Winning an Earthquake
What is our duty when imperialists go to war?
So, it’s war again.
With Vladimir Putin having ordered a full-scale military invasion of the Ukraine, eastern Europe has been plunged into the biggest crisis since the Balkans conflict of the late 1990s. Hundreds – perhaps thousands – are dead; information and misinformation cross streams constantly in a propaganda battle as fierce as the fighting on the ground; and a sense of dread and paranoia spreads across the world like it was the 1980s all over again. Regardless of the outcome, the toll in human lives, destruction of material and resources, environmental ruin, and economic and political stability will likely be vast.
The timing could not be worse (or, depending on your position on the class pyramid, could not be better), and Putin likely knows it. The world is still reeling from the chaos of COVID-19, and many people are predicting an economic contraction on the level of the Great Depression is coming. Climate catastrophes are likely to happen at an increasingly blistering pace, triggering waves of refugees, right-wing reactions, and more austerity measures, which is more and more the only response national governments seem able to formulate. Whatever the results of the war, its worst and most numerous victims will be the poor and working class.
Because there is a lot of time to fill, and because we aren’t going to fill it talking about anything more immediate, much of the chatter in Western mainstream and social media has focused on what the response of the United States is going to be. If Joe Biden’s state of the union address was any indication, it will be what American foreign policy has been for the last century: belligerent, short-sighted, and incoherent. Questions of multiplying complexity are being asked in a desperate attempt to be ‘even-handed’ and ‘fair’, and to pay lip service to a sort of artificial nuance, but on some basic issues, there should be ironclad clarity.
1. Putin’s actions should be condemned absolutely.
There should be no mistake that the actions of Putin’s government are absolutely wrong, and no excuses should be made for them. Putin is an unapologetic autocrat, a corrupt billionaire, a brutal authoritarian, a violent anti-communist, and an enemy of democracy and freedom. Russia, under his rule, is a broken and crooked oligarchy, and there is no meaningful justification for the invasion of Ukraine. The sooner he is removed from power, the better off we will all be.
2. Counter-aggression by the West is no solution.
If the history of the last century has taught us anything, it is that America’s self-appointed role as the world’s policeman is an unmitigated disaster. We have interfered in the political fate of nations across the globe and in every case, have left them worse off than when we arrived. Whether our intention is economic expansionism based on greed, well-meaning humanitarian intervention, or the mere extension of western hegemony based on false notions of realpolitik and the ‘balance of power’, the incompetence of our political class, the crude application of our military forces, and the inherent exploitation contained in capitalist imperialism has meant that the solution has always been worse than the problem.
All the moral righteousness we can muster, and all the understandable empathy we may have towards the people of the Ukraine, cannot change the simple fact that any war between capitalist powers is a war of imperialism. We need only look at the devastation we left behind everywhere from the Philippines to Afghanistan to see the results of our swinging the cudgel of state power. We are less likely to restore the Ukraine than we are to leave it a smoking ruin.
3. Whatever the outcome of the war, the working class will lose.
All modern warfare has represented wars of the elites. The masses are never consulted on whether they wish to go to war, and when they express an opinion – and that opinion is inevitably against war, because it is the masses who will suffer and die the most – it is against war. This is the sole reason warring nations crank up their engines of propaganda, because betraying one’s class interests is almost always accomplished by either deception or brute force. While the sheer volume of information makes it difficult to gauge support for the war, mass protests within Russia indicate that its citizens don’t want their troops in Ukraine any more than the Ukrainians do.
Ukrainians don’t want to be invaded; Russians don’t want to invade; Americans don’t want to interfere. These decisions are made for the masses, not by them. But the working class will fight the war; the working class will die in the war; the working class will have its possessions, its livelihoods, its happiness, and its future destroyed by the war; and the working class will see whatever power it possesses further reduced and limited by the outcomes of the war. Our duty regarding this or any other war of imperialism is simple and straightforward: refusal.
4. Propaganda is the air we breathe.
At the best of times, our government lies to us and our media repeats those lies, when they are not busy making up lies of their own. In wartime, lies are so pervasive as to be nearly omnipresent. We should have learned by now that America’s ruling class will never be truthful when it comes to foreign policy; our parents who lived through Vietnam should know, we who lived through the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq should know, and those younger than us who lived through the war on terror, the new cold war with China, and even the ludicrous rumormongering around “Havana Syndrome” (first attributed to Cuba before Russia became a more convenient scapegoat) should know.
It is not necessary to think Putin and his cronies pure in intention and innocent of wrongdoing, or to reject the obvious truth that the people of Ukraine are genuinely suffering, to maintain the necessary skepticism towards the war narratives of our elites. The truth is bad enough without having to embellish it with lies meant only to whip up war fever and unquestioning support for the actions of our government. None of us are immune to propaganda, and all of us must learn that at times like this, it is both egregious and inescapable. There will be no apology tomorrow for the lies we are told today, so our only defense must be measured judiciousness.
5. Nationalism is perilous.
Nationalism hand in hand with capitalism has been the great poison of the 20th century, and it shows no sign of lessening its toxicity in the early days of the 21st. It might be comical to see the usual American culture-war framing of the Russian invasion of Ukraine being perpetuated the same way it was during previous conflicts – removing Russian teams from soccer video games, ‘Russian’ vodka being poured down drains, and so forth – but at the fringe of this absurd behavior is a razor’s edge of dehumanization and bigotry, ready to be drawn across the throats of real living people who have nothing to do with the actions of Vladimir Putin. Just as the actions of the Israeli ruling class should not be translated into a generalized anti-Semitism, so too should we resist the urge to demonize the Russian people.
