Reading the emerging discourse around the war in the Ukraine in Cosmonaut’s Letters section, I can’t help but note a commonality between clashing interlocutors. Sure, there are those who argue that Russia’s actions are the inevitable result of NATO’s aggressive expansion. Then there are those who argue that nonetheless, Russia’s invasion was a contingent decision with lethal consequences, and as such needs to be opposed. There is more to the debate and good points are made on both sides, but I want to get to the commonality.
The proposed programs on all sides of the debate (I skipped some more nuanced responses that aim to centre class struggle) make demands with the sort of confidence and scope befitting a mass party with serious worker support. Revolutionary defeatism for example is a theoretically and politically articulatable position, yes. But it is also historically speaking a mass movement. It required a level of struggle that none of us have ever experienced. It is not just something Lenin wrote a polemic about, it is the life’s work of countless unsung party members. If the mass party that can pull something like that off exists today, please point me in its direction because I will send my $5 to them instead Cosmonaut. I’m trying to keep it somewhat light hearted here, but seriously: we went from largely denying war could happen, to formulating grand strategic schemes about how to end it. It feels like we’ve spun through a full cycle of grieving and landed straight back at denial.
I would like to then, propsie a little bit of humility. I’m glad to say I haven’t seen anywhere near as many edgelord jokes as I’d expected among lefties. But I would suggest that those jokes are in some sense just a more vulgar version of writing the perfect strategic program: both are responses fueled by fear and shame. Fear of being left out of an historical event, and the corresponding shame of being quite powerless. It’s okay to feel these things. In a lot of ways we are powerless. And it’s important to turn to your immediate friends and comrades; to both receive and offer support. It’s also important to take the time to empathize with the real workers and socialists on the ground. As a starting point, I can recommend listening to Radio War Nerd’s Episode 319 – Escape from Kiev.
Before you dismiss all this as liberal nonsense, ask yourself what exactly you feel about this whole cluster fuck. Have you identified specific emotions yet? I mentioned fear and shame. There are others: anger, curiosity, sadness, joy. This is a common technique in family systems therapy: learning to identify your emotional response to an event so that you can eventually regulate it. Most of the time patients will first respond to the question “how do you feel”, with something along the lines of “I think it’s unfair that XYZ happened, and now Person A is trying to pretend that Person B did this or that.” The therapist then explains that that is a description of the situation, not of an emotional state.
I’m not mentioning this to redirect excited political energy into personal navel gazing – quite the opposite. I don’t believe that a realistic appraisal of the macropolitical situation, and more importantly socialists’ feasible agency within it, is possible until some of these emotions have been processed. Until that happens, the response will be just that: excited. A sort of unclear call to the barricades, accompanied by fervent debates about where the barricades are.
If you buy my argument in principle then your next question might be: how do we know once we’ve processed that first wave of emotion? After all, at some point action is needed. There’s no clear answer to that. But my sense is that if it is done with intent, it is a question of days rather than months. Further, there are a few signs that we are on the right path: less talking past one another, more hashing out of specifics, a shift from high level demands to concrete objectives. Perhaps, a clearer awareness of what we are willing and able to sacrifice, and to what end.
Not with answers, but with solidarity.
– Jules
