Editor Note: This piece was drafted before the empire and its vassal state escalated into all-out war with Iran. We have kept the language the same. For more info on our analysis and position on that subject, see our article, “TURN THE WORLD WAR INTO A CIVIL WAR”.

On February 24, 2026, the goblin-king of the high petty bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the settler labor aristocracy took the podium in the heart of the Burgerreich to deliver his paean to US military and economic power. Amidst what has become an all–too–typical celebration of US empire, the chief executive officer of the imperialist plunder machine delivered a few remarks that we should pay attention to. Yes, his rambling, often unfocused speech was full of little misrepresentations and outright lies,¹ but more importantly, it was filled with signals about class policy.

We have to remember the intended audience for big events like this. It’s televised and scrutinized by the politically active members of the US labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie and sometimes analyzed by the ruling class of other countries for signs about presidential plans.² This isn’t the imperialist bourgeoisie talking to itself; this is the executive branch of government setting out its bait for the masses of labor aristocrats. We have to keep that in mind when assessing the truth of the regime’s claims. This isn’t a board meeting, but rather an advertising campaign.

So what did the Burgher King say?

He was less combative in defense of ICE and CBP than he has been in the past – in fact, he didn’t mention any DHS agency by name. This reflects the government’s awareness that the federal occupation of Minnesota is deeply unpopular. Trump’s regime has been widely unpopular with the middle and lower petty bourgeoisie, but it can only continue its course with support from the labor aristocracy and upper petty bourgeois elements.³ Trump himself must be seen to bridge the gap between the ruling class and the reactionary labor aristocracy in order for the right-fascist coalition to maintain its integrity. 

The speech was peppered with shout outs to members of the US imperialist armed forces,⁴ and “victims” of immigrants as well as a handful of labor aristocrats who, thanks to the Burgher King, have finally managed to become landed property owners and fulfill the American Dream of owning a plot of land. Kissing the dirty boots of this sovereign, every parasite can be a franchisee – to every roach, a toy with their meal. 

Yes, Trump also thanked some members of the ruling capitalist class by name (Michael and Susan Dell and Brad Gerstner) while at the same time sounding the false populist drum of the Stop Insider Trading Act.⁵ The goal of this rhetorical move, of course, is to contrast the “good” ruling class (capitalists) with the “bad” ruling class (politicians) while obscuring the real relation between them, that members of Congress are the servants of the capitalist class.

By far the bulk of the speech was devoted to nativist fear mongering about immigrants. It also included naked threats issued to Iran, demanding the Iranian state surrender its nuclear weapons program or suffer an invasion.⁶ There was a token reference to the policy of trans genocide (inverted, of course, as “saving” children). In its entirety, the speech was clearly aimed at stoking the traditional US middle-class militarism and strengthening the regime’s basis among the labor aristocrats they have been alienating with their Minneapolis operation. The Burgher King attempted to negotiate this while downplaying the fault-line he has opened with the US vassals in NATO.⁷

The regime’s rhetorical commitment to the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie remains loud and steadfast. Trump referred to: a state college savings program for children designed to increase class mobility, a federal pension program for private employees to maintain government savings accounts and putting them on the federal dole,⁸ his success in keeping mortgage rates down to make housing affordable, and keeping property rates high for the value of housing and land to remain a viable path for investment and class ascension to the labor aristocrats.

In the wings, the imperialist bourgeoisie are slavering for war in Iran, occupation of Venezuela, and increased pressure on the US working class.⁹ The main media outlets, which deliver news to the vast majority of the US population, have neither attacked nor defended the speech except to note where it was factually inaccurate. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a member of the Democratic “opposition,” stood and applauded when the Burgher King called for war in the Middle East.

As long as the labor aristocracy stands by the side of the big imperialists, the revolutionary situation will never mature fully. There is an opportunity, here and now, to break this connection. As the Trump regime moves into territory ever-more-fervently desired by the big bourgeoisie, our window for the wedge grows wider. We must break the complacency of the labor aristocrats away from the imperial bourgeoisie; the only way to do that is to build up the revolutionary consciousness and organizational level of the real proletariat and force the labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie into a reckoning with its material complicity with the terror-regime of Washington.

1. The rate of inflation has been 3% and 2.8% for the first two months of this year, not “the lowest level in more than five years,” even if you take just the CPI. ︎
2. Nielsen estimates that 36.6 million people viewed the SOTU address and 70.7% of those viewers were 55 or older. https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2026/32-6-million-watch-2026-state-of-the-union-address/ ︎
3. The MAGA approach has been to try to fuse the labor aristocracy (the middle and upper ranks of the imperialist proletariat) with the high petty bourgeoisie. ︎
4. Buddy Taggart, a WWII soldier; Sarah Beckstrom, the West Virginia National Guardsman who was killed in DC; Andrew Wolfe, another Guardsman; Eric Slover, one of the Special Forces animals who kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, President of Venezuela; 10 other unnamed special forces dogs; and navy murderer Royce Williams, who fought against the self-determination of the Koreans in Korea and the Vietnamese in Viet Nam. ︎
5. He named Nancy Pelosi by name as a corrupt politician. ︎
6. “[T]hey were warned… yet they continue starting [the program] over…. We are in negotiations with them…. But we haven’t heard those secret words, ‘we will never have a nuclear weapon.’” ︎
7. See, for instance, “Too late, Trump envoys try to reassure Europe,” in The Economist. ︎
8. Direct payments to the labor aristocrats for their loyalty! ︎
9. The Wall Street Journal recently published the articles “Violent Militias Stand Between the US and Venezuela’s Vast Mineral Riches,” “Trump Hails an Economic Turnaround Many Voters Don’t See,” and “America’s Bills Will Come Due.” ︎

The All-Empire Worker’s League and its Member Organizations call on all Communists, all local Marxist cells, and all those who love the people and yearn for liberation, to engage in immediate efforts to unify and solidify their local allegiances. We urge any and all Marxist-Leninist cells within the US empire or its junior partners Canada and Mexico to contact the League directly to begin the process of integration into a country-wide network capable of opposing the imperialist war machine.

Fight, fail, fight again!

On the morning of the 28th of February 2026, the Great Satan and its vassal in occupied Palestine launched a cluster of missiles at the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just in the opening salvo, the settler-terrorist regime has bombed a school and killed over a hundred school-aged children, decisively bringing the devastation of the children’s holocaust in Gaza to the heartlands of another nation. As thus proven, the imperialists will stop at nothing to reassert their hegemony, to rescue the “Pax Americana,” because they cannot stop. The abyss of financial collapse and imperial decline looms wide in the imaginations of the yankee elites, as well it should. To preserve the empire and their place in it, no crime is too criminal, however grotesque, and no atrocity is too atrocious, however vast. No destruction is too devastating, however permanent and disfiguring for the shared future for humanity. Anything and everything is on the table, no matter the consequences.

Today the Third World War is being fought on every continent. The genocides waged by the imperialists in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue unabated. The Alliance of Sahel States continues its open rebellion against the neo-colonial system. The battle with Revolutionary Yemen over control of the Red Sea reignites. Missiles launched by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rain down across the empire’s “middle east.” Sirens blare once again in the heart of the forward base colony in occupied Palestine. Resistance forces in occupied Iraq launch a new offensive against the imperialists. The decade-long struggle by the Russian Federation to wrest Ukraine from the clutches of the neo-nazi NATO coup regime continues to grind at the unity of the US-NATO-EU imperialist cartel. The people’s struggle for control of the state in Bolivia carries on despite setbacks, and besieged Venezuela and Cuba persist and develop national autonomy with the assistance of the multipolar powers. Soldiers of the Korean People’s Army march triumphant in Pyongyang on their return from the Kursk front, bringing home valuable modern combat experience against imperial troops for use in the defense of their homeland. The Taiwan question looms at the forefront of east Asian politics.

The Palestinian people of Gaza, silenced and forgotten by the West, still struggle for their lives against floods, cold, disease, and starvation, as the colony’s encirclement and genocidal siege continues unabated in its third year. With every passing hour the disfigurement and trauma of colonial genocide is laid ever heavier on the lives and minds of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

At every turn for the past five centuries, the settler-colonial invasion and occupation of our beautiful continent by imperialist Europe and its “United States” has revealed itself to operate according to raw violence and self-interest alone — and today more people than ever before in all of world history stand witness to the unremittent and unabashed savagery of the euro-amerikan imperial system and are asking themselves, “what is to be done?”

Inside the borders of the US empire, the ICE secret police continue to kidnap innocents and doom untold thousands to die in concentration camps. Migrant workers, refugees, and Indigenous people are targeted for ethnic cleansing, and resistance is stamped out by increasingly militarized police forces. The empire’s oppressed wage a daily struggle for survival against a still-rampaging but censored SARS-2 pandemic, eugenicist labor policies, and ever more openly-genocidal ableism and transphobic violence. And yet the “progressives” of the imperial heart of darkness itself are talking about their 2028 electoral candidates, as if this war is merely a matter of legislative policy. Many “socialists” insist that revolution is impossible, and the Four Opportunist Parties continue their strategies of co-opting spontaneous organizing and demobilizing radical movements. For those of us in the imperial core, the question of how to respond, how to organize, and how to start winning, weighs more heavily and more urgently than ever.

Take stock of the international situation, of how ever more of the world is drawn into conflict with the empire. Then take stock of your local situation, of how ever more people around you are drawn into antagonism with the system. Settlers splinter into fragmentary interest groups as the solution to the crisis of imperialism becomes a more contentious and pressing issue, or they simply “check out” of political engagement altogether, preferring to numb themselves with the bread and circuses of our age. At the same time, the oppressed are drawn to co-operate and resist together, or die alone. As the international situation shifts, it is reflected in the local conditions we experience. Just as the settlers here are more and more at each others’ throats, the member states of the NATO imperialist cartel descend into infighting as their position worsens and continues to destabilize. The experience of the first two world wars of the capitalist-imperialist era taught us that global war is the standard modus operandi of how the global capitalist system resolves its internal crises. Furthermore, the experience of the first two world wars taught us that only revolutionary war can put an end to these conflicts. The first world war was ended by revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Germany, and the second by the united efforts of the revolutionary peoples of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. No such revolutionary force directly threatens the heartlands of the imperialist forces today as the Soviet Union and its allies once did, and so this third world war will only end as the first did: when the revolutionary masses within the empire unite and put an end to it. These masses are the millions in occupied New Afrika and the occupied First Nations, and the millions of settlers oppressed by their state on the basis of their ability, gender, sexuality, and age.

In fighting all of these wars the empire is running out of ammunition; its production simply can’t keep up. Where it can’t control us with naked force, it seeks to intimidate us with pervasive surveillance. But always remember that the empire doesn’t have the manpower to surveil all of us. This is why it pours its finances into AI to do the work for it (as well as to create venues for speculation and parasitism). The empire aims to have the repression infrastructure it needs built before the AI bubble bursts, but rampant corruption and insufficient electrical infrastructure call even that goal into question. It has taken the combined efforts of billions of people in struggle over the last century to bring the empire to its knees, and our task is paltry by comparison: organize a few million more to at last tear out the empire’s heart on behalf of all humanity. We have to turn the third world war into the second US civil war, and carry this war to vanquish the settler empire once and for all. Only a policy of revolutionary defeatism, the pursuit of the empire’s defeat and complete capitulation to its enemies from within, can provide us the concrete foundation for building revolutionary unity among our organizations. All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.

“Commodities begin to be exchanged because of an act of will: their owners agree to dispose of them reciprocally. In the meantime, people gradually come to rely on use-objects produced by others. Constant repetition makes exchange into a normal social process.”

“Our commodity owners learn, then, that the same division of labor that makes them into independent private producers also makes the social production process — and their relations within it — independent of them, the producers themselves: they learn that their independence from one another emerges in and is complemented by a system of all-around dependence on things produced by other people.”

Karl Marx, Capital, pg. 82 (2024)

Introduction

Recently, Cde. Potato published a work in Red Clarion entitled “No One is Coming to Feed Us.” While the piece brings to the forefront important issues regarding food supply chains in the United States, its surface level analysis coupled with individualistic calls to action reflect a deeply disruptive tendency within the contemporary communist movement. This paper serves as a substantive critique to the faulty theoretical lines of thought contained within Cde. Potato’s piece, while also providing a new framework for systematically addressing political issues that will aid us in our struggle to obtain political power and bring about a socialist state.

