The War in Ukraine and America

By Peter McLaren

From the moment the first shots were fired by Russian soldiers in their invasion of Ukraine, Peter McLaren began writing about what has turned out to be the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II. Putin's invasion caused McLaren to think about his father, a World War II veteran who served in the Roy

• Language: English
• Publisher: DIO Press Inc
• Release date: Jul 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781645042747

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Peter McLaren and Ernesto Cardenal (Caracas Venezuela, c. 2005)

We support the Ukrainian people in their fight against Russian imperialist adventurism and Russia’s flagrant violation of international law and the UN Charter. In his recent article in New Politics, Dan La Botz affirms the importance that Marx placed on supporting the right of countries to struggle for self-determination and independence. Marx affirmed this principle in his support for Poland in its various struggles with Prussia, Austria and Russia. Marx supported the right of Irish independence from the British Empire. He famously called upon British workers to support Irish independence. He supported the struggle for socialism in France and fervently backed the Paris Commune in 1871. During the U.S. Civil War, Marx convinced the International to support the United States’ blockade of Confederate ports to keep cotton from being shipped to England’s textile mills. He also condemned slavery, even writing to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln to that effect. Marx was a strong critic of Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe. Yes, at one point Marx considered the spread of capitalism to Asia, Africa, and Latin America to be a good thing, because, as La Botz notes, it might make possible the development of more productive capitalist economies that could create the abundance that is necessary to establish socialism. But later Marx became a strong opponent of European imperialism, identifying with the struggles of the colonial people. So yes, it is in the spirit of Marx’s world-historical support for national sovereignty and self-determination that we can unhesitatingly support the people of Ukraine in their resistance to the Russian invasion of their homeland.

As Schulman and La Botz maintain in their important article against campism in Socialist Forum, socialists that include Karl Marx, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg and C.L.R. James had always foregrounded that workers in each country should support those in another in their struggles for democracy and social justice. It is also in the spirit of international working class solidarity and democratic socialist internationalism that we reject the inverted nationalism of the enemy of my enemy is my friend and support Ukraine against Russian imperialist aggression.

We can acknowledge the wariness sown in the Russian state after NATO’s dangerous incursion into Eastern Europe and the Baltics since 1991, in clear violation of a commitment given to Russia’s leaders as the Soviet Union was crumbling into a dark vortex of disassembly. This incursion on the part of NATO was a great tragedy and a crime. But was there not also a violation of trust sown in Ukraine after Yeltsin signed the Budapest Memorandum in ١٩٩٤ (along with the US and Britain) but failed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity in return for Ukraine’s agreement to give up its nuclear arsenal, at that time the third-largest in the world? By ١٩٩٦, Ukraine became one of the only countries in the world to relinquish its nuclear weapons. So, is it not accurate to describe Russia’s imposed annexation of Crimea and menacing threats against eastern Ukraine as acts of imperial aggression on the part of a fascist leader enticed by the withering siren song of neo-Stalinism?

We need to be clear that this war was not unprovoked. It was provoked. Ukraine has been a de facto NATO ally for years, having been trained by the US (and other NATO allies) for a considerable time. The relationship between the US and Ukraine did indeed threaten Russian security. Putin is not simply a crazed psychopath. But to say the war was provoked does not mean the war is justified. It clearly is not. And it does not mean that Putin does not have imperial ambitions. In my estimation, he does. We, of course, ought to hear many sides of the story. We need to hear from Consortium News and other media outlets that have been discredited by the mainstream. To shut them down is no way to move ahead with a critical approach to understanding the causes of the war. And there are causes to this war. That said, I clearly support Ukraine in its right to defend itself. This war could have been stopped before it began. Whether it was the US who prevented the war from being settled peacefully is a debate that will linger for decades. And we need to bring all our efforts to bear on finding a peaceful settlement. I raise many questions in this book, as a way to provoke debate, but it is clear that I support Ukraine’s battle for sovereignty. I do not believe Putin’s invasion is simply for defensive purposes. This book goes to great lengths in criticizing Putin’s professed reasons for invading Ukraine. But is the US partly responsible for driving Putin into war with Ukraine? There is no doubt about that.

Is Putin’s goal to reclaim parts of the lost Soviet Union by invoking in speeches the Great Patriotic War against the German Reich, or does he want to travel deeper into historical time beyond the founding of Moscow and reconstitute the Russian Empire by taking back what he believes to be Russian land and setting up independent fiefdoms loyal to Russia such as the Russian-controlled Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples Republics? Vladimir Putin, ruler of Eurasia! That certainly has a ring to it. Sounds like the kind of nationalism that comes from a long history of Tsarist rule, doesn’t it? It would be inconceivable for Putin to try to integrate Eurasia into its sphere of influence without Ukraine because of the importance of the city of Kyiv to Russian nationalist mythology. Russia already has the Belarusians under its iron thumb but needs Ukraine turned into a federalized state in order to firm up the idea of Russia as a unity of three eastern Slavic peoples. Does this former KGB Slavophile propped up behind a cartoonish white-topped oval table made from a single 20 foot-long sheet of beech wood loathe Ukrainian sovereignty to the extent that he is willing to engage in a decades-long war of attrition in order to amalgamate this pan-Slavic empire? Putin is searching for his legacy; that much is clear. Would a Russian victory invigorate autocrats and fascist leaders, including Donald Trump, who decry liberalism and celebrate the persistent downturn of Western democracy, which they see as ineffectual and weak?

