At time of writing, a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has begun. After recognizing the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent States, the Russian State claimed that all of Ukraine is a threat to its security, and that it has the right to perform “military operations” until the threat is contained. According to one source, the entire Ukrainian military was disabled in under two hours by precision air strikes, allowing Russian the military to enter the country unopposed. CNN has claimed the Belarussian has joined Russia in the invasion, while the US continues to stockpile NATO forces in Ukraine’s pro-US border countries.
In the December before the invasion, the US approved a $200 million package of military spending for Ukraine (before approving extension to crucial welfare programs, debt forgiveness, or any sort of pandemic measures against the Omicron variant of COVID-19). In January, the US sent close to 200,000 pounds of so-called “lethal aid” to Ukraine, which, apparently all went to waste in less time it takes to binge a Netflix series. The Ukrainian armed forces that the US sends “aid” to officially contains the Azov Battalion a neo-Nazi paramilitary group made official. Despite on paper being exempt from US “aid” they almost certainly receive US equipment, and the US is certainly aware of this fact. And, in the weeks leading up to the invasion, the State Department consistently claimed that a Russian attack was imminent, against even the words of the Ukrainian president, provided no evidence, and simply spun wilder and wilder tales about planned false-flag attacks that never seemed to come to fruition.
Given this, many anarchists and communists analyzing the situation concluded that no such threat was actually real or present from Russia, beyond the general threat of US-led NATO escalation in this case. I was one of them. This was an incorrect assumption, and part of writing this pamphlet is a correction of this mistake.
I am not afraid of being wrong, despite certain voices seeing geopolitics as nothing more than a game to gloat about when they guess future events correctly. Rather, I am afraid of doing wrong. Blindly believing the State Department on this invasion because there happened to be some truth in what they asserted this one time would, in fact, be doing wrong. Boiling the natural consequences of capitalism, imperialism, and the existence of States vying for domination down to “Vladimir Putin, as an individual, is a raving madman dictator who ‘we’ must stop at all costs” would be doing wrong to the nth degree.
The fundamental problem with the left, globally, post the fall of the Soviet Union, is that we are powerless. We are not simply out of power. We are powerless. We lack the ability to make meaningful changes to the political landscape even if we were to be magically handed the reins of power tomorrow.
There are many different ways of responding to what I will call Post-Soviet Powerlessness.
One is complete nihilism and resignation. A comrade of mine is a Leninist or something like that. Whenever we speak, he’s always quick to point out that he simply does not think an organized left exists in any way that’s real or meaningful. The American working class is too invested in capitalism to mobilize, he says. The organizations that do exist are too corrupted by factionalism, liberalism, and revisionism. He swears there’s nothing left to do but secure yourself a job that pays the bills and watch as capitalism and imperialism tear this world to shreds.
The second response to Post-Soviet Powerlessness is campism. These people see the US has this enormous military and economic superpower similar, almost, to a wrathful god. This all-knowing, all-powerful deity will destroy any push to a better world before it even begins. Therefore, destroying the god is not just a top priority, it is the only priority that matters. This view posits that the United States can only be destroyed not by organizing or resistance here and abroad, but by strong, militarized States that annoy the US geopolitically.
Since union organizing, protest, dual power, mutual aid, political education, and even party-building, organization, and principled armed resistance are all pointless, all praxis according campists is reduced to “supporting” any government that the US calls a rogue State.
It doesn’t matter that many of these States are not just not socialist, but repress socialists internally. Nor does it matter that “market economies with regulations and State-run businesses” has never been the definition or end-goal of socialism. Nor does it matter that none of these countries have an interest in solidarity and support of socialist groups outside of their borders. We all must simply wait for these countries to grow big and strong before bothering to organize anything ourselves. Anything else is nothing more than childish idealism.
And then there is, in my opinion, the correct response to Post-Soviet Powerlessness: an idea I suppose I will have to call optimism for a lack of a better term.
The idea is pretty simple: if we are communists, we are communists because we believe that the end goal of communism: a stateless, classless, moneyless society where production is owned and controlled in common, where all people live lives of dignity with not just their basic needs, but advanced needs taken care of, and where goods are distributed from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs, where militarism and chauvinism are but nightmares of the past; would be good for the future of humanity. If we are communists, we believe that end goal is achievable. Tangibly achievable. Maybe not in the immediate future, maybe not in our lifetimes, but achievable soon enough that we can talk about how it can be achieved.
And, as a concrete optimist response to Post-Soviet Powerlessness, if it seems that there is something that the left cannot currently do, if it seems as though that anarchists have no effect on public opinion or public policy in a crisis like this (and it is how it seems, mind you), it is because we have not built the tool that helps with this problem yet.
In response to NATO escalation and Russian petty-imperial expansionism, what is needed is a revived, broad, accessible, anti-war movement, the beginnings of which we say in the early 2000s form in response to the Iraq war. We need a movement with connections to anarchists on the ground in Ukraine and Russia, who elevate their analysis and their condemnations of Russian petty-imperial policy while also taking care not to justify NATO anti-Russian talking points, which serve not to denounce Russian expansionism but prop American-backed intervention as the hammer to drive all nails.