The Dialectic of Revolutionary Struggle

As communists, using scientific analysis of contemporary and historical social relations to determine the correct path of revolutionary struggle is the key aspect of our work. What differentiates Marxism from other pseudo-intellectual attempts at social analysis is that humans are not prescribed natures as independent actors or socially dependent subjects, but are understood in their contradictory truth as both. As an individual you can act in ways that benefit both yourself and those around you. You can go vegan, reduce food waste and compost the rest, and even plant native flowers to help local pollinators. The issue with individual action lies not in its moral nature as a good thing that you should do, but in its quantitative relation to broader society. One person going vegan in a country of over three hundred million is going to have a negligible effect on average consumption habits and their subsequent environmental impacts. However, local concentrations of thousands of vegans and a national population of over a million can begin to introduce qualitative changes in broader society. This is the dialectical nature of social development.

Historical progressions in social-economic relations keenly reflect this process. The bourgeoisie did not always exist, nor did they simply emerge from the mist to bring about a new age of gunpowder and roaring steel. Instead they emerged slowly out of the contradictions of feudal society. These small groups of proto-bourgeois eventually found one another and began to organize towards the interests of their class. Bit by bit the bourgeoisie concentrated and began to disrupt the feudalist biospheres. By the time feudalist society caught onto this process it was already too late to prevent the capitalist age. Feudalist classes had two options: they could either consign themselves to a slow death or face the guillotine. The bourgeois eventually won their class war through bitter struggle and brought about the contemporary age, in which capitalism has subsumed and guaranteed the death of all former social divisions of labor.

Anyone who calls themselves a communist must understand this process, as it is by the same means which we will bring about communism. There are no shortcuts or tricks that allow us to avoid direct confrontation and simply declare the world anew. We are as much subjects to history as we are its progenitors. Winning our war with the bourgeoisie will necessitate a strict dedication to proven revolutionary strategies and the scientific development of new tactics informed by historic failures and contemporary material conditions. The population of cadres politically developed enough to engage in such a struggle may still be small in number, but just as the bourgeoisie and feudal lords before them, we will achieve our social revolution through quantitative action.

Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for our movement. In the face of the end of unimpeded imperialist expansion, the liberal mask of the American empire has fallen. The bourgeoisie have turned their gaze to the core in the hopes that by ripping out the copper wire and using the floorboards as fuel they can hold out against a global turn towards anti-imperialism. We have seen this self-destructive tendency emerge in several ways. On the international scale, the American bourgeoisie have begun to forcibly open up the empire’s vassal states for rapid and brutal economic exploitation. This has primarily emerged through the use of economic crises induced via tariffs, the threat of annexing territories, and the move to end NATO to demonstrate the European bourgeoisie’s reliance on the United States as an occupational force. While these moves have shocked liberals within the imperial core, they are simply a continuation of the empire’s shift towards open imperialist brutality. The longstanding strategy of obscuring the violence necessary to maintain the settler and aristocratic laboring classes has been replaced with an ideological drive toward fervent celebration of complicity in the brutal murder of the globally hyper-exploited. With socialist and anti-imperialist resistance drastically reducing the ratio of surplus-value that can be extracted from the third world, the first world has been turned to as a fresh store of labor and resources prime for rapid primitive accumulation. 

On the national scale, we have seen the violent enforcement of the patriarchal social division of labor through the targeting of transgender people as a third sexed class. Making state backed and extralegal violence against transgender people an acceptable social reality makes all deviations from gendered norms, particularly those done by women (trans or otherwise), a viable marker for increased levels of exploitation. Regarding the nationally oppressed, the state has abandoned the policy of courting select segments of these populations to increase their tokenistic representation in the exploitative classes of the bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and aristocratic labor to justify the continued brutal immiseration of the vast majority of their populations; replacing it with the open and fetishized brutality of their hyper-exploitation. This too is not unprecedented. Over the last two decades the state has forced migrant laborers into increasingly precarious conditions of survival through the slow erosion of legal protections, the expansion of surveillance, encouragement of settlers enacting extralegal violence, and the expansion of administrative violence through Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. Conditions of precarity that have forced this population into becoming a slave-like class of hyper-exploited laborers.

With capitalism’s barbarism now laid bare, millions have been galvanized to take action against these systems of exploitation. While the revolutionary energy of this moment is undoubtable, the ability of any of these movements to effectively harness them to bring about lasting social change is doubtable at best. Once again liberals squander this energy through haphazard and disorganized fits of reaction, such as the recent “economic blackout” that excluded small businesses from their supposed boycott of the American economy, or the national “hands off” protest which included an ideologically muddled list of complaints and no real demands. Those who have yet developed socialist consciousness mistake these protest movements as the means to develop and consolidate power. However, their lack of organization and long term planning leads to apathetic nihilism among the masses when the movements inevitably fail to achieve any of their idealistic goals. As long as there is no a communist party to lead the masses and uplift them from base trade union consciousness, these spontaneous actions will continue to act as a roadblock in the path of socialist struggle. To seriously address these crises requires us to direct our efforts away from spontaneous action, and towards the extensive construction of the communist movement’s organizational capacity. 

You can engage in this work by joining or organizing a local Marxist Leninist book club. After building up a solid base of educated and militantly consistent cadres can you then direct your organizations capacity around a central project, whether that be communal gardening, mutual aid, becoming an anti-ice rapid response network, etc. This tiered process of development will provide you the means to effectively harness local revolutionary energy to not only enact social change, but to slowly institutionalize your organization as a node of political power. This essential work on the micro level will aid in the eventual consolidation of these nodes into a communist party that can harness our collective power towards dismantling the empire once and for all. While the struggle may seem daunting, revolutions have never been won in a single decisive blow. Rather they have succeeded against all odds by dismantling the enemy piece by piece.

The Conquest of Crumbs

As communists in the heart of the imperialist core, there is a vast array of issues we must address to build the foundations for socialism. A key issue that is rapidly exacerbating social contradictions is capitalism’s tendency towards ecological destruction through the metabolic rift. Current production processes and consumptive demands outstrip our environment’s ability to reproduce the raw resources these commodities rely upon. A process from which we have witnessed the total destruction of biomes through pollution, over extraction, and the mass eradication of hundreds of species. Faced with the existential threat that climate change poses, the global bourgeoisie was faced with a choice: either perpetuate the capitalist system by having the state intervene in the process of accumulation so as to restabilize the environment’s process of self-reproduction, or remove all fetters and pursue accumulation at any cost in the hopes some miracle cure for climate change will come along. Being nothing more than soulless husks that physically embody the spirit of capital, the bourgeoisie enthusiastically chose the latter. The ramifications of which have only just begun to hit the insulated imperial core. As Cde. Potato notes in their work No One is Coming to Feed Us, the rapid spread of pollution, disease, coupled with climate change are overlapping factors that will cause serious disruptions in food supply chains. Conditions that require us to face a serious question, who will feed the people?

Cde. Potato’s answer to this question is rather slapdash. Instead of outlining tactics and strategies by which local orgs could begin building the logistical means to feed the masses, we are given six individualist actions one can take to help bring about ecosocialism.

The short term steps towards ecosocialism are:

1. Grow your own food as much as possible to get a functional understanding of what your local ecosystem can produce
2. Support the food sovereignty of Indigenous communities by learning about what they are already doing
3. Support migrant farm workers by learning about what they are already doing
4. Organize to end child labor and prison labor through boycotts, advocacy, and direct action
5. Support local farms with an emphasis on perennials and orchards. Trees take YEARS to replace, these are the farms we can’t afford to lose
6. Recognize that “farmer” is not a specific term that automatically means petit bourgeois. Focus on the ownership class of agribusiness or Big Ag.

The author’s call for everyone to learn how to not just grow their own food, but to can and preserve this food on their own demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of how systematic this issue truly is. This call for individual and small group preparation for a food crisis calls to mind the settler-colonial prepper mindset more than an effective socialist strategy. There will never be the spontaneous emergence of enough gardeners and small scale farmers to feed the people. These pressing conditions require a deeper centralization of agricultural production, not its decentralization.

Let’s say that you, as an individual, want to become more independent from national and international bourgeois agricultural production. So you decide to grow some potatoes in your backyard. Let’s assume you’ve got a natural green thumb and through hard work you’re able to produce 80 potatoes each containing about 100 calories. Assuming you consume 2,000 calories a day, that would result in only a 1.09% decrease in your caloric dependency. If you were to compare the value of each potato given the labor time it took to till the soil, add fertilizer, consistently water them, cover them with leaves so they don’t freeze, harvest them, etc., the amount of labor stored within each potato would far outweigh the price of any you could buy at the store. Attempting to produce your own food at home, while a lovely hobby, is a complete waste of socially productive labor, as the socially necessary labor time to produce these products at scale will always be far outside your capacity as an individual laborer.

If you wanted to reduce your dependency by 10% you’d have to produce at least 73,000 calories, and spread that caloric intake across several nutritional sources such as onions, potatoes, rice, and beans. Of course this work would be made easier in a collective, but doing so comes with exponentially increasing costs. If each person is working towards the same goal you have to produce 73,000 calories for every member within the collective, divided across X number of crops, times an array of values for each crop’s individual requirements for land, water, and labor time necessary to produce a decent yield. Not to mention the financial costs of tools, seeds, etc. Taking on such a monumental task requires one to effectively answer several questions. For example, how are you acquiring enough land to grow that many crops? The majority of people do not own several acres to just start a farm. Even in suburban areas you’d require several front-and-back yards worth of land to feed more than a handful of people. Furthermore, which members of the working class have enough free time to dedicate themselves to farming on top of their jobs and domestic labor? Existing subsistence farmers still rely on the daily work of the whole family to produce enough food to eat or trade to maintain themselves. Finally, where will you obtain the money to maintain this project? Your comrades may be able to chip in through dues, and perhaps well-off members of your community may donate to such a noble cause. Yet, as soon as a financial crisis hits your pool of funds will dry up. There is simply no way to succeed on this path without the substantial support of an emergent socialist state.

When it comes to Indigenous food sovereignty Cde. Potato tells readers to research what their local Indigenous groups are, offer up support for their food sovereignty projects, and to “…shift your mindset to default the authority on agriculture and land management away from profit-driven science and towards Indigenous knowledge.” While it is good for comrades to know the conditions of their local tribes, the lack of direction given shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of these tribes. Indigenous organizations already have to deal with the incessant ignorance of well meaning liberal “allies” that come to the table with no means or tools to aid tribes in their liberatory struggle, yet demand to be educated and cultivated as activists so they can achieve moral salvation. As communists we must avoid adding to this feckless pool of good samaritans, and instead work to achieve the organizational capacity to work with these tribes in coalition. To have cadres who can be put to work using spades to put spuds in the ground or be an active presence to help in the protection of Indigenous farmers from settler violence. 

Beyond this lack of political activation, Cde. Potato refuses to explain what the struggle for food sovereignty looks like in the United States. In the place of such an explanation readers are given a collage of random news articles about Indigenous organizations, federal programs, and small businesses, with no context given for what each meaningfully does in the long term struggle for tribes sovereign management of their own food production, consumption, and distribution. No thought is given to the ways in which ecological colonization, the capitalist enclosure of land, and the genocidal destruction of Indigenous languages, knowledge, and traditions has made many tribes’ traditional food systems nearly impossible to reproduce. Nor is there consideration given to the fact that not all tribes have a strong traditional relationship to agricultural production. Take the Northern Arapaho tribe. Situated in the plains, the tribe’s primary form of caloric intake came from hunting local wildlife and gathering wild grown food. This in turn led to periods of extreme precarity before the introduction of the horse and gunpowder rifle guaranteed a more consistent means to sustain the tribe on wild game (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 74-75). The same level of nutritional variety and food security did not rematerialize until the 1940’s with the emergence of family gardens and increased levels of small game hunting. Gains that were again swept away within a few decades due to capitalist and colonial encroachment (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 78-80). While contemporary efforts such as the Growing Resilience project on the Wind River Reservation was able to achieve some gains in food sovereignty through the development of home food gardens, further efforts are still drastically constrained by extremely limited access to resources and capital.

To understand what role we as communists can play in the work to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty it’s important to first contextualize the project within contemporary material conditions. Food sovereignty represents several political goals in one project: tribes securing access to plentiful and healthy food, the ecologically sustainable production of this food, and the means to develop agricultural production in relation to their own needs and ambitions. While each is key to achieving the political project as a whole, most Indigenous people in the United States struggle with either hunger or being able to regularly obtain nutritious and healthy food, so of central importance to the current struggle is securing access to food. When food sovereignty is brought up by non-Indigenous people the focus is rarely on ending the systematic colonial violence that is the infliction of hunger on Indigenous populations, rather the ecological benefits of Indigenous food systems are made to be the main focus. This is because liberal interests lie not in aiding Indigenous people in their struggle, but using their knowledge to save the Bourgeois and the settler-colonial classes that served as their foot soldiers from the environmental catastrophe they themselves brought about. 

