On the Inter-Imperialist Character of the Russo-NATO Conflict in Ukraine

including research provided by Comrade-Editors Sylveste and J. Katsfoter

Since the beginning of the Russo-Ukraine war — which we believe is more properly termed the Russo-NATO Conflict, given the confluence of forces promoting and subsidizing the war effort — socialists and “leftists” within the U.S. Empire and its satellites have tended to advance one of two narratives. These mutually contradictory and exclusive discourses both, for separate reasons, fail to call the war what it is: an inter-imperialist conflict.

Among the socialist camp there’s been a fringe but vocal attempt to paint the conflict as one between the Western-imperialist bloc and what they claim is an anti-imperialist (or ‘non-imperialist’) Russian bloc. They argue that Russia is a (materially) progressive capitalist power motivated by immediate existential threat and a good-faith interest in ‘denazifying’ Ukraine. We are told that any state that opposes, even for its own reasons, the geopolitical interests of the Western-imperialist bloc must, as a rule, be anti-imperialist in this “unipolar world.” Some even go so far as to actively support the Russian invasion, relying primarily on the position of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) and its continuous requests for the annexation of the Donbass. Others “simply” contort themselves into knots to avoid recognizing that the Russian Federation is a nascent imperialist power.

This is opposed to  the left-neoconservative position — in other words, the hegemonic liberal position — portraying a Manichaean struggle between the civilized and democratic forces of Ukraine against the Asiatic hordes of the barbaric far east. Peace and compromise is off table, only the complete annihilation of Russia will suffice — never mind that it’s equally (if not more!) likely that Ukraine will pay the ultimate price. How many conscripts must be sacrificed to extend the war? As many as it takes to ensure that (all of) Ukraine remains within the Western sphere of influence. This latter position denies the imperialist character of the West and of NATO entirely, insisting that only direct militarism, colonization, or annexation constitute ‘imperialist’ actions. 

Both the advocates of the liberal’s “international rules-based order” and advocates of vulgar anti-imperialism insist upon supporting one imperialist power or the other — thus both of them require some re-education as to what imperialism actually means! In this article we review the Leninist conception of imperialism, apply it to the concrete situation in Ukraine, the US, and Russia, and discuss its practical conclusions.

Imperialism in the Age of Monopoly Capital

Firstly let us clarify some common points of confusion: imperialism — in other words, capitalist-imperialism — does not mean warfare, invasion, colonization, or militarism in general. As Marxist-Leninists, we understand imperialism as the dominant set of economic conditions which gives rise to war, but is not war in and of itself. The era of capitalist-imperialism, in contradistinction to former kinds of imperialism that have existed in history, is characterized by a distinctive kind of economic power by which countries are coerced into accepting unfair and unequal deals that rob them of wealth and, simultaneously, foster dependence and underdevelopment. In other words, under capitalist-imperialism, the vast majority of wealth transference occurs not from war-time plundering, but during peacetime and through ostensibly voluntary relationships. Of course, it must be mentioned that this coercive power could not exist without the credible threat of violence, as the claim to another’s resources must be defended — defended both from international competitors and from nationalist reformers alike (for example, the 1956 Suez Crisis). But we must be clear that the apparent absence of violence by no means indicates an absence of imperialism. If we only understood imperialism as warfare, we’d be blind to Japan’s role in the imperialist world order, for example. Though Japan hasn’t been at war, occupied another nation, or even had an independent standing army since the end of WWII, they nevertheless enjoy a privileged position in the post-war world order, exploiting the resources of less developed nations across the world.

The unique characteristic of modern imperialism is that it is a phase of capitalist development. Specifically, imperialism is the monopoly phase of capitalist development, in which wealth, capital, and the means of production have been centralized into monopolies, including big banks which become financial oligarchies. Finance-capital, capital controlled by banks but employed by industrialists, takes on particular importance, because banks are transformed from passive middlemen into the key directors of new investments. As a nation develops its means of production into bigger and more efficient productive forces, it has the peculiar characteristic of decreasing the rate of profit in the process; wherever monopoly-capitalism develops, the market is already or soon ‘glutted,’ leaving less and less room for profitable investment. 

The countries of the imperialist centers have a high concentration of advanced, technically complex productive processes. Everywhere that efficient labor-saving technology is implemented, the rate of surplus-value — and, hence, profit — is decreased, while, at the same time, requiring the maintenance of  large numbers of technical experts, managers, and skilled laborers. The social reproduction cost of the working class — in other words, the cost of living — is commensurately higher in the imperialist centers — a contingent of  the workers there are bought off with the super-profits of the imperialist capitalists. As a result of the highly mechanized workforce, the rate of profit in the central markets, the markets dominated by the capitalist monopolies, falls.
The less developed nations of the world, with lower cost of living, lower wages, less developed industry, and large stores of untapped resources, thus present a more profitable avenue of investment for corporations large enough to operate on a multinational scale. The workforce there needs to be paid less, and can be focused on primary industry as opposed to secondary, technical, and finishing industries. Consequently, multinational corporations are inclined to invest their capital in the less developed nations, either through foreign direct investment (buying up land, mines, factories, etc.) or by predatory loans (usually from multinational finance institutions and banks directly). The consequence is a scramble to monopolize the wealth of other countries. Competition breaks out between imperialists in dividing up the world into spheres of influence. The imperialized periphery is effectively turned into off-shore factories producing cheap commodities for the metropolitan center, which retains the lucrative work of “finishing” products. The capitalists then turn around and sell the finished products, which are mostly the work of the colonial periphery, back to the colonies and neo-colonies themselves, all the while profiting from the surplus and the arbitrage.

It would be a mistake to view all wars as necessarily imperialist, and, conversely, all imperialism as mere war. There are wars of national liberation, wars of national self-defense, and other non-imperialist reasons to wage war. Capitalist-imperialism itself, when it is functioning at its highest pitch, does not need to make use of the recourse of war. Indeed, the capitalist-imperialist only requires war infrequently and for specific purposes, such as the destruction of a peripheral country’s economy or standard of living or when imperialist powers are confronting one another over the control of territory. 

A portion of the owning class of the exploited country, that is the local bourgeoisie, is bribed precisely to assist the imperialists in maintaining high rates of profit in their countries. These are the so-called “comprador” capitalists. For example, the Mexican government was paid off by the US government during and after WWII to provide impoverished and desperate agricultural laborers for the Bracero program; much of their wages were stolen by American banks, and the money that ended up in the hands of the Mexican national bank never found its way into the hands of the returning Braceros. In terms of suppressing domestic labor conditions, one need look no further than Columbia, in which Coca-Cola’s bottling plant hires death squads to kill unionized laborers. The inevitable end result, once further profitable investment is once again forestalled, is war between the imperialist nations for the re-division of the world. Imperialism is the economic impulse and imperative that produces war independently from the subjective whims of any politician — but we again reiterate that it is not war in and of itself. It is a phase of capitalist development that creates an international web of exploitation and competition, which, in truth, is wracked with violence even during “peacetime.”

