Reply To: Russian Tensions
Leaving aside your shrill rhetoric Robbo, I am wondering if I have read you correctly regarding your view that workers defending their common life against an invader are all “deluded patriots” who would show more common sense if they simply fled from the conflict. The fact that they don’t is to you “dumb beyond comprehension”. It had me thinking that what you find so wrong and incomprehensible is not that they are fighting as such, but that they are fighting under a national flag as a military arm of the state, and it is that which you find so appalling. This is a view I would associate more with anarchists than socialists, but that’s not important here. So what would you say if workers self-organized, independently of the state, to form fighting groups in a defensive war as in Ukraine? I am thinking of organized resistance fighters in France fighting against German invaders in ww2. Or what about anarchist militias in the Spanish Civil War? It’s a question that has particular relevance regarding the Russian war in Ukraine because Ukraine has a fairly impressive record of worker self organisation and political activism. Clearly, such non-State fighters would not be “deluded patriots” fighting under a “tacky cloth called a flag”. So what would they be in your view, and how would you evaluate their behaviour in terms of your socialist beliefs?