Despite these ideals placed on the back of Indigenous tribes they currently do not have the means to fix over two centuries of genocidal environmental destruction. The level of development required for tribes to achieve food sovereignty may at first look nothing like the ideals of ecological stability or growing crops native to a geographic area. It may very well require industrial levels of agricultural development owned, operated, and managed by the tribes themselves. Instead of family and community gardens that feed a handful of people, it may look like the efficient use of socially productive labor through the implementation of heavy machinery, greenhouses, and a variety of other large scale forms of agricultural production. The burden of fixing climate change alongside feeding not just their people, but everyone who will remain on Turtle Island, is a burden that should not be placed solely on the back of these nationally oppressed peoples who are pushed to the absolute extremes of precarity. To expect them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and fix the ongoing environmental catastrophe forced upon them with nothing but a small amount of individual financial, moral, or volunteer support, is not merely an absurdity, but outright cruelty.

If communists are genuinely interested in helping to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty, then we have to develop the means to materially support them. The collective efforts of a communist club can do far more to aid these tribes than any individual deciding on a whim to look into what’s going on. A club could work with food sovereignty projects by helping to organize a donation drive, volunteering club members labor to help build and maintain gardens or farms, or find other ways to provide material and logistical support like offering car rides or free mechanical maintenance. Instead of this ceaseless chatter about what Indigenous sovereignty could do for us, we should be figuring out what we can do at scale to aid in their struggles and fight to restore their land.

When addressing the conditions of migrant farm workers, Cde. Potato again refrains from fully addressing what these conditions are and how readers can engage in migrant workers struggles. The only direction readers are given is to follow United Farm Workers (UFW) “for updates and attend a ‘Know Your Rights’ training if you can.” Information that is only useful if you live in California, as the UFW has little to no organizational presence outside of the state. Further, this call to action yet again shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of self-organized migrant workers. Workers who are expected to trust absolute strangers with not just their personal safety, but the safety of their family. An astounding amount of trust has to be given for these workers to tell a stranger they’re a migrant, particularly when ICE agents are rounding folks up while in plain clothes and many white people are more than happy to report migrants so they can take part in the spectacle of state enacted colonial violence.

Migrant workers can be found in every state of the country, doing not only local agricultural work, but much of the hard physical labor of proletarian jobs that the broad swath of Americans are totally uninterested in doing. Just as these workers can be found in every state so too can you find organizations fighting to improve their material conditions. Some states may have orgs dedicated to this specific struggle or chapters of national organizations such as the ACLU may have rapid response networks of trained legal observers who can show up to ICE raids to inform people of their rights and do everything within their legal ability to prevent an abduction. As an individual it is far more useful for you to get in contact with one of these orgs so they can train you and put you to use in the local struggle rather than simply keeping up on the news. What migrant workers need is not self-educated sympathy, what they need is organized groups of people who will fight to protect them from the violence of their employers and the settler-colonial police force that is ICE. Politically centralized orgs, even in some of the most rural and conservative states, have been able to use long term strategic planning to prevent both deportations and the construction of ICE detention centers. The only way migrants can regain any sense of stability is through the support of highly organized groups that provide safety through rapid-response networks, legal support, volunteer translators, or even the provision of daily necessities such as food and water.

Child and prison labor are similarly under-discussed by Cde. Potato. Child labor is nothing new to capitalist development. Whether it be in the cotton mills, coal mines, or modern day meat processing plants, the blood of child laborers has long served as a fountain of youth for the dead labor known as capital. Liberalism’s main function in the United States has been to obscure the violent exploitation contained within nearly every commodity so that aristocratic laborers can consume them without guilt, so they can eat their $10 cheeseburger without once thinking about the child who lost their hand carving up the flesh they now so greedily consume. The reappearance of such overt exploitation in the imperial core is merely a sign that the imperialist super-profits that once protected America’s aristocratic laboring class from such conditions have drastically eroded. All this change means is that to maintain current rates of surplus-labor extraction within the imperial core now requires adult laborers’ direct competition with child labor. This will continually get worse until we bring about socialism. Cde. Potato also engages in the longstanding myth that prison labor is a profitable enterprise, and thus believes a boycott could do anything to affect it. Prisons in America do not exist to produce a profit, but primarily serve to suppress and concentrate the nationally oppressed and precariat so as to sequester their classes revolutionary potential. The carceral state is a central foundation for maintaining the imperial settler-colonial state. These conditions cannot be ended without engaging in long term socialist struggle.

If feeding people is a genuine concern and if, as Cde. Potato argues, supporting local farmers is imperative to achieving this goal, then we must undertake a serious analysis of their needs and character as a class.  Despite Cde. Potato’s claims to the contrary, farmers are a petit-bourgeois class. Renting land, tools, and having to buy fertilizer do not disqualify farmers from membership in this class. If renting one’s constant capital is all it takes to not be a member of the petit-bourgeois class, then the local cafe or bakery owner is also a member of the working class because they have to rent the building in which their business operates. Whether they own or lease the land, becoming a farmer still requires having access to the capital and labor necessary to not just start their farm, but maintain ownership of it through the exploitation of surplus labor. This labor may come from their unpaid family members, migrant workers, or seasonal agricultural workers. Whatever the case may be, they actively engage in exploitation and thus cannot be labeled as peasants, proletarians, or even aristocratic laborers. Further, Their reliance on government subsidies and the willingness of locals to buy their produce at higher prices places them in a reactionary position against both the bourgeoisie and those that seek to overturn the state. Without state intervention their class would be fully subsumed by what Cde. Potato describes as “Big Ag.” Not only are they petit-bourgeois, but they serve as an active force of colonization.

It is a simple fact that anyone who owns land in the United States is an active participant in settler colonialism. On the east coast this participation is rarely seen and felt as there the tribes’ physical, social, and historical relationship to the land have been the most thoroughly eradicated. It is in the West, wherein lies the largest concentration of reservations, that we witness continuous acts of heinous violence inflicted on Indigenous populations. Police, white workers, ranchers, and farmers regularly engage in the trafficking, sexual assault, and murder of Indigenous peoples. White settlements built on reservation land expand themselves to further exploit native people and resources, while the means of social reproduction is restrained to conditions of utter desperation within the tribes. These conditions of precarity provide an opportunity for settlers to engage in further exploitation by getting Indigenous people addicted to drugs and alcohol. The war against Indigenous people never ended in the United States, the same tactics and tendencies have been in continuous use by colonizers for well over 500 years. Liberal society simply chooses to wash away the blood on its hands by silencing Indigenous voices and sequestering their violent subjugation to the least populated areas of the country. 

Local farmers are just, if not more, guilty of perpetuating this systematic violence. They have no legitimate claim to the land they till and grow food on beyond that which is enforced by the settler-colonial state. The right of eminent domain makes this relationship clear, as any land can be claimed by the state for the expansion of infrastructure to benefit the military and the national means of production. This makes their class one of highly concentrated, yet split reaction against all those who may attempt to expropriate their land and capital, i.e., the industrial bourgeois, the state, and Indigenous tribes.  This is why as communists we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the anarchist tendency to reduce every class and struggle to that of David and Goliath. Just because a class of people views the bourgeoisie as a threat does not mean that they are our ally in the socialist struggle. The petit-bourgeoisie’s reliance on the capitalist system of exchange to maintain their means of production and access to a wide pool of exploitable labor puts them in a natural opposition to the socialist cause. Even if that were not the case, Lenin’s critique of the cooperative movement remains a salient reminder of why we must struggle against these anarchist tendencies contained within Cde. Potato’s work:

“Do you really think that the capitalist world will pave the way for the cooperative movement? Capitalism will try to take power over the cooperatives by any means necessary. This ‘anti-authoritarian’ cooperative group of English workers will be crushed in the most ruthless way possible and will be made into servants of capital. They will depend on capital via a thousand threads so that the newly created trend, which you sympathize so much with, will be caught as in a spider’s web. Pardon me, but all of that is unimportant! Those are all details! What is needed is direct action of the masses, and as long as that is not happening, nothing can be said about federalism, communism or social revolutions. Those are all children’s toys, prattling without any firm ground under our feet, without power, without means, and it does not bring us any step closer to our social aims.”

Vladimir Lenin, A meeting between V.I. Lenin and P.A. Kropotkin

Capitalism will not allow you to leave its social relations! You can free yourself as much from their overwhelming pressure using collective farming, housing, cooking, etc. as a submarine can free itself from the pressure in the Mariana Trench by opening up its hatch. The capitalist class will smash you into mush just as it has done with every attempt at individualist revolution for well over two centuries. The choice is simple. Engage in vanguardist organization, or die being remembered for nothing but hindering the revolutionary movement. In order to win, these petit-bourgeois anarchist fantasies must be smothered in their bed, before we lose another decade to their cult worship of spontaneous and individual action.

If you want power you have to think as if you already have it. You have to think about how resources will be transported, you have to think about how people will be supported, think about where funds will come from, think about how to maintain people’s morale, and you have to take your enemies seriously. If we take for granted the fact that local farmers’ agricultural production will be of key logistical importance in the revolutionary struggle, then to prevent local farmers’ total capture by reactionary forces our short term strategy must be to direct the energy of their class struggle against our mutual enemies. Such work has already been done in getting farmers to join the ecological struggle against the construction of pipelines by arguing against the use of eminent domain and demonstrating to them how their farm could be destroyed if a leakage were to occur. Further work can be done to organize the struggle against factory farms due to their mass production of and spread of livestock diseases. Gaining the full trust of these farmers in the socialist cause will necessitate the construction of a sophisticated party that has the logistical means to ensure their goods are transported and traded at a fair price, can secure the maintenance of their means of production, and possibly reduce the economic pressures they face by providing free technical, mechanical, or physical labor through party cadres. To manage this contradiction of aiding this settler class and fighting for Indigenous sovereignty, the emergent socialist state’s mass agricultural production must be placed under the management of Indigenous experts. Through this process the land and capital of industrial agriculture can be expropriated into the hands of Indigenous tribes, providing the foundation for the eventual expropriation of all settler-controlled land for the benefit of Indigenous and nationally oppressed peoples.

This paper is not a condemnation or a call to shy away from the necessary work to provide food security for the masses. It is however a call for comrades to recognize the path to do so is not an easy one with simple solutions. Taking on the task to feed the people is a vital struggle for our movement to take on, and doing so will significantly aid the development of our logistical capacity and political power. If your club or organization is interested in taking on this work then you should follow these steps: first, ensure you have developed the institutional means to take on and cultivate new cadres. If local needs outstrip your organization’s capacity and it collapses, that will harm the movement far more than developing the essential skill of patience within your cadres. Second, secure a regular supply of food through donations, organizational funds, or whatever means are at your disposal. Third, find and build connections with those in your area who lack the means to secure food on a regular basis. Learn their stories, struggles, and work to find out what they want and need. Fourth, connect with other organizations doing this work. Ask how they’ve come to their current strategy, what has worked and what’s failed, see if there’s any way you can support one another.

The struggle for a socialist world is not a game and there is no salve by which we can fix all the harm capitalism has brought upon humanity. The only path for liberation is to engage in massive struggle propelled through the people. As communists our responsibility is to become a collective leadership the masses can trust, to not just courageously overturn the present, but to safely guide them through this tempest with vision unclouded by idealism. When the people ask the question of who will come to feed them, our goal must be that it comes with the quick reply, “The party is here to feed you.”

Citations

Arthur, Melvin, and Christine Porter. 2019. “Restorying Northern Arapaho Food Sovereignty.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 9 (2): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.09b.012.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1902) 1961. What Is to Be Done? Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press.

The U.S. imperial senate immediately swept into action to protect its client state, even as the embattled Democratic Party leader, the octogenaric ambulatory corpse Joseph Robinette Biden, leaked his displeasure with the zionist attempts to draw their imperial protector into a regional war. But, of course, this is what the zionists have been seeking ever since their resounding defeats of October 7, 2023: to instigate the flames of war across the region and force their doddering big brother, the U.S. empire, to enter the conflict officially and at scale.

The zionists are beyond the control of the U.S. ruling class, which has shown itself unable or unwilling to cut off aid and reliant on the zionists to support U.S. hegemony. Now, the political configuration of the zionist state pushes it to engage in further and more extreme steps of genocide. The Iranian response to the zionist provocations was intentionally limited; Iran released a statement that they now consider the matter resolved. This provides an offramp for the U.S. imperialists to de-escalate and reign in their client. If the zionists provoke further violence, it will demonstrate conclusively that the U.S. has lost control of its vassal. 

