The “Zimmerwaldists” seriously compare the war in the Donbas with the First World War. Historical parallels are always risky. This parallel is altogether meaningless. In the First World War of 1914-1918, blocs of imperialist countries of roughly equal strength fought over markets, sources of raw materials, and colonies. The victory of the Anglo-French bloc, easy to see in hindsight, was not so obvious to contemporaries of the war, even to Marxists. For example, Lev Kamenev, a leader of the Bolsheviks, predicted a German victory in the war.

In 1914, a deadly battle confronted two centers of capital accumulation, two systems of capitalist division of labor, with their centers in London and Berlin. These systems had reached the limits of their geographic expansion in the 1870s, bumping into one anothers’ frontiers. The last act of this expansion was the rapid division of the African continent between the great powers.

The clash of these divisions of labor (the German-Central European, Anglo-French, American and Japanese) was the economic cause of the First and Second World Wars. After World War Ⅱ, there was only one such system – headed by the United States. In the late 1940s, it incorporated the European and Japanese systems, in the 1970s it absorbed the former colonies, in the 1980s China and the Eastern European people’s democracies, and in the 1990s the Soviet Union.

The rightist, neoliberal reaction of Reagan-Thatcher gave this system its finished, current form. At the heart of this system is the Federal Reserve, as the body producing the world’s reserve currency, the IMF, WTO, and World Bank.

After 2008, the system entered a period of systemic crisis and gradual decay, the causes of which I have examined elsewhere. As a result of the collapse, the capitalist elites of some countries began to challenge the “rules of the game” set by Washington because the existing system was no longer as attractive as it was before the crisis.

Thus, we do not have two blocs gripped in a deadly showdown (as in 1914), but a brand new situation, with no historical analogues, where the system breaks down and starts to fall to pieces. Some capitalist groups (organized in nation-states and transnational formations) try to revise the existing framework of the system, while other groups (Washington’s ‘regional committees’), on the contrary, hold on to the status quo and seek to punish those who encroach on the holy principles of the system.

Conflicts within the system are related to its internal contradictions, rather than a clash between individual centers of capital accumulation and their  systems of division of labor, as it was in 1914 and 1939.

Those who present the conflict in Ukraine as a fight between Russian and U.S. imperialism à la 1914 have analytical skills at the level of the propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, who threatens to turn America into “nuclear ash.” Russia and the United States are not comparable in their economic power; they fight in different weight categories. Moreover, there is no “Russian imperialism”; even “American imperialism” in the sense of 1914 does not exist. There is a hierarchically-organized imperialist world system with the United States at the head. There is a Russian capitalist class, which in this structure resides not on the first or even the second “floor”, which tried to raise its “status” in this hierarchy and is now frightened by its own audacity, after meeting resistance from a united West. Imagine for a moment that Russia really is an imperialist country à la 1914, that is, like Italy with its “imperialism of beggars”. This Russia really had imperialist interests in Ukraine, related primarily to the transportation of hydrocarbons, and to a much lesser extent in industrial assets. However, these are not interests for which it would deliberately risk the deterioration of relations with the West.

In the Ukrainian crisis, the Russian capitalist elite have not conducted any deliberate imperialist strategy, they have only responded to the challenges of a rapidly developing situation. This reaction has been halfhearted, contradictory, inconsistent — demonstrating to the careful observer an absence of strategy.

As the situation developed following the coup in Ukraine and the beginning of the uprising in Crimea and the South-East, the Russian leadership faced a difficult dilemma. To not step in and not support the population of Crimea and the South-East meant losing legitimacy in the eyes of its own population, amidst a deteriorating economic situation fraught with political crisis, much stronger than in 2011. To intervene meant to break with the West, with unpredictable results. In the end, they chose the middle option — intervention in Crimea but not in the South-East. However, when the uprising in Donbas moved from peaceful to armed, Russia had to offer assistance. It had to, because the military suppression of the rebels with the tacit consent of Russia would be a catastrophic blow to the image of the Russian authorities within the country. But this support was given reluctantly. Putin publicly called on the people not to hold a referendum on the independence of the DPR and LPR. The meaningful flow of military aid only began after the abandonment of Slavyansk [July 2014], when the capital of Donetsk was under threat of falling to the Ukrainian army.

Such support has aroused dissatisfaction and resistance among most of the Russian oligarchy, which dreams not of restoring the Russian Empire but of a mutually beneficial partnership with the West.

Is it possible to support the republics if the Russian bourgeois regime is trying to instrumentalize the revolt and use it in its own geopolitical interests?

Let’s conduct an historical analogy. It seems to me that the following is much more appropriate than the analogy with the situation of the First World War.

Spain in 1936: There is a civil war in Spain. Let us imagine that the Soviet Union, for one reason or another, could not or would not assist the Spanish Republic, and bourgeois Britain and France, on the contrary, provided support, sent military supplies and humanitarian aid, gave loans and even sent military experts to help the Republican Army and police. Naturally, the capitalist elite of Britain and France would pursue their own goals at the same time — the retention of Spain in its own system of investment and trade in the context of an emerging confrontation with the German bloc.

Would the left, on this basis, have refused to support the anti-fascist struggle of the Spanish Republicans? Of course not.

