The nature of the conflict and the position of revolutionaries
Marco Ferrando
February 22, 2023
One year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is important to take stock of the war. Of its nature, its evolution, and the political position of revolutionaries.
In the past year, both in political debate and in common perception, truths, prejudices, ideological representations impervious to evidence, and contamination produced by contradictory war propaganda and its reflection, often reversed, in public opinion, have settled and intertwined confusedly. An inextricable tangle in which the fundamentals of the war are often thrown out, almost as if they were an annoying encumbrance.
“We know there is an aggressor and an aggressed. But enough is enough, we must stop the escalation that is leading us to World War III. No more weapons to Ukraine, move on to diplomacy, we want peace.” After a year of war, this is a widespread view, even in the left.
This view condenses and mixes different ingredients, with different meanings. On the one hand, the more than justified fear of war escalation, the rejection of militarism, the annoyance with bourgeois rhetoric, so hypocritical as to be unbearable, all the more so when it comes from a post-fascist-led government. On the other, a willingness not to meddle in “facts that do not concern us,” a waning sense of solidarity and empathy with the bombed Ukrainian population, real cases of Ukraino-phobia, even a subtle fascination with Russia’s “reasons” and the dark side of the force.
To grasp this public sentiment, in all its contradictions and facets, is very important. Not to passively go along with it and smooth its fur, as the Five Star Movement (M5S), the reformist leftists, and even Berlusconi (apparently in the company of… Matteo Messina Denaro), but to educate it, separating the progressive side of this sentiment (the rejection of war escalation, of the nuclear threat, of increased military spending) from indifference to an invaded people, from illusions in imperialist diplomacy, from denial of the very nature of the war, which is and remains first and foremost a war of Russian imperialism on Ukraine. The one that began a year ago.
The Russian imperialist war
A year ago, Russia invaded Ukraine, not to “defend the Donbass” but to conquer and subjugate Kyiv. To erase Ukraine’s national sovereignty and its historical legitimacy. “Ukraine is an invention of Lenin and the Bolsheviks,” Putin declared on all the networks on February 21, 2022. So, it must return to Russia, to Great Mother Russia, claimed and celebrated by the regime, the Moscow Patriarchate, and patriotic chauvinism. Hence the public motivation for the February 24 invasion, at once imperial and (overtly) anti-communist. Two days later, a sixty-kilometer column of Russian tanks advanced in the direction of Kyiv.
The prediction was of Ukraine’s swift fall, with the precipitous flight of the incumbent government and its replacement by a pro-Russian puppet government. This was also the prediction of the US government, which in fact immediately offered Zelensky a golden asylum, effectively encouraging him to flee. Those were the hours when German Chancellor Scholz let slip a revealing confidence: “If, indeed, invasion must be, the lesser evil is for Ukraine to surrender quickly.”
The fact is that everyone’s predictions were belied by Ukraine’s decision to resist, thus changing the dynamics of the conflict. Those who portray world affairs as the work of big imperialist puppet masters, who plan everything and arrange everything, should recognize that factual reality has once again contradicted their schema, from the very origins of this affair.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a result of the power politics of Russian imperialism. A common platitude denies the reality of Russian imperialism. At best, it portrays Russia’s policy as essentially defensive, against NATO and Western expansion. The reason is simple: in the memory of people of the left, imperialism is only American imperialism. This is the long memory of the postwar period. But today the reality of the world is profoundly different.
Certainly, since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and capitalist restoration in the USSR, the NATO imperialists have gradually expanded their area of influence, incorporating large parts of Eastern Europe into their domain, and projecting themselves into the Middle East. The unofficial promises made to Gorbachev about Western respect for Russia’s area of influence lasted the space of a morning, no longer than the 1994 Russian promise, with the Budapest Pact, to respect Ukraine’s borders after obtaining its nuclear disarmament.
But the expansionist line of Western imperialism suffered repeated reverses in the 2000s, first in Iraq, and then in Afghanistan. And since the great capitalist crisis of 2008, it has been confronted with the impetuous rise of Chinese imperialism on a global scale. At the center of the international scene today is not the irresistible expansion of the US, but the deep crisis of its hegemony.
