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Title: The Invasion of Ukraine Author: Peter Gelderloos Date: March 14, 2022 Language: en Topics: Ukraine, war, authoritarian left, refugees, borders, imperialism, anarchist analysis Source: Retrieved on 14th March 2022 from https://itsgoingdown.org/the-invasion-of-ukraine-anarchist-interventions-and-geopolitical-changes/
The current war in Ukraine is difficult to grapple with and not only for
those of us with friends and comrades who are over there, fighting or
surviving, or who have already fled and now find themselves homeless,
many of them for a second time, in the case of the many refugees who had
taken shelter there over these last several years.
It is also difficult to know how to position ourselves, given that this
overwhelmingly appears to be a conflict with only two sides, and both
sides—NATO and Russia—are systematically involved in torture, murder,
repression, exploitation, racism, and ecocide domestically and around
the world.
As anarchists, though, when we look at the world around us, we have to
be aware of the campaigns of states and the structures of capitalism,
but to also always create room in our analysis for the needs and actions
of people outside of and against those forces.
As we often do, many anarchists in Ukraine and surrounding countries are
focused on providing support—by building up resources and sharing them
in an empowering way—with people who have been injured and those made
homeless, as well as with the one million refugees produced by the war.
Many anarchists are also choosing to fight against the Russian invasion,
even though that requires some level of collaboration with Ukrainian
government forces. It is significant, though, that many of those
fighting are Russians who had already fled their country as Putin’s
regime became more totalitarian.
Revolutionary experiences from the Makhnovschina and the Mexican
revolution a hundred years ago to Kurdistan today have shown us that
states do not leave us any terrain in their conflicts. It is in their
interests that their conflicts are always between slightly different
versions of the state. Since for a long time now there has been no large
territory of total statelessness to defend, an anarchist positionality
means carving out our own space, fighting alongside state forces willing
to offer us an alliance against other state forces that would annihilate
us in a moment. The historical lesson seems to be that in these
situations, we need to maintain as much autonomy as possible, to
continuously think about a revolutionary, transformative horizon, and
not place any naĂŻve trust in the decency of state allies. We also learn
that revolutions, subordinated to the needs of pure warfare, wither and
die, but sometimes, for mere survival, people need to engage in warfare
and fight back. In the Spanish Civil War, even disciplined
individualists supported engaging with the imperfections of the
situation rather than running away to maintain their bubbles of purity.
This can be a hard lesson to affirm, because in all other moments our
position of not making alliances with political parties or other
governmental structures has proven correct. As far as I know, the false
pragmatism that justifies such alliances—with this new law in place,
with that new government in power, our revolutionary movements will be
stronger—is never borne out.
But we have also seen that when a major social conflict erupts, we need
to find a radical position within it, even and especially when the
mainstream framing of that conflict leaves no room for anarchist
positions. Staying home as the proper anarchist thing to do nearly
always facilitates centrists or the far Right taking over such
conflicts.
War is the health of the state and war is where revolutions die, but
ignoring them is not an option as they threaten our individual and
collective survival, destroy social movements, and crush communal
infrastructures. In situations of warfare, anarchists have no easy
answers; we must balance the conflicting needs of short-term survival
and a revolutionary horizon, the conflicting lessons of always making
space for anarchist positions in a conflict, never trusting states, and
not being able to act from a place of purity and isolation.
I would suggest another lesson. We have not done an adequate job of
analyzing the failings of anarchist movements throughout the 20^(th)
century. It has been vital to remember our dead, but often that has
translated into romanticizing a collective death wish. We need to
acknowledge how the deaths of our collectives has caused a grave
interruption to the continuity of our struggle. This resulting loss of
memory and intergenerationality has set us back. The lesson is that we
really do need to place more value on survival.
Those who lose the most in any war are people and the land, and those
who are oppressed in one way or another are the most vulnerable to the
violence unleashed. No matter who wins or loses, the bravery of fighting
back to defend the collective should be celebrated, but war itself
should not be.
On the contrary, we should condemn war and its instigators, while also
trying to understand each war’s particularities. How will the outcome of
this conflict affect ongoing geopolitics, shaping the wars to come, both
cold and hot?
I think that whether or not a Western-oriented, democratic government in
Ukraine survives this war, we can already say with a fair degree of
certainty that among states, the losers will be the United States and
Russia, and the winners will be China, India, Saudi Arabia, and other
mid-range states. And among capitalists, aside from the obvious
observation that arms companies will make a killing, we can single out
energy companies—both fossil fuel and renewable—as the big winners.
