War is a constant fact of capitalism today. The operation of the capitalist system inevitably leads to the competitive struggle to appropriate the surplus value produced by the world’s working class — in other words an imperialist struggle. As the amount of surplus value relative to existing capital declines, this struggle becomes more violent eventually leading to war. Over the last 120 years, war has been almost continuous. At times, such as 1914-1918 or 1939-1945, it has been so widespread that it has been called a ‘world war’. The foundation of the UN in the aftermath of the Second World War was intended — according to its founding statements — to be a guarantee of world peace. But somewhere in the world, war has been raging almost constantly since 1945, indeed since the beginning of the 20th century.

Though we see war as a constant factor, the Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a significant deepening of inter-imperialist tensions, over and above the catastrophe for the people of Ukraine and Russia who have been targeted in different ways by the military actions of both sides. The rationale for war is fundamentally economic. The ongoing crisis of the capitalist economy is a result of its insoluble contradictions, but on a national level war can bring some temporary relief by destroying the productive capacity of competitors and directly taking over resources. Ukraine is a major producer of agricultural staples, such as wheat and sunflower oil. It also has significant mineral wealth. Acquisition of these would be an asset to the Russian economy. Failing that, destruction or dislocation of Ukraine’s production would help Russia’s economy by knocking out an economic rival. The political manoeuvrings over disputed elections and the status of the predominantly Russian-speaking regions in East Ukraine over the last 20 years are both the background to, and the consequence of, the manoeuvres by pro-Russian and pro-American factions of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie and external fractions of the capitalist class.

It is not the only war currently being fought, however. Azerbaijan and Armenia have been fighting, with more or less ferocity, since the early 1990s, and the war there briefly blew up again during the summer of 2022; the wars in Syria, Ethiopia, Yemen, Israel/Palestine, Somalia, Iraq, Myanmar and across the Maghreb are continuing; warlords and criminal gangs (sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference) are continuing to ravage Africa and South America. There are more continuing conflicts than can readily be listed; some states are fighting more than one ongoing conflict and they span every continent.⁽¹⁾

None of these conflicts have anything to offer the working class but more misery. Whichever gang is in charge of the state, whether regions and language-groups secede from a particular state, join another state or found their own, are not issues for the working class. It does not change the reality of capitalist relations or exploitation.

The war in Ukraine, though not so far the deadliest of the ongoing conflicts, is nevertheless an important one. It directly involves Russia, a nuclear power that has threatened to use nuclear weapons. Russia has been trying to build a closer alliance with China, now the US’s main rival, with some (though not total) success.⁽²⁾ It has however moved, diplomatically and militarily, closer to Iran, also a long-term enemy of the US. The US and other NATO countries are backing Ukraine, supplying weapons and training to the government in Kyiv. The US has succeeded in disciplining some of its allies, like Germany, and bringing them more into line with its own foreign policy. Sweden and Finland are in the process of overturning 70 years of neutrality by joining NATO. At the time of going to press (January 2023) only Hungary and Turkey are still to ratify the accession treaties. Turkey, however, though a NATO member, has been playing its own diplomatic games with Russia, posing as an honest broker. Hungary is, for an EU and NATO member, quite close politically to Russia, and the president, Viktor Orbán, is likely to take his time about ratification.⁽³⁾ These manoeuvres by powers great and small represent nothing more than jostling for position to take best advantage of the carnage in Ukraine, to get the best deals while picking over the carcasses left by the slaughter.

This is a war between two imperialist camps and the working class can have no side in this fight. The liberal Western ‘democracies’ say that Putin is an authoritarian and Ukraine is a beacon of democracy; the former may be true, but the latter is a lie. Putin says that Ukraine is soft on fascism and the Russians are liberators; again, the former may be true, but the latter is a lie. Neither the ‘anti-fascist crusade’ nor the ‘defence of democracy’ are worth one drop of workers’ blood.

