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. . .
9 notes and some thoughts1
What has been the deadliest war of the 21st century? Many would answer the war in Ukraine. Others would say the war in Syria. Some would mention the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. A few, more informed, readers could name the war in Yemen. In fact, Ethiopia’s unknown war (the “Tigray conflict”, 2020-2022) is probably the deadliest of the 21st century, with around 600,000 civilian deaths, “without including combatants on both sides, which some military intelligence sources put at between 100,000 and 200,000.”2 For a war to make it in the main news, it must either involve people that the privileged citizens of the West can identify with, and/or have a political significance (a recognizable framework of importance) for global capitalism.3 The war in Ukraine signals a decisive move towards a bi-polar world. Some anarchists and leftists are calling to support the Ukrainian troops against Russian imperialism, other anarchists and leftists put the blame on NATO, arguing that the strengthening of the “Russia-China alliance” will weaken the power of Western imperialism. Many people in the countries formerly known as “Eastern Europe” are thinking “should we talk about capitalism now that we are so close to war?”, fascists are attempting to win followers by rebranding themselves as “antiwar”, many are lost in geopolitical analyses, and most people have got used to this war and only care when, every few weeks, the threat of a nuclear warfare increases4. The mass media and “the voices of reasoning” call us to support “our” capitalism, threatened by Putin’s and Xi Jinping’s version, while in the capitalist periphery the Russian private military company Wagner poses itself as an agent of anti-imperialist struggle. Although capitalism, as a global system of death and destruction, attacks us in multiple ways, resistance to capitalist wars is mainly connected with anti-imperialism. But “imperialism” as a concept is creating confusion about the nature of capitalism, while “anti-imperialism” in practice entails succumbing to state power and accepting nationalism as a “necessary evil”, a trojan horse for nationalism and state-building. If we do not create a clear position soon, a position that will spread globally beyond borders, with all the practical work this entails, opposing all false options presented by the “new multi-polar world-in-formation”, we will end up with a future where there will be no choice at all.
If we want to save the future, we have to repair the past, that is free ourselves from the burden of the manufactured concept(s) of the past — and the present.
1. Imperialism is not the last but the first stage of capitalism
According to a common (and manipulable) misconception, imperialism is relatively recent, consists of the colonization of the entire world, and is the last stage of capitalism. This diagnosis points to a specific cure: nationalism. It is offered as the antidote to imperialism, since wars of national liberation are said to break up the capitalist empire.
This diagnosis serves a purpose, but it does not engage with any real event or situation. We come closer to the truth when we turn idea on its head and say that imperialism was the first stage of capitalism, that the world was subsequently colonized by nation-states, and that nationalism is the dominant, the current, and (hopefully) the last stage of capitalism. The facts of the case were not discovered yesterday; they are as familiar as the misconception that denies them.
(Fredy Perlman. The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism, 1984)
2. For hundreds of years, resistance to colonialism and capitalism didn’t entail creating states and nation-building
The modern representations of the proletariat as a European, industrial working class occulted the first experiences of solidarity, self-organization, and self-emancipation displayed in the Atlantic by the “many-headed hydra” comprising sailors, pirates and deported slaves. Living in an age of machines and factories, Marx did not consider such experiences as significant for the future.
[Enzo Traverso, Left-wing melancholia: Marxism, history and memory, 2017
(Malinconia di sinistra: Una tradizione nascosta 2016)]
The emphasis in modern labor history on the white, male, skilled, waged, nationalist, propertied artisan/citizen or industrial worker has hidden the history of the Atlantic proletariat of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. That proletariat was not a monster, it was not a unified cultural class, and it was not a race. This class was anonymous, nameless. (…) Like Caliban, it originated in Europe, Africa, and America. It included clowns, or cloons (i.e., country people). It was without genealogical unity. It was vulgar. It spoke its own speech, with a distinctive pronunciation, lexicon, and grammar made up of slang, cant, jargon, and pidgin—talk from work, the street, the prison, the gang, and the dock. It was planetary, in its origins, its motions, and its consciousness. Finally, the proletariat was self-active, creative; it was—and is—alive; it is on a move.
(Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra. The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, 2000)
3. Actually, for an even longer period, millions of people all around the world fled away from state-control and oppression
For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. James Scott (The Art of Not Being Governed – An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, 2009) redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism” and tells the story of the peoples of Zomia from the perspective of stateless people by choice: “hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon5 communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.
Zomia is […] knitted together as a region not by a political unity, which it utterly lacks, but by comparable patterns of diverse hill agriculture, dispersal and mobility, and rough egalitarianism, which, not incidentally, includes a relatively higher status for women than in the valleys.”
We can find similar cases in other parts of the world: Ernest Gellner (Saints of the Atlas, 1969) makes it abundantly clear that the demarcation line between Arab and Berber is not, essentially, one of tribe, civilization, let alone religion. Instead, it is a political line distinguishing the subjects of a state from those outside its control. Pierre Clastres (Society against the State, 1974) argues persuasively that the so-called primitive Amerindian societies of South America were not ancient societies that had failed to invent settled agriculture or state forms. On the contrary, they were previously sedentary cultivators who abandoned agriculture and fixed villages in response to the dire effects of the Conquest, i.e. both disease-induced demographic collapse and colonial forced labor. The maroon communities in Brazil, called “quilombos” (Palmares, 1605–1694, the largest one, had perhaps twenty thousand inhabitants), home to not only escaped enslaved Africans, but also to Indigenous peoples, and poor or marginalized Portuguese settlers, were another case — their legacy survived until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the form of Brazil’s “social bandits”, the cangaceiros.
In our part of the world, we had tribal populations living in the Balkan mountains, often completely independent of Ottoman rule, or, more to the East, the peoples still living in the Kurdish mountains. All these areas were also places of refuge with a characteristic feature: “a patchwork of identities, ethnicities, and cultural amalgams that are bewilderingly complex” (Scott, 2009). In the beginning of the 20th century, I.W.W. was the only cross-border labor movement’s organization that kept the spirit of this planetary proletariat.
4. Anti-imperialism is not something emancipatory but an antechamber to nationalism
Central to the Leninist concept of imperialism is the notion that ambiguous capitalism that brings intensified exploitation, together with the possibility of emancipation (as described by Marx and Engels) has turned circa 1900 into entirely “negative” capitalism. The latter is “monopoly capitalism” characterized by finance capital, a corrupt workers’ aristocracy and imperialism and needs to be fought and destroyed by any means necessary. “Totally bad” as opposed to “ambiguous” capitalism is complemented by the notion of “bad, perverted nationalism”, i.e. imperialism, versus good, benign nationalism (as in ‘healthy patriotism’ etc.)
The Leninist concept of the right of nations to self-determination is historically rooted in the nineteenth-century idea, then shared by liberals and democrats, that nation-building overcomes late-feudal atomization and creates, within a unified national society, the conditions for emancipatory movements.
Arguably there is an element of orientalism in the Leninist assertion that the “peoples of the East” need nation-building as the first stage of emancipation, whereas those in “the West” have passed this “stage” and are ready for class struggle unencumbered by nationality and ethnicity. (The realpolitics of ‘socialism in one country’ quickly replaced even this geographically limited anti-nationalist stance.)
[Marcel Stoetzler. «Critical Theory and the Critique of Anti-Imperialism»,
The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, V3. 2018]
During the so-called cold war, “anti-imperialism” was used to turn colonized populations around the world into nation states under the control of local communist parties and bourgeoisies in order to create a global, also imperial, system centered on the USSR (and later on China too). The attachment to the military machine of the Soviet empire would protect the new nation-states from the plunder of their raw materials by the “imperialists”. Of course, the “homeland of socialism” would undertake that “exploitation” of natural wealth, while its regional allies were to undertake rapid industrialization in order to reverse the “uneven development” “imposed by imperialism” — an alternative description of “primitive accumulation”, but for “the good of socialism”.
5. Nationalism is not an enemy of capitalist cosmopolitanism, it is its instrument
With their bravery, they [“citizens of Ukraine’] have made clear that citizens are willing to die for liberal ideals, but only when those ideals are embedded in a country they can call their own.