Russia will lose any of its remaining sparkle as a superpower and nearly
all of its regional leverage if it fails to oust the Ukrainian
government, though if it manages to take Odessa and with it the entirety
of the Ukrainian coast, it will have acquired a significant consolation
prize. But even if Russia wins in Ukraine, it will have accelerated the
expansion of NATO along its borders and isolated itself from most other
states and international bodies. It will also hasten the decline of its
major economic lever on the world stage, its fossil fuel output, second
only to that of the US but a much larger portion of its GDP (over 50%,
in fact, which is to say Russia has no economy without fuel exports).
The economic sanctions levied by Western institutions will not bring the
Russian government to its knees. As effectively detailed here they have
not accomplished that goal in Iran, and Russia is much better insulated
against such sanctions. But they do serve to limit Russia’s possible
global alliances and economic leverage, and they might even encourage
some of Russia’s capitalist class to imagine a government without Putin.
The cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was set to bring
more Russian gas to Germany and the European market is a far greater
loss than a friendly government in Ukraine could ever make up for. My
only guess is that Putin made this miscalculation because he was spooked
by the recent uprising in Kazakhstan, another country Moscow sees as its
backyard. As a statist and, what’s more, one with a background in
intelligence services, Putin is prone to the paranoid and unrealistic
view suffered by government leaders everywhere, that people are not
smart enough to rise up on their own and only ever do so as puppets. He
probably misread the Kazakhstan uprising as Western interference, a step
towards the final dismantling of the Russian Empire, created by the
tsars in centuries of bloody warfare against hundreds of Indigenous
peoples, expanded by the state capitalists of the USSR, and inherited in
diminished form by Putin, who is an explicit revanchist.
The reason the US government will be a loser is more subtle but
extremely important. First, though, let’s look at what the US has won.
The US has positioned itself in a conflict with relatively little direct
risk, in which it is all but guaranteed to play the role of good guy.
What’s more, this is a conflict that drastically increases European
unity, reviving Euro-nationalism, and plying Germany and France away
from their budding friendship with Russia. This can only be a good
thing, from NATO’s point of view. What’s more, the US has increased its
credibility, much damaged after the years of Bush and Trump.
A week before the invasion, I was sure that Russia would not attack
Ukraine, almost entirely because the US government said it would. The
daily reports quoting anonymous intelligence officials seemed lifted
from the playbook used to prepare for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It
turned out, though, the US government has multiple playbooks, and this
time they were telling the truth. In a less typical use of information
warfare, the US government seems to be broadcasting accurate
intelligence culled from the communications of the top echelon of the
Russian government in order to spook Moscow with how much they know.
This faulty prediction was a big error on my part, because it
constituted falling back on a liberal critique of government. As
anarchists, we don’t oppose governments because they lie, we oppose them
because their very existence is an assault on all of us, and whether
they lie or tell the truth, it is based on a calculation of their
interests to maintain power over everyone else.
So, for now, the US gets to be the poster boy of honesty, decency, and
peace; a huge change from its media image since the end of the Clinton
days.
However, the new gleam on the much tarnished brand of the US government
can do nothing to reverse the most important result of this war, in
geopolitical terms. And that is the acceleration of the emergence of a
multipolar world in which no one state exercises hegemony. Because of
their need to still access Russian energy and pay for those
transactions, and their awareness of their own potential vulnerability
to sanctions, countries like China and India are quickly developing
alternatives to Europe’s SWIFT system for bank transactions and
alternatives to stock and commodity markets that rely on the dollar as
the common currency.
Even if Russia loses this war or becomes a total pariah, the US is
quickly losing its perch as the world superpower. This is in large part
because US hegemony was never based primarily on its military power,
though that was a necessary ingredient. But raw US military power was
only ever enough to maintain allied/occupied governments in western
Europe and Latin America. Washington’s force projection was hit or miss
everywhere else in the world, as demonstrated in China, Korea, Vietnam,
Zimbabwe, Afghanistan…
It is the fact that nearly all economic activity in the world, even in
so-called socialist countries, has relied directly or indirectly on its
currency and its financial institutions, that made the US the most
powerful country in the world. And that reality is coming to an end. It
was already ending, as I pointed out in Diagnostic of the Future, but
all the sanctions around the ongoing war are speeding things up rather
than slowing them down. The US is using its most potent economic weapons
at a time when it is in a state of diplomatic tensions with many of the
world’s mid-range powers, motivating those governments to create
effective defenses even as the bulk of world economic activity shifts
out of NAFTA and the EU.
As far as capitalist winners, this war gives us another tragic reminder
of how renewable energy and fossil fuel energy are by no means opposed;
on the contrary, they have always grown in tandem and what is good for
one tends to be good for the other.