The rightist unity government now running the show in Tel Aviv is fighting for its survival, both in the military field against the Palestinian resistance, and in the political arena against zionists to their left flank. Genocide hawks, who prefer the immediate and sharp destruction of warfare to the slow ethnic cleansing of the “left” zionists, have gone so far as to begin the sale of real estate in Gaza and parade the vision of a genocidally cleansed shoreline, replete with zionist ocean-side resorts, in conferences and on zionist news media.

On the one hand, the zionist response to the brave attacks of October 7 has put the continued existence of their state at risk. On the other, this same collapse of the occupation military in the face of concerted guerilla action has put the political future of the right-leaning genocidaires on the line. These genocidal elements see total victory, the elimination of Palestine as a nation, as the only path to retain political and economic power within the zionist state. To that end, they have reached out to the reserve of zionists located abroad; ultra-rightists in Europe and the U.S. have raced to their support.

One of these transparent efforts at instigating a regional war, in which U.S. interests in Saudi Arabia and Jordan would be imperiled, forcing the U.S. imperial garrisons to respond, was the April 1 bombing of Iran’s embassy in Damascus. The zionists were hoping for a response to this war crime. They are desperate for any excuse to call for help and any fig leaf to present the zionist state as under attack in the media. Why?

The zionist military is defeated. It can only hope to achieve something remotely like victory if it receives direct assistance from its imperial master, the U.S. In order to do so, the occupation has been lashing out at neighboring countries and threatening to destabilize the whole region. Their sole hope, as this paper has reported, has been for the zionists to convince the U.S. to lend direct aid.

In fact, prior to this punitive strike, Iran appealed to the U.S. empire and the U.N. for aid. They were rebuffed. Open conflict remains the last available option to them, despite the danger that it might trigger a U.S. backed war, or worse, a retaliatory nuclear strike.

As the IRGC pounds zionist military targets, obliterating U.S.-provided hardware and degrading the zionist occupation force, Tel Aviv is set to receive a new aid package from its U.S. master. It is now imperative that we block this aid. All U.S. organizers of all tendencies should exert pressure on their House representatives, up to and including disrupting their Congresspeople’s personal lives and giving them reason to fear voting for the bill the Senate just passed.

Some may ask what duty we have to the “working class of Israel.” This question is malformed and improper. If there is a working class in the zionist state, it is the duty of that working class to attack and defeat its own government in Tel Aviv. To the extent that there are so-called Communists within the zionist state, they must now call for the complete disarmament of the Tel Aviv regime and an acknowledgement that the zionist entity is doomed. Failure to do this is a betrayal of international solidarity on their part, not on ours. Others may claim that the Clarion thereby takes a “neither Tehran nor Tel Aviv” position. This is incorrect. This author — indeed, the Press Organization as a whole — critically supports the Iranians in their efforts to bloody the nose of the zionists. Palestine has broken out in waves of anti-zionist violence in the wake of the drone and missile attacks, and many Palestinians are celebrating the battering given to the occupation by the IRGC and Ansar Allah.

Further, it is our duty in the West to take any and all measures to prevent the imperialist armed forces of the U.S.-Canadian empire and their junior partners in NATO from entering the arena. As Aaron Bushnell and Senior Airman Herbert have demonstrated, there are ways to attack the morale of the U.S. imperialist armed forces. We must attack not only their morale, but degrade their capacity to function through all means at our disposal. Such is our duty. Even if the moral situation of the genocide did not already demand it, the imperialist chain may very well break in Tel Aviv — weakening the U.S.-Canadian capitalist empire fatally. Our own interests are tied with those of Palestine. Solidarity is not only a moral necessity, it is a strategic requirement.

The ruling class of the U.S. capitalist empire cannot afford to surrender its grip on the strategic necessity of the zionist state; its brutal dominance of the capitalist world-system is dependent on the zionists to a large degree. It is, perhaps, a foregone conclusion that the lackeys of the ruling class will vote for aid to the zionists — unless they are more afraid for their physical wellbeing or economic livelihood than they are for the strategic value of the zionist state.

Although it would be irresponsible to suggest, as Lucy Parsons did, that “every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich,” action must be taken — direct, immediate, and sharp action. That action must inspire terror in the hearts of the ruling class, such that they cannot imagine continuing their support of the genocidal zionist state. Onward, to revolution!

Collusion, Corruption, and Extortion:

In that same pamphlet, I argued that the Ukrainian government is a semi-colonial, comprador state, which is to say that its government sells out its own people to foreign imperialists for the personal gain of state officials. To justify this, I pointed to several reforms that were made to facilitate the dispossession of Ukraine’s farmers at the behest of the IMF and against the wishes of the majority of the country. But again — this was prior to the war. How does war itself create opportunity for profit? One way is “disaster capitalism,” where a crisis in a locale causes the price of its resources to drop. Normally, an unstable environment is unattractive to investors, but when a crisis is acute, when there is an expectation that the price will rise after reconstruction, then foreign vultures are apt to jump to the “rescue.” Predatory investors dispossess the locals only to turn around and flip their assets.

And this is precisely what happened earlier this May, when American and British firms leveraged their connections in the Ukrainian government to steal the assets of several Ukrainian firms. According to Julia Kiryanova, the CEO of Smart Holding, one of Ukraine’s largest investment firms, her and other’s businesses have been hit with “dubious criminal charges” and were added to “Ukraine’s list of sanctioned companies by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on highly vague national security grounds.” Ostensibly, the firms were sanctioned for having ties to Russia, and yet they had not done any business with Russia since 2014. “Coincidentally,” these same firms had been approached by Western businesses who had promised that they could have their sanctions lifted… If they agreed to sell their companies for a pittance of what they were really worth:

“This was followed by a series of police raids at our head office and our subsidiaries,” Kiryanova explained. Ukraine’s security services seized $96 million in assets, and the deeds to 40 companies and 30 natural gas wells… Yet, hours before the raids, the company [Smart Holding] was approached with a fire-sale buyout offer for its natural gas interests from foreign investors — British and American — who have no history in the energy sector. They said they’d face no problems, as “they would be able to resolve any issues with the office of Ukraine’s President.” The offer — a third of what the businesses are worth — was declined.

Sanctions cause rising business fears in Ukraine, May 2023.

Various other companies and investigators have attempted to get an explanation from Ukrainian authorities, and yet no formal communications have been received, suggesting that the government agents responsible are acting with the tacit consent of the state even while it is supposedly waging a struggle against corruption. Even without a formal explanation, the situation is clear: Western imperialists used their connections with Ukrainian compradors to extort the country’s businesses and to plunder their resources. 

Without the ongoing war or some other crisis, this kind of brazen collusion likely could not have happened. In a period of conflict, however, calling attention to corruption can leave one open to retaliation and accusations of “endangering the war effort.” The media and international community have essentially given the Ukrainian state a blank check to repress anyone who gets in their way, whether rival political parties, churches of the wrong denomination, or capitalists who refuse to fall in line with the comprador’s cannibalistic agenda. Even here in America, criticizing the Ukrainian government can get you accused of supporting Russia’s invasion, as if the collusion between Western and Ukrainian oligarchs are not also threatening the lives and wellbeing of Ukrainian citizens!

US Aid: Who Is Benefiting?

Of course, this collusion doesn’t just end with the private sector: Western governments got in on the action directly. For example, where exactly is American tax money going in Ukraine? Weapons of course, but not only weapons: some of it is straight money that goes into Ukraine’s treasury — nearly half of the government’s budget is coming from Western aid — and some of it is investment in “economic recovery.” There is a portion of that money which Ukraine pays back out again to Western firms to help “rebuild.” That amount is a direct transfer from the tax-paying population of the U.S. to the private U.S. firms reaping the benefits. 

According to Holly Williams’s report on 60 Minutes: 

Russia’s invasion shrank Ukraine’s economy by about a third. We were surprised to find that to keep it afloat the U.S. government is subsidizing small businesses… In total, America’s pumped nearly $25 billion of non-military aid into Ukraine’s economy since the invasion began — and you can see it working at the bustling farmers market on John McCain Street in central Kyiv.

What U.S. taxpayers are getting for their money in Ukraine, September 2023

The purpose of this aid is alleged to be supporting Ukraine’s economic self-sufficiency, yet, in truth, it’s only pushing Ukraine further into dependence on Western capital. The agency responsible, USAID, is, after all, run by the Department of Defense and the State Department. It’s not a charity, it is an instrument of the empire.

USAID claims that it is concerned with unemployment and hunger and the ability of the Ukrainian government to become self-sustaining. If we were to take them at their word, they would be one of the most inept international organizations ever to step on the world stage, unless becoming self-sufficient really means continuing to provide cheap commodities to the world market. That is, while the U.S. government arms Ukraine to keep fighting their battles with Russia, the NATO alliance still expects its private firms to profit from Ukraine’s agriculture. This much is said about as explicitly as can be expected in a press release conspicuously titled “The United States Provides Additional $250 Million to Help Ukraine Continue Feeding the World”:

Ukraine’s agricultural products and grain are critical for the world’s food supply and key to the country’s economic recovery and future prosperity. USAID, through AGRI-Ukraine, will continue to help Ukraine’s farmers produce, store, and export agricultural products and grain to the world. To date, USAID has leveraged $250 million in private sector contributions in support of AGRI-Ukraine… USAID is supporting infrastructure investments that will increase the rate of loading and unloading in Danube ports, and enhancing western border checkpoints and rail lines to expedite and facilitate trade, decreasing export costs for farmers (emphasis added).

The United States Provides Additional $250 Million to Help Ukraine Continue Feeding the World. July, 2023

All this is buried in language about “economic recovery” and “prosperity,” but the emphasis on exports makes it quite clear whose prosperity is really under consideration: Western consumers and imperialist profiteers. And these “infrastructure” investments are not even a public service, but the private property of monolithic agribusiness firms. Three in particular have received USAID funding to increase their export capacity: Kernel (363,000 ha), Grain Alliance (57,000 ha), and Nibulon (76,500 ha). If you read the previous pamphlet, Kernel should jump out because it’s the largest holder of Ukrainian land based in Luxembourg, and because it is also indebted to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which functions like the IMF but confined to the former Eastern Bloc. It’s also owned by Andriy Verevskyi, an infamous Ukrainian oligarch who is a former member of parliament and current fellow of the Agrarian Policy and Land Relations Committee. These three companies are ranked among the top 100 largest “latifundists” in Ukraine — hardly a “charitable” contribution!

Indebted to Europe

By far, the United States has contributed the largest single share of “aid” to Ukraine, but what about the rest of the Western powers? For one, most of the aid delivered by the European powers has been financial, rather than arms. And unlike the American financial aid, which was delivered in the form of grants, the majority of European capital, about 55 billion Euro in total, are loans.

As stated earlier, the American grants were given to giant agribusiness firms in order to increase their capacity to export their commodities to the world market. The loans provided by the European powers, however, are more straightforwardly about collecting on the debt.

The debt racked up by Ukraine has been a tremendous issue, because, as you’d expect, they’re unable to repay it in the middle of a war — yet they can’t afford to reject the predatory imperialist loans. A year ago, Ukraine, while hoping for their debt to be forgiven, was forced to beg for their debt repayment to be restructured; “magnanimously,” they were given a two-year freeze on paying back $20 billion of their debt. According to Reuters, “BlackRock Inc (BLK.N), Fidelity International, Amia Capital and Gemsstock Ltd are among the biggest holders of Ukraine’s debt… Kyiv had appointed JPMorgan as sole solicitation agent.” Worse still, additional conditions on the debt will make it more difficult — not less — if and when the Ukrainian economy begins to recover. According to Dr. Elliot Dolan-Evans, a professor of political-economy:

Most of Ukraine’s debt is denominated in US dollars (60%) or euros (24%), [so] spiralling Ukrainian inflation ensures that debts are harder to repay. Second, in addition to approximately $25bn (£21bn) in bond commitments, Ukraine has outstanding ‘GDP-linked’ obligations to creditors of $3.2bn (£2.7bn). These instruments ensure that Ukraine will pay investors an increasing amount as post-conflict reconstruction increases GDP, as repayments on these obligations are tied to GDP growth (emphasis added).

Ukraine’s debts to Western banks are destroying its social safety net, November 2022.

Forced into debt servitude to neoliberal creditors, Ukraine has been strong-armed into destroying its social safety net and demolishing labor protections while workers need strong benefits more than ever. Dr. Dolan-Evans continues:

“[The Ukrainian] parliament recently passed legislation that curtails trade union representation, [which] makes it possible to remove Ukrainian workers from national labour law protections, and allows firms to suspend employees arbitrarily. This new law — which… the UK government secretly supported — was originally submitted by the Zelenskyi government in 2021, but only passed under wartime conditions. This is despite about 40% of Ukrainians losing their jobs since the invasion began, and Ukrainian businesses slashing nominal wages.

