"Seizure of territory and subjugation of other nations, the ruining of competing nations and the plunder of their wealth, distracting the attention of the working masses from the internal political crises (...) disuniting and nationalist stultification of the workers, and the extermination of their vanguard so as to weaken the revolutionary movement of the proletariat-these comprise the sole actual content, importance and significance of the present war."
Lenin
"A revolutionary class cannot but wish for the defeat of its government in a reactionary war, cannot fail to see that its military reverses facilitate its overthrow."
Lenin
"The Chinese people cannot be cowed by the atom bomb."
Mao
Almost three months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, events have unfolded, as they usually do at the beginning of major wars, in surprising and unexpected ways. The unforeseen course of events on the Ukrainian battlefields points above all in the direction of escalation and extension of the war to an open and direct inter-imperialist conflict between great powers, including the real possibility of a nuclear war. This means that we are probably at the most dangerous moment since 1945, even more so than during the great crises of the old Cold War. This fact is once again evidence, perhaps in its most compelling form, of the incompatibility between the permanence of capitalism and the survival and development of human civilization. The Bomb threat is undoubtedly the glaring example of the abysmal contradiction between the productive forces that capitalism has generated (in this case, the development of nuclear technology, with its military application) and the social relations on which it cannot fail to sustain itself (in this respect, inter-state competition with its Westphalian-type balances and strategic logics). As we have said, this contradiction has long since reached such a magnitude that it threatens the very existence of our species.
As we already pointed out in February, the Russian invasion was the expression of an imperialist conflict, where the main actors are great powers, mainly the United States (with its European appendix, a group we call the Atlanticist bloc) and Russia, while Ukraine only serves as a pawn and unfortunate chessboard in this broader game. As we stated then, the main responsibility for this situation lay with the Atlanticist bloc, after several decades of uninterrupted NATO expansion towards Russia's borders, contravening all promises (that "not an inch to the east" that Gorbachev was told he could rest assured of), warnings (starting with NATO's ones: George Kennan, notorious and long-lived anti-communist and father of the "Containment policy" against the USSR after World War II, warned as early as 1997, on the eve of NATO's first expansion among the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, of the "mistake" that this entailed and that it sowed the seeds of a "new cold war") and Russian complaints (Yeltsin himself, in one of his rare moments of sobriety, already spoke in 1994 of the "cold peace" that was being settled given the Atlanticist attitude).
And it is not only the expansion of NATO's military apparatus to the east: at the same time, it has been operating openly and intensively inside Ukraine itself. Victoria Nuland, disciple of the anti-Russian Brzezinski, acknowledged that the United States had spent more than $5 billion on Ukrainian organizations aimed at "democracy promotion" during the 1990s and 2000s. Add up the 500 million euros that the European Union (EU) acknowledged having invested in this same type of groups in the period 2004-2009 alone, during the rehearsal of the so-called orange revolution. Not to mention the generous donations from the German Stiftungen and the penetration of Western capital, the most notorious manifestation of which was the arrival of the exposed son of the current President of the USA at the management level of one of the main Ukrainian gas companies. Already during the Clinton presidency, Ukraine became the third largest recipient of U.S. "aid", behind only Israel and Egypt. As we indicated in February, there is no way to understand the so-called Euromaidan and its coup conclusion through the armed seizure of power in Kyiv without all this support and financing.
As can be seen, the US has been practicing a strategy of expansion leading to the cornering of Russia with full awareness of its consequences. That these consequences - Russia's involvement in a major war over the ex-Soviet space - were intended was made clear, in case there was any doubt, by the Atlanticist attitude after the invasion: economic punishment on a scale unprecedented in many decades on a country with a status such as Russia's, together with massive shipment of military equipment to Ukraine, carried out immediately and automatically, without any connection to any diplomatic pressure or any prospect that these measures could be reversed in the future if Russia were to agree to any kind of compromise. The Atlanticist bloc has sought from the very beginning to bleed Russia in a protracted war, trying to create a gigantic "Slav Afghanistan".
We said in February that the Atlanticist bloc was seeking to absorb areas that Russian imperialism considers existential for its status as such, for its status as a great power. Indeed, this is not 1980's Afghanistan, a peripheral zone beyond Moscow's security buffer in Central Asia. Social-imperialism played an important but not vital game there (it was not that war that dynamited the USSR; it was rather an addition to be incorporated to the essential question: the will of a very important sector of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie to dismantle the Soviet system, which did not cease to represent, echoing its already distant revolutionary origin, certain obstacles to the satisfaction of its short-sighted craving for plunder). In Ukraine, on the contrary, imperialist Russia does face an existential problem. It is not only the cultural, historical and mythological issues that Russian nationalism, the regime's fundamental ideological cement, places on Ukraine. Nor is it primarily a question of economic linkages and market access. As undoubtedly important as these motives are, what immediately causes anxiety in the Kremlin are strategic issues with geopolitical roots: with Ukraine militating in a hostile bloc such as the Atlanticist bloc, Russia simply cannot even aspire to imperialist autonomy, let alone keep up with the pace of strategic competition with Atlanticism.
From the geographical point of view, the great European plain has been gradually opening up and expanding virtually from Paris. By the time it reaches the Ukrainian steppe, it is the basic landscape of the whole area between the Black and the Baltic seas and further to the northeast, even to the White Sea. In this area there are no substantial natural obstacles, such as sea arms or important mountain ranges. The borders of European Russia to the west add up to almost 4,000 km, not counting Finland, which, once it joins NATO (Sanna Marin, the progressive Finnish Prime Minister, has made an effort to break the glass ceiling of the historical neutrality that her country had maintained since 1945), will add another 1,300 km to these distances. These extensive borders, without natural obstacles to provide defensive support and hinder enemy logistics, are, from the point of view of conventional warfare, simply indefensible. That is why the Kremlin's nightmare is that this border will be occupied almost in its entirety by a hostile bloc with more than 800 million inhabitants and a vast military and economic superiority, as well as a significant technological advantage. In addition, 80% of the approximately 150 million inhabitants of the Russian Federation live in the European heart of Russia, which stretches from St. Petersburg to Volgograd, passing through Moscow, far to the west of the Urals. The Russian Empire's traditional strategy of compensating for the lack of natural barriers by building a wide territorial buffer around its core (called strategic depth), very successful in Far East Asia, threatens to be completely nullified by NATO on its much more vital - because it is in the immediacy of its demographic, industrial and political core - western border. Ukraine, already scene of major campaigns during World War II, is, in strategic terms, a veritable military highway: it is not only a plain with no elevations; there is hardly any woodland or important swampy areas, as there are further north, with the Dnieper River being its only natural obstacle. Ultimately, with NATO sitting on it, Ukraine deprives Russia of any strategic depth and constitutes a real dagger aimed at its heart. Add to this the threat of Atlanticist expansion in the Caucasus (in 2008 the door of the Alliance was opened not only to Ukraine, but also to Georgia - already a victim of its own color revolution -, which generated a brief but intense war in August of that year), and there is the prospect of closing the Black Sea to Russia, thus turning the only outlet to warm seas that Moscow has traditionally counted on into an Atlanticist lake.
And, having said all this, we are only underlining the usually forgotten geostrategic problems that Russia would face if Ukraine is integrated into the Atlanticist bloc. We will not delve into the most obvious problems generated for the Russian national identity - indistinguishable in its present form from the notion of empire, of external greatness - by the prospect of the great Slavic brotherly people irreconcilably antagonistic, for there is nothing else that the domination of Ukraine by the Banderite nationalism can guarantee. Of course, all this is equally inseparable from the addition of 40 million inhabitants and vast natural resources, with the consequent market for their exploitation, to a hostile bloc that is already vastly superior in practically all areas, and it is also inseparable from the greater control that the United States will exercise over the supply of energy and raw materials to the EU markets.
The objection that Russia's large nuclear arsenal is a sufficient guarantee against these threats simply demonstrates a superficial understanding of the logic of imperialist strategic competition. Being totally outnumbered by rivals in all fields except the nuclear one, where there is parity, means that in every dispute, crisis or area of conflict where there is friction or confrontation with those rivals, you only have, colloquially speaking, a single recourse: to go all in. This increases the power's anxiety in such a situation, while at the same time it reduces its credibility, flexibility and maneuverability. In this situation, the enemy will always have more resources and capabilities to manage crises and their escalation, and will be much more capable of obtaining concessions. The prospect is, then, to see your empire and areas of influence gradually torn to shreds or to succumb equally to the annihilation of nuclear fire. In fact, to corner a great imperialist power in this situation means objectively increasing the chances that, faced with the anxiety of a slow death, it will take, given a crisis of sufficient gravity, the second option which would at least also mean the destruction of the rival. Nationalist festering and fanaticism, which always accompany the intensification of the imperialist struggle, make this scenario entirely conceivable. Not for nothing did Marx and Engels speak more than a century and a half ago of the "cannibalism of counter-revolution". In any case, it is for this reason that the potential for nuclear deterrence, although it is, since 1945, a sine qua non condition for attaining the rank of great imperialist power, is not enough on its own. Having powerful conventional military forces remains the key element in determining status in the macabre imperialist ranking. That is why the prospect of having to cover that border of more than 5,000 km, with no natural obstacles to rely on and no strategic depth whatsoever, would mean for Russia the prospect of an arms race that, in relative terms to the current size of its economy, would make the weight of military spending that the USSR carried during the Cold War seem as light as a feather...
