself. I’ll present the background to the war in Ukraine through three distinct prisms: 1) US grand strategy, 2) post-Soviet Russian state interests, and 3) Ukrainian national politics since the Euromaidan movement in 2014.
What is US grand strategy? Mike Macnair has convincingly argued in a recent talk at the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Communist University, and in a subsequent article in the Weekly Worker, that the US is a declining global hegemon, the latest in a series of leading states of the capitalist world economy, and is primarily motivated by a need to constrain the rise of any potential peer competitor. A peer is, in general, a capitalist state which is economically strong enough to subordinate the economies of other states to its own, as the United States does. A peer competitor is a peer state that is militarily and economically strong enough, and politically inclined, to reject the United States’ role as hegemon and rule setter of the capitalist world system and begin to take an equivalent role in relation to its own subordinate states, thus threatening to replace the role of the United States on a global scale. Macnair quotes a RAND Corporation report from 2001 which states the US strategy in these circumstances:
the hegemon’s problem is how to remain one for as long as possible, at an acceptable cost. A peer does not arise in a vacuum. If the hegemon sees a peer competitor emerging, it will impose additional costs upon the proto-peer to slow its growth and prevent a challenge from emerging. Imposing costs can range anywhere from punitive trade measures to outright sponsorship of internal strife. Such ‘conflict imposition’ is a tool of the hegemon in regulating potential challenges.1
This describes a purely destructive pattern of behavior aimed at stalling the inevitable. The US shows its might by proving it can still wreck places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela, but it has no constructive role in building up subordinate states like it did in the immediate post-war period for its allies in Western Europe and East Asia.
Russia, however, is not a potential peer competitor of the United States as described above. Its industrial capacity shrunk tremendously with the fall of the USSR and the application of “shock therapy” in the 1990s and it does not have the capacity to effectively subordinate the economies of other states to its own. The only potential peer competitor to the United States at present is China. China has a serious modern army, a strong industrial economy, and has begun to forge its own global economic zone outside of the US-dominated “rules based international order” with the Belt and Road Initiative launched in 2013.
There are a lot of fierce debates within Marxism right now on the nature of contemporary China, whether it’s capitalist or non-capitalist, imperialist or non-imperialist. In my view, China can be understood as having undergone a transition to capitalism without an overthrow of the Communist Party regime in the period from the 1980s to the 2000s, though it is a complex social formation with significant elements of state ownership and control. It is attempting to become an imperialist power on par with the United States in a similar way that Japan was able to upgrade itself into a major power in the late 19th century, which it showed decisively in its victory over Russia in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war. China is not quite there yet. Where the United States has over 750 military bases around the world, China has at most 4 depending on how you count them. Its economy is still a source of superprofits for western firms, so overall it is still more exploited than an exploiter on the global scale.
Where does Russia come in, then, if the United States is most worried about China? Russia is a concern for the United States precisely as a potential ally of China. While its economy is too weak to effectively exploit other states – Marxist economist Tony Norfield ranks it the 16th most economically powerful state, after Australia, India and South Korea – Russia does have a disproportionately strong arms sector, one of the largest in the world, and there have been moves from Russia and China to cement cooperation, with Putin and Xi Jinping announcing a “no limits” partnership in February. Thus Russia stands to play the role of Austria-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire in relation to a rising Germany in the early 20th century as a large state facing economic stagnation but able to contribute significant military force.
If the United States aims to “impose costs” on its Chinese proto-peer, one of the best ways to do so is to go after its Russian ally. No doubt the US end game is that laid out by Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbignew Brezhinski in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard – the full subordination of the Russian economy to that of the United States through another regime change, and even the partition of the Russian state into smaller US dominated units, in Brezhinski’s scheme: a European Russia, a Siberian Russia, and a far-Eastern state. Brezhinski saw Ukraine as the key to blocking Russian assertiveness as well, writing that “Although initially the west, especially the United States, had been tardy in recognizing the geopolitical importance of a separate Ukrainian state… by the mid-1990s both America and Germany had become strong backers of Kiev’s separate identity.”2
Having established how the United States sees Russia, I’ll now move to talk about how Russia sees its own position. From the Russian perspective, the three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union have been characterized by near-total encirclement by US power and influence. In spite of US promises to Gorbachev in 1989 not to expand NATO east of Germany if the USSR allowed the German Democratic Republic to be annexed by its neighbor, the Western Alliance has added 17 new members since, while swearing to every Russian head of state it would not do so. The expansion of NATO has come with the deployment of offensive military systems in these countries and a policy of “nuclear sharing” with members of the alliance; routine NATO nuclear bomber trial flights on the Russian border, and rounds of US-enforced sanctions against Russia.