The government is also planning to merge its social insurance fund with its state pension fund, firing personnel, cutting state expenditure and reducing benefits in the process — even though millions of Ukrainians asked for social assistance when Russia invaded, and the pension fund provides a lifeline for the country’s elderly. Even the government itself estimates that 60% to 80% of Ukrainians may end up below the poverty line.”

Once again, the supposed aid provided to Ukraine is not charity, nor is it building up their self-sustainability. It’s hollowing out their institutions and restructuring their economy to serve the needs of Western consumers while imperialists rake in the profit. With Ukraine understandably preoccupied with their Eastern front, one can’t help but wonder whether  more damage is being done by their Western front.

Military “Circle Exchange” Schemes

Though most of the European aid is financial, some of it is also arms, albeit through peculiar “Ringtausch” (circle exchange) agreements. In essence, one country provides arms to Ukraine while receiving replacement weapons from a different country. In one exchange, for example, Slovakia provided Ukraine with 30 BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, while Germany reimbursed Slovakia with 15 Leopard 2A4 tanks. If, like me, you’re not familiar with military hardware, you should know that the BMP-1 is a piece of Soviet-era hardware. And that’s not unusual for these deals: each participating country is pawning off their outdated, Soviet-era hardware on Ukraine, and then receiving some shiny, new military tech from other Western governments. According to a report from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, “We estimate that the total value of weapons sent to Ukraine as part of German ‘Ringtausch’ is between €82 and €127 million… while the total value of German replacements is estimated at €90 million.”

The exchanges accomplish two things. First, each country is able to dispose of unusable, excess capital that had accumulated in the form of weapons. By wasting resources, they’re able to forestall a crisis of overproduction. Second, the NATO bloc is thereby able to strengthen its peripheral militaries in preparation for a future conflict. From the surface, it appears like they’re donating weapons to Ukraine, when, in reality, they’re foisting their junk on Ukraine.

In some cases, the military hardware probably does do its job, outdated or not. But in at least one high profile case, it likely caused disaster. At the beginning of the year, a “Super Puma” helicopter infamously crashed into a kindergarten in Brovary, Ukraine, killing 14 and injuring 25. Horrifying footage released on social media showed fires spreading from the crash site. Investigations into the incident never confirmed the cause, though this particular model of helicopter, the EC225/H255, had previously been grounded after a design flaw was found to cause the rotor to completely detach from the craft. According to Airbus Group chief executive Tom Enders, the problem was so extensive that around 80% of the entire fleet had been grounded. So why, then, did France sell 55 of these helicopters to Ukraine in 2018? By then, the helicopter’s design flaws had been common knowledge for two years, so they must’ve known the risk, yet they chose to sell them to Ukraine all the same.

Conclusion

The ruling class of Ukraine and the United States have colluded to squeeze out all the blood, sweat, and tears that they can from Ukraine’s working class. Lives lost to war, livelihoods lost to neoliberal austerity, corporate espionage, unpayable debts — none of these things matter to those who claim to be acting in the defense of Ukraine. And perhaps this would be obvious if we stopped to consider the staggering difference in scale between American aid to Ukraine compared to other war-torn countries: what sets Ukraine apart is not that this war is especially heinous, or that Russia is a uniquely violent or dangerous power.

What set’s this war apart is the jackals in blue suits prowling Wall Street and executive suites of corporate towers throughout the U.S. looking greedily at the ruined Ukrainian economy for a time when they can swoop in and restore profitability. But that’s not all: Ukraine also occupies a particular strategic position in the world amidst the West’s pivot to the East. The American Empire is increasingly preoccupied with the People’s Republic of China and its growing bloc of oppositionists. This horrific war, NATO war planners have admitted, is a “cheap” way to ensure Russia ceases to grow on the world scale to prevent it from threatening U.S.-NATO interests.

Perhaps most importantly, from the eyes of the U.S. capitalist class, Europe is forced to align more and more closely with the U.S. at a time when the NATO alliance had begun to drift away from Washington’s orbit. As a result of the war, NATO countries have turned to U.S. liquid natural gas to meet demands that were previously met with Russian gas; the U.S. sabotage of pipelines and the sanctions on GAZPROM and other Russian state agencies have placed the Eurozone in a new position of subservience to their old masters in the White House.

This confluence of overlapping interests — from geopolitical strategy, to corporate profits, to tightening the reins on Washington’s satellites — is what really sets this war apart.

The mass media, slaves to the ruling class, are nevertheless beating the drums of war. The Washington Post (“Democracy dies in darkness”) openly trumpets that the war in Ukraine is good for the U.S. Empire in all of the expected ways: It will “break up” the Sino-Russian alliance, it will defeat “our” enemies (who are “we” here? The editorial doesn’t say, but merely assumes that anyone reading the rag is bourgeois, upper petit-bourgeois, or otherwise aligned with the political class of the Empire), Ukraine is a good place to test experimental weapons and gear up to go to war with the People’s Republic of China, and the perennial favorite, U.S. manufacturing will return if we go to war. Of course, the author Marc Thiessen, speechwriter for some of the most evil people on the planet, doesn’t mean general domestic manufacturing — he means high-tech jobs in the murder sector like Raytheon and Northrop.

There’s more money to be made in Ukraine, though: The U.S., which pushed Ukraine into war with the R.F., can turn around and “rebuild” its infrastructure. The empire and its junior NATO partners have already committed $66 billion to do just that. This would, of course, result in significant concessions within Ukraine to these foreign investors. In June of this year, the U.S. Empire announced its intentions to own the Ukrainian energy grid with a $1 billion investment. Criminal financial monopolists like BlackRock have taken time from their busy schedule of buying all the housing stock in the U.S. to help the clown Zelenskyy raise private capital so U.S. investors can buy his entire country. The war has turned out to be a fire sale for the West. Yes, we are all aware that “[p]rivate investors see a ‘tremendous opportunity,’” as the JPMorgan ghoul Stefan Weifer cooed in an interview with CNN, in the destruction and privation of the Ukrainian people, but we thank JPMorgan for pointing out that the investment firms intend to capitalize on human misery! Of course, the mass media has called out the feeding frenzy and publicized it so no investor need miss out on this opportunity to financially colonize a country.

Reuters released the results of a poll on Wednesday June 28, 2023, showing that this media saturation has had its intended effect. The poll “charted a sharp rise in backing for arming Ukraine, with 65% of the respondents approving of the [weapons] shipments compared with 46% in a May poll.”

In foreign policy, the U.S. government represents the most rapacious elements of U.S. Capital. Anyone who bucks this trend on the all-empire scale, including those within the ranks of the reactionary far-right GOP block, is rapidly silenced. The capitalists cannot afford skepticism about Ukraine, the war, and their part in it. Left-liberal politicians, for so long pointing to the Wagner Group within the R.F. as proof that the R.F. had its fair share of Nazis, rejoiced this month when the same Russian fascist private military contractor turned on Putin and the R.F.’s government. Whichever side they fight for, the U.S. ruling class and their pet politicians seem to keep eagerly lining up with various fascists. Global fascism, in fact, traces its funding and support directly to the post-World-War-II United States intelligence agencies.

We cannot afford to be duped by the mass media, by the politicians, or by the ruling class. We must agree that we will not support the imperialist Ukraine war. We say NO to all U.S. dollars and resources being spent to see bigger piles of bodies in Eastern Europe, to see blood spread across an ever-widening arc in Ukraine. The support of the U.S. is the kiss of death, and benefits no one except the far-right elements within Ukraine. We demand an end to U.S. support for this war!

Imperialists always speak with forked tongues, even when they speak the truth. “The war in Ukraine,” the imperialists say, “is a war of Russian aggression. It began in February of 2022, when the Russian Federation invaded the Donbass.” But beware! The imperialist media has no reason to tell “objective” truths. Whether the people reporting on the war know it or not, they’re being used as tools to sell a story to the workers in the West. That story is one the imperialists want you to hear. They pick a point to start their telling: after their own provocations, but before a response. Then they rend their garments and tear their hair, crying about violence and aggression! But what of their responsibility? We never hear of it! Make no mistakes and no equivocations: the Russo-Ukrainian War is the result of a studied policy of aggression pursued by the White House. At every turn, the Euro-Atlantic alliance took steps to heighten tensions between Russia and Ukraine. At every turn, the U.S. imperialists pushed Russia closer to the brink. It was within their power to bring everyone back, to prevent war, to calm tensions; it was simply not within their interests.

If the war didn’t start in February of 2022, when did it begin? What were the provocations and tensions that made it inevitable? Although we could trace its origins back to the imperialist breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the most direct causes of the 2022 war fell into place eight years ago, during the Euromaidan coup that deposed the lawfully elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. In late 2013 and early 2014, the Russian-leaning government of Ukraine was forcibly ousted by CIA-backed Banderists. The economy of Ukraine was at that time oriented almost entirely eastward thanks to the Yanukovych government. 

By 2014, the Eurostates had already been trying to turn Ukraine westward for a decade. Before Yanukovych, President Viktor Yushchenko maneuvered for years to bring Ukraine into the European Union (EU). Yushchenko was aggressive in trying to “contain” the Russian Federation (RF), much to the delight of the Western imperialists. But Yushchenko’s government collapsed in fights with the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s single-house parliament, which scuttled the efforts of the Ukrainian capitalists to further integrate with the West. In 2010 Yushchenko lost the presidency to the RF-friendly Viktor Yanukovych. What kind of man was President Yushchenko, who wanted to bring Ukraine into harmony with the west? One of his final official acts was to award the dead murderer Stepan Bandera the title “Hero of the Ukraine,” celebrating the man who worked in collaboration with the German Nazis to purge the country of Poles and Jews.

In late 2013, the Yanukovych government in Kiev stalled on a trade agreement with the EU that would have gutted the Ukrainian economy and drawn its resources into the more-developed economies of Germany and France. (This kind of economic draining effect had already been seen in the so-called third tier economies of Italy, Spain, and Greece, as the leading EU economy of Germany fattened itself on that of the others.) In order to achieve this refusal, the RF put the squeeze on domestic prices inside Ukraine. Gas prices increased 79% as the Russian Federation applied pressure to prevent a new Euro-oriented trade deal from being ratified. This triggered waves of internal unrest and set the stage for the Euromaidan coup in early 2014.

Ultranationalist political and paramilitary groups like Right Sector, the Azov Battalion, the National Corps, and Svoboda took control of the Euromaidan protests. From simple expressions of discontent, the demonstrations were rapidly transformed into a rightist coup. The elections held immediately after the coup were plagued with open corruption and office-purchasing. These are the kinds of “irregularities” a country usually finds itself accused of just prior to a U.S. invasion! Yet here, the elections were applauded by U.S. observers. Among other outrages committed by the new government were the renaming of monuments, streets, and awards in honor of and named after prominent Antisemites and Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, the man President Yushchenko celebrated as he left office. The new, post-coup, interim president, Poroshenko, who had been Yushchenko’s Prime Minister, immediately began attacking the use of the Russian language in Ukraine and supported the slow ethnic cleansing of Russians and Russian speakers taking place in the eastern and primarily Russian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. His government outlawed Communist symbols and parties in Ukraine and embraced Ukrainian ultranationalism as a credo. In the name of integration with the “liberal” west, the new Ukrainian government launched a crusade that conflated communism with Russian-ness, wielded its new state power like a great hammer that might crush them both. Banderite ultranationalists were placed into the top posts of the Ukrainian government.

Setting the Stage

The story of the Euromaidan and the Russo-Ukrainian war goes back all the way to 1985 with glasnost and perestroika, during which the agents of Western intelligence penetrated deeper and deeper into the ailing Soviet Union and made contact with the black market oligarchs they would use to destabilize and eventually destroy the Soviet states. The history of Western intelligence services interfering with the new “open” Soviet states is too long and complex to cover in this article. Suffice it to say that the crypto-Banderites, who had been lurking underground in Ukraine and waiting for their day, have been cultivated and encouraged for decades by Western intelligence. To clearly understand the course of events leading up to and following the Euromaidan coup, we should turn to 2010 and the relationship between post-Soviet Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and the EU.

To fully explore the reasons for the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War, it’s important to understand not only the events of the Euromaidan of 2014, but the shifting position of Ukraine with regard to the EU, and the discovery of oil in the country. Further, we have to understand the deep-seated issue of fascism native to Ukraine and how it affects decision making today. The Ukrainian fascism of Stepan Bandera, Banderism, animates the decision-making of many of the reactionaries now in power.