(Francis Fukuyama, A Country of Their Own – Liberalism Needs the Nation, April 2022)
Although the belief that nationalism is an enemy of globalised capitalism is widespread, it is far from true. We could say that nationalism is an enemy that capitalism is pretending to be facing, an enemy that is actively being helped by capitalism to grow, a chosen enemy. This enemy has a specific function: Through the growth of populist right-wing “resistance”, capitalism is creating a false opponent, one that is uniting by dividing, and is fostering the most reactionary ideologies, that can be used by capitalism to discipline populations and create tensions that can then be “resolved” through more arms production and wars. Not much to add here.
6. The new cold war co-exists with capitalist globalization
According to German government officials, Russia has increased its income from gas and oil exports in 2022 by one third, primarily through (direct) sales to Asia and Saudi Arabia, where the oil gets refined for the world market. For the whole of 2022, Russia managed to boost oil export earnings by 20 percent, to $218 billion, according to estimates from the Russian government and the International Energy Agency (…) Russia also raked in $138 billion from natural gas, a nearly 80 percent rise over 2021 as record prices offset cuts in flows to Europe.6
US oil producers have raked in more than $200bn in profits since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as they cash in on a period of geopolitical turmoil that has shaken up the global energy market and sent prices soaring.7 As we are speaking about “profit and loss”, “with additional pledges of nearly 37 billion euros in December, the Americans have earmarked a total of just over 73.1 billion euros for Ukraine support. For the EU, the comparable figure is 54.9 billion euros”.8
In yet another comparison, the profit/loss balance for the Afghanistan/Iraq wars “with the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the Middle East entered a protracted period of war, oil prices have risen, and the share of the oil companies in global profit is moving higher and higher. During the five-year period from August 2001 to July 2006, the average net income of the global oil sector amounted to $108 billion per annum. This figure compares with an annual profit of only $34 billion in the year from August 1999 to July 2000 – a jump of $75 billion: the war costs $100 billion a year and it generates an extra $75 billion in annual oil profits”. (Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Cheap Wars, August 2006)
Another example of what a new bi-polar/multi-polar world within capitalist globalisation looks like: While the Greek state delivers fighting vehicles, weapons, and ammunition to Ukraine9, and facilitates NATO troops by offering them military bases and ports, Greece’s large shipping industry dominates fossil fuel exports from Russia.10
7. The end of the 20th century bipolar world opened up new territories for capitalist looting, but also liberated vital emancipatory forces
When the “three world” system of the Cold War era collapsed at the beginning of the ’90s, neo-colonialism through debt (and war) intensified. Already since the 1980s, the IMF and the World Bank promoted their “Structural adjustment programs”, non-Western economies “opened up” and “foreign direct investment” took off. On the other hand, the collapse of the “Eastern bloc” and the global influence of the Soviet Union led to the liberation of forces and movements that previously had had no other option but to join one of the two blocs of “barracks socialism” (USSR or China). Movements from the “global South” began to meet with resistance in the centers of globalized capitalism, giving birth to something new and essential. The farmers’ movement in India, the landless rural workers’ movement in Brazil, the zapatista movement in Mexico, the piquetero movement in Argentina, the shack dwellers’ movement in South Africa, and more, started meeting with squatters, feminists, migrants, precarious workers, etc., in the core capitalist countries, creating a horizontal network of communication and struggle against capitalism. This “global justice movement” at some point, before the involvement of social-democrat and “radical” left parties at the Porto Alegre World Social Forum, and, more crucially, until the “9/11” World Trade Center attacks, really looked like the return of “the specter haunting” not only Europe, but the world.
8. War and capitalism
The war in Ukraine and the new divisions it produces are good for the state and capital and catastrophic for humanity and its prospects of emancipation, as wars have always been. Capitalism from its beginnings was not based solely on the development of productive powers and the creation of surplus value, but also on looting, destruction and war. “…According to Marx, the root of the conflict lies in the sphere of production, the key unit of political economy should be based on labour – the ‘socially necessary abstract labour time’ that ‘productive workers’ must spend, on average, to produce a given bundle of commodities (…) [our approach] is radically different, capital is not a material-economic entity affected by power. It is power – and indeed nothing but power”.11
Capitalism, as a constantly expanding global power system, is based on its ability to turn everything into profit and create value through production and destruction alike (merchandise fetishism, alienation, the situationist notion of the spectacle, manufacturing consent and co-option through consumerism are equally important aspects in this process, especially for Western societies, but they are not the focus of this article).