But Russian problems do not end there. In line with this "cannibalism of counter-revolution", the strategists of imperialism have never ceased to theorize about the real possibility of winning a nuclear war. Very summarily and leaving aside now speculations about a limited nuclear conflict, it can be said that in theory the number of strike weapons, plus strategic anti-missile defense capability and superior technological ability, together with short flight times to their targets could result in what is called a "splendid first strike": a first strike that would cause such destruction to the opponent's strategic systems that its nuclear retaliation, although still possible, would be sufficiently diminished so that, beyond significant damage, the basic functions of the State and society themselves would not be destroyed to an essential degree. Historically, Mutually Assured Destruction (i.e., the guarantee that in any case and despite the possibility of suffering a devastating first strike, there is sufficient retaliatory capacity to ensure that the enemy state and society will also cease to be functional) has not always been the stage of relationship between nuclear powers. In fact, the USSR only definitively reached that level of parity with the US in the second half of the 1960s. This is the situation that has been maintained since then, but there is clear evidence that the US is striving, together with all that has been pointed out so far (military expansion towards the East and the interference and promotion of coups in Ukraine itself and elsewhere in the former Soviet space), also to break this balance in its favor. Precisely, the US has unilaterally withdrawn from most of the nuclear control agreements established during the second half of the Cold War. Particularly relevant in this regard is its withdrawal in 2019 from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed in 1987, so that the US is now free to deploy such weaponry in Europe, including the eastern half it did not control 30 years ago. Precisely this type of intermediate missiles, which are the ones that generated the Euromissile crisis in the 1980s, located at close range to the adversary's centers, are the ideal kind of weapon to try to generate that "splendid first strike". And there is also the plan outlined by the government of Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama to invest one trillion dollars (!) in the modernization of the US nuclear arsenal. This is an astronomical figure that the Russians, despite their hard-won advantage in some areas, cannot dream of matching and which means the prospect of being overrun in their last strategic stronghold as well.
Finally, Russian nationalism is very sensitive to the idea of Smuta, or "time of tumult". From this point of view, Russia has been periodically shaken by periods of internal chaos that have brought the country to the brink of decay and have marked dividing lines in its history. This threat, together with the ever-present external insecurity, is what justifies in the Russian nationalist conception the need for a central state with autocratic overtones. The Romanov dynasty came to the throne after one of these periods of chaos in the early 17th century. For Russian nationalism, 1917 opens another of those tumultuous periods (this is how the ideological predecessors of the current Russian leaders interpreted that moment: the whites of the Civil War of 1917-1921), as well as the 1990s. The latter is particularly important for today's Russian nationalism, as it represented that decade of humiliation in which the country was ignored by the US (hence the susceptibility of this nationalism to the question of greatness and international respect). At the beginning of that decade the western Moscow safety belt was on the German Elbe. Today their tanks are fighting east of the Dnieper. It is easy to imagine the anxiety caused by the prospect of a new Smuta, but this time with NATO sitting on the immediate borders of the Russian European core. This fear is quite understandable if we take into account the bourgeois and parasitic character of the current Russian State, literally founded on mafia robbery, which does not augur well for prospects of great resilience if subjected to major pressures. Of course, Atlanticist imperialism does little to assuage these anxieties. Its most war-mongering penmen are already publicly showing maps of Russia's future that resemble those drawn up by Nazi-fascism in 1941 to cut up the USSR: Balkanization on a Eurasian scale!
For all these reasons it is reasonable to understand that when the Kremlin speaks of this struggle as existential, it is not a propagandistic exaggeration: it is really conceived in that way. In this sense, the unfolding of events since February 24 gives us perspective to see the desperate character of what was, literally, the Russian gamble. We will elaborate a little later on the causes of the initial Russian approach's failure, but what is important now is to underline how this setback has shown the relative weakness of Russian imperialism, something that few observers noted before the start of the invasion (paradoxically, most of the few voices warning against Russian military overconfidence came from within Russia itself). This unexpected show of weakness has activated the most bloodthirsty instincts of Atlanticist predators, who are sniffing out big game. As we have stated, it was absolutely clear that the Atlanticist plan was to provoke Russia to get into that bear trap that would be a "Slavic Afghanistan", with the aim of bleeding and weakening the rival as much as possible and disciplining the European flank of Atlanticism which, in this way, would not only ruin any improbable flicker of strategic autonomy, but would also take special responsibility for marking the weakened Russian rival, allowing the Americans to finish turning towards the Pacific without the danger of weakening their hegemony in Europe.
In terms of the success of the provocation and of pushing the EU into confrontation with Russia, the plan has been a monumental triumph of Atlanticism. The Europe of peace has hardly hesitated to join in the anti-Russian war fervor (which has not failed to fully bring to the surface the deep and repugnant racist, supremacist and Russophobic streaks of Europeanism, barely hidden under its liberal mask), in an atmosphere that is probably the closest we have seen to August 1914 since that fateful date. Within the EU, Germany is subjected to a particularly hysterical propaganda campaign to silence any doubts among the representatives of the exporting industrial bourgeoisie, who are already counting the loss of competitiveness that will result from renouncing cheap Russian fuel. Environmentalists are at the forefront of the Atlanticist fervor in Germany, with the Greens complaining about Scholz's alleged lack of firmness. Historically, Germany's relationship with Russia moves contradictorily between Ostpolitik and Drang nach Osten, although it is the latter the one that has tragically tended to prevail, as it seems to be doing today as well. The only country that has shown some dissent from the EU's warmongering line, Hungary, is waiting to be retaliated against (the imminent freezing of European funds due to human rights problems in the country has already been announced). Finally, what can we say about the Spanish State, led by the most progressive government in history? The Spanish armament sent has already been photographed in the hands of the Azov Regiment and, not satisfied with that, the Sánchez, Díaz and co. have decided to add a little more progressive infamy, consummating the definitive betrayal to the Saharawi people, to the greater glory of stability in the rear, now that all attention is required to be focused on the Ostfront. And all this despite the fact that few analysts estimate any other result of the sanctions and the decoupling of the Russian economy than to favor a major economic crisis in the EU and a significant loss of competitiveness of its industry.
The only surprise in Brussels' disposition has been the attempt to present this war fervor as an advance of Europeanism and a strengthening of the EU. If this imperialist monstrosity had any vocation to play any autonomous role in the world (i.e., to have a voice of its own in the imperialist pillaging: the perspective of a possible autonomy has never been any different than that), it has evidently been totally annulled, showing blatantly that it has never been and never could have been anything other than the civilian arm of NATO and the institutionalization of the Yankee hegemony in Europe. However, as we have already pointed out on numerous occasions, it is not possible to speak of a "loss of sovereignty" on this issue. This only denotes an economistic understanding of imperialism, which ignores the hierarchy established among the imperialist powers within the same bloc, the genesis and historical inertias in the institutional articulation of that bloc, as well as the strategic decision of the decisive sector of the different imperialist bourgeoisies within that bloc. In this sense, the game of balance between powers, with frequent eruptions of war, which had marked the relationship between the European powers until 1945, was replaced by the anti-communist agreement between them, under the American umbrella, for the confrontation against the USSR. Nothing else is at the very origin of the European project. EU policy today is nothing but the conservative inertia of its origin, implemented by mediocre technocrats lacking any imagination. Therefore, it is worth considering what the European position has to do with a genuine decision: the calculation is undoubtedly that loyalty to the Atlanticist bloc and its unity, despite the immediate costs implied by its policy in Ukraine, compensate for the uncertainties and crises that a breakup would generate, at a time when the global inter-imperialist competition is accelerating.
The point, as we say, is that, having achieved these objectives, Russia's show of weakness in failing to achieve its initial plan has triggered the most unbridled expectations, not only with regard to wearing down the old Russian rival, but also to inflicting a decisive defeat on it, if not openly fantasizing about its destruction and dismemberment. This has decisively escalated the Atlanticist involvement with respect to what was presumably planned beforehand. The harsh economic sanctions immediately put in place were followed in the weeks that followed by what amounts to the practical expulsion of Russia from the global financial and trading system. Likewise, the already massive first flow of weapons, referred to a type of weaponry suitable for defensive and even guerrilla warfare (anti-tank missiles and grenade launchers, as well as portable anti-aircraft systems), while calls to send heavier and more complex material, suitable for conventional offensive operations, were taken more cautiously. This line has already been crossed and tanks, armor, artillery and heavy anti-aircraft systems are flowing regularly into Ukraine. To the estimated $8 billion in military hardware that has been sent to Ukraine in the first two months of the war, Biden added the announcement in late April of an additional $33 billion aid package through September ($20 billion of which is directly for weapons, with the remaining funds serving to financially support the ailing Ukrainian state), with the possibility of further packages thereafter. These are magnitudes not seen since the Korean War or even since the Lend-Lease of World War II. U.S. intelligence makes no secret that it is actively participating in the Ukrainian war effort, while rumors are growing about the involvement of special forces and officers from NATO countries in operations on the ground. It is clearly a proxy war, and its declared objective is no longer to increase Russian costs or to strengthen Ukraine's position at the negotiating table, but, in the words of Borrell (another Spanish socialist who can now be placed, along with Solana, in the pantheon of Atlanticist war criminals), "the defeat of Russia on the battlefield". Moreover, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated that the target is even higher: not only the Ukrainian victory, but also to ensure that Russia will not be able to take such an action again. In other words, the declared goal is to use Ukraine to remove Russia from the ranks of the major powers.
The stakes are enormous and so are the risks, which increasingly seem acceptable to the Atlanticist hawks. It is no longer just the likely economic crisis in the EU, aggravated by the boomerang effect of sanctions (a price to be borne in Washington), but, showing that perhaps Atlanticism is also falling into its own trap, it is the institutionalized global financial system itself (and, perhaps, the preeminence of the dollar in it) what is being sacrificed for the sake of vanquishing Russia, which is simply too big to be treated like Venezuela (which, by the way, seems to be welcomed back into the international community). Even the very system of alliances that was being woven in Asia-Pacific in the face of the decisive confrontation with China is at risk: India, unwilling to join the economic blockade against Russia for historical and strategic reasons, has already been warned by Blinken that the U.S. will monitor its respect for human rights, which Washington suddenly notices in danger in a country that until a few months ago was "the world's largest democracy". Worse still, while the Poles suggest that perhaps the entry of a ground force into western Ukraine to create a humanitarian sanctuary might be timely and, as in Syria, red lines are provocatively drawn regarding the use of certain armaments, the public debate in the Anglo-Saxon media has for weeks been insisting on the need for NATO to establish a "no-fly zone" over Ukraine. This - that NATO forces are engaged in the direct destruction of Russian aviation as well as its air defense systems - plainly signifies the beginning of World War III.