This indeed is the critical point: both the export of capital and war are symptoms of imperialism, but neither are, strictly speaking, defining characteristics of it. It is a critical error to conflate the two, as both our modern day liberals and socialist falsifiers do. The imperialist phase of development causes and decomposes into these effects; the effects do not compose the system of imperialism. We must be absolutely clear that capitalist-imperialism is strictly the monopoly phase of capitalist development; to insist that a capitalist country is not imperialist would be exactly the same as saying that a country remains in the pre-monopoly phase of development. Thus, let us be quite clear on this matter: both the United States and Russia are monopoly capitalist countries, and hence, both are imperialist. This is no abstraction: Both countries, as a consequence of being imperialist countries, exploit the wealth of other countries and are, therefore, necessarily compelled to defend those investments by military force. This assertion will be expanded upon in later sections, but for the time being it suffices to say that any additional commentary about relative position in the world economy, relative military size, types of commodity exports, unipolarity or multipolarity, etc, is nothing more than sophistry masking the real character and relationships of these countries.

The conflict in Ukraine can only be properly understood as a competition between two imperialist blocs vying for the resources of Ukraine, as an inter-imperialist proxy war between the U.S. Empire and its satellites (predominantly) and the Russian Federation. To emphasize one side over the other is to miss out on the fact that the people of Ukraine are stuck in a game of tug of war, the results of which will be to their detriment regardless of outcome. That Zelensky is a comprador — a fascist puppet of Western imperialism — must be understood so we do not support the Ukrainian people’s domestic oppressors or foreign overseers; that Putin is an imperialist with imperialist aims reigning chaos and destruction on Ukraine must be understood so that we do not lend support to the (other) international oppressor of the Ukrainian people (and the domestic oppressor of the Russian people alike). Both are war-mongers hell-bent on escalation and destabilization, risking world war in the process.

A Brief History of Modern Ukraine

Going all the way back to the Roman province of Ilyricum, Ukraine has been the breadbasket of Europe. Thanks to its abundant arable land and favorable climate, the country is one of the world’s largest single producers of wheat, barley, and corn. And yet, despite this natural endowment, the people of Ukraine — least of all their farmers — scarcely see any of the benefit from their own produce or land. Instead, massive Agribusiness conglomerates, domestic and foreign alike, split up the wealth while their products get exported out of the country. Despite having the apparent capacity to export essential foodstuffs, Ukraine has been affected by food insecurity for years,  being one of the only European countries to receive food aid from the UN’s World Food Program. According to the Land Matrix Initiative, a group which catalogs international land deals, “Ukraine ranks second among target countries with respect to the total contract area of transnational investments in agriculture, at over 3.3 million hectares.” So why does food go abroad while Ukrainians go hungry? Why do Ukrainian farmers go penniless while corrupt oligarchs roll around in big vaults of gold coins Scrooge McDuck style (we assume)? How did this happen? To understand, our story must begin with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The Land Question

When Ukraine became a newly independent country in 1991, one of the first courses of action was to reprivatize and break up state-owned farms. At first, the land was privatized but owned collectively by groups of farmers in Collective Agricultural Enterprises (CAEs). By 1999, at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), these collectives were split apart and divvied up into private parcels of land, about 4 ha each. Many people began selling their shares for a pittance, and the burgeoning oligarchs began amassing huge concentrations of wealth; in a sense, they re-collectivized and re-centralized the land, but under the sole ownership of one oligarch or another, rather than under the collective control of the workers. Thus, as a temporary measure, a moratorium was put in place in 2001, halting land sales:

The moratorium includes a ban on the sale of land with a designated agricultural use. Such land cannot be sold through the transfer of land shares allocated to citizens during the land reform process. It is forbidden to sell land; to change its intended purpose (i.e. from an agricultural to a non-agricultural use); to transfer land to the assets of any business enterprise (for example as collateral for a loan); or to transfer it as a pledge. The only convenient and legal options available for transferring land include lease agreements (for legal and natural persons) and certain forms of gifts and inheritance (for natural persons).

The Land Question

The land under moratorium made up 96% of all of Ukraine’s agricultural land and split up among some 7 million small land owners. Legislators insisted that it would be an interim measure until a better system could be worked out, but the moratorium remained in force for decades. Despite the supposed effort to prevent the development of latifundists in Ukraine, this is precisely what resulted anyway:

After the moratorium was introduced, land lease has become the main (although not the only) way to control land in Ukraine. Immediately after the privatization of land, a large rental market for land was formed. Due to the huge number of plots available, the rental cost was very cheap. Millions of owners were ready to rent their land for trifling sums as a lack of capital, combined with the spatial inaccessibility of the plots themselves — which were often located 5-10 km from the owners’ homes — prevented many farmers from cultivating their plots of land themselves …

The 2007 amendment provided lease holders with a much wider range of opportunities, such as the use of especially long-term lease arrangements known as emphyteusis. This particular type of contract was created more than two thousand years ago in ancient Rome during the times of slavery. It involves the right to the full benefit and use of agricultural land for a very long period of time and, in many aspects, resembles full ownership although it is, technically speaking, still a leasehold. The definition of “agricultural purposes” is also unusually broad … For example, under this scheme, PJSC Myronivsky Hliboproduct (MHP) — one of Ukraine’s largest agroholding companies — began constructing the world’s largest biogas plant with a capacity of 20 MW.

The Land Question

In brief, the Ukrainian farmers, even those who nominally own their own land, see no benefit to their labor, their property, or to their country’s wealth in general, because that wealth is being expropriated and concentrated by the Ukrainian ruling class who increasingly monopolize the means of production for their own benefit. This conflict between the farmers and latifundists is one of the defining capitalist conflicts of the modern era for Ukraine, but this fight over Ukraine’s land doesn’t end inside its borders, and is not played out solely by the national bourgeoisie and national proletariat. In the age of imperialism, this conflict necessarily takes on international significance, as multinational corporations and investors scramble to get a slice of the pie. It would be naïve, of course, to suggest that land ownership and agricultural products are the only topics of great importance, but we focus on this issue because it illustrates the principal interests and motivations of the international ruling classes who are responsible for imperialist wars. In short, by framing the whole affair through the lens of the land question, it is easy to make heads-or-tails of both the national and international class struggle as it relates to Ukraine.

