We are living in the most reactionary of times. The depth of the economic crisis has raised inter-imperialist rivalries to a new pitch. War in Ukraine is in essence a war between US, British and European imperialism on the one hand, and Russian imperialism on the other. Behind Russia, however, looms China, whose GDP is set to surpass that of the US by 2028. In its efforts to delay its inevitable relative decline, the US has stepped up its aggression; its determination to crush its far weaker Russian imperialist rival lies behind today’s war in Ukraine. As the US also attempts to bring European imperialism to heel, in particular Germany and France, Britain moves in lock step, its shrill denunciations of Russian ‘aggression’ revealing that post-Brexit, it has no independent influence or role. This was graphically demonstrated when Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov casually swatted away his British opposite number, Liz Truss, at their meeting on 10 February prior to the Russian invasion.
Reaction pervades every aspect of British politics. In the lead-up to the Ukrainian crisis, Prime Minister Johnson appeared to be on the ropes with the flood of revelations related to ‘Partygate’. Yet no one proved capable of delivering the coup de grace: the Tory majority in Parliament too large to make a vote of no confidence a viable option, while the potential threat from the Covid Recovery Group of extreme right-wing Tory MPs was silenced with the ending of Covid-19 public health measures. Johnson has been able to shrug off any potential challenge precisely because there has never been any opposition to his determination to limit, delay or truncate any public health measures to address the Covid-19 pandemic, with the result that over 163,000 people have been socially murdered to date to ensure British capitalism has been as little obstructed as possible in its pursuit of profit. Yet Labour’s stance of ‘constructive engagement’ with this most reactionary of Tory governments has been no more than collusion. Minor disagreements over policy details cannot disguise the fact that over substantive strategy in dealing with the pandemic Labour has never opposed the government. It has been as concerned as the Tory government to keep British capitalism open for business.
In contrast to the indifference of politicians and mainstream media to the deaths of thousands of people, the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been an outpouring of the crudest anti-Russian chauvinism. It has not just been the tabloids, but the supposedly liberal outlets – the BBC and The Guardian leading the charge. Labour leaders have been even more strident than their Tory government counterparts, Keir Starmer insisting on 6 March that sanctions on Russia ‘have to be the strongest possible… They have to not just isolate Russia, they have to make it impossible for Russia to function.’ Writing in The Guardian, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy branded the invasion ‘an unprovoked outrage and a heinous violation of international law’, describing President Putin as a ‘tyrant prepared to take lives, destroy infrastructure and rob his own citizens in the name of a demented imperialist dream’.
Labour is positioning itself very clearly as the party most able to defend the interests of British imperialism as it faces a deepening post-Brexit crisis. Under Corbyn’s leadership the already-diminutive opposition to austerity was demobilised as Labour-led local councils were ordered to continue setting cuts budgets. However ritualistic they were, protests and demonstrations which had numbered tens of thousands during the years of the ConDem Coalition collapsed in size. The pandemic allowed the Labour and trade union leadership to exercise ever greater control: limits on the freedom of assembly were seized on as an excuse to abandon most activity, Zoom meetings maintained the demobilisation and have proved very handy in excluding the few opposition voices. The upshot is that protests against the very real cost-of-living crisis called by the People’s Assembly have numbered no more than a few hundred at most, even in London.
In preparing Labour for government, Starmer has moved ruthlessly against any opposition. Excluding Corbyn from the parliamentary party; driving out hundreds of pro-Palestinian members; recruiting Zionists into prominent positions; hobbling Young Labour are all directed to assuring the ruling class that Labour will be a safe pair of hands. His attack on Stop the War (StW) in The Guardian was part of this. His claim that StW ‘are not benign voices for peace. At best they are naive; at worst they actively give succour to authoritarian leaders who directly threaten democracies’ was one step short of describing it in Thatcherite terms as ‘the enemy within.’ In demonising Putin’s imperialism Starmer does not expect to be challenged over British imperialism’s post-1945 record of more than 140 overseas military actions, let alone the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Yugoslavia.
Former Shadow Chancellor and Labour MP John McDonnell speaks at a Ukraine Solidarity Campaign rally, April 2022
What of the left? Drawing its membership from privileged layers of the working class whose material conditions depend on crumbs passed down from imperialist loot and plunder, the left has offered no meaningful resistance to Starmer’s ideological offensive. StW is clear: in its statement on the Russian invasion it ‘condemns the movement of Russian forces into Ukraine and urges that they immediately withdraw’ and then offers some mild criticism of NATO. However, to make its primary allegiance clear, the banner headline on its website reads ‘Stop the War in Ukraine – Russian Troops Out’. Nothing here to dismay the British ruling class, it would seem. But Starmer was still having none of it: when 11 Labour MPs signed the Stop the War Statement, he issued instructions that all had to withdraw their support else face having the whip withdrawn. They all meekly obeyed. A week later, MPs John McDonnell and Diane Abbott withdrew from a StW rally under pressure from the Labour leadership, McDonnell later gibbering ‘People are dying on the streets of Ukrainian cities. This is not the time to be distracted by political arguments here. Nothing is more important at this time. Nothing should distract us from that. So I won’t feed into that distraction by going tonight.’