The working class is the only force that can stop the war — by ending capitalism, which is the driver of war in the modern world. But at the moment the working class is weak and divided. In much of the world it is — happily or unhappily — tied to the nation, and hardly aware of itself as an international class that has the historic mission to overthrow capitalism and create a worldwide socialist society.

In this new situation, revolutionary groups (and ostensibly revolutionary groups) have been casting around trying to understand what is happening, and finding parallels in the history of the workers’ movement.

Some parallels seem apt. In 1914, as the Austro-Hungarian army attacked Serbia, the event which triggered the cascade of alliances that led to the apocalyptic slaughter of the First World War, socialists across Europe struggled to come to terms with the new situation.

One section of the Second International stuck by the resolutions of its Congresses, spearheaded by Lenin and Luxemburg, at Stuttgart in 1907 and Copenhagen in 1910 and reaffirmed by the Basel Manifesto of 1912. These called on socialists to oppose the war on a revolutionary basis and agitate to bring about the downfall of capitalism. These revolutionaries included the Russian Bolsheviks, the Bulgarian Tesnyaki, the Dutch Tribunists and the Polish and, crucially, Serbian Social Democrats, who proclaimed that the war was one between belligerent capitalist powers and had nothing to offer the working class, even though Serbia had been directly attacked by Austria-Hungary. They said:

for us, the decisive fact was that the war between Serbia and Austria was only a small part of a totality, merely the prologue to universal, European war, and this latter — we were profoundly convinced of this — could not fail to have a clearly pronounced imperialist character. As a result, we — being a part of the great socialist, proletarian International — considered that it was our bounden duty to oppose the war resolutely.⁽⁴⁾

Most of the ostensibly ‘Marxist’, ‘revolutionary’ Second International tore up the resolution of the International against the war and supported ‘their own’ ruling class. This marks the historic betrayal of the majority of the ‘socialists’ — the Labour Party in Britain, most of the French Section of the Workers' International, the majority of the Social Democrats in Germany — who, along with the trades unions in the belligerent countries, lined up to recruit men for King and Country, Emperor and Fatherland, the defence of civilisation … whatever the excuses, the reality was to slaughter and be slaughtered in defence of the interests of national capital. In countries which were not directly involved in the war, many socialist parties fractured into groups supporting one side or the other, such as in the Socialist Workers’ Party of the Netherlands which produced pro-German and pro-Allied groups as well as a revolutionary minority.

A third contingent of the Second International took up a pacifist position. The likes of Karl Kautsky declared that the war was an aberration and the world must return to the status quo ante bellum. In other words, the working class’s best interests were served by a return to the ‘normal’ workings of capitalism. Exploitation and misery in the service of capital were fine, but war was just going too far.

In the responses of different groups to the Ukraine war, we can see echoes of these historical positions. There are revolutionary groups that have remained firm in defence of internationalism and the interests of the working class. Groups that support either Ukrainian ‘resistance’ or Russian ‘liberation’ can be likened to the socialist groups that supported one or other belligerent power in the First World War, while some groups have a confused position between outright support and outright condemnation.

Internationalists

The groups of the Communist Left have without exception opposed the war on the basis that it is imperialist and serves only the interests of capital. All affiliates of the ICT have published numerous texts dealing with the war since it began. We refer readers to previous issues of Revolutionary Perspectives and to our website.⁽⁵⁾ The other groups of the Communist Left have also roundly condemned the war as imperialist. We have many important disagreements with the International Communist Current (ICC) and the various International Communist Parties (ICP), but we recognise that the statements these groups have published on the war are rooted in proletarian internationalism. Both have condemned the war as a war for capitalism with nothing to offer the working class.⁽⁶⁾ Numerous smaller groups inspired by the wider Communist Left, such as Internationalist Communist Perspective in Korea⁽⁷⁾, have also published internationalist statements against the war. We consider that all these groups are correctly opposing imperialist war with class war, no matter what other disagreements we have with them. We see proletarian internationalism, which ultimately means the refusal to take sides in imperialist conflict, as being a cornerstone of the positions of the Communist Left since the early 20th century and fundamental to all groups which claim the heritage of the Communist Left today.