The roots of many of today’s issues giving rise to the war can be traced back directly to the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko. Viktor Yushchenko was the third president of independent Ukraine. During the 2004-2005 election, Yushchenko’s opponent, Viktor Yanukovich, was initially reported as the winner. Foreign governments and media outlets reported election-rigging, likely as part of a Euro-American plan to shift the country rightward. Yanukovich, as we will see, had been a Soviet administrator who was attempting to develop a semi-independent Ukraine. Yushchenko, a right-wing candidate from the center-right party Our Ukraine, promised to pursue tighter relations with the West and to try to tie the country to the European Union and NATO. As a result of the reports of electoral fraud, massive civil resistance erupted in Kiev and across the country. The U.S. Empire engineered these riots and protests, which even the Guardian reported at the time. “The operation — engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience — is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people’s elections.”

This has been widely called the “Orange Revolution” and we can see it as a trial-run for what will come when Yanukovich actually manages to win an election in the face of U.S. interference.

The Yukashenko presidency was, as promised to both the people of Ukraine and the ideologues in Washington, characterized by tighter relations with Western Europe, attempts to implement International Monetary Fund (IMF) policy to receive and continue receiving imperialist debt relief, opening agriculture to free market forces, seeking and obtaining NATO membership, membership in the EU, introducing a second house of the Rada to “bring stability” to the government (and we should note that a second parliamentary house, like that of the UK or U.S., is often used for the anti-democratic purpose of defeating popular legislation), the formation of a single Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and giving the status of war veterans to anti-Soviet partisans who fought on the side of the Nazis and Banderite fascists. In essence an unreformed proto-fascist, Yushchenko tried to make inroads during his presidency to hitch Ukraine to the western-imperialist bloc. His ideology appeared vacillating: now siding with the RF, now with the EU. The compass behind his policies, however, has never strayed from his true north: a powerful, sovereign, ethnically homogenous Ukraine.

The entire world economy was rocked by the Great Recession of 2008 as the U.S. housing market collapsed. Speculators preying on low-income members of the U.S. working class who were trying to buy homes brought down the entire financial infrastructure of the U.S. Empire and plunged the world into an enormous downturn.

In Ukraine, this meant lowered demand for steel, its second-largest industry, and subsequent defaults to the RF state gas company Gazprom. Gazprom cut off Ukraine’s gas supply as a result of these debts and Ukraine spiraled into a deep and serious financial crisis. Ukraine’s manufacturing industry shrank by 42% and its construction industry by an enormous 58%. Yushchenko pushed the country into an IMF loan for $16.5 billion USD. As with all IMF transactions, the bank forced the Ukrainian government to implement austerity measures and privatizations of public utilities as part of the loan repayment.

The EU entered into talks with the Yushchenko government to establish a free trade treaty, the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement. The EU desperately wanted to open a free trade corridor with Ukraine to help orient it toward the Eurobloc. Doing so would give Germany and France access to the considerable Ukrainian industrial base built by the Soviets, would completely open a market of 45 million people for German exports, and would contribute to the encirclement and isolation of an increasingly assertive Russian Federation. The talks were ongoing through the end of Yushchenko’s presidency, although they remained unconsummated at the time of the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election.

Yushchenko, however, got into serious disagreements with the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. Yushchenko struggled with the Rada in 2007 and 2008, attempting twice to dissolve it. In 2008-2009 his government broke apart; a rift opened between his Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, and his office. These successive crises eroded his political legitimacy and the general attitude in Ukraine began to swing back toward the left-leaning Coalition of National Unity.

The Ukrainian Economy, Russia, and the CIS

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union by the imperialists and the defeat of Communist parties and organizations in the breakaway republics, the capitalists who took control of the new and turbulent states in 1991 established an anti-Communist treaty organization to replace the federation of the USSR: the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Ukraine was a founding signatory of the CIS treaty. This created the Commonwealth of Independent States Treaty Organization (CISTO). Beginning in 1991, the CISTO states began negotiations toward a free trade deal — the Commonwealth of Independent States Free Trade Area (CISFTA). These negotiations were concluded in 2012 and the free trade area established. 

In the meantime, the Russia and the CISTO states sought admission into NATO and the western imperialist alliance, but the RF was rebuffed again and again. Eventually, the RF recognized that the Western imperialists would not ally with them and began establishing their own regional hegemony. Ukraine never came to that conclusion. U.S. agents continued to lead Ukraine on, without any actual intention of allowing Ukraine to join the NATO alliance but rather merely to prevent the new Ukrainian government from closing ranks with the RF. This attempt to keep the RF isolated from its natural allies so it could be opened to Western imperialism again, and would not rise to the status of regional imperialist or even global imperialist power, is at the heart of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

The economy of Ukraine grew by leaps and bounds between 2000 and 2008. It was reliant on exports of metals, metallurgy, engineering, chemicals, and food. In the early 2000s, prior to the Great Recession of 2008, the price of metals and chemicals continued to rise and brought a headwind into the Ukrainian economy. Foreign direct investment increased from half a billion dollars in 2000 to $7.81 billion USD just five years later.

President Yanukovych Victorious

In 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, from the Coalition of National Unity, won the Ukrainian presidential elections. President Yushchenko’s disgraced reputation brought him only some 5% of the vote. His embattled Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, was defeated by a narrow margin. A former transport manager in Soviet state enterprises and former Prime Minister in the cabinet of the second president of independent Ukraine, Yanukovych, and his bloc, favored closer integration with the RF while walking a “Europragmatist” path. The Yanukovych government continued discussions with the EU, feeling out a path toward the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement.

The 2008 crisis had forced the government in Kiev to rely on Russian economic aid for recovery even as the ruling class sought to court the EU. Although Yushchenko’s prior government had received IMF loans, this was not enough to buoy up the country. Critically, the gas needed to power industry and heat homes came from the RF. Yanukovych’s election represented, in part, a concession of the ruling class of Ukraine; although members of that class clearly wanted closer relations with the EU, access to Russian markets to absorb Ukrainian goods and reduced gas prices were more critical for the development of Ukrainian industry. The Yanukovych government, aware of the geopolitical importance of Ukraine in the defense of the RF (see below), was able to strike a balance and obtain a closer, but not integrationist, trade policy with the RF.

In 2011, the Yanukovych government ratified its entry into a competing treaty organization: the above-mentioned Commonwealth of Independent States Free Trade Zone (CISFTA), which abolished trade barriers between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Moldova, and Armenia. CISTFA is one of the many treaties between the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which is composed of former Soviet republics. The establishment of this treaty meant that Ukrainian goods could travel without tariffs into Russia, and granted Ukraine access to all of the CIS markets. It also meant that gas prices from the RF would be reduced, both necessary terms for the continued development of Ukrainian industry.

The policies of the Yanukovych government represent in miniature the ongoing problem facing independent Ukraine: being battered between the world-imperialist EU and the RF, which has been seeking to fully integrate the markets of the CIS countries, and even to politically integrate the former Soviet regions.

Back-and-Forth: The Russia/EU Problem

Ukraine is located in a strategic chokepoint between the world-imperialist EU bloc (which is part of the reigning Euro-American Alliance that has divided up nearly the whole world), and the emerging imperialist power of the Russian Federation. The RF’s ability to project power is mostly limited to those states directly on its border and within its sphere of influence, but it has assiduously carved out a small zone of control over the former Soviet republics: the CIS.

Independent Ukraine has thus, since its formation in 1991, leaned first one way and then the other. It is a small state which must balance the predatory concerns of its larger neighbors. It has sought the protection of the RF and shelter in its markets when the ruling class needed to restore profitability, then the protection of the EU and its imperialist ambitions when the ruling class needed to exert its independence from the CIS and the RF. This see-sawing makes of Ukraine a dangerous flashpoint between the Euro-American imperialists and the RF. Its physical location at the mouth of the East European Plain makes it geostrategically critical for Moscow to maintain friendly relations and foreclose the entry of hostile troops into Ukraine; at the same time, it has been vigorously courted by the U.S. Empire in an effort to destabilize the RF and open up the vast raw material reserves of the former Soviet Union to renewed Western exploitation.

The European Union-Ukraine Association, the free trade treaty sought by Yushchenko and the EU, was still being negotiated under the Yanukovych government. Free trade within the EU benefits Germany and France; free trade between the EU and other states benefits the entire Eurobloc, but disparately such that the greatest benefits flow, again, to Germany and France. When trade barriers are lowered, technical experts will tend to move to the place with the highest wages (the imperial centers). Concentrations of technical experts ensure that secondary, high-paying, “finishing” industries (as opposed to primary industries) will follow. The peripheral countries will be reduced to selling raw materials or primary materials to the technically advanced economies, then buying back the completed products at a markup that permits the imperialist metropole to extract even more from the periphery.

Russian industry is focused on the production of primary goods and raw materials. Because Ukraine, under the Yanukovych government, entered into CISTFA, the CIS free trade zone, Ukrainian finished goods found markets within the RF. RF raw materials were exported to Ukrainian industry for secondary processing and completion. However, if trade barriers between Ukraine and the EU were lifted, both Ukraine’s economy and the Russian economy (because, recall, there are no trade barriers between the two at this time) would have been exposed to the market forces of the EU, and to great quantities of European finished goods entering Russia via Ukraine. Both Russia and Ukraine would have reduced to industrial backwaters while the very expensive finished goods of the EU were resold in a balance of trade for raw resources and primary goods. The RF made it clear throughout the early 2010s that should Ukraine enter into the convention with the EU, it would cut off free trade to its own markets. Ukraine was forced to choose between closer ties to the EU and potential membership in the Euro-American imperialist alliance and closer ties to the RF and some degree of domestic economic freedom. Had Ukraine entered into the EU-Ukraine Association while the Russian Federation’s free trade provisions of CISTFA were still in place, this would have undermined the very careful and public trade policy pursued by Russia. Essentially, without trade barriers between the RF and the EU, advanced production in the EU would destroy the less-profitable industries inside the Russian Federation and re-colonize or re-imperialize Russia, transforming it into a reserve for pumping out natural resources to the advanced economies of Western Europe and forcing it to rely on Western European finished goods.

In 2014, in response to the repeated RF warnings, the Yanukovych government stalled Ukraine’s entry into the EU treaty convention. The government in Kiev, reliant upon the Russian markets, appeared to be poised to enter into more friendly negotiations with the RF purely out of necessity in protecting its own industries from European domination and to retain access to Russian primary goods. Trade sanctions and market instability combined to drive prices of gas even higher in Ukraine; real discontent broke out on the streets. The U.S. Empire and its junior partners, smelling the blood in the water, moved in to replace the Ukrainian government with one that was more pliable and more Westward-oriented.

Discovery of Gas and Oil

In 2010, enormous reserves of oil shale and gas were discovered in the Donbass and off the coast of Crimea.. Data indicates somewhere in excess of 5 trillion cubic meters of gas reserves in Ukraine, and 390,000,000 barrels of oil. European, and especially German, dependence on Russian Oil and Gas has been one of the greatest weaknesses of the western imperialists, and, consequently, perhaps Russia’s greatest strength in its struggle with the Euro-Atlantic bloc. These newly discovered deposits represent enough oil and gas to make Europe entirely independent of Russia, if it could be exploited to the benefit of the EU states. 

In 2012, U.S. monopoly capital (in the form of the Shell and Exxon corporations) was granted exploration rights to the new Ukrainian oil and gas deposits. The Yanukovych government, like the governments before it, was hedging its bets, engaging on the one hand the RF and on the other the Euro-American imperialists.

As of 2021, the top Russian exports were crude and refined petroleum. The industrial sector of the RF is reliant almost entirely on the production and export of natural resources. Its largest companies are the state-owned Gazprom and Lukoil. In order to realize the profits (and thus drive its capitalist internal, domestic markets) in these corporations, it must export massive quantities of gas, oil, chemicals, and grain. It is the third largest oil-producing company in the world, behind only the U.S. Empire itself and Saudi Arabia, a U.S. satellite. It produces 10.5 million barrels of oil a day.

In 2021, 45% of the natural gas consumed in the states of the European Union came from the Russian Federation; almost all of the rest comes from within EU states. 90% of oil and natural gas imported into the European Union (EU) states came from Russia. The RF had been one of the largest suppliers of liquefied natural gas to the EU from 2017 on. The exploitation of Ukrainian oil and gas sources and the opening of Ukraine to drilling and export would have destroyed Russian state revenue. On the eve of the war, it was clear that the U.S. imperialists were pursuing a strategy designed to clip the wings of the RF by foreclosing the one economic strategy that had permitted it to retain some regional independence from the West.