The Easter Rising of the Irish Republicans against the British Empire in 1916: All those who call themselves leftists honor this heroic episode of the anti-imperialist struggle of the Irish people.

Meanwhile, one of the major factions of the uprising — the Irish Republican Brotherhood — in 1914, at the beginning of the war, decided to revolt and take any German assistance offered. A representative of the Brotherhood traveled to Germany and obtained approval for such assistance. It wasn’t provided only because the German ship carrying weapons was intercepted at sea by a British submarine.

Lenin unconditionally supported the Irish rebellion, despite the fact that it was much less “proletarian” than the revolt in the Donbas. And in those days there were leftists who called the Irish Rebellion a “putsch,” a “purely urban, petty-bourgeois movement, which, notwithstanding the sensation it caused, had not much social backing.” Lenin answered them, “Whoever calls such a rebellion a ‘putsch’ is either a hardened reactionary, or a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon.”¹.

Despite the apparent support of the Germans, not to mention the fact that the uprising in the rear of the British Empire “played into the hands” of German imperialism, real leftists supported the Irish Republicans. Supported them, despite the fact that bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Irish nationalists fought together with socialist James Connolly and his supporters. Of course, Connolly said that a declaration of independence without the formation of a socialist republic would be in vain. But the left in Donbass says this too.

Why doesn’t the Irish example apply to the Donbass, an example from the era of the First World War, which the self-styled “Zimmerwaldists” are so fond of?

The present-day Kurdish people of Syria (Rojava): Or take a modern example. It’s no secret that the Kurdish militia in Syria fighting against Islamic fascists receives support from the United States. On this basis, should the left refuse to support the Kurds of Rojava? Of course not.

The Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation: Over the years, the Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation has also relied on the support of bourgeois and undemocratic regimes in the Middle East. The ratio of advanced and progressive elements in the Palestinian leadership was usually far less beneficial to the forces of progress than in the Donbas. However, the left has always supported the Palestinian liberation movement.

But with Donbas, some leftists apply a double standard, diligently looking for excuses to condemn the DPR and LPR and allowing themselves to take a position of indifferent pacifism. Genuine leftists never held such a position. “Indifference to the struggle is not, therefore, exclusion from the struggle, abstinence or neutrality. Indifference is tacit support of the powerful, the oppressors,” Lenin wrote.² Standing aside in a detached posture, the self-styled “Zimmerwaldists” actually side with the Kiev authorities, who are leading a punitive operation against the rebels.

“War is nothing more than the continuation of policy by other means,” wrote the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. This statement is recognized approvingly by the classics of Marxism.³.

What are the policies continued by Kiev and Donbas? To justify a “neutral” position, the imaginary “Zimmerwaldists” try to prove that these policies are the same. “All cats are gray” – that’s the apex of their “Marxist” wisdom.

The World War of 1914-1918 was really a continuation by Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia of policies of colonial plunder, the struggle for colonies and markets, the fight for the destruction of imperialist competitors. The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 was a continuation of the same policies.

However, it would be foolish to argue that there could be a civil war where the parties are pursing the same policy. The essence of civil war is to impose one’s policies on the enemy, to break the political force and suppress the social classes or layers that conduct this policy. North and South Vietnam carried out different policies, resulting in a civil war. Different policies are also carried out, for example, by the regime of Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and other Islamists in Syria. Different policies guided the Spanish Republic and Franco in the years 1936-1939. Different policies were pursued by Muammar Gaddafi and his opponents in the civil war in Libya in 2011.

So the  civil war in Ukraine is not a continuation of the same policy. What are the different policies of Kiev and Donbas?

The attitude of Marxists to war cannot be reduced to the single example of the First World War. Marxists have always supported wars of the oppressed against the oppressors, considering the retreat into pacifism and indifference in the case of a just war to be bourgeois hypocrisy and hidden support for the masters.

Yes, even in the First World War, those socialists who did not disgrace themselves by betrayal, who did not shift into the service of the imperialist governments, were not just for ending the fratricidal war, where workers of one country kill workers of another country for the alien interests of the capitalist elite. These socialists advocated turning the imperialist war into civil war. They said that the oppressed should turn their weapons against their own oppressors, using the mass arming of the people as a tool for social revolution.

“History has known in the past (and very likely will know, must know, in the future) wars (democratic and revolutionary wars) which, while replacing every kind of ‘right’, every kind of democracy by violence during the war, nevertheless, in their social content and implications, served the cause of democracy, and consequently socialism,” Lenin wrote⁵. It is this kind of war we have now in the Donbas.

Such was the position of genuine left-wing Zimmerwaldists. The imaginary “Zimmerwaldists” from Kiev, calling for disarmament of both sides of the conflict, place an equal sign between the rebels, on the one hand, and the regular troops forced to the front and neo-Nazi volunteer battalions, on the other.

The demand for disarmament of the rebel militias is a demand for their surrender, and it is unlikely that the self-styled Zimmerwaldists do not understand this.

Of course, any war means blood and suffering of people, but to stop this war by a complete renunciation of the uprising means that the blood has been spilled in vain. Moreover, it means revenge and repression by the nationalist forces against the population of Donbas.