That is why we say that we are in the most dangerous time since the end of World War II. Important sectors of Atlanticist imperialism's leadership are openly proposing to escalate to open military confrontation with Russia (and indeed, while the prospect is for a long Ukrainian war, there are few steps to climb from where Atlanticist involvement is right now to such a stage of open war). But as we have explained at length, while Atlanticism ups the ante and devotes increasing resources to this war, Russian imperialism has good reason to consider this conflict as existential, one it simply cannot lose... If direct NATO intervention were to occur, the conventional military superiority of this alliance over Russia is overwhelming. It would not be a cakewalk like the invasion of Iraq and there would be many casualties, but most likely the Russian Army would be defeated. Given the imperialist and anti-popular character of the Russian state (and its reluctance to consider even a partial mobilization of its reservists, despite the difficulties on the battlefield, is indicative of this character), national mobilization cannot be implemented other than through the regular channels of recruitment for conventional warfare, which in no way guarantees the avoidance of defeat. The only sure tool that Russian imperialism has to balance the scales is its nuclear arsenal (which has certainly already deterred a direct Atlanticist intervention that would otherwise already be underway). It would probably start with the use of tactical nuclear weapons over the theater of operations, but there is simply no history or experience of escalation control in this situation. At this point the possibility of using strategic weapons against vital centers within the respective belligerent countries would be very high. In any case, if faced with the eventuality of a lost war against NATO over something as important for Russian imperialism as Ukraine, where its soldiers are already dying (it is not an island in the distant Caribbean as in 1962), the Kremlin were to renounce using its nuclear weapons, it would be as much as confessing that it would not use them in defense of any other of its imperialist interests, which is equivalent to nullifying all their strategic deterrence value. Not using them in this case would in practice be the equivalent of getting rid of its entire arsenal or handing it over to its rivals. It would be the -longed for by the Atlanticists- definitive end of Russia as a great power, a prelude to other possible ends... Right now there is a powerful group of "cannibals" in Washington, for whom Ukraine means nothing more than an opportunity to finish off an old rival, pushing for a situation in which their cornered Russian anthropophagous colleagues will have to make that fatal decision. This is nothing more than the current concretization of the criminal logic of imperialist strategic competition, which cannot but maintain the old Westphalian dialectics of competition-balance between powers, even after having crossed the nuclear threshold, and which is now totally unsustainable even from the elementary point of view of the preservation of the species and of civilization. However, this logic appears chillingly objective and unappealable from the helm of the imperialist state, showing that never, since the first atomic device exploded back in the summer of 1945, have we been as close as we are now to a nuclear war. Of course, this old imperialist logic is also totally incompatible with the point of view of the historical progress of civilization, which is that of the revolutionary proletariat, and is one more proof of how irreconcilable are the antagonisms between the main classes of society: literally, a matter of life and death...
Before proceeding further, it is worth pointing out a few questions regarding the focus of this part of our current specific analysis, given the critical insinuations that have been heard regarding the inappropriateness of the "geopolitical" type of analysis. Certainly, geopolitics, as one more of the analytical compartments imposed by the bourgeois discipline of the so-called "political sciences", poses, like the rest of science (in the broadest sense of the word), a contradictory and mediated relationship with Marxism. Having said this, what is unacceptable and demonstrates the typical short-sightedness that grips the communist movement dominated by revisionism, is the insinuation that the sphere of relations between political entities (mainly States) and its manifestation in the natural physical space, to give an elementary definition of geopolitics, is not a material dimension of reality and that, therefore, can be ignored by Marxists. Or worse, there are spheres of reality that would not be Marxist, while others (presumably economics) would. The reactionary nature of such statements, which barely disguise their denial of Marxism as an integral conception of the world (once again reduced to a "critical theory" plus, perhaps, the "critique of political economy"), is evident, and once again they imply the attempt to limit the development of the proletariat, beginning with its vanguard, to prevent it from being able to place itself at the level of the antagonistic class that today controls all the levers of civilization.
However, the geopolitical approach brings some interesting issues that, conveniently digested by Marxists, are particularly useful for an analysis of situations such as the present one. Geopolitics, by its very nature, provides an elementary materialist perspective on the level of international relations between States (very useful in an environment dominated by the crossfire of the propaganda of the imperialists in confrontation, full of lofty moral, "humanitarian" and "anti-fascist" motives). Thus, on the one hand, it draws our attention to the raw materiality of space and the constraints or opportunities it presents for the development of the State. Since this space has an intimate relationship with the military form of relationship between these states (it facilitates their defense or the opposite), it immediately puts us on the trail of the very raw essence of the state as an apparatus of violence (in this case, fundamentally oriented outwardly). This, on the other hand, does not undermine, on the contrary, the historical materialist understanding of the bourgeois state. The bourgeoisie, when it comes to power, does not create its own State, but, as Marx stresses, "takes as booty" a given bureaucratic-military structure, which is itself the product of a previous secular development that sinks into the mists of the Middle Ages, if not beyond. This means that the bourgeoisie necessarily takes a structure with logics that pre-exist its bourgeois conquest, logics that it preserves, although it transforms them, elevating them. Precisely, the State is perfected as a military-bureaucratic machine in the period prior to its definitive conquest by the bourgeoisie, during the constant wars, either religious or dynastic, that marked Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries. War, basic pillar of the State, which the bourgeoisie perfected to the point of turning it into just another scientific technique, was the "sport of kings" par excellence. Here we have a historical fabric of universal continuity, which in its relation to the bourgeois quest for the extraction of the greatest surplus value in the shortest possible time must be understood in a mediate, dialectical -neither immediate nor mechanical- way.
In fact, if we were to expand a bit further on this point, we could say that the bourgeoisie does not constitute itself as the ruling class of our world directly from its economic attributes as exploiter of wage labor, but, in accordance with the whole structure of reality, including the social one, it needs a mediation to transform that material potentiality into agency, into political class struggle. In the case of the bourgeoisie, that mediation is, in its mature historical form, the national movement that consequently leads to the nation-state. In its decadent form such mediation is the imperialist State which, with its recurrent struggle for new divisions of the world, brings to the fore, every time such a struggle looms on the immediate horizon, this military strategic logic, capable of imposing a sacrificial discipline to the craving for immediate benefits of this or that faction of the bourgeoisie that is part of that imperialist State. In this sense, the geopolitical approach puts us on the track of the logic of imperialist competition in the era of wars (hot or cold, direct or proxy wars) between the great powers. It is no coincidence that geopolitics, as a bourgeois academic discipline, was born, with Kjéllen, Mackinder or Haushofer, at the moment when capitalism is reaching its imperialist phase, in the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
Two extreme deviations from the geopolitical approach are worth noting. The first is its immediate assumption, without further criticism or elaboration. The result is, for example, the eclectic addition to the class struggle, as categories of equivalent entity, of a whole series of "dialectics of states and empires", which barely conceal their chauvinist-imperialist aroma, totally alien to Marxism. Secondly, closer to the economistic tradition of revisionism, as we have already mentioned, is its plain ignorance and denial. We have already pointed out the dialectical deficit implied by such an attitude, which falls squarely into imperialist economism, which links univocally and mechanically, that is, abstractly, the concrete policy of this or that imperialist power at a given moment with respect to some of the general economic characteristics of imperialism, which are usually reduced to the export of capital. Just as economism mechanically derives the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat from the immediate economic struggle for its conditions of existence, the politics of imperialism is reduced to a mere epiphenomenon of one of the economic manifestations of imperialism. It does not seem that this smart economicist critique has contributed at this time more than a new repetition of bland truths, "known for a long time now" among the vanguard, about the "struggle between financial groups", stripping of all substance the concrete analysis of the concrete situation of the struggle between imperialist powers.
But in addition to this mutilation of the concrete analysis of the concrete situation in favor of the abstract repetition of general truths, there is another fundamental issue that worries us regarding the abandonment of this perspective of geopolitical relations between states. We cannot forget that the revolutionary proletariat has already historically achieved the state of establishing its state power for a prolonged period in the acutely hostile environment of the imperialist inter-state system. The experience of the Soviet Union is not only paradigmatic, but particularly timely in this analysis. The pressure of that imperialist environment made itself felt on the revolutionary power from the very beginning, and it did not let up even when the revisionists eliminated the dictatorship of the proletariat. As we have pointed out on numerous occasions, there was a sharp objective contradiction between the development needs of the World Proletarian Revolution (WPR) and the preservation imperatives of the Soviet state. This contradiction ran through the entire history of the Communist International (1919-1943) and, in general and as we have also pointed out on numerous occasions, we can conclude that it tended to lean more and more towards the aspect of preserving the Soviet State at all costs, to the point of identifying the WPR itself with the survival of the latter. Whatever the historical ideological and subjective limitations that facilitated this displacement - on which we have also elaborated on other occasions - it is important not to lose sight of the fact that these limitations were expanded by the enormous objective pressure that the Soviet State suffered from its birth and until the very disappearance of its last revisionist version (and which includes Brest-Litovsk; the imperialist intervention in the civil war; the cordon sanitaire; the largest military invasion in history in 1941, leading to a war of extermination, and the encirclement and constant threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War). To ignore all this when making the necessary criticism of the Soviet leadership of the Stalin period would be to forget that this deadly imperialist pressure will be an objective constant of any successful enterprise that manages to relaunch the WPR to the level already historically achieved. The correct future management of this contradiction WPR-Socialist State will not be solved with doctrinarism: it will require a vanguard trained in the mastery (in the first place, necessarily theoretical) of the problematic of the State in all its amplitude, including its external relations (since the new vanguard-Party dialectic cannot be sustained but on the comprehension of its predecessor, the masses-State dialectic). In fact, this command of the vanguard will be precisely the best guarantee that the inevitable pressures and threats (which would appear practically as given physical phenomena for an inadvertent vanguard) that will lie in wait for the future socialist states do not become a servitude within the WPR, unexpectedly subordinated for the sake of the Realpolitik of the possible survival at each moment. In this sense, we place ourselves in the tradition of Marx, who in 1864, despite having already deciphered the enigmas of the commodity and value, did not lecture the proletariat with general truths, but encouraged them to "master the mysteries of international politics".