The Maidan Coup

For the first two and a half decades of the nation’s independence, Ukraine remained within the sphere of influence of the likewise-newly-independent Russian Federation. Then in 2014, the United States backed the Maidan coup, which empowered nationalist and fascist forces to overthrow the democratically elected leadership and install a more Western-friendly one. The United States unleashed violent fascists to achieve this end — for example, the CIA trained the neo-Nazi Azov battalion — at the expense of the Ukrainian people, for the profit of US imperialists. In this way, the violence of American imperialism has been transferred to the Ukrainian state (and para-state) forces, but by no means is the arrangement actually peaceful. Indeed, it was this maneuvering by the West that initially prompted the Russian invasion of Crimea and instigated the Donbass independence movement; the lives of Ukrainians being mere pawns in the imperialists game of monopolizing other country’s resources.

This Western-backed regime eventually came under the control of president Zelensky, a politician as corrupt as the oligarchs he won by rallying against, who subsequently put an end to the moratorium. As part of another of the IMF’s ‘structural readjustment programs,’ Ukraine had to end its land moratorium in order to take a $5 billion loan. As explained in this Oakland Institute report:

The IMF has leveraged the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic to coerce “Europe’s breadbasket” into creating a land market despite overwhelming opposition in the country. In March 2020, Ukraine ended the moratorium on the sale of land that had stood for 19 years in order to qualify for a desperately needed US$5 billion loan package from the IMF. The World Bank, along with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), has been laying the groundwork for the creation of a land market to the benefit of agribusiness and private investors who promise “growth” in exchange for access to land.

The Oakland Institute, Driving Dispossession

The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology conducted a poll to see how people would react to ending the moratorium (among other issues):

• 64% of Ukrainians believe that things in the country are going in the wrong direction (in the right direction – 20%);
• 71.7% of Ukrainians support holding a referendum on banning the sale of agricultural land. If it is held, among all respondents, 65.2% will support the ban (among those who would take part in the vote – 74.9%);
• 84.1% of Ukrainians do not support the sale of agricultural land to foreigners;
• 56.4% of Ukrainians believe that the Law on Deoligarchization is not a threat to oligarchs. [Respondents that do believe the law poses a threat to oligarchs – 20.4%];
• 52.7% disapprove of President V. Zelenskyi’s activities, 34.1% approve.

The results of the poll, as you can see, were unambiguous: people overwhelmingly opposed ending the moratorium. According to the Kyiv Post, thousands even  protested the end of the moratorium. And yet, the legislation passed all the same, against the wishes of over 60% of the country. As is typical of bourgeois democracies (if you can even still call Ukraine a democracy at all), Zelensky went against the overwhelming majority of the country’s interests for the sake of appealing to oligarchs and imperialists; it’s here most especially where one can see the subordination of Ukraine’s politics to the interests of imperialism, to international finance-capital. Consequently, the current regime has little popular support and relies on various kinds of suppression to stop unrest. Officially, the passed legislation compromised with the public by removing the provision to open the land market to foreigners, but loopholes remain in force as before, with around 10% of Ukraine’s land being under multinational control.

In a private correspondence with us, Lorina Fedorova, a Ukrainian representative of the Land Matrix Initiative, explained to us how so much land can be held by foreign countries despite this being illegal: “legally multinationals can’t buy agricultural land even after the end of the moratorium at the moment. [However,] foreign entities still control a lot of agricultural land by leasing land plots through subsidiaries registered in Ukraine.” Thus the apparent “compromise” of ending the moratorium but banning sales to foreign corporations is little more than smoke and mirrors for the pro-imperialist and pro-latifundist agenda of the Zelensky regime. Foreign capital penetration has continually risen over time, decelerating just a bit after the 2014 coup, presumably due to political destabilization and the Russian annexation of Crimea (it is more difficult to lure investors when conditions are not predictable or stable, which is why state-run multinational finance institutions have to get involved to promote the growth of the private sector).

We can see that the usual suspects are well represented among the top investors, with two unexpected outliers: Luxembourg and Cyprus. These are both notorious tax havens — because of their lax reporting that’s actually designed to hide ownership, reconstructing the ownership proportions from within these countries is tricky. Checking each corporate holder’s country of registration as well as the country of its major beneficiary makes this more clear; for example, most of the biggest Cyprus companies holding Ukrainian land are actually owned by Ukrainian oligarchs, and thus much of this land is not “really” (or completely) in the hands of multinationals. Take for example UkrLandFarming PLC, a company registered in Cyprus that owns 312,370 hectares of Ukraine’s land — the second largest single sum held of any company — controlled through a web of subsidiaries. The ownership structure can be seen below, where the orange circles are all land deals, the dark teal circle is UkrLandFarming PLC, and the other circles are Ukrainian subsidiaries:

According to the comments provided by Land Matrix: “The company is incorporated in Cyprus (most probably for tax avoidance purposes), but the country of origin is the Ukraine. [Ukrainian oligarch] Oleg Bakhmatyuk, the company CEO, is the beneficiary holder of 95% of the shares.” On the other hand, many of the biggest Luxembourg companies holding Ukrainian land are not only owned by Ukrainian oligarchs, but are also indebted to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), a sort of European-focused IMF (that the US helped found, and of which the US holds the single largest share). Consider the below example:

We detail the means by which imperialists gain access to Ukraine’s land in order to expose the cooperation between Ukrainian oligarch compradors with foreign imperialists and to reveal the actual largest players involved in Ukrainian finance/agriculture. As stated earlier, Ukraine remains one of the most exploited nations with respect to agricultural land area held by multinational corporations, but one would be left wondering how if they only looked at the letter of the law. But for the Ukrainian oligarchs and politicians, none of this matters so long as some of that wealth trickles down to them instead of leaving the country (or rather, as long as some of the money that leaves the country returns and settles in their coffers). Zelensky, along with every other Ukrainian politician, oligarch, latifundist, etc, has sold out the people of Ukraine to world imperialism: they are enemies of the Ukrainian working class just as much as Russia, just as much as America, just as much as any other imperialist power with their hands in the pot.

Thus, having exposed all this, we assert that to have solidarity with the working people of Ukraine must mean to expose the true character of the Ukrainian state as a fascist comprador state, and to support the Ukrainian working class struggle against their ruling class, against Western imperialism, and against Russian militarism.

American Imperialism

It would be impossible to fully comprehend the development of post-Soviet Ukraine without understanding the impact of American imperialism. There are two critical ways American imperialism has manipulated their development: the Maidan coup and the various interventions of the IMF. Our immediate focus will be on the latter. The IMF was founded in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference with a stated mission of “working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.” The pretty language here is nothing less than the velvet glove hiding the iron fist of Western finance-capital; those who rely on the IMF inevitably find themselves in a pact with the devil.