Various anarchist or anarchist adjacent groups have also taken internationalist positions on the war, opposing the class struggle of the workers of both sides against the war of the capitalists. The international Anarkismo group⁽⁸⁾, the Anarchist Communist Group (ACG) in Britain⁽⁹⁾, the IWA-AIT (which includes the CNT in France, Solidarity Federation in Britain and many others)⁽¹⁰⁾, Tridini Valka in Czechia⁽¹¹⁾, the Kurdish-Speaking Anarchist Forum⁽¹²⁾, A$AP Révolution in France⁽¹³⁾, and many other groups have opposed the war on a class basis. Most significantly some in and near the belligerent countries have opposed the war – notably KRAS, the section of IWA-AIT in Russia⁽¹⁴⁾ and the Assembly group in Ukraine⁽¹⁵⁾ whose statements have been widely re-published by ourselves and others; ‘Some Anarchists From The Central European Region’⁽¹⁶⁾ who issued a call for solidarity with deserters on both sides; or the group ‘Konflikt’ in Bulgaria⁽¹⁷⁾ which issued statements and provided analysis on the basis of clear class positions. We are heartened that these groups have been able to put forward clear expressions of class politics, no matter what other disagreements we may have with them.

The Litany of Defencists

Not surprisingly, a great many groups that claim to represent the working class have come out for one side or another. In the main, Stalinist groups have come to the defence of Russia, citing NATO support for Ukraine and Putin’s idea of an ‘anti-fascist’ crusade as sufficient reasons for supporting Russian imperialism. Of course, they do not see Russia as imperialist, and claim Russia should be supported precisely because it is ‘anti-imperialist’, by which they mean an enemy of the USA. Their failure to understand capitalism is the flip-side of their inability to understand socialism. The CPGB-ML in the UK is a paradigm of this current: its position is entirely of support for the Moscow ‘line’.⁽¹⁸⁾

Some Stalinist groups, such as the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) in the UK and the KKE in Greece, have opposed the war. However, this does not mean that these groups have somehow become internationalist; their fundamental method is still entirely leftist and calling for an end to the war is a matter of tactics, not fundamental principle. The CPB for example calls for a negotiated peace, not class war, echoing Kautsky and the pacifists of the First World War who saw the war as a failure of policy, not a sign of the fundamental crisis of the capitalist system.⁽¹⁹⁾

The Trotskyist groups have come out with a variety of positions, but tend towards more-or-less clear support for the Ukrainian regime, while simultaneously criticising NATO militarism. The Socialist Workers’ Party in the UK (SWP), once the largest group to the left of Labour and now a tiny rump, has called for a Russian withdrawal, and also said that Russia’s military defeat by ‘the Ukrainian people’ would be a positive result.⁽²⁰⁾ The Socialist Party of England and Wales, formerly Labour’s loyal internal opposition group ‘Militant’, calls for ‘self-determination for Ukrainians’, which in the midst of this war is tantamount to support for the regime in Kyiv.⁽²¹⁾ The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) in the UK (an organisation which emerged from the Trotskyist milieu) has made its support for the regime in Kyiv, and therefore for US imperialism and NATO militarism, explicit.⁽²²⁾

The continued support of the majority of Stalinist and Trotskyist groups for the belligerent powers (even if, in the case of the Trotskyists, it is couched in terms of ‘national self-determination’ and ‘the victory of the Ukrainian people’) is hardly surprising. Long ago the political forebears of these organisations made their peace with capitalism as a whole and settled for fighting for their place within the structures of the national state and the imperialist pecking-order. Without calling into question the fundamentals of their history, the organisations that descend from Stalinism and Trotskyism cannot offer a real alternative to the working class. Instead, these parties serve only to offer different formulae for the management of national capital, and to tie the working class more tightly to a statist version of capitalism.