Another of the fallacies propagated by some sectors of revisionism refers to the non-imperialist character of Russia. Once again, revisionism falls into imperialist economism by understanding imperialism as a series of isolated economic characteristics, attributable only to some of the great powers of the system. Of course, the claim that Russia is not an imperialist power obviates even fundamental elements of these analytical economic characteristics (it ignores, among other things, the monopolistic character of key sectors of the Russian economy and the growing Russian export of capital, especially since the economic boom of the 2000s - a good deal of which, by the way, went precisely to Ukraine before 2014), but this claim amounts above all to not understanding the systemic character of imperialism as an integral phase of capitalism at a given historical moment, characterized by the accumulation of capital taking place on a global scale. Basically, it is a reedition of the old Kautskyan conception that understood imperialism as a particular policy (economic in this case) of certain powers. On the contrary, from the systemic point of view of Leninism, there is no great capitalist power that can now escape the label of imperialist. And Russia is certainly a great power by any standard of consideration. The weakest of the current ones, at a great distance from the United States and China, but with a power that surpasses the regional framework (in spite of the scornful statements to that effect, made with full intention, by some U.S. leaders, such as Obama): simply its physical size, its availability of raw materials, the size of its economy (evident when one takes the usual monetarist criteria aside and measures it by real purchasing parity), its military-industrial complex, as well as the power, both conventional and strategic, of its armed forces. It is no longer the global superpower that social-imperialism still was, but actions such as its intervention in Syria or, beyond its initial setback, its ability to operate, without resorting to mobilization, continuously and for months hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a high-intensity war in a foreign yet neighboring country such as Ukraine, show that Russian power surpasses its categorization as merely regional.
Having established its structural character, paying attention to the political action of the Russian state and its procedures is not only useful from the concrete analytical point of view, but also to confirm its imperialist character and to make a complete refutation of those who deny this nature. It should be noted that, from the point of view of the Line of Reconstitution (LR), this perspective, attentive to the activity of the powers involved, is particularly interesting: the form of this activity is dialectically related to the nature of the one who exercises it. As we have pointed out on numerous occasions, the historical determination of political action in the conditions of capitalism is configured through the mass-State dialectic. Within this contradictory unity, a true democratic and, in this case, anti-imperialist policy tends to rely more on the first aspect as its center of gravity. Probably, the paradigmatic case of anti-imperialist struggle would be the struggle of the Vietnamese people for their liberation and national unity. Indeed, once French colonialism was expelled and northern Vietnam was liberated, access to formal statehood in that specific area of the nation was still not the engine of development of the Vietnamese national struggle. The newly liberated state did not go on to lead the movement according to the logics of its own nature, as given by its recognized insertion in the inter-state system: attention to the balance of power, balance of conventional forces and inter-state diplomacy, etc. Far from it, the center of gravity of the national struggle shifted to the mass movement in the south of the country, in struggle against the puppet regime of the then Saigon. The Democratic Republic in the north became a fundamental support base of the national struggle, but as a coherent organic whole with respect to the mass armed struggle in the south, without subordinating the logic of this struggle to that of its own coexistence with imperialism on the formal state plane. That is to say, although the Vietnamese leadership was based in Hanoi, the State in the North did not become the ordaining reason of the national movement; instead, that role was played by the political and military development of the mass movement in the South. Eloquently, the substitution in the antagonistic role of French colonialism by Yankee imperialism which, from the point of view of power relations between States, should have induced a cautious and conservative Realpolitik, given the enormous increase in the power of that antagonist, led to the opposite, to an intensification of the mass struggle and guerrilla activity in the South, whose support and sustenance from the Democratic Republic was organically non-negotiable. Such is the political foundation of the audacity of the people who inflicted one of the most humiliating defeats on imperialism.
We can therefore use this paradigmatic example of genuine anti-imperialist struggle to understand the monstrous corruption of this concept by revisionism when it is attributed to policies such as that of the current Russian state. Quite the contrary, Russia has not ceased to play the big game of great power politics: conventional balances of power between states, cabinet diplomacy and the consideration of mass movements as sacrificial and uncomfortable pawns in that big game. As we know, the Maidan coup in February 2014 and the realization that with it had come to power the old Banderite nationalism produced in response what became known as the Russian Spring: a spontaneous mass movement that shared many of the grievances that had animated the Maidan in its spontaneous origins (against corruption, impoverishment, etc.), but with a different national political orientation. This movement spread during March and April 2014 across southern and eastern Ukraine and was not separatist in general at its inception, but did assert Ukraine's multinational identity and the role of Russian language and culture in shaping it, which, in the international sphere, entailed a stance of closeness/non-hostility to Russia. The attitude of Moscow, which had dropped Yanukovych (usually branded as "pro-Russian", which is inaccurate, since, as we have said on other occasions, he was rather a representative of the neutrality of the nation: not hostile to Russia, but not particularly docile to its wishes either) to this movement was opportunistic and largely instrumental. The only place where the Russian Federation's action moved in tune with a key sector of the mass movement was precisely where, for historical reasons, its separatist streak was most dominant, in Crimea. It was there that the only Russian action that was swift, bold and somewhat in line with the direction of the local mass movement was witnessed, and this was primarily due to strategic motivations with respect to the Russian position in the Black Sea.
From then on, the Kremlin's attitude towards the movements in the south, east and, particularly, in the Donbas was one of obvious discomfort. Contrary to the usual Atlanticist accusation, far from promoting them, Russia, more concerned with finding understanding with Western chancelleries, especially with Berlin and Paris, tried to abort these movements (Geneva agreements of April 2014) and allowed them to be crushed on the ground during May and June in a large part of the country (the act of terror of the Odessa massacre stands out, although it was far from being the only one), with consequences that today seem as decisive to us. Only when the defeat of his last stronghold in the Donbas at the hands of the Ukrainian Army and the Banderite Freikorps seemed imminent, Putin, pushed by the European indifference to his approaches and the domestic pressure of Russian nationalism, decided to send substantial aid, albeit only effective to prevent that defeat. At all times the Kremlin's attitude had its focus away from the internal movement of the Ukrainian society, disregarding it in favor of the balance games between imperialist powers. In fact, Putin, observing the apparent contradictions between Washington and the European flank of Atlanticism during the Maidan crisis (summed up in Nuland's famous "fuck the EU"), tried to take advantage of the whole situation to drive a wedge precisely between the two shores of the Atlantic, striving to draw in the EU and separate it from Washington.
This whole strategy, formally successful, is summarized in the two Minsk Agreements, negotiated with the mediation of Russia, France and Germany. This strategy required the subordination and disciplining of the movement in the Donbas. Thus, any social fickleness that could be deduced from the vague nostalgia for the Soviet brotherhood of peoples that animated a part of the movement was immediately cut off, while its entire development was made conditional on the course of this understanding with the diplomatic departments of the European powers. This was exemplified by Moscow's attitude towards the independence referendums in the already self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in May 2014, as well as the formation shortly thereafter of the New Russia confederation between the two republics. Without going into how the choice of the name (New Russia was the denomination of the old Tsarist administrative governorship) tells us a lot about the dominant ideology even then, Moscow simply ignored the independence wishes, a majority after experiencing the bloody Ukrainian offensive, and made the references to New Russia disappear after a few months due to the discomfort they produced with respect to the negotiations in Minsk. To this disciplining of the movement in the Donbas also contributed opportune assassinations (officially attributed to Ukrainian intelligence, but some of them under suspicion) or the withdrawal of charismatic and more independent leaders, such as Mozgovoy, Givi or Strelkov, who were replaced by bland figures with clearer links to Russian intelligence. This disciplining was necessary because in the end, the Minsk Agreements fell far short of where the political development in the Donbas had reached. The fact is that these treaties, as signed in February 2015 (what is known as Minsk II), implied that, in exchange for a greater degree of autonomy and regardless of the will of these regions, the Donbas would remain within the Ukrainian state. This was useful for the Kremlin, as it allowed it to maintain an internal element balancing the political scales in Ukraine, helping to preserve its neutral status and preventing the Atlanticist drift clearly promoted from Washington with its support for Banderite nationalism. It also seemed to separate the U.S. from the EU, which was hesitant but with a position in principle different from that of its U.S. big brother. All these were cabinet victories and exemplify that at all times the Kremlin handled the situation from the point of view of the position of the Russian state in the balance of powers, the key sphere of decision being that of the inter-state summit negotiations, completely subordinating the movement and the desire of the masses in Ukraine and the Donbas to this sphere. The fruits of this purely imperialist policy proved to be bitter... This supposed victory that the Minsk Agreements meant, already hardly a retribution which, from the point of view of imperialist competition, did not even formally compensate for the determined placement of Ukraine under the Atlanticist orbit after the Maidan coup, was moreover unfulfilled at all times by Ukraine in its material implementation. The US, never in favor of Minsk, encouraged this non-compliance, with the EU's attitude oscillating between duplicity and impotence. The war in the Donbas, of high intensity between June 2014 and February 2015 (with the intermediate hiatus brought about by the first Minsk agreement in September 2014), never ended but simply froze, while NATO trainers became part of the Ukrainian landscape.