Geopolitical Concerns

Lastly, we come to the military-strategic problem: the North European and East European Plains. These are regions of flat terrain, uninterrupted by substantial geographical barriers to troop movement. The North European Plain is very narrow in the north of Germany, but opens wider and wider the farther east you go, until it reaches the Urals. Because the East European Plain runs all the way to the Urals, Moscow lays exposed to rapid troop movements. It was this fact of geography (in part) that allowed the Wehrmacht to able to rapidly cross and occupy such great tracts of Soviet land, from the border all the way to the Moscow suburbs, eighty years ago and, 130 years before that, allowed Napoleonic France to accomplish a similar feat.

Ukraine sits at the point where the North European Plain joins the East European Plain. It’s at this juncture, on the eastern border of Ukraine, that the plain grows so wide that a general defense of the entire territory becomes untenable. The western border of Ukraine, however, is relatively narrow and forms a natural line of defense between Moscow and Europe. Little Belarus, a staunch ally of the RF and a member of the CSTO, projects outwards in an exposed salient, flanked to the north by NATO members Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Ukraine sits to the south of Belarus. Should Ukraine become hostile to the Russian-dominated CSTO, Belarus would be nearly enveloped, and the East European Plain would be held by enemy hands at nearly its widest extent, making land defense on a continuous front essentially impossible.

And so, in 2014, Ukraine was precariously positioned. The West wanted access to Ukrainian oil and to establish a friendly, NATO ally on the doorstep of the East European Plain. The Yanukovych government, much to the frustration of the Western imperialists, kept a cool distance from the EU. The stage was set for the Euromaidan and the events that would lead directly to the war. U.S. intelligence assets needed only one more part of the equation: connections with the Banderites.

Banderism

No understanding of modern Ukraine is complete without examining the subterranean force behind the right nationalists in that country: Ukraine’s own home-grown fascist ideology, Banderism. Western capital traditionally finds its strongest allies in the little fascists of the nations it wants to exploit. Ukraine is no different in that respect. Banderists, for their own reasons of “national regeneration,” despise Russia — and that is useful to the suits in Washington.

The Banderite Past

Before the 19th century, Ukraine was not considered ethnically or nationally distinct from Great Russia. The very name, Ukraine, means “border march.” The 19th century saw a number of major nation-building projects: from France and Italy to Ukraine, countries across Europe embarked on efforts to unify the people in their territory into a single “nation” with a shared history and ethnic identity. The territory of Ukraine was, in the 19th and early 20th century, divided between the Tsarist Empire to the east and the Austrian dominions in the west.

Nation-building began among the Ukrainian intelligentsia during the late 19th century, rooted in figures like Taras Shevchenko. Ukrainian nationalism and antisemitism were intimately linked. In 1905, amid the backdrop of the failed revolution in Russia that same year, a pogrom was carried out by monarchists and nationalists in Kiev that killed 100 Jews. During the First World War, the fragments of Ukraine controlled by Austria and the Tsars were themselves at war with one another. By the time of the Russian Civil War, both reactionary “White” (aristocratic, monarchist) armies and nationalist armies carried out pogroms. In 1919, for example, a series of brutal pogroms in and around Kiev were carried out by Ukrainian White volunteer army forces. It was not until the Russian Civil War of 1917-1923 that parts of Ukraine were at last able to exercise self-determination. In the west, Germany and Poland took over large swathes of territory and threatened the new Soviet republics in the former Russian Empire.

The parts of Ukraine in the Soviet Union were recognized as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In the Polish-controlled regions, the Ukrainian language was suppressed. Members of the Eastern Orthodox Church and those who were recognized as being Ukrainian nationals or ethnically Ukrainian had fewer rights under the Polish Republic. This suppression led directly to the development of Banderism through the heightened nationalist movements that arose in reaction. In the early 1920s, inside Polish-occupied Ukraine, nationalists founded both the Ukrainian Military Organization and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). 

In the 1930s Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian far-right nationalist, rose to prominence inside the OUN. He was involved with several assassination attempts on Polish officials. He was tried by the Polish authorities and sentenced to death but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment before it was carried out. It was this trial that established him as a household name among Ukrainian nationalists and which marks the beginning of the formalization of the vicious Ukrainian form of fascism that we now call Banderism. Bandera was freed from prison during the partition of Poland and he moved to Nazi Germany where he started working directly with the Abwehr and Wehrmacht. By 1940 he was the head of a splinter faction of the OUN, founding the OUN-B or the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists — Banderite. By 1942, the term Banderite was widely associated with the murderous antisemitism and anti-Polish actions of the OUN-B.

Bandera was proclaimed providnyk (the equivalent to the German Führer and Italian duce) at the Second General Congress of the OUN. It was at that same congress that the fascist salute and the call-and-response “Slava Ukraini!” (“Glory to Ukraine”), “Heroiam Salava!” (“Glory to the Heroes!”), so recently thundered from the pulpit of the United States Congress, were adopted. In October of 1942, the OUN-B, operating now in German-occupied Ukraine, formed its own army and death squads (the so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Ukrayins’ka povstans’ka armiia, or UPA), carried out pogroms and massacres, and received nearly continuous material and political support from the German Nazi authorities. Banderism was embodied in the manifesto of the OUN-B, “Ukrainian National Revolution,” calling for the annihilation of “Ukrainian ethnic enemies.” The OUN-B stated that “When it comes to the Polish question, this is not a military but a minority question. We will solve it as Hitler solved the Jewish question.” This manifesto incorporated specific calls for ethnic violence against Jews, Poles, and Russians. “Kill the enemies among you — Jews and informers.”

According to the Banderite plan, only an ethnically homogenous Ukraine could stand on its own. They planned for an “annihilation action” and a Ukrainian version of the Nazi Generalplan Ost: the “evacuation or annihilation” of all non-Ukrainians. As the Red Army withdrew from Ukraine in the face of the Nazi advance, pogroms were organized in the cities by OUN-B and the UPA. In L’viv the UPA, in participation with the Nazi units, killed 4,000 Jews. In all of Ukraine, the pogroms carried out by Bandera’s forces are estimated to have killed 35,000 Jews. The murder of Poles was even worse: between 50,000 and 100,000 Poles were murdered by the UPA during the war.

Modern Banderism

Banderism was suppressed during the Soviet period. Nazi collaborators went underground. The Soviet government engaged in what was called “de-nazification,” preventing former Nazis living in the East German Republic and the agents of their Eastern European collaborator regimes from holding political office. There were trials, even executions. Bandera himself, who had escaped to the West under the U.S. policy of patriating and adopting Nazis, was killed by KGB agents in 1956. 

What about the West? Banderites have a distinguished history working with modern U.S. intelligence agencies. The CIA recruited Mykola Lebed, a Gestapo-trained leader of an OUN group and overseer of the murder of the Jews of Krakow, to work in their West German intelligence services in 1947. He was then smuggled into the U.S., hired by the Pentagon, and worked in CIA fronts like the Prolog Research Corporation.

The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, established in 1940 before the World War, still operates today. It is, as the journalist Russ Bellant wrote in “Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republic Party,” an umbrella organization made up entirely of OUN-B fronts. U.S. President Reagan welcomed Jaroslav Stetsko, a Banderite ideologue who had helped Bandera compose the OUN-B Manifesto and who personally oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in L’viv, into the White House in 1983.

The U.S. courted these Banderites during the entirety of the Cold War, hoping to use them to overthrow or destabilize the Ukrainian SSR. Today, the stronghold of Banderism is the Western Ukrainian city of L’viv, but the ideology has adherents throughout the government. After the expulsion of Yanukovych by the Euromaidan, there was a sudden explosion in Nazi and Banderite monuments and dedications inside Ukraine. This is the tail end of a process that began as early as 1991 — with the collapse of the Soviet authority in Ukraine, the Banderites emerged from the shadows, particularly in the “European” western half of the country. For instance, in 1996 the journalist Ivan Matveychuk wrote that “For five years ultra-radical nationalist organizations are [sic] conducting a well-organized propaganda campaign against not only the left, but all Russians and Jews. B. Borovich, a mayor of Ivano-Frankovsk, recently told the schoolchildren of the city to ‘follow the true path of Stepan Bandera!’”

Efraim Zuroff of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted that “Ukraine has more statues 4 killers of Jews than any other country”.

The Drums of War

Why do the imperialists sound their drums and trumpets for the fascists in Kiev? It’s not as simple as the common fascist ideology of the U.S. imperialist ruling class and the murders in Kiev. Yes, Senator John McCain met with an applauded Ukrainian fascist Oleh Tyanhybok. Yes, Senator Christopher Murphy, a Democrat and supposedly an opponent of gun violence, stood on the platform with the murderous Tyanhybok. Yes, the leaders of both parties gladly and warmly welcomed the Neo-Nazi Azov leadership in October of 2022, long after their ties were public.. But the criminal conspiracy of looters that rule in Washington doesn’t honor ideological alliances; it has no friends except those who, for the moment, can continue to serve its interests. No — the Russo-Ukraine war was promoted by the U.S., arranged by the U.S., and finally brought about by U.S. manipulations that had very little to do with the fascists in power in Kiev. Washington would not lift a finger to save its favorite white-supremacist fascist rulers unless its agents knew there would be some remuneration for the Empire.

You will hear the breathless protestations of the agents of capital — the paid agents and the unwitting ones — more and more in the coming year as they moan with faithless mutterings that Ukraine was unjustly attacked; that NATO is a peaceful alliance; that a ruthless and expansionist Russian Federation was merely seeking to claw a little more territory, a few hundred-thousand square miles, from Europe. You have already heard, no doubt, news anchors and U.S. politicians alike decry the “asiatic barbarians” and their Oriental despotism.

But no; the U.S. ruling class wanted this war. It sought this war. It manufactured this war. There is no surprise in the halls of Washington, or if there is, it is only that the Russian Federation would not let itself be manipulated forever, hedged forever, trimmed and attacked in small, cutting ways forever.

The U.S. acted along several lines to bring about the conditions for the Russo-Ukraine War: economic provocations, threats to Russian oil and gas industries, and finally the general strategic impossibility of Ukraine joining the NATO alliance.

Euromaidan

In 2014, Yanukovych stalled the trade talks with the EU. The Radka had already approved the agreement, but the RF was exerting ever more pressure to prevent Ukraine from entering into a free trade zone with the EU. The RF signaled its displeasure by interrupting trade with Ukraine and, on the eve of the ratification, it offered economic aid packages that exceeded what Ukraine would gain from the EU and a promise to reduce the price of natural gas. This was unacceptable to certain elements in the Ukrainian ruling class, including Yanukovych’s political opponent, billionaire (and the man who would, as a direct result of the Euromaidan, become president) Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko later said “I was one of the organizers of the Maidan. My television channel — Channel 5 — played a tremendously important role.”

The Maidan protests broke out in the West of Ukraine — in the traditionally Banderist cities. They lacked majoritarian support throughout the country and, in fact, most of the eastern portions of Ukraine didn’t participate in the protests. It is most likely that the initial irritation in Ukraine was organic. A real outpouring of working class anger at the now-this-way now-that-way policies of Kiev, frustration at the capitalist excess of the oligarchic ruling class that had captured the country in the years after 1991, the protests were nevertheless directed not at emergence of Banderists in the leading government posts of the west, but rather at Yanukovych for failing to bring Ukraine closer to Europe. Once the protests had begun, the Banderists wasted no time. The most active protesters in Kiev were members of the fascist-Banderist Svoboda. In L’viv, protesters captured the regional administration, declared a “people’s council” and proclaimed the Svoboda-staffed local councils as the only legitimate governing bodies. Right Sector led attacks on the police in Kiev. Nazi and founder of the Social-National Part of Ukraine Andriy Parubiy was declared the media’s “commander of Maidan.”

The protests in Kiev were strengthened by a hard backbone of fascists. “A sweet, ol’ grandmother is pouring Molotov cocktail in a nationalists’ bottles; and a manager of a large company is carrying ammunition to the student… For some, its ‘we need a couple of crates of AKs and grenades, we’ll sort things out here quickly,’” wrote Ilya Varlamov on his livejournal, during the protests. The city was cut apart by barricades: piles of burning tires in the streets, lit day and night by militants, blazed every night. The nationalists and the Banderists had control.

In Odessa, Communists built an anti-Maidan camp at the historical city center. Fascists, Banderists, and nationalists stormed the tent camp, forcing the Communists into the Trade Unions House nearby. The Banderists surrounded the building and, lobbing petrol bombs, set the Soviet-era structure ablaze. They killed 46 people in the Trade Unions House and injured some 200 others. Although there was an investigation, the Banderite government never formally tried or punished anyone.