War disciplines citizens and aligns them with the ruling class interests (“war is the health of the state”, The State, Randolph Bourne 1886–1918). In geopolitical analysis there is no place for social movements, and if there is, they are just tools in the hands of governments.
Also, the war industry is still an industry that has to sell its merchandise, open up new markets, increase consumption and production, etc.
When more money will be made by going to war than by not going to war, war will always be the choice.
Moreover, war emerges as a necessity, when capitalism is faced with chronic stagnation and the saturation of global markets. Cycles of destruction and reconstruction are the answer to the need to perpetuate accumulation in the face of stagnation.
“Stagnation” describes two main problems of capitalism: the depletion of raw materials and the inflation of debt. Capitalism as a system, in order to remain balanced, must always expand. Having expanded across the planet, it attempted to expand into the future (through money from debt) and is now investing in destruction. Most people don’t realize that banks can lend money that they do not possess, and that the only “real money” is the one paid as debt. But this is stolen from the future. And “money from debt” is creating a huge bubble. According to the IMF (December 12 2022), the global debt is well above pre-pandemic levels despite a steep drop in 2021, calculated at 247% of global gross domestic product. That compares to around 195% of GDP in 2007, before the global financial crisis. Global debt continued to rise in 2022, although at a much slower rate, reaching a record $235 trillion. Many people also think banks collapsing will put in danger global capitalism. But banks losses are always paid by the tax payers and wide privatisations are enforced to “save ourselves from the crisis”.
As long as people continue to believe in economy, crises will be used to benefit capitalism.
“The social convention of money, as we know it today, is based on the trust placed in it by the public. And as money is the basis of the entire financial system, the system’s stability depends also on trust … Fiat money (paper or digital money without backing in precious metals or commodities, almost all national currencies today) is an asset with no intrinsic value … its value clearly comes from trust. This is why the issuer of money is so powerful.”
(The value of trust, speech by A. Carstens, General Manager of the BIS12, Madrid, Spain, 6 March 2023)
Money in any case is an imaginary construction, an enforced convention reproduced thanks to the people’s trust in it and in the economy in general, or better, in their enforced inability to come up with something else.
The money produced through debt appears to us as entirely imaginary, an inconceivable expression of the system’s irrationality, which we struggle to rationalize. The money created in the places of production seems more real to us, we feel angry as we are not getting paid enough, because others profit from our labor in jobs that are unpleasant, that insult our dignity and harm our health.
Speaking of money “backed by commodities”: If tomorrow imaginary money acquired a “real” existence after a decision to privatize the air we breathe, would it then seem more real to us? Sounds unbelievable, doesn’t it? But how has the privatization of water, forests, natural resources in general, and essential services such as healthcare or education, or the privatization of war, come to appear as reasonable, if not because we actually accepted we should buy it?
8b. “credo”, “credit”, “investītūra”
Credit, 15c., (from Latin verb credo, meaning “I believe”) is the trust which allows one party to provide money to another party (thereby generating a debt).
Investiture, late 14c., was the clothing of a new officeholder [rulers, bishops, magistrates] in garments that symbolized power. (In feudal society) the formal bestowal of the possessory right to a fief or other benefice. Borrowed from Medieval Latin investītūra.
Invest, “to dress, clothe”.The meaning “use money to produce profit” is attested from 1610s in connection with the East Indies trade, via the notion of giving one’s capital a new form. The military meaning “to besiege, surround with hostile intent” also is from c. 1600.
(on-line dictionaries, emphasis added by us)
What if we got together and gave that big gray bubble a kick?
(Eduardo Galleano, The Book of Embraces –El libro de los abrazos–, 1989)
9. After the failed attempt for a blitzkrieg, war in Ukraine has turned into a trench warfare with foot soldiers being treated as cannon fodders. Who is paying the price?
War capitalism using minorities, martial law against the labor and social movements in Russia and in Ukraine, “restructuring” the economy of Ukraine. And resistance.
