La Cause du Peuple – About the situation in Ukraine

We hereby share a translation of an article published by La Cause du Peuple.

For 1,143 days, a war of plunder has been raging in Ukraine and against its people. 1,143 days of carnage in which hundreds of thousands have been killed, towns and villages have been wiped off the face of the earth, and atrocities have been committed on a scale not seen in Europe since the Second World War. After eight years of conflict in eastern Ukraine, the widespread invasion has set the world ablaze. Its nature is also clearly unprecedented, as we have not seen a direct attempt to destroy a nation through annexation on the continent for decades. We have an imperialist power, Russia, that wants to annex a large part, if not all, of a sovereign state.

The situation in Ukraine is complicated for many, but it is also a ‘catharsis’ that allows us to get to the bottom of things. The difficulty in taking a fair position stems from the fact that it is the point of convergence between several contradictions that are sweeping the world, the main one between oppressed nations fighting for their independence and the imperialists, and the secondary one between the imperialists themselves, who are fighting for hegemony, but also between the bourgeoisie and the Ukrainian masses. The war in Ukraine is part of the life-and-death struggle between the imperialists to redivide the world and the semi-colonized nations for their total independence. In this inter-imperialist struggle, the spoils are the oppressed nations.

We must be clear that the main contradiction in the world today is between the imperialist states and the semi-colonial nations (the Third World). The national liberation struggle of the peoples and nations of the Third World is the basis and center of the World Proletarian Revolution. It could not be otherwise: 70% of the world’s masses are concentrated in these countries. It is extremely important to keep this in mind when we study the political situations in the world, otherwise we will go astray and fall into idealism. That is, we will take what we think is right as the truth outside of objective realities. The most current example is the relationship of revolutionaries with Hamas or all other Islamist national liberation movements. As revolutionaries, we want the end of capitalism, patriarchy, etc.; Hamas has a reactionary social and economic policy, so we do not recognize it as a movement “worthy” of being defended in the struggle for Palestine. This is a typically idealist position, whereas if we are Marxists we understand that the main problem in Palestine is Zionism-imperialism, in which case Hamas becomes an objectively revolutionary force of the first order. The movement organizes the masses politically and militarily to resist Israel and its masters where no one else does.

It is therefore Marxism that allows us to untangle the knot of contradictions that drives each process, it is Marxism that allows us to understand what is primary and secondary in each phenomenon and therefore what indicates the movement and direction of the process.

Understanding this, we can clearly affirm that the main contradiction in Ukraine is between the Ukrainian nation and Russian imperialism. This means that the war is just from the Ukrainian point of view, it is a war of national liberation, and unjust from the Russian side, it is a war of plunder. We must therefore unquestionably support the struggle of the Ukrainian nation for its freedom and, today, clearly for its survival. The “geopolitical” analyses (i.e., the bourgeois and even fascist analysis of imperialist relations in the world) that give Russia some justification or other are nothing more than a bourgeois view of relations between nations and therefore in fact support the right of Russian imperialism to destroy, annex, and plunder Ukraine.

Similarly, people who, under the pretext that the Kiev government is closely linked to US imperialism, or that Nazi groups are operating within the Ukrainian armed forces, declare that this is not a just war, are in fact supporting Russian imperialism in its war of aggression.

It is understanding the secondary contradiction that allows us to understand what is at stake with NATO. The US and secondary imperialist powers such as the UK, Germany, and France have seized, more or less quickly depending on their interests with Russia, the opportunity presented by the Russian invasion to advance their pawns in the struggle for the redivision of the world.

By arming Ukraine and taking direct control of military operations, the US-NATO alliance saw a way to weaken Russia and strengthen NATO’s stranglehold on Eastern European countries in order to integrate them ever more closely into the anti-Russia apparatus. The policy towards Russia is part of a broader context, that of the confrontation between the US and China for global hegemony. Russia is a strategic problem for the US because it remains the only power capable of physically annihilating it. One way or another, this problem must be resolved.