We don’t yet know the answer to these questions, but I am leaning towards a ‘yes’ with regard to the last question. Should Ukraine have agreed to a ‘non-bloc’ status? Even if it meant becoming a puppet regime of Russia? Should Ukraine have willingly withdrawn from the EU Association Agreement and DCFTA (Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement)? Should Ukraine have happily joined the Eurasian Economic Union? The Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity gave us the answer to those questions.

Sadly, however, some US leftists are arguing that Maidan was a US coup carried out by the US against a democratically elected government. I disagree and concur with Žižek that Maidan was an authentic popular revolt. Žižek writes:

During the uprising, Maidan became a huge protest camp, occupied by thousands of demonstrators and protected by makeshift barricades. It had kitchens, first-aid posts, and broadcasting facilities, as well as stages for speeches, lectures, debates, and performances. It was the furthest thing from a Nazi putsch that one can imagine. Indeed, the events in Maidan were of a piece with the Arab Spring and similar uprisings in Hong Kong, Istanbul, and Belarus. While the Belarusian protests of 2020-21 were brutally crushed, the demonstrators can be reproached only for being too naive in their pro-Europeanism; they ignored the divisions and antagonisms that cut across Europe today.

By contrast, the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol most certainly was not an American Maidan. There is growing evidence to show that it was largely orchestrated ahead of time, and that Trump – the most powerful man in the country – more or less knew what was in store for that day. Still, immediately following the insurrection, before all the details were known, some of my leftist friends channeled a sense of loss. The wrong people are taking over the seat of power, they lamented. We should be doing it!

More questions arise: Will Western Ukraine become the site of Ukraine’s government-in-exile? It may well turn out to be the case. Very likely, Putin will not try to control western Ukraine, where the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) fought against the Soviet Union until the early ١٩٥٠s. But will US-backed Ukrainian partisans be fighting Russian forces in a long, protracted civil war? And will the quest for democracy in Ukraine be lost forever? Will Ukraine become known more for its Azov Battalion than for its courageous pro-democracy struggle, as it fights a guerrilla war that could last for decades or even longer? For scholars of liberation theology, these are not easy questions. I’ve been trying to integrate liberation theology into the field revolutionary critical pedagogy for some years now.

Liberation Theology became a powerful movement for social justice within the Catholic Church in the 1970s and 1980s, brushing against the grain of traditional Catholic catechesis. For decades the Catholic Church had been extremely averse to social justice movements involving members of its ecclesiastic ranks, often associating such movements with communism. This was made clear as early as the anti-Communist encyclical, Divini Redemptoris, written by Pope Pius XI in 1937 that formalized the Vatican’s inevitable opposition against Left-Wing social movements, such as Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement (ironically, Dorothy Day has recently been named ‘Servant of God’ by the Vatican and seems destined for sainthood). Numerous and disparate expositions have revealed Liberation Theology to be, first and foremost, a call to Christians and members of other religious traditions to serve the world’s poor and beleaguered populations even if that meant that they remain allied to Leftist causes.

The late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s had been especially brutal years for campesinos, workers, activists, teachers, and revolutionaries throughout Latin America, especially in the Southern Cone. The industrial developmental model that had been undertaken in Latin America since the 1950s was dependent upon richer nations and utilized a form of import substitution that gave advantages to the middle classes and some sectors of the urban proletariat but was overwhelmingly devastating to the peasantry. These countries—which were leaning populist politically—were not so much underdeveloped as they were overexploited by the industrial powerhouses of North America and European imperialist regimes. This unequal development that greatly disadvantaged the Latin American countries of the peripheral and so-called Third World contributed mightily to the overabundance that flowed into the coffers of the rich capitalist regimes of the centre and so-called First World. Before the military regime came to power in 1970s El Salvador, several Jesuits there had begun rethinking and repivoting their work in a concerted attempt to embrace fully the ‘preferential option for the poor’ that emerged from the conference in Medellín, Colombia, and to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and heart-to-heart with the poor and powerless campesinos. They understood this to mean actively supporting the rights of campesinos and civilian movements promoting social, economic, and political reform. Over time, liberation theologians began to call for ‘the reorganization of social, governmental, and economic structures so that the poor are not merely cared for, but brought into the fullness of human flourishing.’ Catholic Christology, ecclesiology and spirituality shifted prominently towards a pastoral concern for those who live in the countries of the periphery. Paulo Freire, a Catholic, was called upon to make contributions to the development of liberation theology. And protestant theologians such as Emilio Castro, Julio de Santa Ana, Rubem Alves, and José Míguez Bonino made significant contributions to the theology of liberation.

