November 17—Once again, workers are forced to fight their class siblings for the profits and territorial ambitions of their exploiters. In this case, Ukrainian and Russian capitalists.
Some are drafted by law and others by poverty. Some are volunteers blinded by nationalism or anti-communism. Who benefits from the mass bloodshed and devastation? Only the capitalist and imperialist rulers of Russia, Ukraine, and Ukraine’s western allies.
Socialists and communists held an important conference in Basel (Switzerland) in 1912. They declared that, in case of war, workers everywhere should “with all their powers utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.” This is still true.
Who are the workers fighting in Ukraine?
Both Russia and Ukraine have compulsory military drafts.
Putin promised that draftees would not serve in combat. Still, many youths fled the country. Prisoners were recruited with a promise of freedom if they survived.
A disproportionate number of Russian draftees are ethnic minorities, mainly from Siberia and the far east. They get the most dangerous assignments.
The Russian imperialist army needs still more cannon fodder. It recruits mercenaries from desperately poor communities in India, Nepal, and sub-Saharan Africa. Indian youths, promised jobs and university admission in Russia, found themselves instead on the front lines in Ukraine.
Thousands of North Koreans are also fighting for Russia. White nationalists, neo-Nazis, Christian extremists, and other fascists from across Europe volunteer alongside pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region.
The pro-West Ukrainian capitalist government realized that its own draft and nationalist propaganda would not mobilize enough troops to stop the Russian invasion. It formed an International Legion. This Legion reflected Ukraine’s history of fascist antisemitic opposition to the Soviet Union during World War II.
We don’t mourn the deaths of fascist mercenaries on either side.
But the mounting casualties among working-class youth from almost every continent are a tragedy for us all. They should spur us to organize more vigorously for communism. Especially among youth. Especially those in uniform.
The first world war broke out two years after the Basel Manifesto. Most socialists quickly succumbed to nationalism. They abandoned international working class solidarity. They supported “their” governments—actually the governments of their own exploiters.
The communist Bolshevik Party in Russia was the big exception. Others included a breakaway faction of German communists and socialists and anarchists in the USA.
There were at most a few thousand Bolsheviks before the war. There were 24,000 in February 1917, which grew to 400,000 by October. The October Revolution realized the goal of “the downfall of capitalist class rule” in Russia.
As war spreads across the globe today, that remains our urgent task.
But revolutionaries today must not repeat the Bolsheviks’ mistake of building socialism. They thought that communists could transform a system still based on wage labor and markets into a classless society based on cooperation and sharing. Instead, the socialist wage-labor system transformed the communists into a new capitalist class.
We see the result today in Ukraine. Russian imperialism is no less deadly than US/NATO imperialism.
The International Communist Workers’ Party stands by the core principle of the 1912 Basel Manifesto. “The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists. The proletariat is conscious of being at this moment the bearer of the entire future of humankind.”
That future is communism.