For its part, Russian policy is merely the finalization of the revisionism that took power in the USSR after Stalin’s death. Starting with Khrushov, the peripheral republics of the USSR became semi-colonies, with the USSR returning to the fundamentals of Tsarism. It was the Russian bourgeoisie that decided to put an end to the USSR and grant formal independence to the peripheral republics, arguing that they were too costly for Russia. The idea was to keep them under indirect domination. From the final collapse of Soviet revisionism, the Russians pursued an imperialist policy against the peoples directly or indirectly under their domination. The “new” Russia, old tsarist rot, waged wars of aggression directly against its own peripheral nations, notably the two genocidal wars against the Chechens fighting for their independence. It exploited the ethnic complexity of the Caucasus to subjugate the nations of that region. It supported “separatism” in Georgia to the point of invading the country in 2005. It used the Armenian national minorities in Azerbaijan to create instability conducive to controlling the area. By arming Armenia and posing as a peacemaker, it subjugated the bourgeoisie of both countries. It also relied heavily on Russian minorities in the former Soviet republics, such as in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Of course, other imperialists, first and foremost the US, have used the just struggles of nations for independence to advance their own interests and develop their own imperialist policies.

We can therefore see that the invasion of Ukraine is not an exception in Russian policy produced by US hegemonic ambitions, but rather a deliberate policy dating back to Tsarism, attempting to reconstitute the lost empire. Of course, the US is making full use of the national contradictions of the Russian Federation to try to cause the country to implode nationally. Putin has repeatedly said that the national policy of the communists was the worst thing for Russia, from his chauvinistic point of view, and with good reason: he is now sitting on a real bomb, because the Federation is a prison for the peoples. In order to exist as an imperialist power, Russia must secure what it considers to be its backyard. As an imperialism in advanced decay, it is cornered, with its back against the wall, and can only react with all kinds of atrocities. This policy of redrawing the world, including national borders, is not unique to the Russians. Other imperialists are pursuing the same policy in the Middle East, as they did in Europe by dismantling Yugoslavia (which became a prison for peoples under Titoism) or by separating the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The smaller the countries, the less they can defend themselves against imperialist powers.

The other question is clearly whether supporting the Ukrainian patriotic war means supporting the Kiev government and the fascist gangs. The first point to grasp is that before the war, Ukraine was not at all ready. Only a minority of Ukrainians in the Lviv region were nationalist and anti-Russian. The ties with Russia were very strong simply because Russian speakers are a large minority in Ukraine, there are many Ukrainians in Russia (5.8 million before the war) and there are many binational marriages. The two nations are very close, even if the nationalists are trying to “decouple” them by inventing a fantasy history. More seriously, the army was weak and the regime deeply corrupt (which has not changed). It was therefore necessary to mobilize the masses very quickly, politically but above all militarily. To do this, they used Nazi paramilitary groups such as the Azov battalion, which, well organized and financed, were able to inspire mobilization. They took advantage of this to destroy all dissenting political opposition, particularly on the “left.” Whatever happens, we must not focus on these groups, which have been integrated, willingly or by force, into the official army, in order to take a position on the war. Despite this, the war is just because, as we have said, it stems from the first contradiction. The French Communists allied themselves with the Gaullists during the Anti-Fascist National Liberation War in a united front because the main contradiction in the world was between the USSR, the first socialist state and red base of the proletariat, and Nazi Germany, the most aggressive form of monopoly in crisis. In France, the main contradiction was the loss of national independence and the occupation of the territory by a foreign army with a collaborationist government of traitors.

The most important question is to define the current regime in power, embodied by Zelensky. Let us be clear: Zelensky and his gang are selling their homeland to US imperialism in the hope of freeing themselves from the Russians. Pre-war Ukraine was a semi-colony that had fallen politically under US-NATO domination since 2014, but Russia retained relatively strong economic and political power. The army and secret services were infiltrated by pro-Russian agents, and the oligarchy was economically linked to them. The characteristic feature of these comprador regimes is that the bourgeoisie is bound hand and foot to the interests of the imperialists. The figure of the oligarch represents this completely rotten and corrupt social layer, which is above all treacherous to its country. This economic and political base has not changed with the war; on the contrary, Ukraine has lost all form of independence. The impossibility of a general popular mobilization is due to its semi-colonial character, as well as the absence of a struggle against the number one scourge of this country, corruption. Billions have gone directly into the pockets of a handful of traitors. Zelensky is obviously on that list.