The progressive ideas of the Jesuits had greatly influenced meetings of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, such as the idea that God identifies with the oppressed and that Christians should not only actively fight the oppression of the poor and powerless but also seek to create a society where economic exploitation and inequality cease to exist. According to supporters of Liberation Theology, the Bible should be experienced from the perspective of the poor, and the Catholic Church should support those who are denied their rights as human beings. The late Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, a self-declared Christian and supporter of Liberation Theology, went so far as to ask Pope Benedict to apologize on behalf of the Catholic Church for supporting the genocide of indigenous peoples in Latin America during the colonial era during which time the Church forced indigenous peoples to become Christians or be tortured or killed. Chavez also ‘accused the Vatican’s former representative in Venezuela, Cardinal Rosalio Castillo Lara, of allying himself with the country’s rancid oligarchy.’ Memorably, Chávez suggested that priests such as Castillo Lara ought to subject themselves to an exorcism because ‘the devil has snuck into their clerical robes.’

Liberation Theology’s critique of the Catholic Church establishment led to supporters of Liberation Theology becoming the target of ceaseless opprobrium by the establishment forces within the Vatican. Travelling along the interminable road of critical inquiry with its reservoir of dialectical insights, revolutionary ruptures and ‘untested feasibilities’ (Freire’s term) was not a path esteemed by the Church nor the state oligarchs that it served. Recently, Eduardo Campos Lima (2022) interviewed several liberation theologians about their attitudes towards the war in Ukraine for America: The Jesuit Review. What follows are some of the comments.

Theologian Father Codina, S.J., believes that dialogue could have solved this problem years ago and sees the conflict as having economic motivations at its base. Unsurprisingly Father Codina and other theologians denounced the invasion by Russia but were unwilling to place the blame solely on Putin. Codina remarked: ‘The only ones who have something to gain are the gun manufacturers.’

Feminist theologian Sister Gebara (who had once been silenced by the Vatican because of her views on abortion) emphasized that this war is not a Hollywood drama and viewed the war as a ‘male-centred spectacle of death’ that has no heroic warriors. She continued: ‘The real rescuers are the women, who have been taking care of the elderly people and the children. Such a domestic salvation—the fact that women are improvising small places of care, schools for the refugees’ children, and are taking care of the collective survival—does not seem to attract the attention of the destroyers of lives who are engaging in war.’ The attempt to transform some of them into saviours and some into sinners is an effort to portray the war as a Hollywoodian drama. Sister Gebara described the war in Ukraine as ‘a reproduction of all wars that we daily face in poor neighbourhoods and favelas that do not appear on TV.’

Father Codina remarked on the differences in the way that politicians and the media treat the war in Ukraine in contrast to the wars in Africa and the Middle East. He said: ‘I see a great disproportion in the political, economic and media reaction to [Ukraine] and to the wars in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, African countries, Israel’s aggressiveness against Palestine, etc. Why is Switzerland not freezing the assets of other dictators?’

Jorge Costadoat, S.J., a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, describes the invasion of Ukraine as a violation of international law, ‘something as serious as the 2003 attacks of the United States against Iraq. Everybody now demonizes Putin, but the United States did the same thing back then. […] To simply condemn Putin as if he were a devil will not bring any solution.’ In Father Costadoat’s view, the current conflict is a consequence of major geopolitical shifts emerging out of the conclusion of the Cold War that went unresolved for too long: ‘The end of the Cold War generated a complex geopolitical situation,’ he said. ‘The victorious bloc should have established the necessary order since then, and I do not know that it did so.’

The German-born theologian Paulo Suess, a major liberation theology thinker in Brazil, specializing in missiology, who has spent decades working with Indigenous groups, offered a practical response to the war, including a rethinking of Ukraine’s desire to join NATO: ‘Heroism will lead to more deaths. How many lives can be spared if both parties give in and negotiate…. They have to negotiate with Putin, despite all problems and risks involved, to save lives.’

The Latin American left has been fighting US imperialist assaults on their countries, but this became especially deadly during the 1970s and 1980s, and leftists today are rightly suspicious of US geopolitical motivations in Ukraine and elsewhere. But Francisco Borba Ribeiro Neto, the director of the Pontifical Catholic University’s Faith and Culture Centre, believes that liberation theologians today are not very willing to criticize Putin because liberation theologians were historically supportive of communist dictatorships (a point that I feel is exaggerated, since guerrilla movements, while often supportive of communism, were not supportive of dictatorships—since that was what they were fighting—dictatorships!). Father Nieto notes: ‘For them, dictators were not responsible for their atrocities; [the atrocities] were, in fact, the result of the pressure exerted by Western democracies and counter-revolutionary forces against the implementation of socialism. It is the same logic.’ (I would rather put it this way—liberation theologians were fighting Latin American dictatorships who were supported by the US and whose death squads were often trained in the US—in Fort Benning, Georgia, to be precise).

Father Nieto claims that the Brazilian Catholic Church does not support Putin and that they are mostly critical of the West because of its history of colonization in Brazil. He explains: ‘The hegemonic position among Catholics in Brazil is the same as Pope Francis, who considers the war a human failure and blames Putin for the invasion, even if the act of blaming him is not always verbalized. In a way, Putin is not condemned more often by the Brazilian Catholics simply because his guilt is considered obvious.’