However, it is not just the descendants of the shipwreck of the Communist International that have called for workers to fight for capitalism. A section of the anarchists have also enthusiastically called for workers to throw themselves into the slaughter. Following in the footsteps of Kropotkin, who along with others in the ‘Manifesto of the 16’ called for support for the Allies in the First World War against the military aggression of the German Empire, some anarchist groups have taken the position that it is the job of workers to defeat the Russian invasion.

Most prominent among these have been, in the UK, the group around the newspaper Freedom (closely connected with Kropotkin at its foundation), which has enthusiastically promoted the idea of an ‘anti-authoritarian resistance to the Russian invasion’⁽²³⁾, and the Anarchist Federation (AFed), which is currently intimately connected with the Freedom group. In its magazine Organize 96 it expressed its solidarity with those fighting ‘against fascism and forces of the imperial invasion’.⁽²⁴⁾ AFed is part of an international organisation, the International of Anarchist Federations (IAF), which has not, in the main, come out in favour of Ukrainian national-defencism⁽²⁵⁾, but its international statement leaves no doubt that it sees the war as being a result of Russian aggression, even if in response to NATO provocation.⁽²⁶⁾ The IAF’s willingness to lay the blame at the door of particular states, to see Russia as the ‘aggressor’ and Ukraine as the ‘victim’, leaves the door open to national-defencism. The section of the IAF in Czechia and Slovakia, for example, has repeated the same pro-war rhetoric as the British section, and specifically criticised the Italian section’s defence of internationalist positions!⁽²⁷⁾ The British and Czech-Slovak sections of the IAF are echoing the call of some anarchists in and around Ukraine, in Russia and Belarus, to resist Russian ‘fascism’ — an irony, as the campaign against ‘Ukrainian fascism’ is the justification Putin gives for the Russian invasion.

Sadly, some anarchists have taken these calls seriously and so-called ‘anarchist’ or ‘anti-authoritarian’ detachments are fighting in the Ukrainian army, alongside and even part of battalions that include fascists. See for example the report, originally from ‘Anarchist Black Cross Dresden’, on the state of the anarchists fighting in Ukraine.⁽²⁸⁾ This is one of the German anarchist groups providing solidarity to the “Ukrainian resistance”. They don’t hide their main aim. “It’s about freedom, it’s not about nationalism, about a state, it’s about the Russian world not spreading to Ukraine”. There is no mention of NATO or the US. They even claim that Ukraine before the invasion was somehow a “place where people found refuge from repression”!

This group provided support for the ‘anti-authoritarian’ units in the Ukrainian army. They say that initiative has now collapsed and the founder of the solidarity campaign stole €20,000 of donations. So ‘anarchists’ and ‘anti-fascists’ are now just fighting in various military units both in the normal army, but also in specific ideologically right wing units.

They admit “it has been difficult to oppose the structural organization of the war, i.e., the army, precisely because there are no independent units”. And they say their comrades’ “attempts to get a place in the military ranks brought them directly to units directly connected with Ukrainian fascist groups” , the Right Sector, Azov Battalion and such like, which means “some antifascists and anarchists are now, in one way or another, becoming forces that support the development of far-right politics in Ukraine”.

In the face of this, they now give people the choice to donate to “antifascists and anarchists” either in normal army units, or in right wing units! So, in a roundabout way, these German anarchists are also providing support to fascist groups in Ukraine, and quite clearly supporting the Ukrainian state’s military drive. So much for ‘anti-authoritarianism’ and ‘fighting fascism’.

Perhaps the collapse of some anarchist groups into national-defencism, no matter what is given as a defence, is not surprising. Lesser-evilism, which generally falls back on a ‘defence of democracy’ or something similar, is a recurrent feature of political approaches that are not based on a class analysis. As has been shown, many anarchist organisations do centralise class struggle, but others fall back on abstractions like ‘freedom’ and ‘the people’ that have no meaning in class societies — and thus, end up repeating the commonalities of the rest of bourgeois politics, even when they see themselves as the antithesis of both the bourgeoisie and ‘politics’. Yet this they are not; at best they are their witless instruments.

