Stop the inter-imperialist war destroying Ukraine! For the defeat of US/NATO and Russia/China imperialist blocs!
The following is an ILTT leaflet to be distributed at the United Front Committee For A Labor Party rally “STOP US NATO Drive Toward World War – International Day Of Action” on 12/02/2022 in San Francisco:
Build the Workers’ Anti-Imperialist United Front and A New Zimmerwald
The International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT) and the Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA) joined this action against US imperialism to “Abolish NATO, to Shut Down US Bases Around The World” – to launch class war against Our “Main Enemy at Home”–(That’s U.S. Imperialism!, we say!) We support the call “For Working Class Strikes Globally To Stop The Wars!” Not as a pressure tactic to push for negotiations but as a fight to take power!
These slogans press the working class to identify that its class interests are uncompromisingly opposed to those of the capitalists and imperialism. Workers want to know: What does the slogan “The Main Enemy is At Home” mean; and what does the call for international strikes against the war require from our social class?
These international strikes we talk about need to arm the workers to take power from the capitalists. This is what “The Main Enemy is at Home” requires! Does it mean workers do not have any other enemies? No! We unite with workers internationally to defeat their own capitalist and imperialist masters.
We need to unite the international working class in a class political anti-war united front against all its imperialist enemies. Imperialism is a system not a choice of national capitals.
The Class Character of the War in Ukraine!
The statement on the Ukraine war adopted at the Socialism or Extinction Conference held in Mexico City October 28-30 2022 explained:
“The war in Ukraine is an inter-imperialist proxy war between the decaying hegemonic US/EU/NATO bloc and the rising China/Russia/CSTO/ SCO bloc. It is counter-revolutionary and aimed against the interest of the workers and farmers on both sides! Because the war is reactionary and fought on behalf of imperialism on BOTH SIDES, soldiers and workers must take a dual defeatist attitude toward the war!”
And as we wrote in July, 2022 in “Ukraine: For a New Zimmerwald!”:
“Today the world is at war in an inter-imperialist conflict for control of the semi-colonial world, their markets and securing spheres of dependency. The hegemonic US/EU/NATO imperialist bloc’s orientation to, and subordination of, Ukraine, accelerated since the EuroMaidan, is militarily challenged by the competing Russia/China imperialist bloc, which if it is to advance internationally, must secure its near periphery-both for economic and geo-strategic reasons.
We say the inter-imperialist conflict is overarching and predominates, not just in Ukraine but across the globe. The war cannot be understood outside the growing confrontation between the two imperialist blocs. There is no other explanation for the Eastward movement of NATO since the fall of the USSR, for the refusal to negotiate a solution as demanded by Russia, and for the deliberate use of hitherto extreme economic sanctions against Russia in response to its invasion. Those who think it’s not a proxy war have no appreciation of the meaning of imperialist as understood by Lenin and are blinkered by NATO propaganda. Those who think it is not an inter-imperialist conflict because there are apparently no NATO troops’ boots-on-the-ground have a great number of facts contradicting their position, …”
Self Determination vs Imperialism
Today the workers organizations are being drawn into supporting either Putin’s invasion or the Ukrainian proxy regime and the US/NATO encirclement of Russia and China. We are being told that Ukraine as a nation has no right to exist by Putin and that Donetsk and Luhansk have no right to self determination by Zelensky.
Only revolutionary Marxism shows that national self determination is a democratic right that, in the age of imperialism, can only be secured by socialist revolution. As long as the imperialists are around to chop up your homelands workers will have no national rights the bourgeoisie will observe for long. This goes for either the US/EU/NATO imperialist bloc or the China/Russia imperialists.
To turn the imperialist wars into class war against the cause of war–monopoly finance capitalism, the working class must remove all of Capital’s agents and servants-and smash the capitalist states!
For Class Struggle Against Imperialist War!
Our class needs to employ a united front tactic. The united front tactic is activated not just by a unity of action but by its dialectical counterpart, critique! And critique is the debate the working class must have in order to chart its politically independent course, to resolve in our favor the terminal crisis of capitalism, which by war and commitment to the fossil fuel economy puts the dictum SOCIALISM OR EXTINCTION front and center!