As mentioned above, the US sees Ukraine as key to these efforts to constrain Russia due to its large size, historic closeness, and its strategic placement above the Black Sea. Therefore the United States has consistently promoted a pro-West Ukrainian-based pro-European nation-building project defined in opposition to Russia in order to decisively separate the two. I’ll describe this more later.
No doubt Russia has not only fears but also aspirations. Russian Marxist Maxim Lebsky, in an essay translated to English for Cosmonaut Magazine, describes Putin’s “project of a big Russian nation” that harkens back to the days of the Russian Empire. This nation building project, which includes the Russian ethnic and language minority in eastern Ukraine, and the anti-Russian West Ukrainian nation building project, define themselves in opposition to each other. I highly recommend comrades read this essay to understand these national projects. Perhaps if Russia had gotten the victory it wanted in the initial stages of the war with its offensive aimed straight at Kiev and had been able to occupy the whole country it could have become an imperialist power able to subordinate the Ukrainian economy to its own. It’s unlikely but surely Putin would have liked it to happen and it matches up to his remarks at the beginning of the war that the Ukrainian nation was a fiction invented by Lenin. This is why, although I see the Russian invasion as a tactically offensive move which is strategically defensive, I don’t think communists should support the Russian war effort and should stand with the Russian peace movement. Thankfully, such a position is utterly marginal on the left to an almost comical degree.3
To discuss the present political situation in Ukraine, it is necessary to go back to the formation of an independent Ukrainian state in the first place. The rough contour of the Eastern border of the present Ukrainian state was initially a product of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, which was a highly concessionary treaty imposed on the newly formed Soviet Republic by the Germans. Because the Bolsheviks were desperate to make peace, the Germans were able to make this border extend quite far into areas populated by ethnic Russians. After the Soviet state regained control of Ukraine, they retained these borders in part because the large Russian minority would serve to bring the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic closer to the rest of the USSR. Kruschev’s addition of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954 was depicted as a gesture to honor the many Ukrainians who served in the Red Army in the Second World War, but there may have been similar ethnic considerations involved here as well since Crimea was and is overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Russians.
Of course, after the fall of the USSR, all the individual SSRs become independent states and the presence of a large Russian ethnic and language minority in Ukraine becomes a source of division rather than one of unity and a considerable political problem for both Ukraine and Russia. As mentioned above, the creation of a pro-Western Ukrainian national identity became a political project for a section of the ruling class based in Western Ukraine who see greater integration with Europe as their path to prosperity. The historic link and cultural affinity of Russia and Ukraine thus become an obstacle, since the conflict between Russia and the West rules out attempting to court both at once. The Donbas had historically been the most important industrial area in Ukraine, with large coal reserves and manufacturing capacity, but the Ukrainian nationalist political project required subordinating this Russian language majority area to their national project, which involved the promotion of the Ukrainian language at the expense of others like Russian and Hungarian. It also involved a retelling of history in a Ukrainian nationalist vein, so the Soviet legacy and the war against the Nazis were downplayed in favor of what was deemed true Ukrainian patriotism. Thus the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Stepan Bandera became the quintessential national heroes for this strand of politics in spite of that organization’s extensive ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews and its alliance with Nazi Germany. The famine that struck the USSR in the 1930s caused in part by forced collectivization affected Ukraine particularly hard due to its role as an agricultural exporter, was also recast as an intentional genocide against the Ukrainian nation, a claim that many historians, even those quite critical of the Soviet Union, dispute.4
Because of the complex ethnic makeup of Ukraine, this nationalist political project couldn’t immediately win out. The Eastern regions’ economic importance meant that they couldn’t be so easily politically unseated, and, to a large extent, Ukraine attempted to play a balancing act between Russia and the West. Victor Yanukovich, who tried to navigate this balancing act, was eventually overthrown in 2014, despite having made significant concessions to Western-centered Ukrainian nationalism compared to previous leaders, including the rehabilitation of Bandera as a national hero.5
The Euromaidan demonstrations in 2013-2014 were triggered by Yanukovich’s decision not to sign the EU Association and Free Trade agreements his government had negotiated because they would have spoiled the balancing act he was attempting between Russia and the West by decisively choosing the side of Europe. The demonstrations in Kiev were not quite fringe but not exactly mass either, and were considerably dominated by far right organizations such as Right Sector. There were sympathetic demonstrations in other West Ukrainian cities and anti-Maidan demonstrations, which had more participation from left-wing organizations like the radical trade union Borotba, in the East. The Western media and intelligence apparatuses pushed the movement into a regime change operation, and the anti-Maidan movement morphed into the present-day separatist movement, though Russian nationalism has largely replaced any left wing character to this movement.
