The situation in Ukraine is crucial for communists in the 21st century to study, because it provides a look at how the capitalist ruling class will react as states worldwide continue to become less stable. Ukraine's breakdown in social services, shrinking of zones in which laws can be enforced, and efforts by the bourgeoisie to take advantage of the crises are an accelerated version of what's happening throughout the rest of the capitalist world. The climate crisis, the pandemic, and the global depression from capital's contraction are taking civilization towards collapse, causing the bourgeoisie to go into crisis mode.
To get a full sense of why the rise of the Ukrainian fascist regime represents such an ominous development for the global class struggle"-and why there's still hope for revolution despite this"-I'll first delve into the nature of this crisis of capital.
An economic system that's being deprived of its means for survival
Capitalism is being forced to eat itself. It's facing a progressive decline in the rate of profit, and a waning of U.S. hegemony that's cutting off capital's ability to expand into the peripheral countries. The only way capitalism has been able to survive in the last century is by colonizing more of the globe. Throughout the last generation, it's continued to partially succeed in this with the Iraq invasion, the coups within places like Ukraine, and the ongoing looting of Syrian oil by the U.S. military. But these victories for imperialism have come at the cost of making Washington less able to maintain credibility in the world's eyes.
It can't get the Global South to support its military adventurism, with most of the globe recognizing how hypocritical its rhetoric about "sovereignty" and "human rights" are. Its investment in the Ukraine proxy war, which was supposed to pay off with a weakening of Russia that allows for destabilizing broader Eurasia, has failed to bring Russia's collapse. Washington's hope for revitalizing its colonization projects has been thwarted by the rise of multipolarity. Now the United States, and the rest of the capitalist countries, face a future where their capital and social stability continue to weaken.
Lenin concluded that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism because it's the stage in which capitalism has developed into a monopoly paradigm, where a financial oligarchy rules the capitalist state and mandates that capital be exported into new markets. Imperialism isn't merely a preferred policy under this paradigm, clarified Lenin. It's what the system requires to maintain itself. Without imperialism, a capitalist economy will be like modern Russia's: lacking in the ability to keep its capital strong enough, or its workers well-bribed enough, for long-term safety from revolution.
The main reason capitalist Russia hasn't so far undergone revolution since its catastrophic descent into neoliberalism is that under Putin, it's stopped being a U.S. client state, and has therefore at least been able to undergo some comparative improvements in living standards during the last two decades. Now that Russian capital is being forced to contract for reasons not even fundamentally related to the sanctions (which are letting Russian businesses fill the void left by foreign capital's migration), the country's people are getting subjected to more austerity, and are therefore becoming more likely to mobilize towards revolution. The imperialist countries, their stability dependent on the continuation of imperialist extraction, will at some point become as weak in their capital as Russia's is. Then they'll fall apart likely faster than Russian capitalism eventually will.
Capitalism, deprived of its capacity for maintaining the colonization paradigm that's kept it alive for so long, is now being forced to rely upon self-cannibalization. As Lenin assessed, capitalism in the age of monopoly capital and financial oligarchy is a decaying capitalism. It relies on parasitism, which provokes the countries it exploits to fight for their economic independence. If the range for extraction starts to shrink, as it is now, the system starts to implode.
Perpetuating wars to create profits for the military-industrial complex, carrying out blatant acts of theft from the countries it wages war against, and profiting from the migrant crises the wars create are how capital can benefit from imperialist wars during imperial decline. Capital can't expand into new markets, something essential for imperialism to perpetuate itself. Since the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, which themselves infamously led to failures in nation-building after the initial corporate plunder within them, imperialism has been failing to acquire additional neo-colonies. Its project to create a new wave of colonization throughout southwest Asia by instigating the Iran-Iraq war has failed to produce the intended outcome of turning both of these countries into extractive sources. Iran has held out against imperialist regime change efforts, while Iraq has largely collapsed into a contended territory with unstable borders, its capital increasingly embracing Iran as an ally.