The weakness of Moscow's Realpolitik has been shown in all its consequences with the exhaustion of the first phase of the conflict last February. If the new stage of large-scale warfare has shown anything, it is that in recent years, since the signing of Minsk, the military balance has shifted to the detriment of Russia. While Russia, without much consideration for the daily shelling that the population of the Donbas has suffered at the hands of Ukrainian artillery during these seven years, demanded from its Western colleagues the implementation of Minsk to the deaf ears of all, the Ukrainian Army, which had been easily beaten in 2014-15, grew stronger every year. The Ukrainian Army was purged by the Maidan regime of elements dubious for nationalism, received a huge investment (in 2020 it reached practically 9% of the GDP of a country in constant economic crisis and impoverishment) and advanced more and more in what can rigorously be considered its de facto integration into NATO, as evidenced with respect to training, tactics, style, command structures and intelligence. Undoubtedly, the awareness of this progressive strengthening and integration has been what motivated the urgency of the Russian invasion last February. Here again, however, the desperate short-sightedness of Russian policy is evident. The action has been a real gamble, seeking not so much military victory as the political collapse of the Ukrainian government, which, like Czechoslovakia in 1968, would fall through a combination of special forces action in the capital and the sheer intimidation of seeing the entrance of armored columns across the border. Once again Russian imperialism has fallen far behind its social-imperialist predecessor. If in 1968 the Warsaw Pact environment allowed such an action, the international context of 2022 was that of Atlanticist dominance around a regime at whose core there were fanatically anti-Russian forces. The only element that could have destabilized the soil of the Maidan regime and made this collapse conceivable was precisely that of that mass movement of spring 2014 that the Kremlin, with its imperialist chancellery policy, had allowed to be massacred, terrorized and dispersed, while Banderites were entrenched in the Ukrainian state apparatus. Now that the initial gamble has failed, which has also resulted in a clear Russian military setback in the northern part of Ukraine, around Kyiv (largely due to an erroneous operational plan, designed on the basis of false and reactionary political and ideological premises), the prospect of a long and uncertain war is opening up. Even the current phase of full-scale war is evidence of the catastrophic nature of the Russian imperialist policy, since cities and strong points that would have been easily occupied in 2014 and 2015 and that even saw the initial expulsion of the official Ukrainian authorities by the anti-Maidan masses, as is the case of Mariupol (conquered by the Ukrainian Army in May 2014 and which only the signing of Minsk II in February 2015 saved from being retaken by Russian-backed independence fighters), have today been the scene of major battles that have consumed vast resources and fed the myths and irredentism of Ukrainian nationalism.
It is worth noting here another element that underlines the imperialist character of the Russian state and how this weakens its political pretensions. It is the ideology of the regime, which is none other than Russian nationalism and which, despite its updating to symbolically include some of the events of the 20th century (essentially the Great Patriotic War), cannot hide its threadbare Great-Russian chauvinist soul. Behind the gamble that represented the initial Russian plan of this February there was also a conception of the world, precisely that of this great-Russian nationalism. The illusory claim that the Ukrainian state would collapse at the mere knock on its door and that the Little Russians would acquiesce to the designs of the Slavic big brother was based on the chauvinistic conception - implicit in Putin's articles and explicit in his pre-invasion speeches - that Ukraine is not a nation and that its statehood has no roots, being little more than a Bolshevik crime. Ultimately, the Russian plan was fueled by the disregard and underestimation of Ukrainian national consciousness and the process of intensive nationalization that the past thirty years of independence, including the last eight years of repressive Banderite-driven Ukrainization, had entailed. Of course, an alternative democratic policy to the simple opposition of one nationalism to another was out of Moscow's reach, since that would have meant starting from the fact that Bolshevism had already recognized more than a century ago: Ukraine is already a nation, equal in entity to Russia and has the same right to self-determination. Just from the unconditional recognition of this reality enormous possibilities could have opened to develop an international mass movement, in accordance with the multinational structure of Ukraine and which would have opposed the racist Banderite exclusivism, fighting for a democratic organization of the Ukrainian State (which would have naturally declined the refusal to join imperialist military blocs hostile to Russia). Statistics and surveys prior to the Maidan (and even more so those prior to the so-called Orange Revolution of 2004, which already began to normalize Banderite dogmas and to make Ukraine's entire political life revolve around the national question) overwhelmingly show that the majority of Ukrainians used the Russian language on a daily basis, showed goodwill towards Russia and misgivings about NATO membership, while, of course, defending the maintenance of Ukraine's independence and sovereignty. The foundations for this democratic movement were therefore everywhere and, it must be said, were rooted in Soviet national policy and in the memory of the historical reality achieved of this brotherhood of peoples (even if it was progressively tarnished by revisionism). Of course, the imperialist wheeling and dealing and the chauvinist blindness of the Russian regime, insensitive to the sufferings of Ukrainian society (if not responsible for a large part of them) squandered this potential, arrogantly denouncing the Soviet legacy and propagating the nationalist virtues of the Russian world. This narrowed the social base for this democratic movement in Ukraine, as, amidst the growing onslaught of Banderites, which it fed back, it identified the recognition of the multinational fact of the real Ukraine with Russian nationalism and even with the very dismemberment/disappearance of the country. In any case, it serves to show that although mistreated and never developed, there was indeed the foundation for a movement that would sustain a true anti-imperialist policy, whose center of gravity rested with the Ukrainian masses and which would have really meant the underpinning of fundamental democratic elements for the country itself.
Of course, we would not like to finish this section without insisting that this critique of Russian imperialist policy must be understood as a complement and culmination of its structural critique. Russian imperialism simply cannot conceive the possibility of relying on a mass movement or even allowing that at a certain moment the center of gravity of Russian policy could rest on this movement. This would immediately call into question its internal regime and structure. Russian imperialism can then only resort to cabinet diplomacy and the regular army, which, as we see, further weakens it when confronting a stronger imperialism. It should also be made clear that we have limited ourselves to point out the possible, general characteristics of this abortive movement in the democratic anti-imperialist framework, limited to the old mass-State dialectic, because our criticism is directed towards the illusion, propagated by some revisionist sectors, of a supposed "Russian anti-imperialism". Of course, the democratic framework itself, although less asphyxiating than the rigid structures of imperialism among which Putin's policy moves, would be in itself a narrow scaffolding in the objective conditions of the Ukrainian society, which demand from the vanguard a superior starting point and horizon, as can only be the historically superior dialectic of the Socialist Revolution. The democratic treatment of the national question should be in Ukraine, as in Spain, part of the political line of the vanguard in its struggle for the reconstitution of communism and the development of the proletarian revolution. It is therefore appropriate to insist that the tragedy being experienced today by the former Soviet Ukrainian and Russian fraternal peoples is a warning of the catastrophe lurking behind the arrogant social-chauvinist proclamations which, as part of the general atmosphere dominated by reaction and nationalism, find their way into the vanguard.
Before continuing with the specific Ukrainian scenario, it may be advisable to dwell for a moment on an element associated with the fallacy of denying the imperialist character of the Russian state. We are talking about the praise of so-called "multipolarity", the illusion that an imperialist system with several independent centers of power and decision-making would somehow be more democratic, fair or balanced. Again, this represents one of the most monstrous ways of embellishing the nature of imperialism. In essence, stripped of all balanced democratic garb, multipolarity boils down to the mutually recognized right of several rapacious countries to guarantee their share of the pie. The idea is that, in several regions of the world, the language of the official thief and bully should not be English, but Russian or Mandarin. One must have forgotten any elementary notion of Marxism and internalized so much the defeat of the proletariat at the end of the October Cycle, assuming that there is no other horizon than to cheer the efforts of the ascendant imperialists or the weakest at this moment, as to dare to present this argument among communists.
The limited "anti-imperialist" scope of this pretension becomes evident when it is understood that unipolarity, that is, the unchallenged domination of the entire international system by a single great imperialist power, does not correspond, even empirically, with the material structure of imperialism. In the economic sphere, more than a century of experience seems to corroborate that the uneven and leaping development of capitalism guarantees that the ground of unipolar dominance will never be stable. In fact, the unipolarity of unchallenged Yankee hegemonism corresponds to a brief stage in historical terms, barely a generation long, which we can periodize between 1989-91 and 2014 (the latter date, conventionally, is when we can situate a transition that was already showing symptoms beforehand and which, even today, is not completely closed). The reality is that most of the history of imperialism has been dominated by the struggle among various powers. Bipolarity marked the period of the Cold War, but -and the "anti-imperialist" spokesmen of this bucolic multipolarity should take note- it was precisely the 1900-1945 period that, from the point of view of the number of great powers present in the international system, was marked by multipolarity. That is to say, empirical evidence alone shows that in imperialism, multipolarity cannot be associated with "democracy" or "balance", but on the contrary, with the multiplication of hotbeds of tension, the acceleration of inter-imperialist competition, the intensification of demands for new shares of the pie, the increase in militarization and the greater probability of major wars between powers, with what this implies, in our circumstances, of an increase in the danger of nuclear annihilation.
The realization of this evidence does not imply idealizing the arbitrariness and brutality of Yankee hegemonism, but simply opposing the anti-Marxist mystification of counterposing one period of concrete historical development of imperialism to another, which is nothing more than the logical consequence of the previous one. The current rise of multipolarity is the legitimate offspring of the advanced state of exhaustion of the unipolar Yankee moment. In fact, politically, it is nothing more than the result of the dissatisfaction of the new and old powers with their place in the declining Yankee hegemonic order. In the case of the rising new Chinese power, it is obvious how tight the corset reserved for said power is. More eloquent is the case of the old power of Moscow, in historical terms in undoubted decline from its relative peaks in the 19th century and, above all, in the mid-20th century. Since 1991 the dominant policy of the Russian power has not been precisely opposition to the U.S. hegemonic thrust, but on the contrary, collaboration, attempts at conciliation and the search for recognition. This is evidenced in two fundamental moments, with profound geopolitical implications: the first splitting of Yugoslavia in the first half of the 1990s and during the so-called war on terror during the 2000s. Kremlin's pretension was clear: willingness to accept U.S. hegemonism as long as, in return, the U.S. recognized its autonomous sphere of influence in the former USSR. It is Washington's refusal to concede even this what, together with the stabilization of Russian power after the resounding collapse of the 1990s, leads to the current clash that we can date back to 2008 (Bucharest NATO Summit and the Russo-Georgian War). This underlines the two characteristics we are insisting on: the strategic offensive position of Atlanticist imperialism in its drive to corner and annul Russia, but also the undoubtedly rapacious, reactionary and imperialist character of the latter power, on the defensive only as a matter of relative weakness vis-à-vis its rivals.