The Korean-born Catholic theologian Jung Mo Sung, a religious studies professor at the Methodist University of São Paulo and a liberation theology thinker, believes that it is inadvisable to take sides: ‘I am against Putin’s actions the same way I am against NATO’s move. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a condemnable act, and NATO’s intention of encircling Russia is also condemnable. There are no innocents [among political leaders] in a situation like that,’ he said. ‘Equally, there is no devil either. When you demonize your opponent, you are assuming that war is a necessity, that killing is a necessity. […] I am against Putin’s actions the same way I am against NATO’s move. […] The Western thinking is too hasty. Putin has been preparing his move for years. He wants to recuperate ‘Mother Russia.’ A wild beast, like a wolf or a bear, should not be cornered because it gets even more ferocious. NATO’s expansion in the region was a form of cornering Russia. […] In Latin America, colonization has been the major element of our formation. That is why we tend to be critical of the West.’

In stark contrast to the Trump-worshipping ranks of pro-Putin cheerleaders found among the evangelical community in the US, liberation theologians today express a viewpoint that is much more nuanced and critical—and dialectical. The Catholic Church has a role to play in the conflict and shouldn’t take a backseat role. It must side with the oppressed. And, in doing so, it would do well to listen to its liberation theologians. I am old enough to remember my father talking about his visit to the Vatican in the last days of the Second World War (he was a member of the Royal Canadian Engineers in the Canadian army who fought the Nazis in various locations in Italy and the Netherlands). I was a teenager at the time and wondered why I was attending an Anglican Church when my father was raised Presbyterian, and my mother was raised a devout Catholic. Later I learned that the Catholic Church had just gone through a difficult time during the Second World War, yes, but it had placated the Nazis, and even helped some of them escape to Latin America. In fact, many Nazis were welcomed into German communities that had settled in Latin America prior to WWII. Do the names Adolf Eichmann, Joséf Mengele, Walter Rauff, Franz Stangl, Joséf Schwammberger, Erich Priebke, and Gerhard Bohne sound familiar?

Pius XII’s legacy is still being debated. But we can celebrate the actions of priests such as Saint Óscar Arnulfo Romero, who courageously stood by his people as Auxiliary Bishop of San Salvador and risked his life in calling for an end to the violence perpetrated by the government of El Salvador, whose weapons of death (both ideological and material) were supplied by the United States (many death squad members were trained in Fort Benning, Georgia). So powerful was Romero’s voice that he was gunned down by an assassin while saying Mass. For those who may look to liberation theology for inspiration, I recommend reading the works of six Jesuits murdered by the Salvadoran Army on November 16, 1989, gunned down on the campus of Central American University, San Salvador, El Salvador, along with two others, the caretaker’s wife and daughter. They are:

Ignacio Ellacuría Beascoechea, S.J., the rector of the university;

Ignacio Martín-Baró, S.J., vice-rector of the university, a leading expert on Salvadoran public opinion;

Segundo Montes, S.J., dean of the department of social sciences;

Juan Ramón Moreno, S.J.;

Joaquín López y López, S.J.;

Amando López, S.J.;

Elba Ramos, their housekeeper; and

Celina Ramos, her sixteen-year-old daughter.

As democracy falters and as we reel from the effects of state capitalist opprobrium, we need not countenance rage and despair, plunge ourselves into dark cesspools of reactionary politics or remain content with neo-Scholastic journeys into abstraction that remove the flesh and blood from our veins, leaving us in a quagmire of dogmatic delineations and interpolations in which faith adheres to our shirt tails like an errant piece of scotch tape, or is fastened like glue to the soles of our shoes, not to the souls of our political conscience. We need a shift in the way we envision ourselves. The urban and rural poor continue to be under the heel of capitalist oligarchs. This must end. We must start a new trajectory in our relationship to the otherworldly that does not forfeit social justice, that does not stipulate a motivated amnesia towards the history of oppression inflicted upon the poor and powerless. We can read The Gospel in Solentiname along with our sweet memories of Ernesto Cardenal, poet and revolutionary who founded a community of peasants, poets and painters in 1966 that personified through artistic endeavour a trenchant opposition to fascism. Cardenal was suspended by the Catholic Church for more than three decades because of his political activism.

In our spiritual pursuits, we must not leave this world. Historical consciousness will not grant us a reprieve from our moral responsibilities in relation to the here and now. How we address the war in Ukraine may well serve as a referendum on how critical pedagogy is understood in the future. We can do this without a self-righteous arrogance that we are right. We can approach the struggles of our time by asking questions, by problem-posing pedagogies taught to us in the spirit of ‘armed love’ bequeathed to us by Paulo Freire, our beloved patron of Brazilian education.

May peace be with you.

Notes

Some parts of this essay are taken from McLaren, P. (2022). Liberation theology. In A. Maisuria (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education (pp. 373–386). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004505612_023.

Ukranian-born Marxist humanist, Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–1987)

In his forceful article in the April issue of New Politics, Michael Karadjis analyzes Putin’s desire for a Russian leadership of Eurasia that, at the very minimum, requires Russian-led unity of the three ‘core’ ex-Soviet states (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus), and, as a minimum, control of the north coast of the Black Sea. He notes that Russia’s nationalist-ideological objectives do not include sharing the Black Sea, teeming with hydrocarbons, with Ukraine. Besides, Russia has an economic, political, military-gendarme, ‘credibility’ to protect. Karadjis writes that a revanchist Russian Empire, however, drunk on past glory, and its outsized role as the world’s second largest military power, envisages itself as the leader, the centre, of Eurasia. Therefore, asserting its military superiority was important to its credibility; it wasn’t going to allow a third world country like Ukraine to demonstrate any independence from the Fatherland.. I have forcefully supported Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia’s fully-fledged mass-casualty invasion (it’s not an ‘operation’), stage-managed by its ethnonationalist and imperialist leader, ex-KGB agent and billionaire, Vladimir Putin. I have asserted, hammer and tongs, that Ukraine does not want to become one of China’s most popular client states but wants its future to be contemporaneous with that of Europe. Ukrainians don’t want their subjectivities to be spawned out of the ill-favoured dogmatist culture of neo-Stalinism (where Ukrainians are stripped of their identity and told they are really Russians and that their country does not actually exist), nor do they wish to be absorbed into Putin’s pretence of Russian traditionalism, as epitomised by the philosophy of an Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin or, indeed, Steven Bannon.