Because the imperialists have been unable to take the region they call the "middle east," and are consequently now pulling out of it to pivot towards militarily encircling China, imperialism's comprador force Zionism has failed to blossom into a new large-scale colonial project. Israel's occupation of Lebanon has been beaten back by the armed struggle of Hezbollah, Israel's project to create settlements within Yemen has become limited by the victory of the Houthis, the resilience of Assad has prevented Israel from advancing its strategic interests within Syria, and Iran's growing influence has created a bigger regional check on Israel's terrorism activities. Without a means for subduing these or the other parts of Eurasia, the imperialists have no way to win on the grand geopolitical chessboard. They can turn Ukraine and the rest of eastern Europe into a neo-colony, a project currently progressing through the latest wave of neoliberal shock policies within the country. But this isn't an expansion of their imperial reach, it's another example of capitalism consuming itself. One that will exacerbate contradictions within the post-Soviet countries, and inevitably bring new explosions of class struggle.
This is because whatever further extractive benefits they can draw from eastern Europe are isolated, not accompanied by any revitalization of neo-colonialism throughout the Global South that would restore imperialism's former strength. The imperialists can't prevent China's Belt and Road Initiative from undoing neo-colonialism's inequities. They're only able to partially frustrate China's progress by sowing chaos throughout the countries that may join the BRI. These meddling actions have at the most kept more vulnerable countries like Sri Lanka from joining the Chinese bloc, and such victories are by no means permanent; class struggle is intensifying, and at some point the people within these countries will mobilize to throw off neo-colonial rule. Imperialism's only hope for stopping capitalism in the imperial center from rapidly collapsing is to prevent a new wave of revolutions, a task which Zionism's innovations in repression can help with.
The occupation of the Palestinians as a model for preventing revolutions
Increasingly having to rely on themselves amid U.S. imperialism's decline, the Zionists are leaning into the global fascist connections that their supremacist ideology has given them, strengthening Israel's alliances with other settler-colonial states like Colombia and Brazil. With the help of Israeli military technologies, Colombia has been waging war against anti-austerity protesters throughout this last year, and Bolsonaro's Brazil has been tightening its repressive apparatus. This parallels the Israelification of the increasingly militarized and deadly U.S. police state, whose "Blue Lives Matter" supporters are the same kinds of American fascists that support Israel out of anti-Arab racism.
Faced with the growing threats to capital, the global bourgeoisie are mobilizing to revitalize the fascist movement, strengthening the alliances between their ideologies of racial supremacy and anti-communism. Hindutva fascist India and Euromaidan fascist Ukraine are other examples of regimes Israel has been forming such bonds with. The imperialists have had their Zionist puppets create a global testing ground for surveillance, restrictions on freedom of movement, counterinsurgency techniques, and military technologies. The exporting of these tools to the other oppressor countries is a way to preemptively wage war against the uprisings the imperialists know are coming.
These armies are waging their counterrevolutionary war already, a war against poor people, the racially marginalized communities who disproportionately make up the poor, and those fighting to end this intersecting dynamic of oppression. The police raids, state-sanctioned murders of unarmed people of color, and brutality against demonstrators that constantly happen in the U.S. are the tactics the capitalist state is using to try to terrorize the masses into submission. The Israeli police training program has gone along with the War on Terror's importing of military equipment to make U.S. law enforcement more effective in its violence, and the equivalent is happening in places like Colombia. It's a campaign to suppress liberation efforts in both the core and the neo-colonies, waged so that imperialism might delay its demise long enough to successfully win its geopolitical game against China. The seemingly unrelated developments in U.S. politics from the last decade or so, like the return of great-power competition and police militarization, have been intertwined in this sense.
The longer the empire tries and fails to regain its global dominance, the more apparent it becomes to the ruling class that repressing the existing colonies"-both on the peripheries and within U.S. borders"-is essential for capitalism's survival. The ruling class can no longer afford to bribe the workers in the core through a substantial welfare state, or to let up on its austerity measures throughout the peripheries. It must perpetually intensify neoliberal attacks on the working class in both places, as we continue to see in the austerity policies of the Fed and in the equivalent measures of the IMF. Because the bourgeoisie have no choice but to relentlessly intensify their war against the global working class, even after they've already been intensifying it for half a century, they must increasingly treat the working class (and those pushed out of the working class by capitalism's crises) as enemies in a military sense.
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