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A Russian Invasion

The most crucial national question facing the October Revolution was that of Ukraine, a vast territory colonized by Catherine the Great. Russian feudal lords imposed serfdom, brutally converting Ukrainian peasants into serfs and locking Ukraine in the Prison of the Peoples. Ukrainian nationalism was to miss a whole ethnogenetic epoch and remain unhatched.

The Bolsheviks’ palinodes and retractions about which Lenin himself felt "strongly guilty before the workers of Russia, for not having intervened energetically and decisively enough" against the resurgent Great-Russian chauvinism of the rising Stalinist bureaucracy and their ultimate failure to respond adequately fueled the civil war, contributed to containing the revolution within the Tsarist borders, too far away from Europe and especially Germany, and even enabled the king of Romania to bloodily crash the Hungarian Soviets. The famine during Stalin’s forced collectivization, and the continuous national oppression afterward, could only add an anti-soviet and anti-communist character to the Ukrainians’ hate towards their oppressors.

The final implosion of the bureaucratic regime gave birth to a Ukrainian nation-state, yet far too belated on the historical scale. It could only be a post-soviet capitalist state endowed with a novice capitalist class out of ex-bureaucrats, gangsters, and looters.

A capitalist class with two souls within its breast oscillating from its former Russian masters to the triumphant Western Imperialism, but with two, if geographically and economically separated heads as well: the Western and the Eastern oligarchic clans. The former put its bets Westward and opted for an unwavering pro-Western orientation; the latter, economically close to Russia, opted for preserving the profitable ambiguity, halfway between the two imperialisms.

As Russia was asserting its imperialist ambitions, the tensions between the two oligarchic clans could produce – and did produce – political turbulences and even spark a civil war. The 2014 Maidan and Anti-Maidan uprisings had been politically dominated from day one by oligarchs of either clan, along with their imperialist patrons. Yet, the pro-Russian oligarchs were to learn shortly that no ambiguity could be tolerated and to be politically devoured by the Putinist version of Great Russian Imperialism.

Russian Imperialism has finally sought to dismantle the Ukrainian state but, by this threat, has both unified the Ukrainian capitalist class and reinforced its thrust for wholehearted integration into the Western imperialist chain. Thus it has enabled the Ukrainian capitalists to fool the working class and drag it under the wings of Western Imperialism by raising the banner of national Independence, of a just working-class aspiration. But in the imperialist epoch and the Ukrainian political configuration, the typically post-soviet atomized Ukrainian proletariat, instead of its national Independence, could only have a simple capitalist statehood steadily attached to the Western Imperialist chain. The tragedy of the Ukrainian working class, aired on TV from February 2022, has always been its political subordination to this or that faction of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie. They fought and still fight under alien banners.

The global character of the war

In the 1917 preface of his famous brochure Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin classified Tsarist Russia –international bully and colonizer– as an imperialist power, despite its financial capital being far too weak.

Post-Soviet Russia is in a similar position. It is a nuclear power, second only to the USA, coupled with a raw material exporting economy and a comparatively minuscule GDP. Yet, rebounding from the 1990 shock, capitalist Russia has considerably expanded its sphere of influence over a sizeable portion of the former Soviet Far East. Moreover, Russia has today a strong presence in the Middle East and, in co-ordinance with the rising Chinese Imperialism, an equally strong presence in Africa via the Wagner mercenary Group. Russia and China also claim from their Western rivals the arctic resources, which climate change uncovers from eternal ices.

The once only and omnipotent Western Imperialism is losing ground, which the rising Eastern Imperialism moves to gain. The Russian 2014 annexations and its 2022 invasion are part and parcel of this reactionary imperialist confrontation. The direct and secret negotiations between exclusively USA and Russia, which surfaced in the press, clearly highlight this fact.

The War in Ukraine is thus instantiating a hot imperialist rivalry between the Western Imperialist camp with its NATO war machine and the unstable and yet-in-the-making Eastern Imperialist camp around China and Russia. This confrontation, an unjust from both sides war, directly threatens to drive the world proletariat into the imperialist slaughterhouse. Thus supporting either imperialist camp is pro-war politics.

From a working-class internationalism standpoint, the only political initiative worth of support would hopefully be a politically independent agitation of the Ukrainian proletariat yet to come. The workers-soldiers in the belligerent countries need to turn their guns around against their own bourgeoisie. For the time being, our duty as internationalists is to call for the end of the war with no annexations, no indemnities at all and to effectively oppose the war, refusing to relent to either of the imperialist camps while defying and fighting back our own capitalist class; our main enemy is still at home!

The Fascists’ Whereabouts

Since 2014, much of the debate inside the global left has revolved around fascist militias. The openly fascist united front of the Right Sector has visibly dominated the Maidan movement. Its counterpart, the anti-Maidan movement, has been equally dominated by Royalists, Douginists, Cossack nationalists, and Great Russian chauvinists, hardly concealing their reactionary character by glorifying the so-called Great Patriotic War. The leaders on either side had been on the payroll of oligarchs or were simply agents of some imperialist intelligence service, or even both.

The fascist militias being, back in 2014, the only reliable military formations, were indispensable for the Ukrainian capitalist class. But as NATO stepped in and boosted the reorganization of the Ukrainian army, the Ukrainian capitalist class would gradually stop financing fascist militias and sideline their leaders. A fascist political agitation was, by no means, desirable by an unchallenged Ukrainian bourgeoisie. Nor was it more desirable on the other side by the then-stable Bonapartist Putin regime. The Great-Russian fascists were soon to be equally sidelined too.

But, unlike Ukraine, Russian Bonapartism had to pursue the imperialist ambitions of its dominant class. For a long time, the Wagner group, formed in 2014 by former GRU officer Dmitry Utkin and businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, has been the only really active, armed, and politically independent – as the attempted coup d’état demonstrated – fascist organization in the area. Unlike the militias, the Wagner group has been financed and supposedly controlled not by individual capitalists but by the Russian state itself through contracts for overseas war adventurism. 

The Group has a separate political agenda, an undisputed fuhrer, and fascist political inclinations, to be sure. But the most indicative as for its fascist character is the plebeian origin of its soldiers. The mercenary mass of the Wagner Group is mainly composed of criminal prisoners not that much different from the mob of Luis Bonaparte, “the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither” as Marx had once put it.

Putin resorted to the Wagner Group as his military struggled to advance and then to retain its initial territorial gains, but being in need, could no more, evade Prigozhin's claim on state power.

Putin, equally arrogant as once was Croesus, attacked to grab Ukraine out of the reach of Western Imperialism only to achieve the very same outcome: to destabilize his own rule seriously enough to secure impunity and urgent reconciliation with the mutineer and purges in the army.

But as for Putin, it is not just about his own rule but rather about a whole imperialist camp at stake, as all of the overseas expeditions of the Wagner Group could be at risk.

Will Putin concede power or even be overthrown from the right?

Can the Russo-Chinese coordination last?

None of the possible answers to these questions favours the working class and thus the urgent need for a global working class independent anti-war agitation.