On the other side of this coin, it does not diminish the suffering of the people of Ukraine, nor reduce the great heroism shown by many of its people, to criticize the actions of its state actors when they are worthy of criticism. The egregiousness of Putin’s invasion does not mean we must support Ukrainian fascist movements, and the bravery of Ukraine’s citizens does not mean we must accept the racism shown towards Africans attempting to leave the country by their sides. Reducing all these things to a thin glaze of essentialism does nothing but excuse jingoism and intensify the lust for war.
6. Charges of ‘whataboutism’ are not a cure-all.
It is true that using some variant of ‘Sure, what X did is bad, but what about what Y did?’ can be a distraction from the truly harmful actions of X. But just because this rhetorical device is sometimes misused is not a carte blanche to ignore the actions of Y. Any time we see powers outside the western capitalist-imperial hegemony act in ways our ruling class find unacceptable, the left is quick to point out the times those western powers have done the same thing, or often something even worse, because such examples are not hard to come by. This is almost always met with cries of ‘whataboutism’, or ‘both sides do it’ as an excuse for inaction or exculpation.
There are a number of problems with this. For one thing, ‘both sides do it’ assumes that we on the left are speaking from a position where we believe there are only two sides: the invader and the invaded, the west and the east, the black and the white, the conservatives and the liberals, the foreign and the domestic. We, of course, reject this false dichotomy outright. We do not find an ally in Russia or the Ukraine, or in the United States or Russia or China. Our loyalty is to the people, and our allegiance is to the working classes of all nations. We say ‘both sides do it’ not because we wish to excuse the excesses of either state actor, but because we know the working class has never asked for war.
For another, even if ‘whataboutism’ is wrong, what is being pushed as an alternative is something even worse: exceptionalism. If we ask “How can America condemn Russian imperialism when it has been engaging in its own form of imperialism for decades?”, it is not because we ourselves support Russian imperialism; it is because we oppose all imperialism! The voices crying ‘whataboutism’ go curiously silent when there is no counterpart to Western imperialism, implying that America’s behavior is exceptional and that aggression, interference, and military expansion (of the kind practiced for decades by NATO) isn’t bad when we do it.
We are certainly capable of condemning more than one thing at once; communists have always been against the total package of capitalist crimes in all their forms and by all their practitioners. Over 9,000 Russian citizens were arrested and jailed in anti-war demonstrations over the last week; we can and should condemn this government oppression, celebrate the bravery of the protests, and demand that the people be freed to fight the violence and cruelty of their leaders once more. But we can and should also remind the world that our own government arrested and jailed almost twice that many people during the protests over George Floyd’s murder alone. Many of the people arrested in those uprisings around the police murder of innocent black Americans are still imprisoned; some of them were themselves murdered by police. Pointing this out is not ‘whataboutism’; it is a two-pronged condemnation of state brutality wherever it occurs, and an insistence that we not hypocritically confine our opposition to such acts solely to when they are done by governments other than our own.
7. We are not without hope.
It is so, so easy to despair in the face of this war. We know that war is never the answer. We know that America is not acting from a selfless moral position, but one motivated by greed and power. We know that people are suffering tremendously as we speak. We know that we can trust almost nothing that comes out of the media, that we live in a country that has systematically reduced our ability to direct the affairs of state to nearly zero, and that whatever the outcome of the war, it will only make worse what is already a time of helplessness, depression, deprivation, and fear. And while the one truism of the postwar world has been that America does not militarily interfere with nuclear powers, Putin’s saber-rattling around tactical nukes and America’s bizarre claims that atomic war wouldn’t be that bad is giving those of us who lived through the nuclear paranoia of the Reagan era familiar nightmares.
But all is not lost. We can take inspiration from the everyday bravery of people in Russia who take to the streets in protest against their government’s murderous actions. We can be buoyed by the incredible courage of Ukrainians who stand up to the violence directed at their homeland. We can be proud of Poles who bring supplies to the borders for fleeing refugees, of Germans who offer up their homes to those whose own homes have been destroyed, of the Irish who have stated that no one escaping the war will be turned away. We can praise – and materially support – the many charities and volunteer organizations who refuse to take sides in this war of imperialism but who are finding every way they can to improve the lot of its victims.
Most of all, though, we can, and we must, draw a clear line between the great powers and the working classes of all nations. We must state loudly and unambiguously our opposition to the war on every level, whether it’s military intervention by the West, further aggression by Russia, sanctions that will only harm the poor, or the arming of unvetted insurgent movements within the Ukraine. We must support diplomatic solutions over violent warfare, economic targeting of the rich over austerity for the working class, popular resistance over covert CIA subversion, honest material and historical analysis over moralistic propaganda, justice over punishment, and solidarity over partisanship. And we must organize to build an alternative to capitalism and empire.
The capitalist classes in any country will only fight each other over temporary advantages; they will never jeopardize the capitalist system itself, nor will they do anything that will interfere with its overall functioning. Conflicts engineered by capitalists and for the benefit of capitalists will continue as long as capital commands the armies, and wars to benefit the rich – which this certainly is – will never end as long as the rich are our rulers.