Bretton Woods, American Hegemony, And The IMF

The Bretton Woods Conference established the financial and political hegemony of the United States after the conclusion of WWII. As one of the sole powers to exit the war with their productive capacity not only unscathed but expanded, America was the sole imperialist power left in a position to advance itself off the destruction of the world. One way in which this hegemony is still seen today is in the supremacy of the dollar as world reserve currency. As explained by the US Treasury:

The United States dollar has been the world’s primary reserve currency for over 60 years. Under the Bretton Woods system, the dollar was pegged to gold and most other currencies were pegged to the dollar. As a result of this arrangement, dollars were used as the main intervention currency and, hence, reserve currency. Limits on convertibility of some currencies, particularly in the early years of the Bretton Woods system, also supported the use of the dollar as a reserve currency …

The dollar’s role as the primary reserve currency (and, more generally, as the primary international currency) was not established by decree but, rather, because of the emergence of the U.S. as the world’s major economy.

Appendix 1: An Historical Perspective on the Reserve Currency Status of the U.S. Dollar

It was at the Bretton Woods Conference that America became officially recognized as the top dog of Western imperialism, with its dominance further consolidated a few years later under the Marshall Plan which subordinated the other imperialist powers to US finance. We thus focus on America not simply because it is the country in which we live, but because other Western imperialist powers remain even today junior partners of US imperialism. And so, with the collaboration of these very junior partners, America founded NATO and a handful of IFIs (the IMF, the World Bank, and more), which became the key institutions of post-war imperialism. Military and financial power are the two arms of imperialism: without military might, finance would lose its underhanded and coercive power; without finance, military might would have to resort to the older and less efficient tactics of open plundering. Thus, the actual function of the IMF, like all IFIs, serves a dual purpose: to extract wealth from nations by maintaining an unpayable debt (and thus to foster a relationship of codependence), and secondly to demand economic and political reforms that further relinquish control of national assets to foreign powers (privatization of nationalized industries, demanding state assets as collateral for expected losses, deregulation of markets, etc). We see this relationship with Ukraine as early as 1999, when the IMF coerced Ukraine into breaking up its collective farms, which, as we all are very well aware of now, simultaneously assisted the development of agricultural monopolies held by Ukrainian latifundists/oligarchs, as well as facilitating the transfer of wealth out of the country to multinationals. The economic growth extolled by the IMF (and other IFIs) necessarily means the accumulation of resources and land into big business monopolies — this centralization indeed is the principal condition for the growth of productive capacity, profit, GDP, and so on. Even as productive capacity grows, the wealth created does not flow to the workers of Ukraine; even as wealth increases, destitution paradoxically does too, as more and more farmers become proletarianized (stripped of their property).

Whenever the imperialists  offer “aid,” it is always with their own benefit in mind. For example, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) promoted land reform (ending the moratorium), implying that it would benefit Ukrainians:

“If you do not own the land, the risk of cultivating a field for crops or an orchard is immense,” explains Larysa Boden, co-owner of Agro Focus LLC, the biggest asparagus farm in Ukraine and a strong supporter of land reform. “It is a big risk for us, and prevents us from investing in smaller producers within our marketing group.”

…

USAID AGRO teamed up with several private-sector professional associations, including the All-Ukrainian Association of Communities and the All-Ukrainian Agrarian Council, to draft and advocate for a comprehensive package of laws that foster land reform and fight corruption in land management. Finally, after 19 years of restrictions, the moratorium on land sales was lifted on July 1, 2021.

…

The World Bank estimates that opening the land market … could lead to incremental GDP growth of over two percent per annum over the next few years

PRIVATE SECTOR ON THE FRONTLINES OF LAND REFORM TO UNLOCK UKRAINE’S INVESTMENT POTENTIAL, January 2022 (emphasis added)

Here we see a foreign institution, which interfered with local politics on the pretense of promoting GDP growth, promoting the owner of a big business as the representative of average Ukrainian farmers. In other words, who is being aided here? Big business. In the beginning of the prior section, we also mentioned that Ukraine receives food aid despite the world relying heavily on its food exports. It is a total farce that imperialists will manipulate a country’s politics, buy up their land, export its food (and other commodities) abroad for profit, then use a scrap of that profit to return a portion of food back and call that “aid.” On this matter, we are reminded of the wise words of former president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, who encouraged African countries to stop paying off Western debt:

Our country produces enough to feed us all. We even produce more than we need. Unfortunately, for lack of organization, we still need to beg for food aid. This type of assistance is counterproductive … because the one who feeds you usually imposes his will upon you. Some people ask me, “but where is Imperialism?” Just look into your plate when you eat: you see imported corn, rice or millet: this is imperialism.

On another occasion, Sankara elaborated further:

In which countries has the IMF been successful [in alleviating poverty]? … Nowhere!

…

Those who really want to help us can give us plows, tractors, fertilizers, insecticide, watering cans, drills, dams. This is how we would define food aid. Those who come with wheat, millet, corn, or milk, they are not helping us.

Setting The Record Straight

Here it is worth taking a moment to debunk a couple pieces of fake news occasionally spread regarding Ukrainian land ownership. One commonly cited figure claims that 3 American companies (Monsanto, DuPont, and Cargill) own 30% of Ukraine’s land. This is false, the figure is closer to 2% (and not split among just these 3 companies). These three companies do indeed have substantial business in Ukraine, however. An investigation by the Oakland Institute revealed the following:

While all three companies have been in Ukraine for quite some time, their investments in the country have grown significantly over the past few years. For instance, Cargill has been in Ukraine for more than 20 years. Their activities include, but are not limited to, the sale of pesticides, seeds, and fertilizers. In recent years, they have expanded their agricultural investments to include additional grain storage, an animal nutrition company, and a stake in UkrLandFarming.

Monsanto has had operations in Ukraine since 1992, and has a focus on seeds and agrochemicals. News reports indicate that in 2012, Monsanto’s Ukraine team doubled in size, and in March 2014 – just weeks after President Yanukovych was deposed – the company invested $140 million in building a new seed plant.

Finally, DuPont has also expanded its investments in Ukraine of late. In June 2013, the company announced that it too would be investing in a new seed plant “to meet increasing demand in the region.”