Russian regions, often with Muslim population, that are experiencing the highest rates of poverty, have mobilized the largest share of conscripts to be sent to fight in Ukraine. In September 2022, police used live ammunition and clashed with protesters in the southern Russian region of Dagestan, during public unrest against Putin’s decision to send hundreds of thousands more men to fight in Ukraine. In October 2022, at the Sakharovo migration center in Moscow’s suburbs, Sobyanin (Mayor of Moscow) advertised a “one-stop shop” for migrants who may want to join the war effort while also applying for their work or citizenship documents. Wagner group forces fighting at Bakhmut number nearly 50,000 mercenaries, among them 40,000 convicts.
In the winter of 2022-2023, hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and policemen descended to a Ukraine region were ethnic Hungarians are living (in the West of the country), rounding up and conscripting whoever they could grab, including members of the Roma population. Since the first days of the war, Zelensky announced that “Ukrainians with real combat experience will be released from custody and will be able to compensate for their guilt in the hottest spots.”
Meanwhile, war economy is used, both in Russia and in Ukraine, to intensify the attacks against the labor and social movements (Ukraine used martial law for this). Moreover, “restructuring” the economy of Ukraine was one of the direct responses to the war: “[Ukraine] is going against any economic theory of war. It is assumed that the interventionism and control of production by the State was what prevailed in the two wars of the 20th century that shook the world. Warring states tend to nationalize key sectors of the economy to maximize weapons production and stabilize the economy. They try to strengthen the national purchase, encourage credit, cancel internal debt and stop paying external debt (…) Interestingly, this has not happened in Ukraine, were, in fact, the opposite is happening (…) by canceling so many taxes and talking mainly about post-war reconstruction in terms of duty-free zones for exports, the war has paradoxically seen an intensification of this fiscal model [“low taxes on large companies are the key to growth and prosperity”]. (…) While Ukrainian workers stood up for the country and did everything in their power to keep things running in very difficult times, multiple reforms were pushed through that further limited rights in the workplace. (…) The first drafts of the labor laws emerged in early July [2022], at the Ukraine Recovery Conference held on the idyllic shores of Lake Lugano in Switzerland.13
Before the war, there had been a remarkable rise in labor protests in Russia, and also revolts in Belarus and Kazahstan: “The conflict now being resolved in Ukraine by tanks, artillery, and rockets is the same conflict that police batons have suppressed in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia itself”14. Sociologist Pyotr Bizyukov is trying to paint a true picture of worker resistance in Russia by monitoring labour protests across the country. “In 2008, the year our project started, we recorded only 95 labour protests (…) 2020 was a record-breaking year, when we collated 437 protests [against the backdrop of the global pandemic] (…) 73% of Russian labour protests in 2021 took place without the participation of trade unions. 2022 started off rather strongly – like those years when the number of labour protests was at a record high. But at the end of February 2022, the “special military operation” began, and in March 2022 there was an unexpected drop [in worker protests]. People were frozen, scared, stunned.”15
Resistance to the war is still going on within Russia, although the public protests that took place during the first weeks after the war have long stopped, as a result of police oppression: “Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as calculated by the horizontal human rights group Solidarity Zone, 112 people have been prosecuted in Russia on charges of radical anti-war actions or preparations for them. Of these, 51 were for arsons of enlistment offices or other administrative buildings, 36 were for sabotaging the railway, 17 – for preparing some arsons, 7 – for setting fire to Z-cars.”16
To these, one should add the Russian soldiers who are deserting, and the increasing number of Ukrainian soldiers who are abandoning their positions or rebelling against commanders’ orders (in January 2023 a new punitive law was signed in Ukraine, introducing harsher punishment for deserters and wayward soldiers, and stripping them of their right to appeal).
10. Some thoughts
All the above might sound good in theory or more or less interesting pieces of info, but how should we act if we want to turn things around?
a) We do not have an answer for all the questions and we do not want to pretend that we do. On the other hand, adopting a general position against the war, based on traditional anarchist values and theories is not really a solution, if in practice that means doing nothing.
b) The main war in the West is still a war for people’s minds.
Although we could never defend the political choice of joining the Ukrainian army, we found ourselves (especially during the first days of the war) in no position to judge the personal choice of joining “Territorial Defense” units. But now that time has passed and some things have cleared out, some things need to be said.