The United States directly influenced the results of the 2014 Ukrainian elections, from which parties deemed “pro-Russian” were barred from participating, with US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland being caught dictating the composition of the new government on a leaked phone call. The new government passed provocative laws heavily restricting Russian language primary and secondary school education and threatened to end the lease of the Russian naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea, which triggered the Russian occupation and annexation of the nearly 70% ethnic Russian peninsula. The Ukrainian constitution now explicitly commits Ukraine to membership in the EU and NATO as soon as it’s offered.
These developments triggered the separatist movement and civil war in the Donbass, with the two oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk declaring so-called People’s Republics and Russia providing irregular military support. In 2015 the Ukrainian government signed the two Minsk agreements with the separatist forces, which stated that Ukraine would not join NATO and the Russian-speaking areas would be granted political and language autonomy within a Ukrainian state. The Ukrainian government has failed to implement these provisions in the 7 intervening years. In the 2019 presidential election, current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky campaigned and won as a peace candidate who wanted to move toward implementation, but once in power, he found that the organized strength of the nationalist right made it impossible unless he wanted to put his government at risk.
Another feature of Ukrainian politics since 2014 has been the ongoing attack on all progressive features of Ukrainian society under the aegis of “de-communization”. On the symbolic level, this has meant tearing down statues of Lenin and other Soviet monuments and repudiating the celebration of the anti-Nazi Soviet war effort in favor of Ukrainian nationalist history. On the material level, it has meant privatization, attacks on social welfare, and anti-trade union laws.
This has all been background to the war that broke out in February with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The immediate reason for the invasion at the time it occurred isn’t clear. The long term dynamics that motivated Russia had been present for years and decades and Russia lost German approval of its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline by making the move. There were reports at the time that the Ukrainian army was preparing an offensive against the separatist republics and there was shelling and exchange of fire in the preceding days, so that may have been the trigger, but as I’ve laid out, the war was ultimately baked into the political and economic terrain of declining US hegemony.
In the first phase of the war, the Russian army aimed straight for Kiev, likely attempting to decapitate the Zelensky government and replace it with a pro-Russian one, though the Russian government now claims that this was a diversion the whole time. Whatever the case, the offensive failed by late March, and Russia shifted its energy to taking and expanding its control in the Eastern Russian language majority areas. The subsequent phases of the war have involved the two sides trading offensives and gaining and losing territory respectively in the East. Most recently, Russia has held plebiscites for annexation in four oblasts it controls: Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. They report percentages in the high 90s in favor of annexations in all four territories. No doubt many supporters of the Ukrainian government will have fled the area, chosen not to vote, or feared the consequences of voting against annexation, so these results can’t be regarded as very meaningful, though they are historically the more pro-Russian areas of Ukraine.
What I hope to have gotten across here is that this war is reactionary on both sides, part of right-wing nation-building projects that run contrary to working-class internationalism. In the case of Ukraine, its national project has become a tool of the world imperialist hegemon to “impose conflict” on a major military ally of its only potential peer competitor. The Russian national project is motivated in large part by fear of the growing encirclement it has faced the past three decades, but there are also “big Russian” aspirations to become a great power again and re-subordinate former parts of the Russian empire.