THE CORPORATE TAKEOVER OF UKRAINIAN AGRICULTURE, December 2014

Similarly, a recent Wall Street Journal article made the erroneous claim that China owns 10% of Ukraine’s land. This claim goes back to a 2013 story in which the South China Morning Post wrongly claimed that the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp (XPCC) leased 3 million hectares of land from Ukraine over a 50 year period. At the time, the South China Morning Post was privately owned by a notorious Malaysian billionaire and real estate tycoon, Robert Kuok, and so the article does not reflect the word of the People’s Republic of China or the CPC. The company with whom XPCC did strike a deal with released the following statement after the initial news broke:

The news published in the media about a Xinjiang corporation and KSG Agro does not reflect the reality.

At the moment, KSG Agro and its Chinese partners are working on a contract for cooperation in the execution of a project aimed at the installation of drip irrigation systems over an area of 3,000 hectares in 2014.

KSG Agro does not intend or have any right to sell land to foreigners, including the Chinese.

China Claims to Have Bought a Huge Chunk of Ukraine, September 2013

What is particularly fascinating about this piece of enduring fake news, is that the story reveals that members of the Western media can suddenly develop an acute understanding of imperialism when they claim others are doing it. The WSJ article, scandalously titled “Why Does China Own So Much Of Ukraine?“, says the following:

Over the past few years, Chinese buyers have bought farmland in countries ranging from the U.S. and France to Vietnam. In 2013 Hong Kong-based food giant WH Group bought Smithfield, America’s largest pork producer, and more than 146,000 acres of Missouri farmland. In the same year, Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps bought 9% of Ukraine’s famously fertile farmland, equal to 5% of the country’s total territory, with a 50-year lease. (In 2020, the U.S. imposed sanctions on the Chinese company over human-rights abuses.) Between 2011 and 2020, China bought nearly seven million hectares of farmland around the world …“What matters most is what the Chinese do with the land,” said J. Peter Pham, a longtime Africa analyst … In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, “they got approval from the previous regime to take 100,000 hectares to produce for palm oil,” the cultivation of which causes damaging deforestation. “And in Zimbabwe, they’re producing beef for export back to China, which is neither a sustainable nor wise use of farmland in a country where people go hungry for want of basic staples.”

This analysis would certainly have made Lenin proud, were it not intended purely as a deflection from the West’s own imperialism. How much land does China actually own in Ukraine? according to Land Matrix, 2304 hectares (about 0.005% of Ukraine’s arable land, 1000x less than claimed). Nevertheless, let us understand the analysis here: resource exploitation and extraction leaving nations poor, underdeveloped, and ecologically destroyed — turning other countries into cheap factories for your own consumption — this indeed is the practice of imperialists!

The Bottom Line

To summarize, when we say America is an imperialist power with relation to Ukraine, we thus mean the following:

• Ukrainian politics (and politicians) are subordinated to the whims of American capital, American financial interests.
• America extracts wealth from Ukraine, both in the form of commodity exports by American-owned corporations, and through debt to multinational finance institutions such as the IMF.
• America has intentionally released, supported, funded, and trained fascistic and nationalist forces in Ukraine to defend their investments. They must defend their capital both from the Ukrainian working class, and from competing imperialist powers (i.e., Russia).
• America is sacrificing the Ukrainian people in its proxy war with Russia over Ukrainian assets, principally agricultural land.
• Supposed aid to the country, especially military supplies, further subjugates Ukraine to the USA, while encouraging them to continue bleeding for the God of profit.

Understanding this, it must be said that to stand with Ukraine must mean to stand against our own ruling class who exploit the Ukrainian working class, who destabilize their country, who implicate them in geopolitical skirmishes, and who unleash violent reactionaries upon them.

Russian Imperialism

We began this article by discussing the meaning of imperialism and made the claim that to call a capitalist country non-imperialist is essentially the same as saying that their economy remains in the pre-monopoly phase of development. In fact, some people do make this very claim about the Russian economy! We therefore begin by investigating the content and character of the Russian economy since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Russian Economy at a Glance

While the formerly powerful Soviet machine-building sector was destroyed by the shock of the fall of the USSR and the cannibalization of the Soviet economies by the Western imperial powers, it would be a mistake to think that the Russian economy remains in the pre-monopoly phase of development. Since the 1991 destruction of the former Soviet economies, the Russian Federation has been increasing its capital investments in machine production and rebuilding its internal economy. Of the 17 largest companies in Russia, each worth in excess of ten billion dollars, 12 are state-owned. A report on the Russian financial sector reveals a strongly monopolized and state-centralized banking sector as well:\

Financial penetration in Russia is high with the banks’ total assets at around 100% of GDP. The banking sector in Russia is highly concentrated with the two largest banks holding around 50% of the market. Systemically important financial institutions (12 banks) account for 75% of the total assets of the Russian banking sector. The two largest banks Sberbank and VTB Group are both state owned. Together with other state owned banks, the share of state owned banks in the banking sector is 72%. Domestically owned private banks account for 18% of the total banking sector assets, while foreign ownership in the banking sector is rather small at 10%.

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Banks have larger exposure to corporate borrowers with a 65% share of loans to the corporate sector in the total credit portfolio.

Overview of the financial sector in Russia, 2021.

Furthermore, the World Bank reports that the percent of Russian firms using banks to finance investment rose from 11% in 2000 to 34% in 2020. We thus not only see a strongly centralized financial sector, but finance-capital specifically as a growing force in the Russian economy.

Until recently, Russia was also a large investor (more than one billion Euro) in the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, a European financial institution that was founded in 1991 for the express purpose of converting the planned economies of Eastern Europe into neoliberal market economies. According to the institution’s website:

The EBRD was set up in haste to meet the challenge of an extraordinary moment in Europe’s history, the collapse of communism in its East …

During the frenetic years of the early 1990s the EBRD’s emphasis on the private sector as the main driver for change in Central and Eastern Europe was vindicated many times over. This was the period that established the EBRD’s reputation as an expert on transition to the open market.

It was heavily involved in areas such as banking systems reform, the liberalisation of prices, privatisation (legalisation and policy dialogue) and the creation of proper legal frameworks for property rights, all vital ingredients for change.

The history of the EBRD, accessed 11/26/2022

According to a report from the Congressional Research Service, “Ukraine is one of the EBRD’s largest borrowers, with cumulative lending of more than €16 billion (about $17.58 billion) in 511 projects since 1996, including more than €1 billion (about $1.2 billion) in 2021.” We include this context to show that until the invasion, Russia collaborated with Western imperialism to a substantial degree in exploiting Ukraine (and elsewhere). Since then, the Russian capital has been frozen and the EBRD plans to spend the money further investing in Ukraine.

At a glance, we see a monopoly-capitalist economy with heavy state involvement, finance-capital dominating industry, and a financial oligarchy operating internationally. If this surprises the reader, we would remind them that Russia was an imperialist power, though a semi-peripheral one, even before the socialist revolution.