Putin’s geopolitical ambitions can be summarised by the words of Paul Mason: ‘to disorganise the West: split NATO, split the EU, split the populations of Western democracies, repudiate all international treaty obligations so that in place of a global order there is a three-player power game between Russia, China and the US (where every four years Putin gets to choose the US president).’ Ukraine’s entire centuries-long independence struggle has been intensified by a streak of Putin’s paranoia since he senses it to be part of a foreign plot driven by calculating Western imperialists seeking to sabotage Mother Russia.

I have condemned Russia’s increasingly indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas that have resulted in a wave of refugees fleeing the fighting and traumatised those left behind, who have been tasked with dragging from the rubble disfigured and dismembered bodies, their melted and gelatinous flesh reminiscent of the horrors of World War II. Whether or not years of Kremlin propaganda have set the stage for atrocities on a scale not witnessed in Europe since the days of Stalin and Hitler remains to be seen. Yes, I have castigated the United States and NATO for their double standards and for NATO moving eastward after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, yes, I have characterised this war as a US proxy war , where the U.S. benefits from a weakening of Russia without having to directly engage in combat. While I criticize the U.S. and NATO for their culpability in this war, in making the war more likely to happen, in no way is it meant to serve as an apologia for the criminal invasion of Ukraine by Putin. Early in the conflict it was a Russian shadow war, with Russia feeding separatists sophisticated weapons, such as an SA-11 capable of striking a fast-moving jet liner seven miles in the sky.

But this conflict is being waged as a defensive war on the part of Ukraine. It is also a hybrid war. One feature of hybrid warfare is that its absence of direct armed conflict makes it difficult to discern whether or not you are even in a theatre of war because it does not have to involve lethal kinetic force. In a hybrid war, ‘kinetic’ warfare is combined with ‘non-kinetic’ warfare (i.e., electronic and electromagnetic warfare, information technology as warfare, psychological warfare, disinformation, exploiting ongoing political debates, economic and policy bribery). To claim that Putin merely wants to protect Mother Russia and save Ukraine from itself by eradicating all the Nazis goose-stepping in union along the boulevards to the tune of ‘Erika’ and trudging through the fields of sunflower and maize is a Potemkin village justification for an imperialist invasion. Yes, there are some neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine, just as there are in the United States and Europe, and this fact is worthy of condemnation. Nobody denies that. And, true, Zelensky is a neoliberal politician who has worked with Ukrainian oligarchs. But bourgeois democracies, as flawed as they are, are better than no democracies. My support for Ukraine’s anarchist/Antifa units, its pro-democracy volunteers, trade unionists and socialists have been duly noted. Ukraine’s pro-democracy movements and those in former Soviet territory terrify Putin. They threaten his hold on totalitarian power. A bevy of self-professed Marxists of various stripes, with more than an air of certainty about them, have, after canvassing some of my work, asked: How can you be a Marxist and not support Putin? Is it because you believe Marx was a humanist? He may have been, they exclaim, but only as a young man. It is important not to forget the extent to which propaganda plays a central role in this war.

Humanism, which has various iterations, is centred on a common principle, human value. Human value, as used by Marx, was not a term he saw as a bourgeois expression but played a role in his critique of political economy that included feudalism and capitalism. Yes, there were some forms of humanism that Marx criticised, but, because Marx recognised man as a social being, the essence of Marx’s work was to oppose all those social relations and forces that dehumanised individuals and groups, including women, the LGBTQ community and people of colour. Seamus Connolly writes:

On the Left, today, many look askance at humanism. They ridicule it, lambast it and castigate it. And, in large swathes, they outlaw it and anyone who wishes to speak of it, neglecting in the process the diverse histories and multifarious traditions of humanism as living systems of thought and practice. Humanism has been many things, it is true: a fig-leaf justification for colonialism; a bourgeois denial of class politics; the belief in an abstract ‘Man’ that squats outside of the world and that denies women, people of colour, lesbians, gays, intersex and disabled peoples the agency and affirmation of their particularity. But humanism has also been the very basis of the attacks on these abominations: from Marx to Dunayevskaya, Césaire to Fanon, Fromm to Kosík, and more. So, what, then, is humanism, considered in relation to Marxism, and why do we profess it?