The result is clear: Ukraine will be chained to the US-NATO militarily, economically, and politically. Recently, an agreement between Trump and Zelensky sealed Ukraine’s total economic submission to the US. Ukraine will be carved up by the “Western” imperialists, and the Russians will lose everything. After the ceasefire, Ukraine will be a state totally dependent on the US-NATO, a ruined, occupied, divided, and impoverished satrapy. Zelensky’s policy will be revealed in the future, as will the trap set by the US-NATO imperialists who pushed Ukraine into war by assuring it that they would support it to the end.

Ukraine cannot win; it can only negotiate a ceasefire as quickly as possible, which will in any case be catastrophic. The lies about Russia and its army that we have been fed since the beginning are becoming increasingly clear to us. It is true that Russia thought it was carrying out a coup, a lightning war in a single campaign, using a degenerate blitzkrieg that consisted of targeting command posts and logistical lines. Like the Nazis, it thought that Ukraine would collapse politically and morally in a matter of days, considering Ukrainians to be sub-Russians. This mistake had serious consequences for the Russians, as the masses rose up and resisted the first campaign by all means. From the outset, Russia aimed for a limited war, and this is still the case, but even limited, its resources are no match for those of Ukraine. Above all, Russia has a much larger pool of manpower than Ukraine, which is virtually running out of men. The war of movement has turned into a long war of attrition. The Ukrainian tactical offensives, their excellent defensive skills, and their legendary heroism do nothing to change the catastrophic situation from a military and moral point of view.

The future of Ukraine is bleak. The post-war period will see part of Ukraine (20% of the territory) directly colonized by the Russians, where the national industrial base is located. The “free” part will be a semi-colony totally crushed by US imperialism and its allies. But the Russians will not emerge victorious from this conflict; they have in fact greatly exacerbated the problem they wanted to solve. They have strengthened NATO and the EU, which will rearm as never before since the end of the Cold War. With productive forces that are no match for those of Russia, the situation will become perilous for Putin and his gang. Well-equipped, well-trained troops will be at their borders, and the few square kilometers gained in Ukraine offer no strategic advantage. In effect, Ukraine is now part of NATO. Worse still for Russia’s decaying imperialism, it will find itself increasingly dependent on the Chinese social imperialists. Putin, who thought himself a great strategist, finds himself cornered in his Federation, which will never regain the splendor of the Empire.

There will be no peace in Ukraine, but a 10-year armistice, which is the time needed to rearm and mobilize Europe. Meanwhile, the situation will become tense everywhere. Ukraine will become a gigantic barracks, just like the Baltic states and Poland. The masses of these countries will serve as cannon fodder in the next confrontation with Russia, which will happen if there are no proletarian revolutions on the continent, while Germany, France, the US, etc. will provide the officers.

All this will have major consequences for political action in our country. The regime can only become more reactionary because there is an urgent need to restructure the economy for war and to mobilize the masses for its disastrous projects. Reindustrialization will redevelop a working class that will be forged in struggle, because restructuring can only come about through the destruction of our social rights. Revolutionaries will have to firmly oppose the march toward war by opposing it with the necessity of revolution, which is in fact a revolutionary war.

The most important thing lies in two things:

• Keeping in mind that the main contradiction is between the oppressed nations and the imperialist states, the heart of the Proletarian Revolution lies in the Third World, where important mass movements, rebellions, and resistance are developing, with the People’s Wars as their vanguard, which will experience a new upsurge with the new situation. These revolutionary developments will have immense repercussions in the imperialist countries and will shine like a beacon in the night. This is the main aspect.
• The intensification of inter-imperialist struggles, driven by the confrontation between China and the US, will make Europe a front in a hypothetical inter-imperialist war. The development of this trend, with all its consequences, will make Europe a future battlefield for imperialism but also for revolution, a phenomenon that exists only in the form of contradiction. This means that the restructuring of imperialism into a “war economy,” political reaction, and the reactionary mobilization of the masses are opening up a period of historic crisis that we will seize.

The peoples do not want war, but to stop the imperialists’ war madness, we have no choice but to oppose it with a new Paris Commune in the form of a Prolonged People’s War. There is therefore only one future: either an inter-imperialist war that we will transform into Revolution or, and this is the best solution, Revolutionary Wars that will prevent it from happening. For the first time in history, the proletariat and the popular masses have the possibility of averting imperialist war through the Proletarian Revolution.