Imperialism in the terminal crisis of capitalism is dependent on wasteful militarization which workers organizations and all oppressed must unite to stop at points of production and distribution. Strikes, sympathy strikes, occupations and hot cargoing of goods are historically working class means of struggle. Without us nothing moves!
We know that if the US railroad workers strike, the war industry comes to a stop! First order of business is the AFL-CIO must declare sympathy strikes with the rail workers! But we know that won’t happen under the current leaderships which imposes the union neutering ‘team concept’ at the work site and as social patriots teaming up with imperialism. Their job is to police the labor movement for the capitalists to prevent class struggle at work or in politics.
Our task is to build class struggle caucuses in the unions and action committees in the workplace which fight for class independence in all things: No to labor management unity!, No to the bosses’ parties and the bosses’ wars! Class struggle caucuses unite workers to defeat the influence of the bosses ideology in the workplace by raising transitional demands to bring workers into action to resolve all economic and political issues. We need to raise up a mass cadre of militant rank and file leaders committed to class independence and class struggle methods to drive out the hacks and bureaucrats which tie labor’s hands to the bosses and the Democrats.
We need to win workers and soldiers here and internationally from fighting each other over their bosses’ national frontiers to fighting their capitalist masters. When the military enlistees see their sister and brother workers using class struggle methods and as all social stratification is reflected in the military, the mass struggle will also be reflected in the military. All the old crap will come to the surface. The contradiction of the unresolved class, race, sex and gender oppression seething just below the surface fuel potential for class struggle to erupt in the military. Remember fragging during VietNam? The officer corp does!
We need to split the lower ranks of the military along class lines against the officer corps. Most military enlistees in the US are recruited by economic conditions–the ‘poverty draft.’ Enlisted ranks need their own industrial union with a class struggle program. They need this now!
When the rank and file take up the fight for a “Build a Come Home Now Movement! And Convene Soldiers councils to elect rank and file officers.” This will show workers internationally that the US working class are not their enemy. When the US working class fights national imperialism at home, workers of Russia, China and Ukraine will welcome the internationalism of US workers and unite and rally to apply the “dual defeatism” necessary to resolve all the international conflicts in the workers interests. This is our task!
Smash the Obstacles to Working Class Political Independence
How then can workers resolve this crisis in leadership to unite to build the international strike against war? And what exactly are the goals of the anti-war strike? For the international working class to put their hands on the levers of power strikes must build workers’ councils and workers’ militia, that is our strategic goal. What stands in the way?
Where is the party prepared to use class struggle methods to stop the imperialists? It has to be built in class struggle against the misleaders, reformists and centrists. Workers in every nation need to build their revolutionary workers party and unite in a new workers International coordinate the fight against world imperialism.
Such a party must resolve the crisis of working class leadership and develop rank and file factory (work-site) committees to assert the workers historic program at the point of production. As the working class become conscious internationalists, only then do we become capable of ending all imperialist wars.
First the “progressive” and Democratic war hawks like Barbara Lee and Nancy Pelosi rally the traditional liberal base including the unions to keep funding the war in Ukraine. Second, the ‘isolationist’ Republican bloc against military aid is expanding in the new Congress. Calls like ‘Don’t send another penny…’ are GOP talking points. Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Trump and the GOP majority forged a “front” uniting, separately and severally with ‘realpolitiker’ Kissinger and Noam Chomsky, and Stalinist stooge Vijay Prashad advocating negotiations. Sergei Lavrov on behalf of Russian imperialism is being dragged along kicking and screaming that the “Terms are Unrealistic.”
Ultimately the calls for negotiations by the anti-war movement is a pressure campaign of the ‘let’s you and him talk it out’ variety ( i.e., Blinken and Lavrov) and will not “end (the inter-imperialist) conflict.” This would be excluded, even if backed by mass strikes, unless these strikes are escalated and lead the working class to power.
Still the biggest obstacle blocking the workers from initiating militant class struggles against the war is the labor bureaucracy loyal to the capitalist Democratic Party. They act as a transmission belt delivering the Democratic wing of the ruling class’s objectives and ideology down to the rank and file. The churches, the CBO’s and NGO’s and anointed leaders of unorganized and specially oppressed workers also block the fight for class political independence and a workers’ anti-imperialist united front.