It’s important to acknowledge that liberal humanism is different from bourgeois humanism is different from Marxist humanism. But human value is central to all such humanisms. And, as Connolly correctly notes, such value is extended to non-human animals and the environment. Marx’s humanism is famously identified with his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of ١٨٤٤, which forms the basis of the philosophy and practice of Marxist-Humanism. Connolly writes:

In seeking to demystify the alienation and fetishism of capitalist life, Marx raised the flag of human value as opposed to value in the sense of exchange value, that is to say, value in its economic sense. Through his analysis of value in political economy – which despite what is claimed by many Marxists today, is clearly inaugurated in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts – Marx unmasks the inversion whereby human value is subsumed by the pursuit of economic value that dictates the labour process as a whole. Under capitalism, as Marx tells us in the Grundrisse, ‘[t]he social character of activities, as well as the social form of the product, and the share of individuals in production … appears as something alien and objective.’ In Capital, too, it is clear that Marx is concerned with unmasking the inversion of subject and object: the objectification of human capacity in alienated labour that denies the need for universality and also for the free association of that labour.

Marx’s concern with social being is intimately bound up with the struggle for freedom. Connolly identifies Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Giorgio Agamben with today’s cadres of anti-humanist thinkers. What is most striking in this context is the work of Althusser, which, as Connolly writes, ‘shoehorns Marx’s project into a markedly objectivist science of history in which individuals are reduced to mere supports (Träger) in the division of labour in the different levels of the structure. This fantastic corruption of Marx, in which history is rendered as a process without a subject, reduces the subjectivity of individuals (all individuals) to that which is constructed in ideology: which is to say, hardly a subjectivity at all!’

This is at variance with Marx’s emphasis on the self-activity of the proletariat – the ‘revolutionary compulsions’ that are activated in the struggle for freedom. Alyssa Adamson describes the importance of Raya Dunayevskaya’s Hegelian-Marxist framework (which was the source of her critique of both Stalinism and Maoism) in countering Althusser’s anti-humanist portrayal of Marx:

Contra anti-humanist Louis Althusser, who popularised the idea of a fundamental epistemological break within Marx’s oeuvre between the young humanist Marx of the 1844 manuscripts and the Marx of Capital, Dunayevskaya reads Marx’s theory of alienation as the foundation of his ruthless critique of everything existing through the totality of his works. As she writes in Marxism and Freedom, ‘Marx’s primary theory is a theory of what he first called ‘alienated labour’ then ‘abstract’ or ‘value-producing’ labour. Capitalism begins when the capacity to labor becomes a commodity.… Hence, it is more correct to call the Marxist theory of capital not a labour theory of value, but a value theory of labour.

Central to the functioning of a philosophy of praxis is an emphasis on human agency, subjectivity and the unity of idealism and materialism in relation to the contextual specificity of the political forces at play in any particular place and at any particular historical moment since, as Dunayevskaya points out, humanists need to be able to ‘rise to the challenge of the times.’ Marxist humanists are concerned with enlarging our human capacity to understand the larger world-historical struggles of the times and participate in them, steered by the dialectical movement of theory and practice and the transcendence of mental and manual labour. That is the context in which we need to frame the current war in Ukraine: how can the struggle against Russian tyranny be fervidly animated by a vision of freedom and guided (horizontally) by a philosophy of praxis exemplified by the writings of Marx, a philosophy forged in the crucible of everyday struggle?

What motivates the ‘masses in motion’ (as Dunayevskaya might characterise it) in Ukraine and across the world, as part of the struggle for freedom, democracy and human dignity that yet belongs to the wider dialectics of self and social transformation? Connolly declares that ‘[i]n the manner of the true humanism that Marx himself exhibited, Marxist-Humanism is a praxis wholly open to the world, to what is happening wherever it is happening and is thereby global in a genuine sense.’ He further advocates for ‘the power of Marxist-Humanism to grasp the human expression of the need for universality, and to account for the articulation of this need in the present, as what promises to be a turning point in the battles against our dehumanised reality.’

The question of humanism should not be seen in a negative light as somehow jettisoning science, as if it were a naïve and aerosol approach to human liberation that the mature Marx readily abandoned when he saw the error of his ways. Rather, humanism is the lifeblood of Marx’s protagonistic agency, an agency that was always in dialectical conversation with his understanding of the world and of the possibilities for a non-alienated existence, an existence that is worth struggling for, that is worth fighting for. It is in this spirit that we can stand in solidarity with our comrades in Ukraine who are not just fighting for the right to build their future but fighting for the right to have a future.