Across the left the story has been the same. Momentum was clear: ‘We offer our solidarity with the people of Ukraine against Putin’s act of aggression. Russian forces must withdraw.’ Socialist Workers Party took an initially radical pose when it reminded supporters that ‘Luxemburg’s comrade Karl Liebknecht coined the slogan: “The main enemy is at home.” That should be our watchword today.’ That, however, was for the birds: the placards it then produced for demonstrations and its stalls stated: ‘Russian troops out of Ukraine, No to Western and Russian imperialism, No to NATO.’ No mention here of the enemy at home let alone of its primacy.
Socialist Worker criticised the 11 MPs who so quickly succumbed to Starmer’s threats, complaining that their capitulation ‘risks leaving activists coming under the cosh for criticising NATO, feeling isolated and abandoned.’ That meant nothing in practice. Only a couple of weeks later, on 19 March, the SWP welcomed two of them, Diane Abbott and Richard Burgon, on to its Stand up to Racism platform. It is not possible for the SWP or similar organisations to break with the Labour left: they are all tied to British imperialism through their shared privileged material conditions. Their refusal to break with Labour has contributed to the carnival of reaction we are now experiencing. They are truly forces of the past, their events of ever-diminishing size and significance, banning or proscribing any opposition.
Real socialists and revolutionaries have to move in a very different direction. In 1916, at the height of the First Imperialist War, Lenin analysed a very similar situation where the open social chauvinists (the equivalents of Starmer) were completely discredited, but the radical petit bourgeois forces (the equivalents of the Labour left and the SWP) continued to insist on unity with the open reactionaries. He declared that ‘unless a determined and relentless struggle is waged all along the line against these parties…there can be no question of a struggle against imperialism, or of Marxism, or of a socialist labour movement’. Lenin cited Engels’ rejection of the ‘bourgeois labour party’ of the old trade unions, the privileged minority, and his appeal to the lowest mass, the real majority who were not infected by ‘bourgeois respectability’, concluding that it was necessary to ‘go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism.’ We too need to go to those who are not infected by the ‘bourgeois respectability’ that drives the old left. That means reaching out to young people in particular, and we can only do this by opposing the imperialist Labour Party and its allies on the left all along the line.
Robert Clough
Lenin on war
A trend in the opportunist left has begun to argue that the war between Russia and Ukraine is a war of liberation on the Ukrainian side; some even argue that it is akin to the Palestinian struggle for freedom and argue it should be supported in the same way. This is reactionary nonsense. The position of revolutionaries vis-à-vis any war depends on a concrete analysis of the political content or substance of that war. How do we disclose and define the substance of a war?
‘War is the continuation of policy. Consequently, we must examine the policy pursued prior to the war, the policy that led to and brought about the war . . . The philistine does not realise that war is “the continuation of policy”, and consequently limits himself to the formula that “the enemy has attacked us”, “the enemy has invaded my country”, without stopping to think what issues are at stake in the war, which classes are waging it, and with what political objects.’ (Lenin, Collected Works (CW) Vol 23, p33)
In other words, Marxism requires:
‘. . . an historical analysis of each war in order to determine whether or not that particular war can be considered progressive, whether it serves the interests of democracy and the proletariat and, in that sense, is legitimate, just, etc.’ (CW Vol 23, p32)
Lenin often quoted Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means. In fact, he took it a step further, saying, ‘War is not only a continuation of politics, it is the epitome of politics’ (CW Vol 30, p224), to emphasise that it was not a break from the norm of political struggle, but quite the opposite, especially in the imperialist epoch.
Furthermore, in analysing the substance of any war, communists needed to determine what class aims were at stake:
‘The social character of the war, its true meaning, is not determined by the position of the enemy troops…What determines this character is the policy of which the war is the continuation (“war is the continuation of politics”), the class that is waging the war, and the aims for which it is waging this war.’ (CW Vol 25, p362)
In other words, the military and political issues involved cannot be separated. In the case of Ukraine, it is a reactionary comprador bourgeoisie waging the war, with the full support, short of direct military intervention, of Western military forces; the intention of the Ukrainian ruling class is to ally itself with US imperialism directly against Russian imperialism, and to hand over ownership and control of the massive agricultural and mineral resources of the country to giant monopolies to enable them to be looted and plundered. There is nothing in the war for the Ukrainian working class, and the recent imposition of martial law in the country shows this.