The Fortress Economy: The Russian Economy in Detail

This term “fortress economy” has been popularized by the West and by neoclassical economists to refer to the preparations that have been underway in Russia for the past decade or so with the intention of resisting the implacable force of Euro-Atlantic sanctions designed to destroy the economies of “rogue” states (in reality, any state which does not accept the hegemony of the US imperialists and its junior partners in NATO).

As Marxists, we must be very careful when we approach this question: what is the “fortress economy”? Does it demonstrate any material difference from the hoarding of a war-chest of a capitalist-imperialist economy? Does it possess its own distinct productive relations?

We should pay attention to the large degree of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the Russian Federation. For instance, Gazprom and Rosneft, collectively worth $206 billion, are the two largest state oil and gas companies; the two largest private gas and oil corporations in the Federation are Lukoil and Surgutneftegas, collectively worth roughly half that at $113 billion. According to a 2017  article from the Russian Journal of economics, the 52 largest SOEs in the Federation account for 40% of the total capitalization on the stock market in Russia.

Nevertheless, this form has increased since 2008, going from 30% of the share in the GDP to 35% by 2010; the total contribution of the public sector was nearly 70% by 2015. In addition to state-owned joint stock companies, the Russian Federation includes a corporate form known as a “unitary enterprise,” which is a SOE with no ownership rights in the assets it uses, which belong to the Russian federal government.

Who benefits from these state-controlled corporations? The directors of the SOEs are appointed ministers who oversee the respective state ministries. They are political appointees.

The Ministry of Energy, for example, has responsibility for appointing the boards of management of energy-related corporations. The current minister, Nikolay Shulginov, is currently chairman of the board of management of RusHydro. The deputy minister, Alexey Miller, is chairman of the management committee of Gazprom. Another political appointee and former Deputy Prime Minister is Igor Sechin, CEO of Rosneft.

What is this fortress economy? It is a naked dictatorship of capital. It is the direct joindure of state and capital interests, a command over the economy held purely by the political appointment of the state. The Russian state has become an independent class-actor, with the civil servants of the Russian Federation also being its capitalists.

Is it a “fortress”? No. It requires external markets to absorb its massive exports of gas, oil, petroleum products, chemicals, and grain. The Russian capitalists are invested in economies all over the world. Sberbank, for instance, operates in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Austria, Croatia, Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Hungary, Czech Republic, China, India, Malaysia, United States, UK, and Cyprus.

Exports

• China, 13.43%
• Netherlands, 10.50%
• Germany, 6.57%
• Belarus, 5.09%
• Turkey, 4.96%

Imports

• China, 21.91%
• Italy, 14.41%
• Germany, 10.16%
• Belarus, 5.53%
• United States, 5.43%

In the import/export balance, it thus supplies the world with $202,000,000 in finished goods while it takes $222,000,000 in finished goods off the world markets. However, if capital goods are excluded, that becomes an export:import ratio of $186,000,000:$126,000,000.

We see neither a “fortress” nor an imperialized country.

In what countries is Russian capital invested?

Firstly, Russian direct investment abroad grew by $20.2 billion in September 2021, compared with a growth of $8.9 billion in the prior quarter, according to the CEIC (Census and Economic Information Center).

According to  Data collected by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, major direct investments into foreign economies by the Russian Federation as of June 30, 2021, include:

• Austria, $28 billion
• Bahamas, $7 billion
• Belarus, $3.5 billion
• Cambodia, $2.875 billion
• Cyprus, $184.6 billion
  • Recall: this is a notorious tax haven. It is certainly no coincidence that a highly sanctioned country like Russia would funnel so much of its capital through Cyprus. Though, like Ukraine, some of this is probably invested back into Russia — more on that later.
• Czech Republic, $2 billion
• Finland, $2.979 billion
• France, $3 billion
• Germany, $9.196 billion
• Italy, $2.6 billion
• Kazakhstan, $3.6 billion
• Latvia, $1.69 billion
• Monaco, $1.564 billion
• Montenegro, $1.35 billion
• Netherlands, $24 billion
• Serbia, $1.78 billion
• Spain, $6.1 billion
• Singapore, $10 billion
• Switzerland, $22 billion
• Turkey, $6.48 billion
• Ukraine, $3 billion
• UAE, $1.9 billion
• United Kingdom, $14 billion
• United States, $6.1 billion

As a benchmark, the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the US Department of Commerce reports that US direct foreign investment in 2020 was:

• Austria, $4.9 billion
• Russia, $12.5 billion
• United Kingdom, $900 billion
• Cyprus, $5 billion
• Ukraine, $0.761 billion

According to the UN’s World Investment Report, the 2020 outbound FDI stock — in other words, the total value invested into other countries —  reached $8.13 trillion for the US (the single largest global shareholder), $2.06 trillion for the UK, and $380 billion for the Russian Federation.

This leads us to the following conclusion: the Russian Federation is an imperialist power, albeit a small one. Its sphere of influence appears limited to the post-Soviet states in Eastern Europe and Asia and the “third tier” of states in Europe itself. The Moscow Times reported that in 2020, Russia hosted merely $1.4 billion in foreign investments, a record low since 1994. Furthermore, FDI penetration may even be deceptively high; as explained by Vladimir Tikhomirov, chief economist at BCS (a Russian finance group), “foreign direct investment has never played a big role in Russia” since much of it is actually repatriated capital — in other words, much of it is capital owned by Russians but hosted in offshore companies. And finally, de-dollarization of the Russian financial sector has been steadily progressing, halving the use of US dollars from 30% to 15% over the last twenty years; this is to say, Russian finance-capital is steadily achieving independence from Western financial hegemony.

Russia and NATO

At the outset, NATO began in 1949 as an anti-communist alliance intent on destroying the Soviet Union. Once this task had been accomplished, the association ostensibly became defunct, and yet the organization remained, changing its focus to maintaining Western hegemony in the post cold-war era. In the early days of the Russian Federation, Russia even attempted to join NATO — or at least remained open to the possibility. Up until the late 2000’s, this remained the outlook of even the Putin administration — keeping an open mind to joining NATO — though relations had already been strained by then due to several NATO operations that Russia regarded as interfering with its sphere of influence. A NATO report from the period is surprisingly forthcoming about how NATO-Russian relations were undermined:

Irreparable damage has been done to Russian perception of NATO through the three policies NATO had undertaken in 1999, 1. Expansion of NATO by way of including the three new members; 2. Modernization of American high-tech weaponry and most importantly; 3. The bombing campaign in Serbia.