I want to be clear at the outset that we are facing a new constellation of antagonisms that were largely unforeseen or anticipated.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has shocked many, and his aim to destroy any form of democracy on his borders, has only intensified his greatest fears. After sending troops into Kazakhstan and Belarus to shut down pro-democracy movements by working-class protestors, he took aim at Ukraine. And his decision to launch a war in Ukraine only drew Finland and Sweden closer to joining NATO’s ranks. The Trumpists and US far right are taking Putin’s side in this war since Putin embodies the attack on political democracy, immigration, LGBTQ communities and human rights so beloved by the anti-globalist, ethno-nationalist American ruling class. While I support Ukraine against Russian colonial domination, since the national question should always be front and center, I do not support US/NATO efforts to participate in intra-imperialist rivalry by weakening Russia. Nor do I support the neoliberal Ukrainian government. Rather, my support lies with the self-determination and national independence of the people of Ukraine. As Peter Hudis and other Marxist humanists point out, the practice of campism—the notion that leftists should support any state power or force opposed to the U.S. or NATO—is now dangerously afoot, but must be rejected. The right of peoples to their national self-determination must be protected by all forces on the left. For this reason I stand with the people of Ukraine against the Russian behemoth’s punitive irruption into history, a nationalist regime that supports far right organizations all over Europe and beyond. The de-nazification of Ukraine proposed by Russia is an slash across the cheekbones of historical memory, insulting the WWII victims of fascism, most significantly the victims of the Holocaust. I stand with the people of Ukraine and those who are trying to foster new, non-alienating human relations in the struggle for socialism. I reject the platitudinous criteria by which the progressive left entertains political reform prescinding from socialism and which is destined to continue the dire circumvolutions of the history of capitalism. Describing Ukraine as a Nazi nation is not only a contumelious act of imperial contempt towards fellow Slavs, but also a squalid and abominable opportunity to capitalize on one’s indifference to moral constraints, a disgraceful reason to cry havoc and open the spigots of bloodlust such that all enemies and their offspring will bewail the victors throughout the generations. There will be no victors in a war that transforms otherwise peaceful soldiers into ‘bloody-hunting slaughtermen,’ to use Shakespeare’s caustic term. Rape and torture are the coin of imperial war’s ignominious realm carried out in the carrion fields of xenophobic nationalism. There will be a heavy reckoning to make as Russia continues its unrelenting prosecution of war.

This is not a time to revisit the Hatfields versus the McCoys. After all, books by Clausewitz and Sun Tzu are growing in popularity. Americans glued to tv spectacles on the war are hastily turning to military websites so that they can stretch their legs on their backyard decks among their spindle-shanked grandchildren playing cowboys and Indians, and outmanoeuvre their neighbours at playing cigar-puffing five-star generals.

If only Old Blood and Guts could take command on the ground! Damn, if only we had our pilots in there, it would be fangs out! 

Send in an iron gorilla flying at the speed of heat and watch the F.M., baby! Make them eat some of our high drags, yeah! 

Excuse me, Frank, Patton died in 1945. Yeah, well, how about Tommy Franks or Norman Schwarzkopf! 

Well, Billy, why you looking so miserable? Wouldn’t you like Uncle Sam to be kicking ass in Ukraine?

No, I kinda like what Smedley Butler had to say. He received 16 military medals, 5 for valour, and was only one of 19 men to receive the Medal of Honour twice. So he wasn’t any slouch. His ١٩٣٥ booklet caused quite a stir. It was called ‘War Is A Racket.’ In that booklet, he wrote (I have it written down here on a piece of paper).

In World War [I], a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War…. How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? […] The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill? […] Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds…. For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

Say what, Billy? 

He also wrote:

I served in all commissioned ranks, from second lieutenant to Major General. And, during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of the racket all the time. Now I am sure of it.

Damn, Billy, sounds pretty traitorous to me.

Well, sounds pretty heroic to me.

This war is not about the theft of a hog in 1878 or family feuds. Or Unionists versus Confederates. Besides tendering some words of reprimand towards our cigar-smoking armchair military strategists, we need to remind our friends and neighbours that we are privileged to be able to live in relative peace, a peace which history has shown us to be always fragile.

I remember not too long ago, before a disability made it impossible for me to travel, I trampled through the freezing, ice-coated hinterlands of Lapland, in the Arctic Circle, with my Finnish comrade, Juha Suoranta, visiting the Sami, who inhabit Sápmi, their preferred name for Lapland. I recall with a smile riding on a sleigh pulled by a bad-tempered reindeer and giving talks on critical pedagogy at the University of Lapland, located in the city of Rovaniemi, the most northern university in the European Union.

Juha and I travelled in a locomotive brandishing a red star across the Russian border to St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) on a rail line constructed in 1867-1870 (starting from both ends) by the government of the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland of the Russian Empire where we were greeted by oversolicitous store managers with trays filled with shot glasses teeming with ‘Zelyony zmei,’ or, the ‘green serpent.’

Finland was once part of the Russian empire—in fact, it remained so for most of the 19th century. It declared its independence in 1917. In 1939, Moscow demanded Finland trade land that bordered Mother Russia so it could protect Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). The Soviets sent in troops when Finland refused. This led to the famous Winter War, which Finland won. Eventually, however, the Soviets prevailed, and Finland lost some land to the Soviets but managed to remain an independent nation. Russia’s Foreign Ministry has warned of military and political consequences for Finland if it joins NATO. Finland is seriously considering joining. Juha performed his military service decades ago and was trained as a sharpshooter. Let’s hope his rifle never has to leave the cabinet of his home during a twenty-first-century version of the Winter War. And Sweden is going to apply to join NATO, too, according to recent reports.

War is a racket. Who will profit? Are geopolitical shifts going to save lives or put more lives at risk? 