More worrying, from the point of view of those who try to express the political programme of the proletariat, are organisations that have a more nuanced approach to these questions, but still fall into the traps of the bourgeoisie and end up mouthing the words of the bourgeoisie in a superficially-proletarian garb.

The Angry Workers of the World (AWW) are an organisation with which the CWO has had some interesting and fruitful discussions in recent years. We have reviewed each other’s publications and written about our criticisms of each others’ practice.⁽²⁹⁾

But once the war began, the AWW revealed some major differences of opinion inside the organisation. On the one hand, some comrades in the AWW could write “we generally assumed that, “workers’ should not fight their bosses’ war” and that, although being a very blunt verbal uttering, “no war, but the class war” could express our general political line. We still carry shreds of the umbilical cord that connects us to the backrooms of Zimmerwald and other communist internationalists in the past.”⁽³⁰⁾ This grouping also draws parallels between those that think there could be a ‘progressive’ form of military resistance to Russian imperialism, with the German SPD in 1914:

The SPD argued that a war against the Czar’s regime will further the cause of a modern working class movement and that war credits should be granted – in a way this was not a betrayal, but just an example of taking this political approach to its practical conclusion.⁽³¹⁾

Identifying one side as a unique aggressor and the other side as the victim, as we have seen, can lead to support for the state through identification with the ‘wronged’ side. Whether this is dressed up as some sort of ‘progressive’ action in defence of ‘workers’ autonomy’ is irrelevant. Both sides who are doing the fighting in the war are made up, primarily, of workers, and the victims on both sides are, primarily, workers. The class which spans all national frontiers has no interest in one national section slaughtering another. In a further article, the representative of this internal grouping says that “in the current system, war is an integral part of politics by all state powers and workers should do what they can to avoid fighting their bosses’ wars”, and we can only agree.⁽³²⁾

Yet another section of the AWW rejects the slogan ‘no war but the class war’, and affirms that (in the context of the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s) “many of the people who started with “no war but the class war” ended up either totally irrelevant to the working class or even worse, on the side of reaction, because of their inability to understand the working class kernel wrapped up in a “national flag” shell”.⁽³³⁾ In a subsequent piece, the same writer repeatedly asks what the Ukrainian working class should do faced with Russian invasion, and falls into the same ‘lesser evilism’ as the anarchists, without ever hinting at what the war means for the Russian working class.⁽³⁴⁾ It is as if the Russian working class has ceased to exist and only the response of the Ukrainian working class is important. While talking about how Russia is a more brutal state than the Western backers of Ukraine — rather reminiscent of the Anarchist Black Cross Dresden’s fear of the “Russian world” encompassing Ukraine, quoted above — it has little to say about how anti-war voices in Russia can be strengthened, how the working class as a whole (not just in Ukraine) can oppose this war in particular and capitalism’s drive to war in general by acting on its own account for its own interests.

Another group which the CWO has in the past had relatively friendly relations is the international group in France, Belgium and Czechia known as Mouvement Communiste/Kolektivně proti Kapitălu (MC/KpK). We have considered this group, though influenced by autonomism, to be in broad agreement with the positions of the Communist Left. However, in March 2022, it published a communique which affirmed “The Ukrainian population is resisting the invader. And that is only to be expected. The defence of towns and villages is above all the defence of its condition against the dramatic aggravation of it caused by the war. The freedom of a democratic regime is, in their eyes, preferable to a military occupation. The resistance in the larger sense must thus be read as an armed democracy movement.”⁽³⁵⁾ It also predicts the collapse of the Kyiv government and urged the Ukrainian working class to turn resistance to Russian invasion into “a mobile war, of harassment and guerrilla action” against Russia. Furthermore, this piece goes on, “The first duty of communists is to encourage by all means (very feeble today) the democratic armed movement to free itself from the symbolic tutelage of the Ukrainian state, which is already collapsing, by appealing to its proletarian component – the vast majority of the volunteers – to anchor the resistance to the defence of its own interests against its state and its bosses (who will certainly change sides at the first opportunity).”