The power politics of Russian imperialism since the mid-2000s have developed in this context. They are a reaction not only to the post-1989 NATO expansion, but also and especially to the weakening of Western imperialism. Russia’s irruption in the Syrian war, in North Africa (Libya), in Central Africa, and even in the Arctic Sea, aims to capitalize in its own right on the crisis of hegemony of the US and its allies (this is the case with France’s crisis in Africa), and the space opened by the rise of China. The invasion of Ukraine, following the US defeat in Afghanistan, is a reflection of this dynamic.
The role of NATO imperialism
Our own imperialists, wrong-footed by the unexpected Ukrainian resistance, have rushed to support Ukraine out of self-interest, trying to make a virtue of necessity. The explanation is simple: they do not wish to suffer without opposition the expansion of a rival imperialism in Europe, especially since Russia is a decisive ally of Chinese imperialism, the strategic adversary of the US on a global scale. An abandonment of Ukrainian resistance to its fate by US imperialism would have meant a green light for China in the Pacific (Taiwan), and a further downsizing of its role in the world. So, a collapse of US imperialism’s credibility with all its allies, both in Europe (starting with Poland and the Baltic States) and in Asia (starting with Japan and South Korea).
Western imperialism’s support for Ukraine is objectively crucial to Ukraine’s staying in the war. At the same time, Western aid supports Ukraine as the rope supports the hanged man: it aims to consolidate Ukraine’s subjection to the influence of NATO, the EU, the International Monetary Fund, and their policies of robbery. Imperialism does imperialism, it would be illusory to expect anything else.
But the theory of the war in Ukraine as a NATO proxy war against Russia is profoundly false. False, as we have seen, in the dynamic of what triggered the war. But also in its subsequent dynamic.
The military effort is intense on both sides. Russian imperialism has responded to the failure of its initial design with the escalation of its military offensive. The defeat of the march on Kyiv, the failure of repeated attempts to seize Karkhiv, the subsequent loss of Kherson in September, have prompted the Putin regime to an extraordinary mobilization of new troops, the formal annexation of four provinces, and above all the massive bombardment of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. And now a new massive ground offensive in the spring seems in sight.
The NATO imperialists have responded, under Ukrainian pressure, with a parallel expansion of military support for Zelensky, first with the provision of HIMARS, then after a year of war, with the promise of heavy tanks. However, much less actual aid than propagandized and promised, in the face of a continuing disproportion of forces on the ground to Russia’s advantage (think of the 10000 armored vehicles Putin still has, and the huge troop supply).
NATO’s military support for Ukraine is not equivalent to NATO’s direct entry into war with Russia. This elementary distinction between military support and entry into war applies first of all at the general historical level: Britain supported Ethiopia against fascist imperialism in 1936, but was not at war with Italy until 1940; Britain supported China against Japanese invasion in 1936-38, but was not then at war with Japan; the Stalinist USSR supported (alas) Nazi Germany economically and militarily between 1939 and 1941, but was not then at war with Britain and France; China and the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s supported Vietnam militarily against the US, but certainly were not at war with the US… The examples could be multiplied, as we can see, with the most diverse protagonists, references and contexts. The idea that military support in itself means being at war does not find comfort in history.
This distinction holds true even in the case of the current war. US imperialism and the European imperialists want to prevent the victory of Russian imperialism in Ukraine, which would mean their defeat, but not at the price of being dragged directly into war. That is why they oppose sending their own troops directly. They refuse to grant the no-fly zone that Zelensky requested. They downplayed the Polish border incident in September. They repeatedly defer aid (even of the famous Leopards) and reduce the actual amount as much as possible. They pose as a condition of military supplies a Ukrainian commitment not to attack deep into Russian territory, measuring the very nature of military aid by this engagement clause.
More generally, the idea that the US would aim for war against Russia to dismember and divide it has much to do with Putinist patriotic propaganda, but much less to do with truth. It confuses the science fiction plans of some circles of the Polish far right with the orientation of US imperialism. Which, on the one hand, for its own interest wants to defeat Putin’s plans in Ukraine, but on the other, fears that a fall of Putin and even more a dissolution of the Russian Federation could be capitalized on by China, its own strategic enemy, with a further expansion of its area of influence in Asia. The reflections of a Henry Kissinger are no stranger to this order of strategic concerns.
An asymmetrical war
The negotiations between NATO and Ukraine that accompany each delivery (or promise) of new weapons are thus a reflection of a tug-of-war between different pressures: on the one hand, the upward pressure of Ukraine under the dramatic press of the Russian war; and on the other, NATO’s desire to contain aid within limits compatible with external support, without direct involvement.