Sociologist William I. Robinson reports that ‘[a]ll around the world, a people’s Spring has taken off. From Chile to Lebanon, Iraq to India, France to the United States, Haiti to Nigeria, South Africa to Colombia, Jordan to Sri Lanka, waves of strikes and mass protests have proliferated and, in some instances, appear to be acquiring an anti-capitalist character.’ What exactly has sparked this international wave of discontent? Part of the answer is the current global crisis of capitalism. Linked to this phenomenon is a topic recondite to many Americans, known as militarized accumulation, which Robinson describes as ‘a situation in which a global war economy relies on the state to organize war-making, social control and repression to sustain capital accumulation in the face of chronic stagnation and saturation of global markets.’ Robinson further defines militarized accumulation as follows:

These state-organized practices are outsourced to transnational corporate capital, involving the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization in order to sustain the process of capital accumulation. Cycles of destruction and reconstruction provide ongoing outlets for over-accumulated capital; that is, these cycles open up new profit-making opportunities for transnational capitalists seeking ongoing opportunities to profitably reinvest the enormous amounts of cash they have accumulated. There is a convergence in this process of global capitalism’s political need for social control and repression in the face of mounting popular discontent worldwide and its economic need to perpetuate accumulation in the face of stagnation.

Robinson demonstrates how ‘endless low- and high-intensity warfare, simmering conflicts, civil strife and policing’ are now essential to the global political economy as the privatized domain of transnational capital is exerting increasing control over logistics, warfare, intelligence, repression, surveillance and even military personnel. He notes that the Biden administration called for a $31 billion increase in the Pentagon budget over the previous year (which was already a staggering $٨٠٠ billion) and allotted $١٤ billion for Ukraine’s defence. The European Union and other governments around the world also allocated billions of dollars in additional military spending. And the steady flow of military hardware and private military contractors into Ukraine seems unabated. Military and security firms such as Raytheon Technologies, Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are rejoicing as their shares continue to skyrocket, and similar surges are seen in European and Indian war stocks.

Robinson is, again, referring to the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization which is attributed to a process in which

the state facilitates the expansion of opportunities for private capital to accumulate through militarization, such as by facilitating global weapons sales by military-industrial-security firms, the amounts of which have reached unprecedented levels. Global weapons sales by the top 100 weapons manufacturers and military service companies increased by 38 per cent between 2002 and 2016 and can be expected to escalate further in the face of a prolonged war in Ukraine.

Was NATO’s proposed expansion into Ukraine a motivating factor in the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine? No doubt. As Robinson points out, US officials were keenly aware that the drive to expand NATO to Russian borders would eventually push Moscow into a military conflict. Robinson cites a 2019 study by the RAND corporation:

We examine a wide range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad…. The steps we examine would not have either defence or deterrence as their prime purpose…. these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, leading Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage and causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically.

Biden’s Secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin, explicitly said that the US wants to see Russia’s military capabilities weakened: ‘We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine…. So it has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.’

We can’t give corporate Democrats a free pass simply because we believe Trump to be the most dangerous individual threat to the survival of humanity, since the Democrats do little to combat the forces of fascism that currently plague the nation, and they are heavily imbricated in the military-industrial complex. But they are not as dangerous as the Republicans; this needs to be emphasized. Both parties are responsible for the eastward advance of NATO. Just look at the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, NATO forces in Afghanistan for twenty years after 9/11, and the NATO bombing of Libya in 2011, which toppled Muammar Gadhafi.

Robinson explains how wars provide critical economic stimulus, having ‘historically pulled the capitalist system out of accumulation crises while they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy.’ He explains that

[i]t took World War II to finally lift world capitalism out of the Great Depression. The Cold War legitimated a half-century of expanding military budgets, and the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, the longest in history, helped keep the economy sputtering along in the face of chronic stagnation in the first two decades of the century. From the anti-Communist fervour of the Cold War, to the ‘war on terror,’ then the so-called New Cold War, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the transnational elite, led by Washington, have had to conjure up one enemy after another to legitimate militarized accumulation and deflect crises of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony onto external enemies and contrived threats.

Much of the problems now facing the capitalist world can be traced to ‘overaccumulation,’ which refers, again, to capitalism’s ability to produce great quantities of wealth but in a context in which the market cannot absorb this wealth because of unprecedented levels of inequality that can no longer be offset by redistributive policies. The level of global social polarization and inequality now experienced is without precedent. Robinson warns us that ‘in 2018, the richest 1 per cent of humanity controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom ٨٠ per cent had to make do with just ٥ per cent.’ The choleric turmoil linked to the global crisis of capitalism has consequences that not only include economic factors such as inflationary spirals and deepening class struggle, including an upsurge of strikes, waves of protest and civic strife, but also menacing political dimensions. The objective changes in global capitalism are also generating racism on a massive scale because, as the economic imperatives of capitalism become manifestly globalized, racial determinations serve to increase capital accumulation, including militarized accumulation. In addition to dividing the working class and diverting attention from domestic crises, such as evidenced by the growing racist sentiments in the US and Europe with the rise of fascism, White supremacy and xenophobic nationalism, we face the threat of multiple imperialisms and sub-imperialisms. What is needed is a grassroots socialism, but in order to facilitate this, we need to support the creation of social structures, organizations, and support mechanisms that can better facilitate the advance of political democracy.

As the crisis intensifies in Ukraine, wars and the scapegoating of marginalized communities become a potent means of side-tracking domestic issues while legitimizing militarized forms of accumulation coordinated by the state and normalizing overall capitalist hegemony. According to Robinson, the Biden administration had clearly targeted China and Russia as external threats to the United States, weaponizing post World War II geopolitical conjunctions well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And as the fighting