Their main role is to stop the working class from becoming self conscious to the point of launching its own fighting workers labor party that unites with the unorganized and specially oppressed in class struggle which challenges the capitalist class for power under the demands for a workers government. In order to win, workers must overcome entrenched organizational and ideological obstacles in the labor movement and the movements of the oppressed!
Those nominal socialists who do not call for “dual defeatism” fall in line as social patriots for one camp or the other. They offer their minimum demand for peace with maximalist calls for socialism with no transitional bridge. The workers’ anti-imperialist united front builds a transitional bridge to power via the class struggle that resolves the crisis of the leadership of the working class. It is the working class anti-war movement that must fight for a New Zimmerwald today! A New Zimmerwald must prepare the left anti-imperialists to launch the new workers revolutionary international.
The text of the United Front Committee For A Labor Party (UFCLP) call to action shows their intention for mass strikes to be a pressure tactic, not for the working class to take power. It maintains that the US is a declining empire under control of a reckless ruling class. The UFCLP holds the view that the US is at the beginning of military conflicts with Russia and China. They obscure for the moment whether their position is that Russia and China are imperialist powers; indeed it does not even characterize US policy as imperialist in the front’s call. The UFCLP opinion is that for decades the US pushed NATO expansion, goading Russia into a proxy war with Ukraine, and that the Democrats and Republicans are opposing any negotiations with Russia which “could bring an end to the conflict.”
This faith in negotiations is another episode in idealist abandonment of historical materialism. The China/Russia bloc badly wants the world to believe they (nowadays) want a negotiated end to this conflict. It is going badly for them. The U.S. bloc says two can play at this and employs General Milley to send a mixed signal.
This is where the working class is misdirected! Here, as at the Peoples Forum last week, the goal of the anti-war movement with all its actions from ones and twos on picket lines to mass demonstrations all the way up to international general strikes are designed to get the negotiations started. And who could argue with such a sensible understanding? Noam Chomsky at the Peoples Forum, introduced the most obvious real politic observation that at some point the war will end in negotiations. Here the ‘left’ abandons class struggle and class against class warfare for the fake peace of imperialism which kicks the conflict down the road.
So from the Peoples Forum to this action here today the working class is being told to launch anti-war actions to win negotiations between the belligerents. This, my friends, does not bring the “end to conflict.” No it does not because it leaves the imperialists in power to negotiate with each other at our expense; and to wage new conflicts when negotiations fall apart. The capitalist nations and the imperialists cannot resolve the right of nations to self determination because subordination and dependency are the only options other than the smashing of imperialism and the founding of workers states and federations of workers states on a world scale. These are the proletarian solutions that the workers of both the US/NATO bloc and the China/Russia bloc must unite around.
No to no Fly Zones! US/EU-NATO and Russia and their allies Out of Ukraine! No to Sanctions, they function as war on working people!
Workers of all imperialist countries your main enemy is the imperialist capitalist class at home! Build anti war committees in the factories and workplaces.
For general strikes and mass actions against the imperialist war machines across all of Europe, the US and Russia! Hot cargo all imperialist belligerents’ freight. For workers’ control of logistics and distribution!
Expropriate the war profiteers and armaments industry under workers control.
For workers self defense militias! For International Workers brigades to defeat the US/NATO covert and overt military forces and the Russian invasion forces! Defeat the fascist battalions, their militia and their foreign nationalist fighters!
No annexations! For an independent Soviet Ukraine! For a Workers’ Russia! For the self-determination of Ukrainians and Russian-speaking minorities!
Soldiers build a Come Home Now movement! Soldiers refuse to handle, fire or use nuclear, biological or chemical weapons! Close US/UK and EU foreign and NATO bases!
Soldiers in the field mutiny, arrest your officers, elect your own officers, fraternize across front lines and protect civilians!
Open the secret pouches of the imperialist belligerents and open the books of the imperialist bourgeoisie and big capitalist enterprises!
No faith in the Hague or UN! For independent workers commissions to investigate and prosecute war crimes.
Free all anti-war protesters! Drop all charges!
Convene a new Zimmerwald conference! For an anti-imperialist workers united front. For “war against war” to “turn inter-imperialist war abroad into class war at home”!
Build revolutionary workers parties and a revolutionary workers International based on the method of the 1938 Transitional Program.
For world socialist revolution to end imperialist wars once and for all!
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), 12/01/2022