A difficult and precarious and yet sought-after balance, to which are added as an additional conditioning factor the contradictions within the camp of NATO imperialism, between US imperialism and European imperialism, between British imperialism and German and French imperialism. But also within the imperialist countries themselves, between government officials and the general staff. Everywhere concerned — from the Pentagon to the German and French commands — to safeguard their military strength by avoiding “overdoing it” by sending arms to Ukraine. What is sometimes mistaken for an unlikely pacifism of the generals is only preparation for future wars, perhaps against China over the Pacific.
Thus, the current war is and remains an asymmetric war. Ukraine is the battleground, not Russia. Russia has been invading and bombing Ukraine for a year, destroying cities, power plants, factories, hospitals, schools. Ukraine is defending itself on its own territory without attacking Russian territory (beyond, of course, the contiguous supply lines and military bases adjacent to the front lines) and without engaging the Russian population. It is a fact.
Ten million displaced Ukrainians are the fruits of this reality, along with the burden of death and terror. They are not the effect of Ukrainian defense and NATO military aid, they are the effect of Russian bombing and Russian occupation. To say otherwise, to attribute Ukrainian casualties to resistance to the invasion (“it is Zelensky who wants the massacre of his people”) constitutes not only a cynical logical fallacy, but also objective support for Putinist war propaganda. That is, support for invading imperialism.
The 2014 Donbass War and the Russian War on Ukraine
Those who represent the current war as an extension of the 2014 Donbass War deny this reality.
That was a war of the post-Maidan Ukrainian nationalist government, led by Poroshenko’s right wing, against the rebellion of Russian-speaking populations against its reactionary measures. We, in that context, unreservedly supported the Donbass republics against the reactionary Ukrainian government, despite the red-brown nature of the separatist governments and the military support given to them, out of self-interest, by Russian imperialism.
This is a war of invasion by Russian imperialism against the whole of Ukraine, including the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass. The Donbass is today one of the sites of the war, not the reason for the war. The “liberation of the Donbass from Ukrainian Nazis” is hypocritical propaganda by Russian imperialism.
All the more grotesque in view of the fact that the so-called “denazification” of Ukraine is being conducted by Kadyrov’s arch-reactionary Chechen pan-Islamist troops and Wagner’s Nazi militias, whose role in Russia’s war of invasion is, moreover, incomparably greater than what remains of the Azov fascists in the Ukrainian defense. So much so that Wagner’s leaders, strong in their own role at the front, now squirm in anticipation of political succession to Putin.
So, we defend Ukraine against Russian imperialism’s war of invasion. Precisely because we are against all imperialism, we are against all their wars, in support of all the peoples invaded by them. We defended Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan against the imperialist wars of the West; we defend Ukraine against the war of invasion by Russian imperialism.
Our position derives from the whole tradition of international revolutionary Marxism, as we have amply documented. Lenin and Trotsky always defended dependent nations against imperialist powers that oppressed and/or attacked them, even when such nations were supported, out of self-interest, by rival imperialists. In 1916, German support for the Irish national movement did not prevent Lenin from supporting Ireland against British imperialism. Britain’s support for Ethiopia against fascist imperialism did not prevent Trotsky from proclaiming the defense of Ethiopia against Italy. Just as British support for China, attacked by Japanese imperialism, did not prevent him from supporting China against Japan.
Inter-imperialist contradictions existed in each of these contexts, but they were not the dominant element. And the ultraleft theses that in the name of those contradictions rejected support for dependent nations were the subject of constant polemic by both Lenin and Trotsky. Our defense of Ukraine against Russian imperialism, despite support for Ukraine by NATO imperialism, is the consistent and elementary application of this Leninist method. As is our support for the Kurdish resistance, even though it is supported by American weapons and instructors.
Of course, if the nature of the war changed, our position would change. If NATO went directly to war against Russia, we would take a position of bilateral defeatism, as in the face of any inter-imperialist war. If Russia withdrew to the February 24 borders and Ukraine, perhaps pushed by some warmongering imperialist circles (Britain, Poland…), continued the war against Russia, our position would also change in the direction of bilateral defeatism. But this is not the case today.