We need an anti-war movement that is truly and simply against war no matter who starts it, that calls for diplomacy at all costs, that calls for the reduction in scale and spending of the US military and NATO, that calls for investment in life-saving social services at home, and that has the mobilization to fill the streets and slow production to back up these demands.
Of course, we find ourselves without anything like that. Post-Soviet Powerlessness and all. So, we build it. We start by talking to our friends, our neighborhoods, our affinity groups, our organizations, or even just people we know online. As those groups grow, we link those groups together. And those larger groups link together, and so one. We make sure each unit has autonomy, the ability to decide by consensus and democracy how to govern itself, while making sure that collaboration can happen effectively.
It sounds like a lofty goal, but it has been happening in practice: from the MAREZ in Chiapas, to the Sudanese Anarchist Gathering standing firm against the military dictatorship in Sudan, to the FARJ in Brazil, to Symbiosis and other autonomist federations in the United States. It “just” needs patience, time, and labor.
After the news of Russian invasion into Ukraine broke out, I did what I usually do when I don’t quite know how to process political events: I read what dead communists had to say about it.
Specifically, the various communist and anarchist responses to World War I. Unlike World War II, which tends to be broken into the “good side” of the liberal and communist powers fighting the “bad side” of the fascist powers, every warring state in World War I had the exact same ideology: capitalist imperialism. World War I had no clear-cut sides, and certainly no winners. It was simply the natural conclusion of the existence of competing States and of competing bourgeois classes.
We’ve all read Rosa Luxembourg, so I opted for different writers.
The renowned anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin infamously signed on to a document entitled the Manifesto of the Sixteen. In it, he and several other co-signers argue that while, as anarchists, they oppose all war, it was the German empire that was the greatest threat. The German annexation of Belgium, a country that was not even involved in the conflict until then and the occupation of France made Germany the clear enemy. Worse, the German working class and Social-Democrats (then radical Marxists), played along with it.
… The bourgeois press prepares the nation for the idea of the pure and simple annexation of Belgium and of the departments in the north of France. And, there is not, in Germany, any force capable of opposing it. The workers who should have been raising their voices against the conquest, do not do it. The unionized workers let themselves be led by the imperialist fever, and the social-democratic party, too weak to influence the decisions of the government concerning the peace — even if it represented a compact mass — finds itself divided, on that question, into two hostile parties, and the majority of the party marches with the government. The German empire, knowing that its armies have been, for eighteen months, 90 km from Paris, and supported by the German people in its dreams of new conquests, does not see why it should not profit from conquests already made.
The Allied powers, while imperialist and actively imprisoning anarchists and members of the anti-war movement (anarchists and Marxists did have a fully developed anti-war movement then, even while most communication took place through letters and conferences), were still the lesser evil, and needed to be allowed to defeat the Germans and their imperialism.
This having been impossible, there was nothing but to suffer that which could not be changed. And with those who fight we reckon that, unless the German population, coming back to the sanest notions of justice and of right, finally refuses to serve any longer as an instrument of the projects of pan-German political domination, there can be no question of peace.
To the Sixteen, supporting the allied powers was a matter of making room for future revolutions.
Without doubt, despite the war, despite the murders, we do not forget that we are internationalists, that we want the union of peoples and the disappearance of borders. But it is because we want the reconciliation of peoples, including the German people, that we think that they must resist an aggressor who represents the destruction of all our hopes of liberation.
In the end, of course, Kropotkin and his co-signers would get what they wanted. The Allies would trounce Germany in the war, no thanks in small part to a nearly successful socialist revolution at home. The allies would make Germany pay severely for their imperial wars and pat themselves on the back for stopping German expansionism in Europe for good.
And yet, we know now that this problem was not solved for good, to say the least.
However well-intentioned their concerns were, the Sixteen were campists. Peter Kropotkin and co had what the kids todday would call a “cringe” “take”. They allowed questions of lesser evils and pessimism about the feasibility of resisting war to cloud their judgement. This error not only made them wrong in hindsight, but wrong in the eyes of contemporary anarchists at the time.
A different manifesto, the Anti-War Manifesto signed a year earlier by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, among others, read as follows:
None of the belligerents has any right to lay claim to civilization, just as none of them is entitled to claim legitimate self-defense.
The truth is that the root of wars, of the war currently bloodying the plains of Europe, just like all the ones that went before it, is located exclusively in the existence of the State, which is the political form of privilege.
Anarchists couldn’t stop either world war from happening. And they won’t be able to singlehandedly stop all the bloodshed in this war either. But our successors did correctly identify the problem with imperialist war. And so, we would be committing a grave error in not building from the foundation of knowledge laid before us.
It is in such troubled times, when thousands of men are heroically giving their lives for an idea, that we must show such men the generosity, grandeur and beauty of the anarchist ideal: social justice achieved through the free organization of producers: war and militarism eradicated forever, complete freedom won through the utter demolition of the State and its agencies of coercion.