We come from a region (the Balkans) that has been repeatedly torn by nationalism. We come from a country that was at war for more than 50 years,17 were nation-building meant not letting people speak the language of their parents, that remained silent in front of the extermination of the Jewish population in Greece, treated Greek refugees that came to Greece after the 1922 Population Exchange Convention with racism and brutally exploited them as cheap labor force (they were really integrated when they fought in World War II). We come from a country where the “communist” party turned from internationalism (i.e. supporting the Slavic Macedonian people’s right to self-determination in the 1930’s) to “anti-imperialist patriotism” starting from the years after the civil war until today. It should be noted here that during the Yugoslav wars the communist party was supporting the “anti-imperialist” Milošević, and this happened not as a result of some discussion or demand from its members, but merely because the party leaders decided so. And all that happened while the nationalist frenzy generated around the sacred name of Macedonia was being used to create a unified nationalist population that was exploiting Albanian migrants’ cheap labor and killing them, and using female migrants from the ex-“Eastern countries” for sex trafficking slaves, house workers and cleaners, and as imported brides.
We come from a country, where all antiauthoritarian voices were silenced for decades by the quasi-dictatorial right-wing government and the Stalinist party alike, and anti-authoritarian approaches could be expressed either by people who had left the country or disguised their thoughts as literature.
Let’s examine some political choices that presented themselves after the beginning of the war in Ukraine, not as a personal choice, but “in order for us not to be politically discredited” (of course such choices were coupled with the argument “how can you speak if you don’t live there”). The scenario for an “independent military resistance” that circulated in the first period of the war in Ukraine soon faded out, expecially after the militarisation of “Territorial Defense” and the transformation of the conflict into a trench war. Isn’t it outrageous to speak in favor of joining the army while soldiers are deserting and brutal force is being used to send people go the front? The Zelensky regime obviously chose the escalation of the war, we will never know what might have happened if, in the first days of the war, instead of the curfew imposed, millions of people went out into the streets in Ukraine to stop the Russian troops. We know that this actually did happen in a spontaneous way in various places during the first weeks of the invasion, and also that during the Russian occupation of Kherson there were protests that were met with less violence than, for example, the recent protests in Greece (in other cases though, mostly in smaller towns or villages, Russian forces reacted by shooting in the air and in some cases at protesters). In total, in the first month of the war, protests and blockades against the movement of Russian military were recorded in around 20 Ukrainian towns and villages, leaving one dead and 13 injured. As a comparison, during the 9 days of the January 2022 revolt in Kazakhstan, that was suppressed with the aid of Russian troops, 227 people were killed.
Another argument presented in defense of joining “Territorial Defense” was that compromises are inevitable, and the example given was the YPG/YPJ collaboration with US troops. Whatever someone believes about Rojava,18 we cannot draw a parallel between anarchists joining the Ukrainian army “as a necessary compromise” with the Rojava compromise to accept aid from Western capitalists, because in the case of Rojava the rebels have control over an area where they can try to create their idea of a just society, while this obviously is not the case in Ukraine (and the participation of anarchists in the national defense can just be used by the government as proof that they are defending an open and free society against the authoritarian and obscure Russian state).
There has also been the argument that if the social movement does not take part in the national defense, it will be politically discredited. How will the people who decided to serve the Ukrainian government be seen after the war, a government that treated soldiers as cannon fodder, a government that used the war in order to impose privatizations and deepen capitalist exploitation, a government that used martial law to ban strikes, liquidate the Social Insurance Fund (an effective social wage cut for millions of workers), sell off agricultural land and privatize the forests, a government that handed unprecedented powers to Ukraine’s construction industry and adopted a law that impacts around 70% of workers in the country? Under the new law, the main instrument regulating labour relations between employer and employees in small and medium-size companies will be individual contracts.
“Parts of the left that support the military resistance claim that apart from immediate self-defense of lives and homes the war is about defending the ‘freedom’ of workers in Ukraine in future. This argument falls for the myth of a national sovereignty in which workers can decide democratically about their fate. First of all, like any other economy, the economy in Ukraine is not a ‘national’ economy, it is deeply integrated into international investment, debt management and trade. Secondly, capital and state in Ukraine are more than willing to use the war in order to deregulate the labour market further and undermine the flimsy layer of formal democracy that exists.” (Angry Workers, Thoughts on the Ukraine war: Initial positions revisited after one year of bloodshed, 11 Feb 2023)19
We move now to the opposite end of the spectrum. We won’t bother with the people supporting the Russian invasion because they think that it somehow constitutes a liberating continuity of the “good old Soviet bear” (of course militarism, authoritarianism, and repression do constitute a continuity between the Soviet rule and Putin’s regime, while political capitalists20 are a continuity of state capitalism disguised as “socialism”). We obviously consider disgusting to glorify death and bloodshed in the name of “noble causes”, “geopolitical analysis” or “high politics”.