We do not at all exclude the possibility of an escalation of the current war in the direction of an inter-imperialist conflict. If anything, one of the paradoxical consequences of portraying the current war as already inter-imperialist is precisely to remove the risk of a leap to inter-imperialist war. All the more so in the case of that crackpot “theory” (which has unfortunately surfaced even in revolutionary circles) that since we are now in the nuclear age, wars between imperialists can only be indirect and “bastard,” “as in Ukraine.”
In order to deny the right of Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion, this thinking actually comes to deny the very possibility of direct war between the imperialist powers. A wrong analysis paradoxically leads to completely irresponsible semi-pacifist illusions, to the detriment of the struggle against the threat of the third imperialist world war, which is, unfortunately, tragically possible.
The fact remains that we cannot confuse a terrible possibility in the future with the present reality. We reiterate. The inter-imperialist element is well present in the conflict: it explains its context, draws the international alignments, and influences the military forces on the ground on both sides. But the central subjects of the war, the ones fighting on the ground, are Russian imperialism, on the one hand, and the Ukrainian state, on the other. This is the front line today.
We cannot be neutral in the face of an imperialist war of invasion against a country that is not imperialist. All the more so when the front line of the war traces the frontier of historical oppression, first tsarist, then Stalinist, at the hands of Great-Russian chauvinism.
Those who paint the Ukrainian resistance as merely an executive arm of NATO not only deny the existence of the Ukrainian nation and its people (as does Putin), but are incapable of explaining the very dynamics of the war. Sure, NATO provides weapons, instructors, intelligence. But it is Ukrainians who are using those weapons. It is Ukrainians who are dying. Ukrainian military, but also civilians.
In Russia, more than a million young people have fled to avoid enlistment in the war. In Ukraine, more than a hundred thousand volunteers have enlisted in the Territorial Defense Forces. This is an indirect reflection of the nature of war: on the one hand, an imperialist war of invasion, on the other, a war of national defense.
The war of defense would not have lasted a full year without the background of popular support. Support which is also civil service, logistical support, relief of the wounded, care of the food supply, moral support. Factors that weigh on the war front no less than weapons. Those who do not understand this are ignoring the history of wars of all times.
Our defense of Ukraine, rejection of NATO and sanctions
We defend Ukraine in complete autonomy from NATO. We are against NATO, against its expansion into Northern Europe (on the skin of the Kurdish people), against its expansion into the Pacific, opposed to China, against the increased military spending of the governments of the West and their mad rush to arm. In a word, we are against imperialism at home, which is always for us the main enemy.
Ukrainians have the right to use all available weapons to defend themselves against the Russian invasion: it is the right of every people invaded by an imperialism. We have a political duty to say that the imperialists who give them weapons do so in their own interest. We have a political duty to say that an entry of Ukraine into NATO would be not a guarantee of peace, but an invitation to future wars. We have a duty to say that Ukraine’s entry into the EU, as Zelensky wants, would mean hanging new policies of austerity and sacrifice on Ukraine, which would fall first and foremost on Ukrainian working men and women, those who today bear the costs of resistance to the invasion on their own shoulders.
We are on the side of Ukrainian resistance, not Western sanctions against Russia. More precisely, we are against sanctions. Sanctions against Russia not only dump their cost on the workers of the West and on Russian workers, but also are now being used by Putin’s reactionary regime on the domestic front to build a chauvinist consensus for its own imperialist war. They are thus, in fact, against the interests of Ukrainian resistance to the invasion, and against the development of a Russian opposition to the war. All the more so are the hateful Russo-phobic postures in the fields of culture, art, sports.
More generally, our opposition to the war of Russian imperialism has nothing to do with the war of Western imperialism against Russia. NATO fights Russia for its own imperialist interests. We defend Ukraine against Russia in the name of the interests of the Russian proletariat, the international workers’ movement, and the Ukrainian people.
In opposition to Zelensky, on the side of the Ukrainian workers
We stand in opposition to the Zelensky government. Supporting Ukraine’s right to resistance does not at all mean supporting the Ukrainian government politically. Just as supporting the right of resistance of the Iraqi people, the right of resistance of the Serbian people, the right of resistance of the Afghan people, has never meant, on our part, politically supporting Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, the Taliban. Just as supporting the Ethiopian resistance against Italy, or the Chinese resistance against Japan, did not mean for Trotsky politically supporting the Negus or Chiang Kai-shek. This is an elementary aspect of revolutionary politics.