In this sense, pseudo-tacticist arguments, which use the relative weakness of one of the imperialisms as an alibi to justify their submission to it, are unacceptable. It is not up to the revolutionary proletariat to fight for equality among the imperialist rapacious (just as it is not up to it to fight for each national movement to conquer its own nation-state before moving towards the dissolution of nations) as a prior step to the struggle for the overthrow of all of them. The Bolsheviks did not calculate the relative weakness of Tsarism with respect to Germanic imperialism before consistently advocating revolutionary defeatism with respect to "their own" government. In this respect, it is particularly salutary to recall Lenin when he mocked disquisitions about which rapacious one initiated the attack or which one is on the defensive; about where the battle front passes or about which imperialist is more right from the abstract point of bourgeois equality when complaining about how "inequitable" the present distribution of the world is with respect to their appetites and stomach capacities. All this is philistine sport which is of interest to the Marxist only from the point of view of concrete analysis when evaluating the possible courses of development of the situation, but that cannot blur for a moment the revolutionary repulse and denunciation of all the imperialist bandits in their reactionary struggle.
We do not want to close this epigraph without referring to one more of the philistine foolishness which opportunism has gifted us with. We are talking about the denunciation as "criminal" of the "distribution of weapons among civilians" that the Kyiv regime was announced to have carried out at the beginning of the invasion. Whatever criticisms can and should be directed towards the reactionary Ukrainian nationalist regime, it should go without saying that a self-proclaimed communist should not join in this kind of reactionary and pseudo-paternalistic shouting about the "criminality" of giving guns to children. Violence and war are adult affairs, specifically those of the ruling classes and their professional special bodies with a monopoly on violence, from which the citizenry must remain aloof; said citizenry, in any case, can only play the propitiatory role of victim of such violence and war (allowing other specialized agencies to take charge of the care of the victims). Naturally, Zelensky is not promoting any kind of people's war, but as we say, in any of the numerous criticisms that can be made of the regime he represents, one should not question elements of principle of revolutionary communism, such as the need for the arming of the masses and revolutionary violence precisely in order to, among other things, break the special apparatuses of violence of the bourgeoisie.
Since we have already mentioned the People's War, it is worth noting a couple of interesting elements in view of the war events in Ukraine. As we say, there is no room to consider that Ukraine is conducting any kind of people's war, not only, of course, from the point of view of the requirements of the universal strategy of the proletariat; not even from the lax meaning of words such as war of the people can such a statement be sustained. The Ukrainian mobilization is framed within the conventional bourgeois channels of regular war and is a procedure of total war which was particularly common in that period of multipolarity of 1900-1945. Nor can the war effort of Ukraine - which, before the war, already had the second largest army in Europe - and its prospects be separated from the massive aid it is receiving from Atlanticist imperialism. As we have already stated, this Atlanticist imperialism has gone from supplying useful equipment for a defensive and even irregular or insurgent strategy (anti-tank and portable anti-aircraft weapons) to start sending massively what is necessary for a large-scale high-intensity tête à tête war against Russia (armored vehicles, artillery, etc.). However, while these Western shipments remain unsubstantiated and discounting the numerical superiority in troops that the mobilization has provided to the Ukrainians, the side that has so far enjoyed arms and technological superiority on the ground has been primarily Russia. Beyond the disastrous military effects of the erroneous Russian initial approach we have already mentioned, Ukrainians have compensated this Russian superiority, in addition to the intelligence and NATO training (probably superior to the Russian in tactical terms), with an intelligent defensive strategy that, besides the mobilization numbers, has rested on the use of irregular and guerrilla tactics for the harassment of Russian communications and logistics, as well as the use of the cities as pivots and axes of the resistance. Once again, in a landscape characterized by the absence of major geographical features, which are supposedly essential for any kind of asymmetric strategy (jungles, mountains, etc.), urban areas have once again proven to be ideal environments for balancing rivals with a notable technological or firepower gap. Another very interesting point to note is the growing prominence of drones on the battlefield, including the use of cheap, commercially available unmanned aerial vehicles for civilian use. Beyond the bourgeois doctrinal debates on whether this new type of integrated systems marks the end of "the great platforms of industrial warfare" (aviation, armored vehicles, large ships, etc.), what is true is that they undoubtedly represent an unprecedented democratization of air power, full of possibilities from the point of view of so-called asymmetric warfare (as has already been shown, for example, by the Houthis in Yemen), and which once again demonstrates the congruence of conceptions such as the People's War with respect to the objective tendencies of social development. We insist that nothing of what is happening in Ukraine in the military field can be separated from the Atlanticist intervention and that it is by all means a conventional war between bourgeois armies, but it seems interesting to us, from the point of view of the conception of the People's War as a universal strategy of the proletariat, to call attention to these facts, which emanate from the biggest military conflict that Europe has seen since 1945.
The geopolitics of competition between empires is also central to understanding Ukrainian nationalism in what literally means a frontier land. Like other small-nation (i.e., stateless) nationalisms, Ukrainian nationalism took shape as a language impulse and the re-signification of agrarian traditions in the last quarter of the 19th century. However, the fundamental base where this effort landed was not the wider geographical area of Tsarist-ruled Ukraine, but in the smaller part under Austro-Hungarian jurisdiction (formerly under Polish control) of Galicia, with its capital in present-day Lviv. These territories had never been under the control of the Muscovite power and would only be integrated with the rest of what is now Ukraine first in 1939 and then permanently after World War II. Thus, Ukrainian nationalism developed heterogeneously. In the Russian empire it did so more weakly and belatedly, the national question being partly blurred behind the more pressing agrarian question. Here, Ukrainian nationalism only began to take shape with the 1905 revolution and, because of this general historical context of the Russian empire (primacy of the agrarian question, influence of Marxism, rise of the revolutionary movement, etc.), it is at that time a nationalism that adopts socializing dyes, ideologically situated between the SR right and the Pilsudski-type national socialists. By contrast, in the Habsburg imperial mosaic, gripped by the national question, Ukrainian nationalism gained much more strength, first as a reaction to the traditional Polish domination of Galicia, and then, around the imperialist war of 1914, promoted by the Austrian authorities themselves, as a counterweight to Tsarist pan-Slavism. This is, as we pointed out in the article we published in February, the key feature of Ukrainian nationalism: the historical dependence of the imperialist rivals of the power established in Moscow (regardless of the character of that power). This is starkly shown in what was to be its foundational experience as a nation-state (we ignore here the nationalist debate on the medieval Kievan Rus'as we consider it pointless and of little scientific benefit), during the period of revolution and civil war of 1917-1921. Indeed, here it was demonstrated that the so-called Ukrainian People's Republic was no match for Bolshevik internationalism. In all the various fluctuations that marked this agitated period, the nationalists only had the opportunity to assert their authority in Kyiv under the umbrella of the Bolsheviks' imperialist and external rivals: the Central Powers first and the Polish invaders later. Their fate marked that of the Ukrainian nationalists, always advancing or retreating alongside these foreign armies.
With no place in the new Soviet Ukraine (nor in nationalist Poland either), the nationalist leaders in European exile made the fundamental doctrinal change that gave rise to the definitive ideological form that Ukrainian nationalism takes to this day. In the atmosphere of the 1920s, these irreconcilable enemies of Soviet power turned quite naturally from any socialist fickleness to the burgeoning Fascist experiment which, with all the air of novelty, was making its way in Italy. Thus, inspired by Dontsov, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was founded in Vienna in 1929. To this organization belong such sinister names as Bandera or Shukhevych and it was under their ascendancy that Ukrainian nationalism appeared for the second time on the historical stage. It took place during World War II and, as is consistently the case, again at the hand of an invading army: no less this time than the Nazi Wehrmacht, with which Ukrainian nationalism collaborated enthusiastically (a collaboration that today is unabashedly vindicated). Ukrainian nationalists not only enlisted various combat units in the service of German Nazi-fascism, the best known of which is the 14th Waffen SS Galizien Division, but formed their own armed organization (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army or UPA), actively collaborating in the Nazi Holocaust and adding their own share of genocide, such as, for example, the massacre of some 150,000 Poles in Volhynia. Some estimates of the bourgeois academic literature itself place the death toll of Ukrainian nationalism in this period, both for collaboration with German Nazi-fascism and for direct responsibility, in the range of two million. In fact, if we add the pogroms already conducted by Ukrainian nationalists in 1917-1920, the result at the end of World War II is that western Ukraine had become a much more "purely" Ukrainian area. For this reason Ukrainian nationalism cannot simply renounce its collaboration with German Nazi-fascism. This period not only profoundly marked their racist conception of what the Ukrainian nation should be; in historical terms, the Holocaust meant an effective step forward in the Ukrainian ethnostate project, a step upon which the very political development of Ukrainian nationalism is sustained. Once the significant presence of the Jewish and Polish communities that characterized pre-1941 Galicia was eliminated, Ukrainian nationalism was able to concentrate on the unequivocal hostility against Russia. The leitmotiv was then just to widen the gap with Russia and to remove the Malorussian tradition from the national heritage. Ukraine was to be built as an unequivocally anti-Russian entity.
This coincides with a shift in Ukrainian nationalism with respect to its imperial geopolitical support. If up to then the role of godfather had been played mainly by Germanic imperialism, after the Second World War it was played by U.S. imperialism. Unlike other collaborationists who could not escape Soviet justice, the survivors of the Galizien were welcomed in the "free world", being the core of the Ukrainian diaspora in the USA and Canada. This exile has come to form a powerful lobby in those countries, not only influencing the policy of the imperial center, but pushing for a rewriting of history to the taste of Ukrainian nationalism, already evident at the level of mass dissemination and which seems set to become, when it comes to the history of those lands, the dominant narrative on this side of the new iron curtain. It was Yankee imperialism which supported the bloody insurgency that the UPA led in Galicia once the Red Army expelled the Germans in 1944 and which lasted until well into the 1950s. From there we arrive without any interruption or any major ideological evolution to the present period. In the midst of the aforementioned American aid and financing, the Ukrainian nationalism that openly re-emerges after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 has, in its most hardline, militant and determined nucleus -in its vanguard-, the same Nazi-fascist, Banderite framework. Its tradition has been cultivated in exile under the legitimacy of the old Cold War and its heroes are those sanctified by the Maidan regime. The very figure of the genocidal Bandera is symptomatic of this process. Marginal in the collective imagination of independent Ukraine until the Orange Revolution, Yushchenko, not without scandal, designated him hero of Ukraine in 2010. Although this was reversed by Yanukovych, the ground of legitimacy had already been gained. After 2014 Bandera not only regained his heroic title, but the date of his birthday became a national holiday in the new Ukraine. Similarly, the new "decommunization" laws passed after 2014 not only led to the banning of the Ukrainian revisionist party, but declared it illegal to "question the justice of the cause of the OUN and the UPA." Facts such as these show the flimsiness of the Atlanticist parliamentary cretinist propaganda that seeks to minimize the influence of Nazism in Ukraine on the basis of the number of deputies of openly fascist Ukrainian parties. Regardless of the number of seats in the Rada, their dogmas, traditions and pretensions are the common sense of the Maidan regime.
