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Arms companies — the merchants of death — have certainly benefitted from the war. There’s an article in today’s Times headed “Defence companies having a good war as shares skyrocket” which begin:
“Defence companies stocks have risen dramatically as the war in Ukraine triggers a ‘massive reinvestment’ in arms, according to industry sources.
Western governments are flooding Ukraine with guns, ammunitions and sophisticated man-portable missile systems, sending share prices for weapons companies up by as much as 72 per cent since the day Russia invaded.”That’s what you’d expect once a war starts. But I don’t think we can say that these companies start wars. They just profit from them. Nor would governments want to favour arms companies in particular as it is governments that have to pay for the arms — out of taxes paid by other sections of the capitalist class.
When I first read Martov’s theory as to why Bolshevik tactics were popular among some sections of the working class outside Russia I found it disappointing and could understand why the 1939 translation left it out.
To see support outside Russia for Bolshevik tactics as coming mainly from ex-soldiers is unconvincing and doesn’t fit the facts, not even in the defeated German and Austrian empires and certainly not in Britain, France and Italy. I know it was written in 1919 when it was not clear how things were going to develop. In any event it didn’t take long —a couple of years — before the Bolshevik government changed its tactics and abandoned immediate insurrection for electing left wing governments.
Dan of course was writing much later and able to trace the origin of Bolshevik ideas and tactics to a section of the Russian anti-tsarist revolutionary movement. But, if I remember, he still saw Bolshevik Russia as in some way basically socialist (because it was based on state ownership) rather than as a form of capitalism.
Because NATO, ie the US, wouldn’t let him of course. Equally significant is his new concession (recognition of reality) that Russian troops could stay in the Donbas region.
Some NATO states, eg Britain, still don’t want him to make any concessions as that would not mean that Russia would be seen to have failed. They prefer to provide Ukraine with more arms in the hope that Russia can be defeated militarily, but the only result will be more cities bombed, more people killed and more refugees.
Here’s what we said about the Russian-Georgian war of 2008 which has some relevance to the current war:
One of the points made in the 2nd letter:
“We should counter the image of a successful campaign that Ukraine is constructing: this war is unwinnable, and every minute of denying it kills more and more people. Patriotic proclamations do not help the newly drafted soldiers, nor do they help the people that can’t evacuate from the slowly encircled and shelled cities, which, authorities assure, “are never going to fall.” A historical example of the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei suffices to prove that, as long as there exists a chance of winning the war, reactionary forces will mobilise for its continuation.”
After being called by Biden a war criminal and a butcher who cannot remain in power, Putin is showing remarkable restraint in not replying that Biden is senile and a doddering dotard — some of Biden’s minders who are having to regularly correct him might well agree with.
A sensible, pragmatic compromise to avoid unnecessary bloodshed (instead of the dangerous, crackpot government advice of throwing Molotov cocktails at oncoming tanks):
“A mayor in a Ukrainian town occupied by Russian forces has been released from captivity and the soldiers have agreed to leave after a mass protest by residents.
Slavutych, a northern town close to the Chernobyl nuclear site, was taken by Russian forces but stun grenades and overhead fire failed to disperse unarmed protesters on its main square on Saturday.
The crowd demanded the release of mayor Yuri Fomichev, who had been taken prisoner by the Russian troops.
Attempts by Russian troops to intimidate the growing protest failed and on Saturday afternoon Fomichev was let go by his captors.
An agreement was made that the Russians would leave the town if those with arms handed them over to the mayor with a dispensation for those with hunting rifles.
Fomichev told those protesting that the Russians had agreed to withdraw “if there are no [Ukrainian] military in the city”.
The deal struck, the mayor said, was that the Russians would make a search for Ukrainian soldiers and arms and then depart. One Russian checkpoint outside the city would remain.”Everything Russia has done, Israel has too, including bombing civilians and assassinating opponents. The US and its protected allies could easily bring Israel to heel even if it has the nuclear bomb but choose not to for strategic reasons. Prize hypocrites.
Australia’s defence minister said on Friday any move to establish a Chinese military base in neighbouring Solomon Islands would be a concern after a wide-ranging draft security pact was leaked online.
Russia’s defence minister said on Friday any move to establish a NATO military base in neighbouring Ukraine would be a concern after . . .
Rosa Luxemburg didn’t think much of the Ukrainian nationalism of her day. This from her 1918 pamphlet on the Russian Revolution (https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch03.htm):
“Ukrainian nationalism in Russia was something quite different from, let us say, Czechish, Polish or Finnish nationalism in that the former was a mere whim, a folly of a few dozen petty-bourgeois intellectuals without the slightest roots in the economic, political or psychological relationships of the country; it was without any historical tradition, since the Ukraine never formed a nation or government, was without any national culture, except for the reactionary-romantic poems of Shevschenko. It is exactly as if, one fine day, the people living in the Wasserkante should want to found a new Low-German (Plattdeutsche) nation and government! And this ridiculous pose of a few university professors and students was inflated into a political force by Lenin and his comrades through their doctrinaire agitation concerning the “right of self-determination including etc.”
She seems to have regarded Ukrainian as a dialect of Russian and to blame Lenin for artificially creating a Ukraine — a claim also made by Putin.
Too late now of course. Ukraine, after being an administrative unit of the old USSR, has now become a state and Ukrainian a separate language.
Interesting statement from the Zapatistas. I hadn’t realised they had gone anarchist. It maybe the quaint language but I am not sure what they mean by the “resistance• in Ukraine. I don’t think they mean the resistance of the Ukrainian state’s armed forces.
Also interesting on that link is a very revealing interviews with someone from the “Social Movement”;
The “Social Movement” is the name Trotskyists in Ukraine under:
https://rev.org.ua/sotsialnyi-rukh-who-we-are/
As can be seen they have joined up to be part of the armed forces of the Ukrainian state.
Incidentally, they could seek to gain support on the basis that Trotskyy was Ukrainian.
Yes, the end of the world is nigh, as the original Abiezer Coppe, the 17th century Ranter preached (before he calmed down after it didn’t happen).
The ICC statements on the war have generally been good but there is an odd passage in this one:
“Our solidarity with the KRAS comrades does not imply that we agree with all the contents of the statement, such as the demand for “an immediate end to hostilities” which seems to be a concession to the idea that the two bourgeois camps can make peace.”
I would have thought that, from the point of view of the immediate interest of the workers, an immediate stop to the killing and destruction is what is required. It may not be likely to happen but it’s a demand that any organisation committed to the interest of the working class should make.
Some of the other KRAS slogans are more dubious and/or just as unlikely to occur (calls for strikes, mutinies), not that this is preventing us publishing their statement in next month’s Socialist Standard.
We are not expected to believe that obvious Ukraine state propaganda, are we? And from the sensationalist Daily Mail (though the Guardian and the Independent willingly echo Ukrainian state propaganda too).
Here’s another example of obvious propaganda since we seem to exchanging examples:
“Large numbers’ of Belarusian troops refusing to join Russian invasion: Ukraine
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence says the possibility exists that Belarus’s army may join the Russian invasion, but its intelligence indicates that “a large number of personnel and some commanders are refusing to participate” in the war.”