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When the ruble collapsed in August 1998, with it collapsed the faith in the Western style economic reform among the Russian general public … The painful negotiations with the IMF had already created an atmosphere that the West was controlling Russian economy with unceasing demands. The West was offering loans and then imposing controls. As a result, Russia was reduced to dependence on Western loans and investments, which were not forthcoming.

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The first irritant to the Russian hawks was of course the bombing of Iraq at the end of 1998 during the impeachment of President Clinton. It made the Russian General Staff furious. Russia’s ally was bombed and Russia was not even notified in advance.

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The war over Kosovo did more damage to Russia-NATO relations than any other event since 1991.

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The main impetus [for occupying the Pristina airport] according to Ivashov was the refusal of the NATO powers to grant Russia a military zone of its own. The arguments presented to the President were that Russia could not afford to come across as submitting to NATO demands.

Discourse on NATO In Russia During the Kosovo War

The Russian economy was in disarray, and politically the country found itself isolated, with its former allies joining a military alliance that repeatedly found itself opposed to Russian interests. Refusing to submit to Western hegemony, Russian politics took a decisive anti-Western and anti-NATO turn after the Georgian and Second Chechan war. In 2009, Dmitry Rogozin, Moscow envoy to NATO, infamously said in an interview that:

We don’t consider it necessary to make any concessions in terms of our sovereignty and we are capable of solving all the threats in an independent way … Great powers don’t join coalitions, they create coalitions. Russia considers itself a great power … We are extremely frustrated and astonished by NATO’s actions in August-September last year, when our soldiers were killed and instead of support, we only saw the hypocrisy of their policy. NATO turned out to be the only organisation that sided fully with the aggressor.

Russia does not rule out future NATO membership, 2009 (emphasis added)

Great power politics has been the defining foreign policy of the Russian Federation ever since, with Russia managing to escape from the leech-filled swamp of Western imperialism to develop their own pond. We would like to emphasize that Russian concerns about NATO expansion and the national security risks it poses are authentic and justified; however, it would be a mistake to think that Russian intervention in Ukraine is simply about defense against Western imperialism. The Russian invasion of Ukraine naturally follows from both Russia’s need to defend itself from Western imperialism and to advance its own position as an imperialist power. It must be said that this contradicts the narratives of both the vulgar anti-imperialist and the liberal hypocrites, both of whom deny that economic imperialism explains the motivation of Putin or of the Russian Federation generally. The liberals in particular have declared that Putin is simply a power-hungry mad-man whose motivations are beyond reason. At the beginning of the war, for example, Joe Biden called the invasion “unprovoked.” And yet, American politicians and foreign policy experts have been warning for decades that NATO expansion would provoke Russian aggression — including none other than Joe Biden himself! Here he is warning of admitting the Baltic countries into NATO in 1997:

The Russian Federation’s aggressive opposition to NATO is not only completely predictable, but attributing it solely to Putin is an exercise in historical revisionism, ideological obfuscation, and idealism. William J. Bill Burns, the current CIA director, wrote a memoir recollecting his time and experience with Russian politics, revealing that US politicians have known for decades that NATO opposition is found across the entire Russian political spectrum:

In his book, Burns says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes — not just Putin — loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

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Burns calls the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.”

…As the Bush administration moved toward opening NATO’s doors to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about a Russian backlash grew even starker. He told Rice it was “hard to overstate the strategic consequences” of offering NATO membership to Ukraine and predicted that “it will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”

Biden’s CIA Director Doesn’t Believe Biden’s Story about Ukraine, February 7, 2022 (emphasis added)

Around the same time that Mr. Burns served in the Russian Embassy, a panel of 50 prominent foreign policy analysts wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton, warning that NATO expansion would undermine nuclear disarmament efforts and agitate Russian politicians across the political spectrum:

Dear Mr. President,

We, the undersigned, believe that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO, the focus of the recent Helsinki and Paris Summits, is a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability for the following reasons:

In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement, and galvanize resistance in the Duma to the START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty] II and III treaties; In Europe, NATO expansion will draw a new line of division between the “ins” and the “outs,” foster instability, and ultimately diminish the sense of security of those countries which are not included …

Opposition to NATO Expansion, June 26, 1997 (emphasis added)

We have already stated that national security is not the only reason for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; we do not elaborate on this issue to excuse or defend the invasion, but to demonstrate that the war in Ukraine was neither inevitable nor spontaneous (beyond reason or prediction). There were abundantly clear and well recognized antagonisms that would risk Russian military response that not only went consciously ignored by U.S. politicians, but have now been completely covered up in the fog of war. To acknowledge what U.S. politicians had been saying for decades, we are told, is repeating Kremlin propaganda, or that it is ‘Putin apologia.’ This is nonsense. We must recognize that this war is not beyond comprehension, that any other Russian leader would have responded similarly in similar situations, and that U.S. politicians knowingly risked military escalation to pursue their own interests in Eastern Europe. This war was clearly provoked, but that doesn’t mean Russia isn’t culpable for their part in it.

Denazification

One final question remains: is the invasion of Ukraine a ‘united front’ against Ukrainian fascism? We answer in the negative. While we do affirm that the reigning Ukrainian regime is fascist, that fascist forces reign terror on the Ukrainian people, we firstly reject the idea that Russia truly cares to ‘denazify’ Ukraine, and secondly that, regardless of intentions, the actual impact of the war has been to embolden and strengthen the nationalist and fascist sentiments of the average Ukrainian. This outcome is hardly surprising. Just as the supposed “war on terror” further radicalized the effected people towards Jihadism and anti-Americanism, so too is the Russian invasion of Ukraine fueling anti-Russian and pro-fascist trends. The rhetoric of anti-fascism is merely useful ideologically to build support for the war, as it builds on nostalgia for the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, but for a country that, like Ukraine, prohibits left-wing parties, bans communist publications, has political appointees in state industries, and criminalizes protest, it is a highly shallow and hypocritical justification. We therefore maintain that the actual, material motivation is best represented by a mix of national security and imperialist conquest, and not anything as honorable as fighting fascism.

In short, we must recognize that both the Russian Federation and the U.S. Empire are imperialist powers, that neither’s involvement in the war is anti-imperialist or anti-fascist, and that both powers must be condemned and opposed.

The Way Forward

This all leads us to the question: so what? If theory ceases to be a guide to action, it is useless, so what practical conclusions can we draw from this? Imperialism is an international system. To meaningfully oppose it means to lend support to struggles that tend to weaken the system in its entirety and not with prejudice for one imperialist over another. Thus the classic anti-imperialist position has been “revolutionary defeatism,” which means that the working classes of all imperialist countries should continue to oppose their ruling class during wartime by continuing to engage in class struggle:

Wartime revolutionary action against one’s own government indubitably means, not only desiring its defeat, but really facilitating such a defeat. (“Discerning reader”: note that this does not mean “blowing up bridges”, organising unsuccessful strikes in the war industries, and in general helping the government defeat the revolutionaries.)