In subsequent documents MC/KpK talk about "proletarian resistance" and how it cannot subordinate itself to the Ukrainian state, how it must retain its independence and "turn the imperialist war into a civil war."⁽³⁶⁾

We think this is fantasy. There is no independent proletarian resistance in Ukraine, the expressions of ‘popular’ or ‘working class’ resistance to Russian invasion are entirely within the framework of the Ukrainian state’s resistance to an imperialist rival and not signs of the class war. MC/KpK is seeing phantoms. Ukrainian workers may generally see the Ukrainian state as better for them than the Russian state. Other workers in Ukraine, especially in the east of the country, may see the Russian state as less bad. Neither hold one gram of comfort for the working class as a whole. Both are the states of capitalists and warmongers. The way the working class can end wars is by working together, by fraternising across the lines, by resisting cuts in wages and living standards even when this is called sabotaging ‘their own’ war effort, and by supporting the actions of other workers, on either side of the front line, against all the governments involved in this barbaric slaughter.

“The Only War Worth Fighting is the Class War”

Some of the anarchists, some of the members of the AWW, and MC/KpK, may reject the slogan, and the principle, ‘no war but the class war’. Nevertheless, for us it means that the working class cannot mix the struggle for its own freedom with the competition between capitalist states. The war in Ukraine is a capitalist war, it is not the class war. Class war may emerge from it, but at present it is a war between two capitalist states, with various imperialist allies and backers, and offers nothing to the working class. We consider it is the duty of revolutionaries to pose the alternative to the working class — either you support the capitalist state which demands that you risk your lives on its behalf (whichever state, however one wants to caveat it with equivocations about ‘peoples’ war’ and ‘armed democracy’ against one-sided ‘imperialism’); or you take up the fight for genuine class war, against capitalism and all bourgeois states.

The present situation bears out what we have been arguing for years. It marks a significant step down in the decades’ long economic crisis of global capitalism for which the ultimate solution can only be a massive devaluation and destruction of capital values. In other words “war”; increasingly tending towards head-on clashes between the 21st century’s ‘great powers’. This is not 1914 but for communists the situation faced by revolutionaries at the start of the First World War is a salutary warning of the need to make working class opposition to capitalist war an integral part of organising a class-wide opposition to ‘the cost of living crisis’ as it morphs into an immediate pre-war crisis. In 1914 the Second International collapsed when the majority of its members simply shut up shop and supported their ‘own’ capitalist side in the war. Social democracy then, like social democracy now, did not make the link between fighting capitalism’s economic attacks and resisting all-out imperialist war. When push came to shove the majority sided with their own imperialist camp.

Only a minority, who later became the Zimmerwald left, remained with the international interests of the working class as a whole. Their slogan “turn the imperialist war into a civil war” was coined by Lenin and became the slogan of the Bolsheviks during the carnage of the First World War. The Bolsheviks propagandised both inside and outside Russia. Inside, to put a consistently anti-war position to the Russian working class which eventually led to their recognition as the party that best represented the proletariat; outside, to rebuild links with other revolutionaries to re-forge the International. This political strategy eventually found an echo in the working class and led to the Russian revolution of October 1917, but also contributed to mutinies in all combatant armies and revolutions in the central countries.

War is inherent to capitalism but the insoluble crisis world capitalism is facing today means that, whatever the result in Ukraine, we are facing more tangible, direct preparations for the ‘ultimate solution’. We are already seeing these preparations in the US denunciations of China over Taiwan⁽³⁷⁾ and in the ideological preparations, such as a war for the defence of ‘democracy’. The sell-out of Social Democracy in 1914 is a salutary reminder that the class war does not stop when the shooting war starts. Far from it, even before the ‘shooting war’, the class war continues. Austerity is the bosses’ class war. Exploitation is the bosses’ class war. The working class is always the victim of war, military or economic. Capitalism long ago ceased its progressive role of developing the social and economic basis for a world socialist community and now itself needs to be overthrown. What the world needs now is a new society without wage labour, money or states.

