Ukraine, Russia and the importance of questions
As in every conflict between capitalist states, the ideological debate and propaganda revolve around law and national sovereignty. Whether Russia has the right to claim its security space, whether Ukraine is a sovereign country to decide its alliances, whether it is fair and legitimate for the United States to extend the borders of NATO, whether the European Union has to maintain strategic autonomy, whether the European bourgeoisie itself is clear about what that means.
But just as important as the answer is the terrain on which the question is situated. And all the above questions are placed on a bourgeois terrain, the one that makes us end up supporting one capitalist state against another, against the basic principles of internationalism and class autonomy that have historically defined the proletarian movement.
Because what is disputed in the current conflict between Russia and NATO is the distribution of our exploitation and the domination of the territory. The development of capitalism implies, on the one hand, the contradiction between the need to exploit labor and the need to expel it with new technologies, which introduces it into a permanent economic crisis, of exhaustion of its own mechanism to produce wealth in the terms of the commodity. On the other hand, this same development makes the capability of a capitalist power to maintain its hegemony over the rest, or even over a stable and robust bloc, even more doubtful, at the same time as it drives the different countries to fight among themselves to become regional powers. The result we are facing is not, as is sometimes said, the trend towards the replacement of the USA by China in the world gendarmerie, but the geopolitical fragmentation of the different powers to ensure their control over the region.
It is in this effort that Russia finds itself in opposition to the US and NATO in the current conflict with Ukraine. The US is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain its world hegemony, as demonstrated by its withdrawal from Afghanistan. They have, in fact, even more difficulties to keep control over their own territory, which is affected by a social polarization that not even the drums of war are managing, at least for the moment, to keep sutured. For its part, Russia exercises its imperialist control over the states surrounding it to guarantee itself a «strategic depth» -a belt of cushion states to militarily soften its own pretensions of hegemonic power-, even at the cost of the bloody repression of the proletariat, as has been seen in its military intervention to crush the revolts in Kazakhstan. The European Union, that conglomerate of old powers in search of lost glory and without the capacity to unite an economic and military policy of its own, has been caught in the train wreck: Germany divided between its energy dependence on the Russian gas pipeline and its alliance with the US, France frustrated by its attempts to sweep under the rug its defeat in Mali by leading European diplomacy autonomously from the US, whose tragicomic end was the failure of the negotiations between Putin and Biden with the arrival of Russian tanks in Donbass.
War is part of the nature of capitalism, and of the nature of every national State. In this sense, every state is imperialist: be it the US, Russia or Ukraine, every state tries to line up the proletariat behind its own bourgeoisie to serve as cannon fodder in the imperialist war. The result of the current escalation of tension and the entry of Russian troops into eastern Ukraine has been, once again, the exacerbation of Ukrainian nationalism and pro-Western on one side, pro-Russian on the other, which only serves to hide the class nature of this conflict under the slogans of democracy, sovereignty and international law.
That is not our terrain. Our terrain is that of the defense of class interests outside and against all national and imperialist interests. The only way that the current conflict in Ukraine can be understood is through the basic principles of revolutionary defeatism: class unity across all borders, class war against the bourgeoisie itself, world proletarian revolution.