Case in point, Europe is being forced to realize how dangerous its high
dependence on Russian gas is. Fully half of Europe’s gas comes from
Russia, and between a fifth and a quarter of Europe’s total electricity
generation comes from gas, with many homes also heating themselves and
supplying cooking stoves with gas.
The response of European governments has been to simultaneously
accelerate the shift to renewable energy, with a 40% reduction of fossil
fuel use by 2030, while also increasing their importation of gas to be
stored before next winter and pushing for new pipelines to bring
non-Russian gas into Europe. These new pipelines would probably carry
north African gas through Spain. Incidentally, the Russian military,
through the Wagner Group, is engaged in several bloody wars in northern
Africa, as is France, one of the longtime colonizers of the region.
And though the US remains the world’s number one oil producer and is not
dependent on Russian production, it is dependent on a world economy that
relies on cheap fuel and can be thrown into a tail spin by a sudden rise
in prices. We have yet to see if the war in Ukraine will have any effect
increasing the push for renewable energy, given how backwards the US is
in both politics and infrastructure, but we have already seen how
Washington is lobbying OPEC to increase oil output.
One of the most important areas for anarchist action—and a site of a
great deal of organizing from the beginning—is around the problem of
borders and refugees. The Russian invasion produced a million refugees
in just a week and that number keeps growing. Those are people who need
access to housing, healthcare, resources or jobs, and affection and
support. This is something anarchists wasted no time in helping to
organize from Poland to Spain.
We have also added our voices to the rage about the white supremacist
hypocrisy that characterizes how white Ukrainian refugees are received
compared with refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and northern
Africa, as well as racialized people fleeing Ukraine.
We can, perhaps, focus this rage in a more effective way. We can drive
home how mainstream media and political parties that sell themselves as
progressive are also responsible for reinforcing the colonial dynamics
at the heart of capitalism, and we can push NGOs and other institutions
that consider themselves a part of the Left to end their racist double
standards and dedicate more resources to the ongoing refugee crises in
other parts of the world. Anarchist projects that create safety,
autonomy, and housing for and by migrants will continue to operate from
Greece to the Netherlands. But if we can intervene to push leftists with
access to far more resources to share those evenly, and not just with
white refugees, it will make a huge difference in many lives and limit
both the way the Right and the Center are encouraging nationalism in the
present conflict and mobilize xenophobia in response to racialized
refugees.
Another thing we can do in the present situation is to realize again how
important direct relationships are for international solidarity along
anarchist lines. In real time, anarchists in at least some areas have
mobilized just as much for Kurdistan, Hong Kong, Chile, Chiapas, or
Oaxaca as they have for Ukraine, even though the media was largely
silent around many of the former wars and repressive crackdowns. The
enthusiasm of our mobilization does not come down to racist double
standards, fortunately, but to the global relationships a particular
radical scene enjoys, which largely comes down to global patterns of
migration and solidarity trips that lead to personal relationships
spreading beyond borders.
We need to get more strategic in building and collectivizing
international relationships in order to increase the flow of information
and support with other areas of the globe that are facing wars or
repressive crackdowns. For example solidarity, and even reliable
information, around the ongoing wars in Sudan and Ethiopia are far less
widespread.
Sadly, we have to dedicate some time to the awful takes coming from
authoritarian leftists, who have once again seen fit to cheer the tanks
sent by Moscow, as they did in 1956 and again in 1968. The only reason
they are still relevant is because they provide a simplistic, Manichean
framework that is highly compatible with statist politics. Compatible in
the sense of not at all subversive.
So let us start with some facts that we should be able to discuss
without falling into a mind-numbing, dualistic worldview. From the
perspective of the government in Moscow, their invasion of Ukraine is in
fact an act of self-defense. Since the ’90s, Russia has been
increasingly surrounded by NATO bases, NATO being a military alliance
founded specifically to oppose Russian power. In 2014, a pro-Russian
government was swept out of power by a popular movement in Ukraine, and
replaced with a pro-Western government, and just a few months ago
another popular uprising almost did the same in Kazakhstan, one of the
few countries still more or less in Russia’s orbit.
When you’re a government, you don’t believe in the legitimacy of popular
movements. They’re either bland side dishes to elections or irrelevant
and annoying forms of expression that stand outside of the channels of
government. If you’re a democracy, they’re window dressing that prove
the citizens are free, as long as they don’t try to actually do
anything, and if you’re not a democracy, they’re minor forms of treason.
When protests cross the line to direct action, they become criminal
affairs that need to be stamped out. In those cases, they are probably
acts of hybrid warfare orchestrated by your enemies, because if you are
a government, your existence is predicated on the belief that people are
incapable of organizing themselves.