It is not for revolutionaries today to wait until the ‘great conflagration’ before they take the ‘no war but the class war’ message to the wider working class. We consider that the situation is so serious that internationalists should join together now to take this message to workers’ struggles. The ICT has proposed the formation of ‘no war but the class war’ committees, in response to war, but not just as a way to organise against this war. The basis for these committees is agreement on five conditions and a willingness to take this message into present workers' struggles. These conditions are:

• Against capitalism, imperialism and all nationalism. No support for any national capitals, “lesser evils”, or states in formation.
• For a society where states, wage-labour, private property, money and production for profit are replaced by a world of freely associated producers.
• Against the economic and political attacks that the current war, and the ones to come, will unleash on the working class.
• For the self-organised struggle of the working class, for the formation of independent strike committees, mass assemblies and workers’ councils.
• Against oppression and exploitation, for the unity of the working class and the coming together of genuine internationalists.

NWBCW groups — often, but not all, with the involvement of the ICT — have already been set up in the UK, US, Canada, France, Italy and Turkey. Our declaration and invitation has been shared further afield, such as Korea. These committees are not a replacement for the self-organised bodies that the working class needs to create in the course of its struggles (strike committees, mass assemblies, etc.), rather they are a tool for internationalist intervention in the class struggles already happening.

In the seriousness of the current situation, this is no short term initiative but, however long the war, we say our task is to encourage and defend the independence of the working class struggle, and also to link immediate demands to the need to replace capitalism and to build an organisation of internationalist revolutionaries who are indispensable to this process. We hope that NWBCW groups can, over time, contribute to this process of clarification of the positions necessary for the working class to overthrow capitalism and all states. As part of the rise in its revolutionary consciousness, the working class will eventually need to forge its own political tool, its own reference point, with a global reach.⁽³⁸⁾ Fantasies of workers in Ukraine defeating the Russian army in a Makhno-style ‘mobile war’ and coming through the fascist-inspired battalions of the Ukrainian army to some kind of internationalist proletarian consciousness have no part in the work needed to create such an International.

Notes:

Image: Graffiti in Ukrainian which shows a Russian and a Ukrainian soldier both saying "I died for capitalists".

(1) A relatively comprehensive list can be found at en.wikipedia.org

(2) leftcom.org

(3) atlanticcouncil.org

(4) Dušan A. Popović, 1915 - letter to Christian Rakovsky. First published in Russian in Trotsky’s Nashe Slovo. In English, published in “The Balkan Socialist Tradition, 1871-1915” edited by Andreja Živković and Dragan Plavšić

(5) For instance, the statement of the ICT in September: leftcom.org

(6) For example, from the ICC: en.internationalism.org ; and from the ICP: international-communist-party.org

(7) communistleft.jinbo.net

(8) anarkismo.net

(9) anarchistcommunism.org

(10) iwa-ait.org

(11) autistici.org

(12) anarchistnews.org

(13) asaprevolution.net

(14) iwa-ait.org

(15) libcom.org

(16) antimilitarismus.noblogs.org

(17) kon-flikt.org

(18) thecommunists.org

(19) communistparty.org.uk

(20) socialistworker.co.uk

(21) socialistparty.org.uk

(22) workersliberty.org

(23) freedomnews.org.uk

(24) afed.org.uk

(25) For example, the IAF’s section in Italy, the FAI has opposed any kind of defencism, see: federazioneanarchica.org

(26) i-f-a.org

(27) afed.cz

(28) enoughisenough14.org

(29) See for example: leftcom.org

(30) angryworkers.org

(31) ibid.

(32) angryworkers.org

(33) angryworkers.org

(34) angryworkers.org

(35) mouvement-communiste.com

(36) mouvement-communiste.com

(37) See: leftcom.org

(38) leftcom.org