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A revolution in wartime means civil war; the conversion of a war between governments into a civil war is, on the one hand, facilitated by military reverses (“defeats”) of governments; on the other hand, one cannot actually strive for such a conversion without thereby facilitating defeat.

The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War, 1915

This was one of the most important lessons from the split in the second international, with the social-chauvinist social-democrats of Germany betraying the world revolution by supporting their imperialist ruling class in WWI. 

This principle is just as relevant today as it was in 1915, but there is apparently a differing matter that requires elaboration. Today, there is hardly any organized left wing, both in this country and abroad, that has the necessary influence, power, or coordination to convert the imperialist war into civil war. The best most of us can accomplish is feeble marches downtown or speak-outs to a crowd of, charitably, 30 people — hardly enough to make a difference in war! And how can we call on the world proletariat to fight against their own government amidst war when, even if their government did fall, they would not have the strength to seize power for themselves? This sense of impotence in the face of imperialism has led many well-meaning comrades to reject the universality of the defeat slogan, and instead to advocate for the defeat of only their own government in the imperialist war while advocating for the success of the opposing government. To those who share these concerns, we would remind them of this critical wisdom from Lenin, only two years before the October revolution:

Anyone who would in all earnest refute the “slogan” of defeat for one’s own government in the imperialist war should prove one of three things: (1) that the war of 1914-15 is not reactionary, or (2) that a revolution stemming from that war is impossible, or (3) that co-ordination and mutual aid are possible between revolutionary movements in all the belligerent countries. The third point is particularly important to Russia, a most backward country, where an immediate socialist revolution is impossible. That is why the Russian [Socialists] had to be the first to advance the “theory and practice” of the defeat “slogan”.

In point of fact, the defeat slogan is precisely applicable because the left is weak both internationally and domestically. Today’s falsifiers, who have distorted revolutionary defeatism to be one-sided, have created an inverted form of social-chauvinism, mirroring the errors of the second international. This treacherous position is a consequence of Trotskyite revisionism, which Lenin polemicized against in the very same article: “The phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings on a simple issue. It seems to him that to desire Russia’s defeat means desiring the victory of Germany” (ibid). Let us be clear that the weakening of one imperialist power by another necessarily constitutes a strengthening of the opposing imperialist power, and in no way represents a weakening of the imperialist system in general. Let us be doubly clear that the defeat of one imperialist power does not necessarily imply the success of the other. We thus reject this campist “social-treachery.”

For our friends in Ukraine, where they are primarily victims of imperialism and not actively engaged in imperializing other countries, the primary struggle is one of national oppression and semi-colonialism. Though Ukrainian oligarchs are themselves monopoly-capitalists, Ukraine itself has not developed into an imperialist power because the market is not yet ‘glutted’; the rate of profit of investment is still high because the country is not highly developed, and remains underdeveloped by war and by imperialist exploitation. This is further reflected by Ukraine’s FDI being quite low. But insofar as the current government and the reigning oligarchs are complicit to the imperialists of the world, they cannot be counted on as a progressive elements in the war for the national liberation of Ukraine. 

Not only that: they are open fascists, or their bedfellows. They cultivate nationalist sentiments which act as a bar to international solidarity, criminalize left-wing parties and communist symbols and papers, and have waged wars of aggression against the Russian speaking majority populace of the Donbass. In short, even though Ukraine is not an imperialist power, its ruling class and government are an obstacle to the liberation of the Ukrainian nation generally and the Ukrainian working class specifically. Thus the primary task of the Ukrainian communist movement must be to agitate for liberation against national oppression, against their oligarchy, and against the fascist forces in Ukraine, and to attempt to convert this anti-fascist and anti-semicolonial war into a socialist revolution. To this end, the national sovereignty of the Luhansk and Donetsk republics must be assured, because the Ukrainian regime is their national oppressor; because Russian war propaganda centers around defending the Donbass against Ukrainian fascism; and because the Russian Federation, having over-extended and overplayed their hand, requires an opportunity to save face in order to accept an end to the war (i.e., they can claim victory in defeat by saying they won independence for the people of the Donbass). At a time when the Russian offensive has been defeated, and the Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun, there is an opportunity now to begin peace talks, which the Ukrainian government has rejected because they want to reclaim lost territory. Ukrainian revolutionaries can take advantage of this war-mongering and turn hostilities against their ruling class by arguing for the national sovereignty of the Donbass and the futility of continued war for territorial expansion; they can further expose their ruling class for selling out to NATO and for being dragged into war and debt.

For our friends in the Russian Federation, the situation is more straightforward, though by no means easy. The Russian Federation is a fledgling imperialist power. Although it responded to NATO provocation, that provocation was itself of the very kind undertaken between capitalist-imperialist countries: interference with local markets and resources, realignment of trade, etc. Although the war was a response to a provocation which any capitalist-imperialist power would have to respond to, the Russian Federation is nevertheless a small-scale capitalist-imperialist power. Any war it wages is therefore a war of imperialist profiteering. It is sacrificing conscripts for material accumulation, waging state violence on protesters, arresting Communists who come out in opposition to the war, etc. A great cost has been incurred for no benefit to the Russian people. 

The very fact that the Russian Federation has managed to stand on its own against the U.S. Empire and its puppets indicates that the age of small-scale local imperialisms is coming to an end. Indeed, as capitalist stabilization collapses, we have entered a new period: one in which the previously-confined, small-scale, local imperialism of the Russian Federation steps onto the world stage.And for those of us in the U.S. Empire, our most essential responsibility is to agitate against our own ruling class and to facilitate its defeat. This, more than anything, is how we can support the people’s movements of the world. Reject arms deals and war bonds. Reject sanctions, which do nothing but harm civilians. Call to abolish NATO and reject expansion. Revitalize the anti-globalization movement which the right has increasingly co-opted and claimed as theirs. Expose the political and economic dimensions of war and conflict; expose the vile hypocrisy of our politicians, media, and institutions. Organize working class power and build a vanguard party capable of gaining mass support and leadership. In international relationships our primary responsibility is to assist the workers of other nations in resisting our own government, but it must be said that to call every act of popular resistance outside the West a color revolution doomed to fail, to support riot police and foreign “peacekeepers” putting down protests, etc, is an egregious breach of international solidarity. Let us instead strike a balance of supporting the authentic demands of the real movement in these countries while, at the same time, exposing efforts to mislead and co-opt them.