Even more eloquent is the role of these Nazi-fascist groups in the very constitution of the Maidan regime and its political evolution. Ukrainian statehood since 1991 had been profoundly weak. To the process of plundering by the old bureaucratic bourgeoisie already freed from all kinds of hindrances, similar to that of other former Soviet republics, that national heterogeneity and the very geography of the country as a geopolitical crossroads were added. The result was a weak institutional framework in what today seems to be a historic impasse: the different factions of the new ruling class were never able to reach a solid and lasting agreement on the internal rules of the game, nor on the country's international position. Thus, the element of mediation, of representation of the ruling class through an institutionalized apparatus founded on that agreement - the collective capitalist element, in short - could never develop consistently. In Ukraine, the big capitalists ruled (and fought among themselves) directly since 1991. Hence the aspect of structural political crisis that has characterized the Ukrainian state. The permanence of the social and economic crisis (Ukraine was, along with Georgia, the only ex-Soviet republic that in 2010 had not yet recovered the nominal GDP of 1991) combined to make the outbreaks, since the late 1990s, increasingly violent and deep. As we have pointed out, a sustained political alternative was never developed on the multinational reality of the country; this was expressed inertially through the increasingly blurred Soviet memory, instrumentalized by some capitalists in the direct struggle against their peers: that memory was debased and impotent nostalgia, and not a propositive program for the country. In the absence of other referents, Ukrainian nationalism naturally made its way as the only consistent project, with a long political tradition, including its victimizing historical narrative that charged all the causes of the country's desperate situation on the Russian heritage, and with the EU completing the horizon of a geopolitical integration alternative for this frontier land. Given Moscow's limited appeal and despite the constitutionally proclaimed neutrality, this pro-Western horizon, this abandoning of one empire to embrace another, gained a broad sociological base among the middle strata of Kyiv and the west of the country, while the first aspect, that of militantly anti-Russian nation-building, provided the vanguard and shock cadres of the movement that would lead to the Maidan. In that Kyiv square, between November 2013 and February 2014, that terminal political crisis of the State, with its direct struggle between big capitalists, the deep social crisis, the pro-Western geopolitical aspiration and militant anti-Russian nationalism converged. A protest that initially had an undoubted substratum of spontaneous popular outrage was ultimately led by the only thing in the desperate Ukrainian political ecosystem that was not melancholy or decay.
As we know, Nazi-fascist groups formed the Maidan's shock force, battling with the Berkut and shedding their blood, while providing the space and, perhaps, the shooters themselves, for the massacre on February 20, 2014. Today internationally famous names such as Pravy Sektor or Azov were heard for the first time those days. The insurrection and armed seizure of power followed, as the Ukrainian state hit rock bottom. The events of the following weeks were fundamental, as they delineated the material constitution of the Maidan regime. This constitution is summarized in a single fundamental article: war against Russia. In the provisional government that emerged from the flames of the February insurrection, the key positions in the core of the state apparatus, those corresponding to the core of the state as a special group of armed men, were occupied by the Maidan fascists. Parubiy, founder and leader of Svoboda (former Social-National Party), moved from the head of the Maidan self-defense committee to the position of head of the National Security and Defense Council, formally in charge of protecting Ukraine's internal constitutional order and external sovereignty. The measures he took were decisive. The aforementioned Russian Spring would not be answered with riot control, as had happened with the Maidan, but with armored vehicles and aerial bombardment: at the end of April 2014 Parubiy decreed the Anti-Terrorist Operation and the deployment of the Army to deal with the resistance in the Donbas. A few days later, the ruthless act of terror in Odessa nipped in the bud any possible extension of this spring as a movement of civil disobedience. The militarization of the conflict and its escalation to the stage of open civil war were firmly established. It is true that Putin's imperialist reaction to the Maidan coup, with the capture of Crimea, favored these movements of the Banderites: as we have already stated, the clash between imperialisms manifested itself on the ground as a reactionary struggle between nationalisms, with its consequent feedback. But Parubiy did not stop there: energetically determined to carry the work through to the end, he established, under the cloak of national emergency and revolution, the purge of the state apparatuses. A process was initiated that has been extended over the last eight years with great success. The Ukrainian army officers, police commanders and SBU (intelligence services) cadres were cleansed of all those suspected of hostility to nationalism. The numerous expulsions were reinforced by a series of timely suicides. All this activity of national purification left the State machine, already historically very weak, a complete wreck. This severed the many existing ties with the Russian security apparatus and, at the same time, created a golden opportunity to readjust its composition and structure.
An expression of the bad situation for the state was the Ukrainian Army's own acknowledgement that, at the beginning of the Anti-Terrorist Operation, out of a nominal force of some 80,000 troops, it was only able to mobilize about 6,000, with a lot of rusty and unusable equipment. The Maidan regime's response was the formation of the National Guard, which institutionalized the numerous militia and paramilitary Banderite groups, which had multiplied throughout the country (especially in its western half) as the Maidan revolt intensified. These paramilitary groups, true heirs of the Freikorps, represented, like their historical predecessors, a mixture of reactionary, nationalist militant commitment and private military enterprise. The latter fitted very well with the Ukrainian tradition of direct political involvement of the capitalists, since many of these oligarchs dedicated themselves to founding and financing their own nationalist battalions. This burgeoning paramilitarism has been one of the key features of the Maidan regime: the State apparatus has been rebuilt around it, establishing a regime of terror in which, while parties were outlawed, television stations were closed down and Russian cultural works were banned, the trail of murders and exile among opponents has never ceased. In addition - and this is fundamental - these Freikorps made it possible to wage the civil war in the Donbas which, with growing credibility, could increasingly be presented as a war against Russia, in the heat of which all measures of forced Ukrainization were legitimized. As we were anticipating, this war, as premeditated as it was facilitated by the Russian imperialist response, became the real constitutional bond of the country. Around its military logic the new common sense of the regime was established (consecrating the hegemony of the Banderite narrative), the horizons of what was politically possible were delimited, the rearguard was disciplined and the country's energies that were not absorbed by its parasitic bourgeoisie, as voracious after Maidan as before it, were endowed with a certain purpose. Or perhaps more, since the Maidan effectively meant the expulsion of a faction of this class, represented by Yanukovych, whose spoils became the object of sharing; a plunder which, in itself, was another element of the new material constitution of the country. Let us add, finally, the insertion of this whole process in that facet we have already mentioned, the sharpening of the inter-imperialist struggle, with its new Atlanticist offensive impulse, and we will have a more complete picture of the situation.
Nothing that has happened subsequently has altered the foundations of the Maidan regime, settled in those crucial months of the spring and summer of 2014. Let the celebrated election of Zelensky as the country's president in 2019 serve as an example. The election of Zelensky, formally alien to the traditional oligarchy that, since independence, directly governed the affairs of Ukraine, and with a program of conciliation and compromise with the Donbas, expressed a genuine social dissatisfaction with the future of the country and its domination by the Maidan regime. However, on the contrary, what Zelensky has ended up symbolizing is the deep roots of this regime and the impossibility of its replacement through a simple parliamentary process (precisely for this reason we speak of regime, to refer to the deep core where the superficial swell of parliamentary swings never reaches). On the one hand, Zelensky was only formally outside that corrupt parasitic bourgeoisie. In reality, Zelensky's mentor was none other than Kolomoyskyi, one of the capitalists who had grown the most in the heat of the Maidan, having served as governor of Dnipro in 2014, where he had been the patron and promoter of the eponymous battalion (as well as having invested in others, such as Azov itself). Finally, on the other hand, the part of Zelensky's program that could threaten the Maidan regime the most, a compromise peace in the Donbas, was quickly aborted. In all fairness, it must be said that Zelensky made at least a symbolic gesture in that direction, which, true to his sense of comedy, was recorded by the cameras. Shortly after his election, Zelensky appeared on the Donbas front line to raise the possibility of enforcing his election program. The response, through Azov's representatives, was clear: that would be an unacceptable treason and would mean the march of the Banderite military units on Kyiv to give a good account of the traitors. Zelensky quickly forgot his electoral commitment and took the usual anti-Russian hard line. Nothing had changed and in 2019, just as in 2014, the Banderite Freikorps - some of which, like the famous Azov, had already reached the rank of effective and well-equipped NATO-standard military units - remained the guarantors of that permanent war against Russia, around which the Ukrainian nation has been sinisterly and successfully being built.