On the figure and political nature of Zelensky, there reigns in reality enormous confusion. Russian imperialist propaganda presents him as a Nazi and a leader of Nazis. The imperialist propaganda of the NATO camp presents him as a hero of democracy and progress. They both lie, of course.
Zelensky is a bourgeois politician of Jewish extraction, a member of the Ukrainian political center who ran for office in 2019 in opposition to Poroshenko’s nationalist right wing. Not surprisingly, he has garnered many votes precisely in the Donbass. At the same time, as a bourgeois politician coming out of the entertainment ranks (on a par with Beppe Grillo in Italy), he has marked populist traits, and has been building himself as a central reference for NATO and EU imperialism.
Needless to say, the Russian war of invasion and Putin’s demonization of Zelensky have boosted his domestic popularity, previously in significant decline. For our part, we do not need to sidle up to the “Zelensky-phobia” fueled by red-brown circles to denounce his bourgeois policies.
Zelensky’s social policies are anti-worker and anti-union: privatization, precarization, liberalization of layoffs, increased working hours, free buying and selling of land for the benefit of large landowners. All policies suggested by the International Monetary Fund and demanded by the EU. To which is added the commitment to pay off the huge public debt accumulated for war expenses.
These policies are rightly rejected by class-struggle unionism in Ukraine. Ukrainian workers and trade unions are committed to the defense of the country from the Russian invasion, which is first and foremost the defense of their homes and jobs. This is also why the government’s social policies are experienced and often denounced as a stab in the back. The spectacle of Ukrainian oligarchs enriching themselves through war by taking their wealth abroad, at the expense of their workers fighting at the front and in the rear, arouses outrage and dismay, rightly so.
The same goes for the new military regulations. The latest decrees of the Zelensky government deprive soldiers at the front of important legal protections against their officers, disproportionately increasing the latter’s power. A popular petition has collected tens of thousands of signatures against these measures, accusing them of fostering the demoralization of the army and thus weakening resistance to the invasion. Class struggle also finds its place in a war of national defense.
The scramble for the division of Ukraine’s future reconstruction now makes the Kyiv government a crossroads of competing but converging Western imperialist pressures and interests. The US, Britain and Germany, along with neighboring Poland, aim to secure the bulk of the pie as a reward for military aid. France and Italy want to join the game. Bonomi’s visit to Kyiv on behalf of Confindustria has its main reason here. Every imperialist of the West (but also Turkey and even China) aims to obtain for itself cheap labor, tax-free investments, lavish orders for its companies. Pro-Ukrainian patriotism is the patriotism of its own pocketbook.
While defending the country from the Russian war of invasion in the name of national sovereignty, Zelensky subordinates Ukraine to the imperialist control of the West. Hence, our opposition. While defending Ukraine’s very existence from the deadly aggression of Russian imperialism, we oppose its sellout to imperialism at home.
The national self-determination of the Ukrainian people, which first and foremost requires the defeat of the Russian invasion, can only be fully realized by breaking with all imperialism. Therefore, only on socialist grounds. It is no accident that it was the October Revolution that recognized Ukraine’s right to independence, which Putin wants to erase today in the name of Great Russia.
For a just peace, without annexations
We want an end to war, we demand peace. Not any peace. Words like “peace” have always been instruments of deception. The war in Ukraine is no exception.
All protagonists in the war define peace according to their interests. Putin calls Ukraine’s surrender “peace”: the loss of its sovereignty or, alternatively, its amputation, with corresponding annexations. This is the peace of imperialist aggression.
The NATO imperialists, who today in their own self-interest oppose the Russian operation, are also underhandedly seeking a way out. The “peace” proposal conveyed recently by the CIA to Russian diplomats, suggesting a negotiated partition of occupied Ukrainian territory as a possible solution to the conflict, was rejected by both Russia and Ukraine, for opposite reasons. But it gives an idea of the logic by which “democratic” imperialism operates. For them, peoples’ rights have always been bargaining chips. This applies to the Palestinians, it applies to the Kurds, why should it not apply to the Ukrainians?