There is also hidden support for the Russian invasion, intentionally or not. In most cases, speaking only about NATO’s responsibility for the beginning of the war in Ukraine, is in practice a covert way to support the Russian invasion. It gets worse: in countries like Greece or Serbia, to speak solely against NATO claiming that this is the genuine revolutionary defeatist21 attitude, is to use a false argument, as these are countries where you can find some of the most widely spread pro-Russian sentiments and where NATO is conceptualized as a foreign body (a logical conclusion of this political line of thinking would be a tactical alliance with the equally anti-NATO Orbán government…) .
Returning to a more reasonable level of debate, we need to stress that contrary to the idea that a multi-polar world would mean an end to capitalist globalization and the ecumenical rule of Western capitalism (and would thus create better conditions for the social movement), in fact, as we have mentioned before, it was the end of the bi-polar world that liberated emancipatory potential and gave the opportunity to create a global movement that could join together movements at the periphery of capitalism and struggles within the core capitalist countries.
The transnational movement was more or less absent after the Russian invasion in Ukraine. We only know of the Zapatista initiative for “March 18 [2022] against all capitalist wars”22 and the Permanent Assembly Against the War (PAAW)23.
Besides our obvious responsibilities (to defend soldiers deserting from the Russian and Ukrainian armies and people refusing to go to the army, support the prisoners of anti-war actions inside Russia –protests, sabotage, arsoning–, support Ukrainian migrants in Europe, connect the resistance to the war with all the social movements emerging here and there, and fight against the prerequisites of war – militarism, nationalism, racism, patriarchy), there are still things that need to be done. We have to realize our shortcomings, overcome our confusion and inertia, and take the initiative.
We repeat: It is vital that we create a clear position (and spread it globally beyond all borders) opposing all false options presented by the “new multi-polar world-in-formation”. We need to talk and to organise. The best actions are always the outcome of collective intelligence.
We must escape the capitalist mindframe, form communities, create a terrain hostile for capitalism and become the Many-Headed Hydra,24the planetary proletariat.
. . .
1. This text was written in March 2023, as a contribution to a cross-borders discussion of comrades in the Balkans interested in preparing a common publication on war, capitalism, and anarchist responses.
2. El País international edition, “Ethiopia’s forgotten war is the deadliest of the 21st century”
3. Skin color has been transformed long ago into a recognizable sign of western civilization’s unquestionable right to oppress others. But “whiteness’’ becomes indifferent when profit is concerned. The war in Ukraine has been described as “the first war in European soil after the 2nd World War”, conveniently skipping the Yugoslav wars, a nationalist bloodshed used for the transformation of power structures and neoliberal “restructuring” (= looting), Ukrainians became “Europeans” when they started getting bombed (the “real” white-skinned refugees compared to the “fake” dark colored ones), before they were just cheap labor.
4. It seems that western citizens believe that dying in the periphery of capitalism is not something that they should care about, as if it is some kind of a strange local tradition, a strange habit going on for hundreds of years. Actually, we are told that we should only care for them when they arrive at the threshold of the fortress-Europe and then we have to drown them in the Mediterranean and in the Aegean and humiliate, beat them, rape them at the land borders of the Balkans. But the periphery is getting closer and closer to the core capitalist countries and methods applied there are imported to the core countries.
5. Escaped slaves in the Americas and Islands of the Indian Ocean who formed their own settlements 16th-19th century).
6. “How Russia Is Surviving the Tightening Grip on Its Oil Revenue”, The New York Times, Feb. 7, 2023
7. “US oil producers reap $200bn windfall from Ukraine war price surge”, Financial Times, November 5 2022.