What should the stance of socialists be toward a war that is reactionary on both sides? This is a question that has a long history in the workers’ movement, and the position developed by Marxists has been called “revolutionary defeatism”. Revolutionary defeatism means standing in principled and vocal opposition to the war aims and making practical inroads against the war effort of one’s own side through anti-war agitation, including among the armed forces when possible. This position was developed because it allows for the unity of the international working class in fighting for a democratic peace when their ruling classes go to war and because in a time of war, all politics become re-oriented around the war question and working for the defeat of one’s own side opens up revolutionary opportunities for posing a totally new policy based on the interests of the workers rather than the capitalists. Revolutionary defeatism breaks out of the logic of the capitalist-imperialist world system and rejects the idea of a “lesser evil” in a reactionary war because the state-connected media apparatus in every country will always be concerned with attempting to portray its own side as the lesser evil. Most Russians probably think this about their government right now and most Americans probably think it about NATO, because there is no revolutionary alternative.
I wrote an article for Cosmonaut a couple of years ago on the subject of revolutionary defeatism which describes some of the relevant history. My approach in that article focused on Lenin’s call to turn the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war and on the necessity of conducting anti-war agitation among enlisted soldiers for revolutionary success. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s possible to turn this war into a civil war in the United States. Lenin made that call in a situation in which there were mass workers’ parties with revolutionary programs and millions of members and supporters in most of the belligerent countries and there was global mobilization for total war. Although the parties of the Second International collapsed in the face of the war’s outbreak, Lenin fought for the foundation of a Third International to lead the struggle against militarism, believing that the training the parties’ rank and file (and the working classes of Europe as a whole) had received in anti-militarism through their experience in the socialist parties made a revolutionary struggle against the war possible. Right now the socialist movement in Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and most of the rest of Europe is extremely weak. We don’t have parties capable of carrying on anti-war agitation to the point of taking power and building majority support in society and among the rank and file of the armed forces. There is not likely to be a revolutionary situation in the time scale of this war.
Thankfully there is an earlier history of principled socialist anti-militarism and revolutionary defeatism to draw on. The size of the socialist movement right now is perhaps comparable to its size in Germany in the 1870s, when the combined membership of the Lassallean General German Workers Association (ADAV) and the Marxist Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP) numbered less than 20,000. In 1870, the two Reichstag deputies of the Social Democratic Workers Party took a principled and public stance against war credits for the Franco-Prussian war from the beginning, even when it appeared to be a defensive war on the part of Prussia against Napoleon III’s invasion, against the advice of Marx. This approach paid dividends when the Prussians won the battle of Sedan and began to march on Paris where the Third French Republic had just been declared. When the Paris Commune was declared in March 1871, Bebel and Liebknecht defended it in the Reichstag, telling the reactionary Junkers there that it was exactly what the workers’ party stood for. They suffered two years of imprisonment as a result. The incredible prestige that the SDAP gained through this bold anti-militarist stance made it desirable for the larger General German Workers Association to merge with them and at the Gotha congress in 1875 they united in the Social Democratic Party, which grew to a party of millions over the next few decades and inspired the creation of organizations modeled after it everywhere from Japan, to Russia to the United States, setting the stage for Lenin to be able to credibly call to turn the imperialist war into a civil war four decades later.
That is what the socialist movement can aspire to gain from opposition to the United States proxy war in Ukraine if we have the guts of Bebel and Liebknecht. The ability to unite all the oppressed and exploited elements of capitalist society around a mass revolutionary opposition party of the working class that can challenge the power of the capitalist state and the ruling class and offer a programmatic and practical alternative democratic-republican and socialist order. Let’s be sure to understand how far below that level of commitment and sacrifice DSA’s elected members in congress are right now when they vote for tens of billions of dollars to advance the US global strategy and expand the war economy. Principled socialist anti-militarism requires courage but it’s what the historical mission of the working class demands.
- Quoted in: https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1410/grand-strategy-and-ukraine/
- Quoted in: https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1389/what-hath-zbig-wrought/
- I was at the Socialism Conference in Chicago this September and was talking to some comrades from the Bolshevik Tendency, who are a split from a split from the Spartacist League, and they were bragging to me about how they were the biggest Left group that supported a Russian victory. Their membership is at most in the dozens worldwide.
- For one account see Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. pp. 273-308.
- This is a point Maxim Lebsky makes in the aforementioned essay published in Cosmonaut. https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/06/putin-and-the-project-of-a-big-russian-nation/