The U.S. Empire got involved. Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy met with Svoboda and applauded the fascists, giving their support to the protestors. A leaked phone call from Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state, to the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine reveals Washington’s hand in promoting and advancing the Euromaidan protests. On the call, the ambassador and Nuland banter over who should be in the post-Yanukovych cabinet — weeks before Yanukovych actually resigned.

On 22 February 2014, President Yanukovych fled Kiev for Belarus. The Banderites had ousted the president. They selected businessman Petro Poroshenko as their interim president. Poroshenko signed an integration treaty with the EU and began the long, brutal war of ethnic and ideological extermination in the Donbass.

As a result of the Euromaidan, Ukraine has become the world’s training ground for the far right. Since the Euromaidan coup, Banderite Ukraine has been making noises about joining the NATO alliance. If Ukraine did join NATO, it would be a strategic death knell for the Russian Federation. Indeed, it would so clearly provoke an unwinnable war that the public-facing leaders of NATO have been very firm in denying Ukraine’s continuous applications. And yet… U.S. imperialist diplomats and advisors have allowed and encouraged the Ukrainian hope that Ukraine would join NATO, have encouraged its Banderite government to crow about NATO applications, and have hoped to spook the leaders of the Russian Federation with this apparition.

The U.S. Empire has refused to permit the Russian Federation to apply to join NATO, forcing it to form CSTO as an alternative. U.S. imperialist agents visited Ukraine frequently, and the U.S. Empire extended the arms of its regime-change machinery in the guise of the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, Freedom House, the Open Society Institute, and even the CIA.

The Cession of Crimea and the War in the Donbass

Immediately following the Euromaidan coup, the eastern regions of Ukraine erupted in pro-Russian protests. Russian speakers and their neighbors rightly saw the triumph of Banderists and proto-fascists like Poroshenko as a threat. As if to prove them right, the Banderists in charge of the new government set to work repealing the Ukrainian law that made Russian a protected minority language. Even the fascistic Hungarian government noted that repealing the protected status of Russian in Ukraine “could question the commitment of the new Ukrainian administration toward democracy.” Although the ultrarightists abandoned this plan, in 2017 they did pass an educational law requiring all classes in Ukraine from the fifth grade onward to be taught in Ukrainian — ending teaching in Russian and other languages of national minorities.

When Yanukovych fled, counter-protests exploded across the country. Crimea, far in the southeast of Ukraine and mostly ethnically Russian, joined in the pro-Yanukovych/anti-Banderist protests that erupted in Odessa and the Donbass. In Crimea, the protests specifically targeted the interim government. Formation of people’s militias and civil defense forces spread across the peninsula. The RF pledged support to the Crimean civil defense forces. A pro-Maidan rally of some 5,000 to 15,000 people demanded the resignation of the Crimean parliament. On 27 February, the parliament of Crimea held an emergency session while surrounded by what Western observers have called “masked and unmarked Russian soldiers” — “little green men.” At that session, the Crimean parliament appointed a caretaker government and deposed the Prime Minister of Crimea.

A 25 May 2014 referendum voted 95.5% to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. On 18 March 2014, the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol was recognized by the Russian Federation as an integral federal subject. This once again secured anchorage for the Russian Black Sea Fleet for the first time since 1991, brought the recently discovered gas deposits in the Black Sea under Russian control, and coincided with the beginning of the War in the Donbass. Two breakaway republics were founded in the Donbass regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Kimitaka Matsuzato, a professor of the Slavic Research Center at the University of Tokyo (and someone lacking in Western intelligence connections or grants) wrote that the republics legalized their local Communist parties. The republics joined together to form a united front to expel the Banderite fascists and defend against the coup in Kiev. Professor Matsuzato wrote in his article The First Four Years of the Donetsk People’s Republic,

As early as May 2014, several lawyers in the DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic] such as Elena Shishkina and Vitalii Galakhov, started to ascertain and record cases of destruction, death, injury, and torture and other war crimes committed by the Ukrainian Army and paramilitaries in the DPR territory.

Outrages by the fascist-infiltrated Ukrainian military have continued unceasingly since the Euromaidan. Banderite fascist parties and organizations inside Ukraine, including Right Sector and the Azov Movement, continue to hold high positions in the military, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Defense. The indiscriminate murder of civilians, the shelling of schools and residential blocks, vile live crucifixions, starvation of entire towns and cities, attacks on water supplies, and worse have been the normal every-day experience of the Ukrainians and Russians living in the Donbass.

These vicious, fascist Banderite forces have been earmarked $105.5 billion from the U.S. imperialist Congress since 2022 began. We have all seen the self-congratulatory photographs of militiamen and regular Ukrainian army soldiers (complete with Nazi Sonnenrads, Banderist Wolfsangels, and other fascist symbology on their clothes) receiving Stinger missiles. Smug, self-assured “social democrats” have smeared their social media with vile imagery of “Saint Raytheon” in Ukrainian colors. The imperialist press and the guerilla social media attachés from the U.S. State Department have been beating the drums of war loud enough to drown out the truth: that the government of Ukraine is in the thrall of detestable fascists.

The Provocation

Under Yanukovych, Ukraine had adopted a non-aligned status. The Rada codified a law preventing Ukraine from joining military alliances — a clear move of conciliation toward the RF, assuring Russia that Ukraine would not strategically endanger the CIS. One of the obvious motives in supporting the Euromaiden from the point of view of the West was the reversal of this non-aligned status, and indeed, Poroshenko did so. In June of 2017, the Rada passed legislation declaring NATO membership as a strategic foreign and security policy objective. There was a new presidential election in 2019 in which Poroshenko was ousted and the comedian-president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was elected, likely with U.S. backing.

Zelenskyy sent out a clear message that Ukraine was interested in joining NATO. In September of 2020, Zelenskyy approved a national security strategy calling for eventual NATO membership. In June of 2021, the Secretary of State of the U.S. Empire Anthony Blinken said, point-blank, “We support Ukraine membership in NATO.”

In January of 2021, on the eve of the invasion, Vladimir Putin delivered a long speech setting out the Russian position. “[I]n December 2021, we nevertheless once again made an attempt to agree with the United States and its allies on the principles of ensuring security in Europe and on the non-expansion of NATO. Everything is in vain. The U.S. position does not change. They do not consider it necessary to negotiate with Russia on this key issue for us, pursuing their own goals, they neglect our interests.”

Clown Prince Zelenskyy

Enter the actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy, cap in hand, begging for a handout from the men and women who put his country up on the frontlines to be ground into hamburger. Prior to his election to the presidency of the Banderite Ukrainian government, Zelenskyy was a stand-up comedian and television actor. He was backed by former employees of the international management firm McKinsey & Company, pro-NATO Ukrainian generals, and the second-richest man in Ukraine, Ihor Kolomoyskyi.

Zelenskyy’s political campaign was utterly devoid of meaningful policy. He ran on a simple platform of national regeneration and “at least I’m not Poroshenko” (the outgoing Banderite president who was rocked by scandals). He did not hold one rally, but rather ran troll farms online, did online events, and used the publicity of his Ukrainian-language television show, Servant of the People (which he also named his political party) in which he portrays a school teacher who is unexpectedly elected to the presidency and proceeds to “clean house” by machine-gunning corrupt members of the Ukrainian parliament.

There was a substantial push from Western imperialists like Howard Buffett (the son of Warren Buffett), the lobbying firm Signal Group (paid through a mysterious agent who appears to be a self-employed lawyer in the U.S.), Christina Pushaw (press secretary for U.S. criminal and governor Ron DeSantis, and former employee of Mikheil Saakashvili), and others.

But who is Zelenskyy? He is an actor, hired to play a role. His job is to give a public face to a corrupt and venal dictatorship of Banderites and ultranationalists. As early as February of 2019, the European Union was investigating the open proclamation of numerous Ukrainian police officers to be Banderites. We must now assume that Zelenskyy was elected with the tacit compliance of the U.S. Empire and the Banderite forces inside Ukraine. The Banderites and ultranationalists have long been an arm of the U.S. foreign intelligence services. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, worked closely with a former Banderite in the 1950s, Mykola Lebed, to destabilize the Ukrainian Republic. Andwhere have we seen the Clown? In no less than the U.S. magazine Vogue, on U.S. television, dressed in a tactical turtleneck and playing the embattled president on news shows and through broadcasts, asking the United States to engage in a nuclear war with the Russian Federation. All along, the right warmongers in the U.S. have been encouraging and even cheering for “NATO no-fly zones,” the invocation of NATO Article 5, sending U.S. soldiers through Poland, and other provocations that would inevitably escalate to nuclear warfare. Zelenskyy is the voice of this warmongering movement. Although he is directly the puppet of the Banderite regime in Ukraine, that regime would not exist, could not have continued to exist, without the support of the imperialists in Washington. Imperialist policy from Washington has magnified the fascist threat within Ukraine, has trained it, has helped elect its “softer” face.

U.S. Empire against the Euro-Alliance

On its face, the conflict now raging inside Ukraine is a war between the Russian Federation and the state of Ukraine. On another level, this is a war between NATO and the Russian Federation, addressed above. On yet a third level, this is a war between the U.S. Empire and its junior partners, the Euro-Alliance.

Although the states in the EU have their own interests that are mutually opposed or exclusive, the EU bloc continues to maintain its cohesion. As its military and economic centers, France and Germany control the general direction of the Union. Together, the member states of the EU are capable of exerting imperialist pressure on the world stage, engaging in imperialist war, etc. In the 30 years following the destruction of the Soviet Union, however, the EU has acted only when and where the U.S. Empire granted sanction. It has been, essentially since the end of the Second World War, a junior partner to the U.S. imperialists, forced to follow the lead of U.S. capital because of its relatively weaker position on the world stage.

As a result of the changing status quo in Europe, the discovery of the Ukrainian gas reserves, and the general decay of the U.S. Empire, the long-term strategy of the ruling class in the United States has shifted to ensure the continued subservience of the Eurostates. The EU’s own representative for foreign affairs (chief diplomat), Josep Borrell, said in October of 2022: “Our prosperity has been based on cheap energy coming from Russia…. [a]nd access to the big China market, for exports and imports, for technological transfers, for investments, for having cheap goods. I think that the Chinese workers with their low salaries have done much better and much more to contain inflation than all the Central Banks together. So, our prosperity was based on China and Russia — energy and market…. On the other hand, we delegated our security to the United States…. You – the United States – take care of our security. You – China and Russia – provided the basis of our prosperity. This is a world that is no longer there.”

European capital doesn’t want to serve the U.S. Empire. It has been forced to by the last great inter-imperialist crisis of the late 1940s. Capitalism in Europe crumbled and its chief beneficiary was the U.S. settler-republic which really, for the first time, was able to fully step onto the world stage as the leading imperialist power of the West. Since 2018 at the earliest, the U.S. Empire has been clipping the wings of the EU. The 2019 sanctions on Nordstream 2 are a perfect example of this trend. As the war approached, thinking in the U.S. Empire changed, spurred on by the deepening threat of general capitalist crisis. Now, the U.S. Empire must reduce the EU and the NATO member states to economic dependencies if it is to survive the contraction of the capitalist economy that will follow this latest crisis. The EU has been content to be a partner of the U.S. Empire — but ultimately, empire brooks no partners, only subjects.

The proxy war in Ukraine between the Russian Federation and NATO is going quite well according to the scoreboard kept by the United States. Russia has been forced to spend countless lives and untold treasure in war machinery while the EU has been decoupled from Russian gas and forced to buy U.S. product. Even better from their eyes, the EU is suffering brutal de-industrialization as the gas prices necessary to perform certain industrial and chemical operations make them no longer feasible.

The U.S. gets two things it wants: a pliable and open Russia which it can exploit, and the European Union put on a leash. But let us not bandy words about: the mere fact that the Russian Federation is a target of NATO aggression cannot transform it into anything other than it is. When a war between two capitalist states is the result of competition over domination — in this instance, the “regional security” and economic control of the Russian Federation over Ukraine on the one hand and the world-spanning imperialist system of the Euro-American alliance threatening to reduce Russia to a client state rather than a competing power on the other — this war does not, by virtue of its inevitability, become something to be celebrated. Indeed, both powers, the Russian Federation no less than the Euro-American NATO alliance, are acting in the interest of capital. In the case of NATO, this is the capital of the U.S. Empire and its Western European toadies. In the case of the RF, this is the capital of the huge state monopolies and the post-Soviet civil service class of robber-princes that command them.