We demand a just peace. A peace without annexations. What this means first and foremost is the withdrawal of Russian occupation troops from the territories conquered since February 24, 2022. “Putin go home” is the first demand for peace in Ukraine. Any peace solution under military occupation can only be a deception. The peace solutions in Palestine under Zionist occupation are eloquent in this regard. There can be no just peace in Ukraine without the withdrawal of Russian forces to the February 23, 2022 borders.
A grave failing of many Italian pacifists is that, at the same time as they reject Ukraine’s right to resist, they refuse to call for the withdrawal of Russian occupation forces from Ukraine, the most basic of demands for those opposed to war.
At the same time, a just peace does not mean subordination to the Ukrainian nationalist right, or to the revanchist tendencies present in NATO circles (Britain and Poland, above all). On the contrary.
It is not at issue for us that Crimea belongs to Russia. The people of Crimea are Russian, not simply Russian-speaking. Any demand by Ukrainian nationalism to regain Crimea would be unjust.
Similarly, the right of self-determination of the Russian-speaking peoples of the Donbass is not at issue for us. It was valid in 2014 against the Ukrainian government, it is valid today in the presence of the Russian invasion. The Donbass peoples have the right to freely choose where they want to live, whether within the framework of a federal Ukraine, within the Russian state, or as independent republics.
For certain, their fate cannot be entrusted either to the farcical referenda of the occupying Russian forces or to the will of the Ukrainian right for revenge.
The decisive role of the Russian proletariat
The struggle for a just peace takes as its reference, not Russian imperialism, not NATO imperialism, but Ukrainian resistance and the Russian proletariat.
The main factor for peace is not Western sanctions, but the possible rebellion of Russian workers, the great forgotten of the antiwar struggle.
Precisely because of sanctions and Russo-phobic campaigns, the Putin regime still, unfortunately, retains the consent of a clear majority in Russia. But the situation is not crystallized. Much depends on the war front. The Russian defeat at Kherson in September, and the subsequent mobilization of 300,000 conscripts, jolted the consensus on the domestic front about continuing the war, or not. All the polls, from different sources, have noted this.
In particular, the cracks in the domestic consensus have manifested themselves in the younger generation and among the populations on the periphery of the empire, those non-Russian populations on which the bulk of the conscription campaign for the war is focused.
Like any Bonaparte, Putin relies on the prestige of victory. It is no coincidence that the Russian war of annihilation in Chechnya (totally disregarded by the Western left) paved Putin’s rise. For the same reason, a defeat on the Ukrainian front could trigger a crisis of the regime. And a crisis of the Putin regime could bring with it a far-reaching popular mobilization in Russia.
Those who read history only in terms of geopolitics, from limousine liberals to campist circles of Stalinist extraction, ignore the very category of a possible Russian revolution. It all boils down to the intersection of Putin and NATO; the rest is talk.
Fortunately, real history is more creative than this schema. No regime is forever. It can fall through internal fractures, it can fall through rebellion from below, it can fall through a combination of both. War, any war, exposes the regime that promotes it to a crucial test, all the more so a Bonapartist regime. A victory consolidates it; a defeat can drag it into ruin and even pave the way for revolution.
Russia’s military defeat first in 1905, then in 1917, undermined the tsarist regime and triggered major revolutionary crises. A defeat of the Putin regime in Ukraine could open the door to a revolutionary crisis in Russia, with enormous effects on the international class struggle.
The Revolyutsionnaya Rabochaya Partiya (RRP, Revolutionary Workers Party), with which the PCL has comradely relations, courageously fights for this prospect. While Zuganov’s Stalinist CP sided with the Putin regime by voting for war credits, the RPR opposed its own imperialism and its war from the outset, consistent with the Leninist tradition.
The RRP is the main Trotskyist organization in Russia, one of the most substantial far-left formations in the country. We who fight against all imperialisms, starting with our own, salute the revolutionary intervention of our Russian comrades against the war of their own imperialism. It augurs well for the refounding of the revolutionary International, which the winds of war make more necessary than ever.
“If you want peace, prepare revolution” is the slogan with which we participate in pacifist and antiwar demonstrations, a year ago and still today. Capitalism brings war as clouds bring rain, wrote Jean Jaurès. Only the overthrow of capitalism and imperialism, only a socialist revolution, in every country and on a world scale, can free humanity from wars. Pacifism, even the most honest, is incapable of understanding this. Revolutionary Marxists have a duty to always remember this, against all imperialisms and on all war fronts.