Having outlined this brief political sketch of the history of Ukrainian nationalism and its role in the Maidan revolt, it is time we comment on the characterization of Ukraine as a fascist state. In our opinion, this debate has more academic than political utility. From the Marxist point of view, the very historical weakness of the Ukrainian state hinders the consummation of the key feature of the fascist form of bourgeois dictatorship: the concentration of all power in a single faction of the bourgeois class, which in turn usually implies a certain institutional closure. However, there is no doubt that the whole development of the Ukrainian state since 2014 is along the lines of increasing fascistization, with more and more factions of the bourgeoisie expelled from the institutional game. Expressive of this were the very treason charges that Zelensky's government was pushing, shortly before the invasion, against Poroshenko, the first elected president of the Maidan regime, one of the country's great fortunes and a rival of Kolomoyskyi. Likewise, all that has been pointed out regarding paramilitarism, the hegemony of the Banderite tradition as an ideological pillar of the regime, the policy of forced Ukrainization, as well as the prominence of openly Nazi-fascist elements in the core of the State apparatus, goes in the same direction of fascistization. The Maidan Ukraine resembled, already before February this year, a huge pile of ruins arranged around an army (official and paramilitary), which absorbed the energies of the country and was also generously fed by the Atlanticist imperialism. However, the very ruinous nature of the social and political structure as a whole seemed to leave numerous fissures that the regime was unable to close. The latest massive wave of illegalization of political organizations, carried out after the Russian invasion, shows that, at least before February 2022, the fascist closure had not yet been fully consummated. Since then, murders, disappearances and lynchings, with trees and lampposts playing the role of makeshift pillories, signal that a new wave of terror has swept over Ukrainian society.
As we have been outlining (and it cannot be otherwise), the reality of the war in Ukraine is tremendously complex and multilateral, dialectically intertwined through multiple contradictions. However, this cannot be an alibi for an academic relativism about the "impossibility of grasping" this reality. In spite of this complexity, every reality has an encompassing foundation, a main contradiction, an aspect that helps explain more and better this reality as a whole. As we have seen, the decisive influence that the Banderite elements, of undoubted and deep Nazi-fascist connections, certainly have in the Maidan Ukraine is not mere Russian propaganda. Likewise, Russia is and acts as an imperialist power, with open contempt for the national character of Ukraine, and shows itself insensitive and ruthless towards the movements and yearnings of the Ukrainian masses, having resorted to military invasion in order to secure its strategic position. However, despite all this, none of what is happening and the way it is happening is explained primarily by these reasons. Russia has not invaded Ukraine out of an anti-fascist zeal, but motivated by its strategic competition with the United States. Ukrainian nationalism has certainly sealed an anti-Russian alliance with NATO, yet what drives Moscow is not the fascist character of Banderism, but precisely that geopolitical alliance. The Kremlin was willing, through the Minsk Agreements, to let most of Ukraine be left at the mercy of the Banderites as long as it guaranteed the neutral position of the country. Likewise, although the Russian invasion has fed back to the Banderites, giving them unprecedented legitimacy and strengthening their exclusivist nation-building project (one of whose founding fathers will be, paradoxically, Putin), little of it has anything to do with Ukraine's sovereignty and independence. The Ukrainian resistance has its basis not in the masses of the country itself, but in the Maidan regime's link to Atlanticist imperialism. It is the military and financial support of this imperialism that makes it possible to conduct the war in the form in which the Ukrainians are effectively implementing it and what provides the concrete expectations they can harbor regarding its outcome. The luster that Ukrainian sovereignty has today is shown when U.S. officials themselves boast provocatively about how they are the ones who give permission for escalatory Ukrainian actions (e.g., attacks inside the territory of the Russian Federation) or recognize Ukraine's proxy character. In short, neither "anti-fascist struggle" nor "national resistance", despite the fact that secondary aspects of reality may more or less approximate such definitions, are the reason for what is happening today in Ukraine (which is therefore equivalent to saying that they are politically false characterizations), but rather, as we have been insisting, the category that best defines and most encompasses the set of factors that shape the war which nowadays shatters Ukrainian territory is none other, despite all the mystifications, than that of imperialist war.
The recognition of this fact is the foundation of any vanguard position and of any further political development of said position. Without underlining this fact, there is no possible proletarian internationalism, nor is there any universal strategic horizon for the independent development of the WPR. Without recognizing the equally rapacious, reactionary and imperialist character of all the contenders in the struggle, it is impossible to build any internationalist trust between peoples. Without denouncing the imperialist war machine of Moscow, any possible link with the Russian proletariat and vanguard, which suffer the oppression of the Russian capitalist regime, is broken, and at the same time the trust with the Ukrainian people, subjected to the crossfire of terror of Russian missiles and to Banderite terror, is broken. While the Russian invasion feeds back into Ukrainian fascist gangs, nothing would weaken them more than the collapse of the Putinist military machine at the hands of the revolutionary action of the Russian masses themselves. However improbable this may be in the present conflict, for the proletarian vanguard there can be no path of historical development below that horizon. In the same sense, to insinuate that Banderism may be leading an "anti-imperialist people's war", with NATO contributing to such a commendable enterprise, supposes another monstrous breach of internationalist trust between peoples and, moreover, in the case of the vanguard detachments located in the countries within the imperialist Atlanticist bloc, it supposes the opprobrious recognition of their own mendacity and impotence, if not worse things. Of course, and equally, the horizon of the revolutionary proletariat would aim at the paralysis of the imperialist expansion plans of Atlanticism and the overthrow of the Maidan regime by the revolutionary action of the Ukrainian masses themselves.
Having established this basis, which connects with the General Line of the WPR, the consistent development of internationalism as a Political Line demands from the vanguard a concretion that takes into account the specific framework in which each one of its detachments operates. Indeed, as Lenin pointed out, the embodiment of the internationalist policy cannot be indifferent to the type of country in which we find ourselves (imperialist, oppressor or oppressed) and the concrete aspects that the proletarian vanguard must emphasize in each case cannot therefore be the same. The same applies to the situation of the vanguard detachments with respect to each of the imperialist blocs in conflict. It is the proletariat within each of the imperialist blocs that bears the main responsibility for weakening, halting and, if possible, destroying "its own" imperialist war machine. Thus, having established the brotherhood of united and complementary work with respect to the revolutionaries who live in the "enemy" imperialist bloc -without the faintest sign about our complicity with respect to the reactionary State that oppresses them there-, it is necessary to develop the political line which, in the case of the Movement for Reconstitution in Spain, must accentuate the consistent opposition to the Atlanticist war machine and its effort to extend and escalate the imperialist war in course.
The moment is serious: there is a real possibility of this extension and escalation of the war to a direct and open clash between imperialist nuclear powers. The Marxist-Leninist vanguard faces the contradiction between the relatively low degree of development of the process of reconstitution of communism and the high probability of a series of catastrophes in the short term. These range from the not inconsiderable probability of such an open war to the certain impoverishment and proletarianization of a new and broad stratum of the continental labor aristocracy and petty bourgeoisie as a result of the economic war already underway and the capitalist crisis, through consequences of global scope (for example, those related to the general increase in the price of food products). The Marxist-Leninist vanguard must take into account its degree of development and its relationship with the perspective which is the only horizon at the height of the historical experience of the WPR: the transformation of imperialist war into revolutionary civil war. The horizon of the revolutionary proletariat cannot be the demand for the "withdrawal of military bases" or any other demanding petition to the authorities, but revolutionary defeatism: that is to say, that the imperialist war results in the defeat of "our" states and that this may contribute to the development of the WPR. Of course, there is no longer any room for the illusion, historically exhausted, about the Proletarian Revolution breaking through spontaneously, as a product of the imperialist collapse, without taking into account the state of conscious development of the proletarian class and its vanguard: there is no longer any revolutionary civil war that can be conceived by a Marxist as anything other than a People's War led by the Communist Party. Therefore, rejecting any kind of adventurism, the Marxist-Leninist vanguard must, in this case, focus its attention on the type of disposition that can best favor its development and the nonnegotiable preservation of the horizon of the WPR, in a context that will surely be punctuated by catastrophes of all kinds, as well as by the general hardening of the social and political conditions, with the consequent and even greater increase of the vigilance and repression coming from the imperialist states. In short, the Marxist-Leninist vanguard must pay attention to the deep shifts that may take place in the correlation between classes in order to know how to apply and promote the Reconstitution Plan under the circumstances that may open up from now on.
Finally, it may be worthwhile to stress once again the prospects opened up by the possibility of open warfare between imperialist powers with large nuclear arsenals. Of course, we are not saying that nuclear war is the most likely thing to happen - taking into account that any possibility that it could happen is already too big - but that never in the past has this risk been as big as it is now. Beyond all the tension and rhetoric, certain rules of the game were established during the old Cold War and both superpowers ended up respecting each other's basic spheres of influence. This was profoundly reactionary, but it also gave a certain stability and predictability to the international system. Today we are living through an uncertain and unstable period of recomposition of the imperialist chessboard, marked precisely by the total lack of consensus over the rules of the game among the imperialists and of recognition of the rival's zones of influence, particularly on the part of U.S. imperialism, which seems determined to take advantage of its great military superiority, inherited from the unipolar period, to mark the limits of its rivals' growth (if not to directly suffocate them), whether in Ukraine or in Taiwan. As we have noted, up until now nuclear arsenals have most certainly prevented the fighting in Ukraine from escalating into open warfare between Russia and NATO. However, the tension continues to grow and there is more and more talk (and, therefore, trivialization and normalization) of the proximity of the effective use of atomic weapons, with all the sinister uncertainties that this would entail. The revolutionary proletariat, as we have stated, must be aware of the gravity of the situation, but it must also affirm that the nuclear threat cannot stop the course of history. Precisely, the proletarian position in this regard was established by Mao, when he stated that "the Chinese people cannot be cowed by the atom bomb". This does not mean, as the Soviet revisionists demagogically claimed at the time, that Mao was an adventurer unaware of the catastrophic effects of a nuclear war, but precisely that this atomic threat could not stop historical progress, restricting the development of the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat. On the contrary, subjecting this struggle to that threat means condemning humanity to live permanently under the sword of Damocles of nuclear annihilation. It is possible that imperialist "cannibalism" will not push the button during this crisis, as it did not push it during the last Cold War. But each crisis that passes without the button being pushed causes the cannibals to become more reckless and arrogant, so that with each new stage of the imperialist competition, the possibility of human civilization's survival diminishes. That is why the threat of the Bomb cannot lead to conciliation with imperialism, but on the contrary, to redouble the revolutionary commitment to its overthrow, which is, more and more, a historical race against the clock to prevent imperialist barbarism from turning the planet into a radioactive wasteland.