8. Ukraine Support Tracker, 21.02.2023
9. Until the beginning of 2023: 142 BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles with all the ammunition of their machine guns, 15,000 73 mm missiles, 2100 122 mm rockets, 20,000 AK-47 Kalashnikov assault rifles, 3,200,000 7.62 mm cartridges, 60 MANPAD FIM-92 Stinger, 17,000 155 mm artillery missiles, and 1,100 RPG-18 anti-tank rockets.
10. Until December 5, 2022, Dec. 5, when the EU’s ban on Russian crude came into effect, Greek shipping companies were “providing almost the largest tanker fleet for the transportation of Russian oil.” (“How Greek Companies and Ghost Ships Are Helping Russia”, Foreign Policy, November 23, 2022). Between 24 February 2022 and 5 January 2023 Greek tankers with total capacity of 135.8 million tonnes departed from Russia, carrying oil, coal and gas — “Greek shipping firms dominate fossil fuels exports from Russia” (“Europe continues to finance Russia’s war in Ukraine with lucrative fossil fuel trades”, Investigate Europe, 27 January 2023). Meanwhile they prepared the way for profits to continue to pile up after the sanctions announced in the Spring of 2022 would come into effect (Dec. 5 2022, EU’s ban on Russian crude oil, Feb. 5 2023, EU’s ban on refined Russian petroleum products): “Tens of millions of barrels of Russian oil switched off Greece – Cargo switching activity taking place in international waters” (“A Bay Off Southern Greece Becomes a Cog in Russia’s Oil Supply Chain”, Bloomberg, February 23, 2023.]
11. Bichler, Shimshon and Jonathan Nitzan, ‘Growing Through Sabotage. Energizing Hierarchical Power’, Review of Capital as Power, Volume 1, issue 5, 2020.
12. BIS: Bank for International Settlements. Created after World War I to “settle” the debt of both the winners and the losers, it was controlled by a board of directors representing the main European national banks and US private banks. During World War II the bank continued functioning and making money whoever seemed to be winning. It rose “controversy” because it accepted gold confiscated from Nazi occupied countries, or melted from the rings and the golden teeth of holocaust victims, to be moved into BIS basement in Switzerland. This was the main reason that many demanded its abolishment after the end of World War II. The English economist John Keynes insisted on the importance of keeping the main BIS functions under a new name (IMF and World Bank), while BIS itself remained active in a very low level, just regulating European currencies, until the introduction of the euro. In the 1990s–2000s, the BIS successfully globalized and its role became more important after the 2007 –2008 financial crisis.
13. Alejandro Marcó del Pont, Un experimento neoliberal llamado Ucrania
14. Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Behind Russia’s War Is Thirty Years of Post-Soviet Class Conflict”, Jacobin magazine, March 10 2022.
15. http://www.trudprotest.org/2022/03/трудовые-протесты-в-россии-в-2021-г-часть-3/
16. Fiery Anniversary. The special review of subversive news from Russia, February 27, 2023, libcom.org
17. Greco-Turkish War of 1897, armed conflict for Macedonia 1904-1908, First Balkan War 1912, Second Balkan War 1913, World War I 1914-1918, participation in the “Southern Russia intervention” against the Bolshevik regime 1919, Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, 1936 military dictatorship, Greece in World War II 1940-1944, civil war 1946–1949.
18. Although we are not sure if the turn from patriotic Stalinism to Democratic Confederalism was by choice or by need and we cannot but find a bit strange that horizontal organizing came as a decision of the leadership of a hierarchical organization, it is only for the best that new generations of Kurdish or other origin rebels move away from nationalism, cult of leadership, martyrdom etc. – needless to say that there doesn’t seem to be a better choice in the area and that the Rojava experiment has to be defended from its enemies.
19. https://www.angryworkers.org/2023/02/11/thoughts-on-the-ukraine-war-initial-positions-revisited-after-one-year-of-bloodshed/
20. For more on “political capitalism”, see: Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Behind Russia’s War Is Thirty Years of Post-Soviet Class Conflict”, Jacobin magazine, March 10 2022.
21. Fighting not with “the enemy”, but against the choices of the ruling classes who sent their lower classes into battle.
22. See https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2022/03/11/sunday-the-13th/
23. See https://www.transnational-strike.info/2022/03/22/a-permanent-assembly-against-the-war/
24. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra. The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, 2000.