So, yes, some of the information Russia is acting on is fact (NATO
bases) and some of it is paranoia (foreign powers being the architects
of all the protest movements since 2011), but all the same, the Russian
government is acting in self-defense.
However, what the Cold Warriors and Stalinists don’t understand is that
you get the exact same results if you privilege the perspective of any
other state. All states are acting according to their self-interests.
The Ukrainian government is also clearly acting in self-defense when it
tries to get closer to the West because, undeniably, from Afghanistan to
Chechnya, Russian power poses a threat to its neighbors. For the same
reasons, Poland and Lithuania and all the rest were acting in
self-defense when they asked to join NATO. Even the US is acting in
self-defense when it tries to get rid of Putin because Putin is hostile
to the US and possesses a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping the US off
the map.
That’s one of the problems with states. They inevitably create warfare
and conflict because their self-interests are mutually exclusive with
those of other states. They think they are defending themselves when in
reality they are all locked into a dynamic that forces them to either
try to conquer the world, subordinate themselves to another state with a
better chance of conquering the world, or they collapse. That’s why we
don’t give a damn for the self-interests of states, and instead we seek
to destroy them all. Institutions should not have a right to survival
that surpasses (and tramples) the survival needs of people and the
planet.
So the Stalinists wave the flag of Russia’s legitimate interests while
ignoring the interests of other states. They talk about US imperialism,
but ignore Russian imperialism. In fact, Stalinists and the far-Right
often end up with a similar analysis, because Stalinism is a right-wing
ideology. Stalin explicitly linked the expansion of the USSR with the
Russian empire. Talk of “the Fatherland” was as prevalent in Russia
after World War II (and it is prevalent again today) as in Germany
during the ’30s. Under the tsars, under the Soviet Union, and under
Putin, Russia has been a racist empire engaged in genocide and founded
on the lands of hundreds of slaughtered non-white and Indigenous
peoples. In the vast majority of its territory, Russia can accurately be
described as a settler state. Minus the boats, white people live in
Irkutsk and Vladivostok by much the same means white people live in Des
Moines and San Francisco.
We are told that Russia is not imperialist because it has not yet
reached that level of capital accumulation; the US is the biggest
imperialist and therefore the only imperialist, and therefore we must
side with Russia against the US (Ukraine here and its inhabitants
disappearing from the analysis as mere puppets). This framework, so
simplistic it is insulting, is a gross simplification of
Marxist-Leninism, itself a gross simplification of Marx, and what’s
more, based on one of the parts of Marxism that is falsifiable and, in
retrospect, false: predictions around how the accumulation of global
capital would advance progressively and lead to world socialism.
It is a theoretical framework with no validity. Its only use is as a
sort of system of flash cards to tell people who don’t want to think
about the world they live in which side they should support in conflicts
that are too complex for them to engage with. (Do people still know what
flash cards are? It’s a study tool with the questions on one side and
the answers on the other. Non-virtual cards that exist in three
dimensions. Nevermind, forget about it.)
Perhaps the best argument against this tankie analysis is that the
tankies themselves don’t use it when push comes to shove. When the USSR
tried to dominate the Chinese Communist Party during that country’s
revolution, Mao rebuffed Soviet imperialism and allied with the United
States. Oops! When fighting off the French and then US occupation of
Vietnam, amidst intense imperial violence that killed millions, Ho Chi
Minh warned that Chinese imperialism was a greater long term danger to
the region than US imperialism. Likewise, the Vietnamese communists
acted in a colonial or imperialist manner when they suppressed the Hmong
or supported the Cambodian monarchy against the Cambodian communists.
So honestly, who the fuck are these tankies trying to fool?
I can think of an even better argument against these authoritarians who
claim to be socialists, communists, or anti-imperialists, but in actual
practice are just right-wingers supporting the same old colonial
dynamics. Famous authors and academics who build their careers on Native
movements fighting the violence of the US and Canada help to silence the
hundreds of Indigenous and racialized peoples continuously brutalized by
the Russian state. Authoritarians who claim to care about the the
victims of US wars in Iraq or Afghanistan don’t care at all about the
people suffering right now under Russian bombs. In fact, the question of
“what should people in Ukraine do now that they have been plunged into
war?” cannot even make an appearance in their analysis. Simply because
Russia is a somewhat shorter range imperialist than the US, Ukrainian
war victims must disappear from view.
The people who use this framework violate the most minimal standards of
solidarity and decency, and they will say anything to justify their
preconceived notions.
In opposition, both to those who justify Russian imperialism and to
those who loudly decry it while giving NATO wars a free pass, I would
dust off the old slogan, no war but the class war and modify it to no
war but the war against the State, understanding the State in all its
dimensions: capitalist, colonial, white supremacist, patriarchal, and
ecocidal.