Introduction
With the war in Ukraine reaching its anniversary, we have to once again learn to think about a matter that was until recently deemed obsolete by many of the leading figures in the capitalist states: territorial war. Matters of war and peace have always been a difficult subject for Marxists, since by their nature they substitute conflicts between states and nations for the – from a Marxist viewpoint at least – more straightforward direct forms of social conflict. While since the experiences of the First World War Marxists are in general in agreement about the need to oppose war itself, and especially imperialist war, it is a lot less clear what that implies for any given conflict in practice. Wars invite everyone who is not an immediate participant to take sides, to declare oneself to be for or against one of the warring sides. After all, the nature of war is to be a state of emergency, a very literal question of life or death for the participants.
This makes it more difficult to simply say ‘a pox on both their houses’: both sides will see this as abandonment of their survival to the forces of the enemy, and natural moral instincts do not tend to reflect well on people who are unwilling to help people in an emergency situation. You don’t respond to a drowning person with the declaration that you are neutral between them and the water. The continued strong appeal of nationalism even in the post-WWII context does nothing to diminish this identification of personal interests with those of states (at least in wartime), even among people who are otherwise inclined to be critical of their own.
Moreover, in the 20th century (and the beginning of the 21st so far) the context of imperialism – whether in the form of inter-imperialist rivalry, the Cold War, or the era of American hegemony – has further strengthened this tendency to want to pick a side, as opposing imperialism is for many Marxists the sine qua non of political orientation in international relations, and that means that a studied neutrality could easily be seen as betraying such principles. Already Marxists tend not to believe in ‘neutrality’ too much – as exemplified by the popularity of Howard Zinn’s famous saying “you can’t be neutral on a moving train”.
But if neutrality is out and anti-imperialism is in, this still far from solves the problem in any given conflict. Even if the left can agree on opposition to imperialism and annexationism, support for converting war between states into class war, and the principle of self-determination of nations against attempts by larger powers to control their policies and institutions by violent means, this does not mean that there is always much consensus on how to apply this. In the context of the Cold War, the question was often whether one considered the US or the USSR the greater imperialist; or if one opposed both, what to do with cases where they were directly in confrontation. Supporters of ‘real existing socialism’ had difficulties with cases such as the border war between China and Vietnam, both states claiming this mantle.
Invoking Lenin
In the era of American hegemony, the dilemma has tended to revolve rather around balancing opposition to American imperialist domination with opposition to the often reactionary governments targeted by that same domination; but as the case of the present war in Ukraine shows, sometimes old-fashioned concerns about relations between the imperialist hegemon and lesser powers still come to the fore too. Couple all this with the tendency of Marxist thinking in international relations to rely on a combination of a rather cheap consequentialism with an underdeveloped realism – something I have written about previously – and you have a theory which, to put it mildly, seriously underdetermines any particular political stance to an ongoing conflict.
One reliable tendency, and in principle a good one, is to refer to Lenin for insights into imperialism and war. After all, if 1914 demonstrated the bankruptcy of the old social-democracy by its willingness to (at least passively) support a senseless inter-imperialist conflagration that left millions dead on the battlefield, it equally demonstrated the acuity and strength of the position of the small left opposition that denounced this attitude – the one that has historically come to be associated with the Zimmerwald Conference (1915) and with the work of Lenin, who was present, in particular.
While other writers, such as Mao, have written substantively on war and imperialism since, these are often presented as elaborations of Lenin’s thought, and even well beyond strict Marxist-Leninist circles the influence of Lenin’s thinking as formed from the experience of WWI can be felt on the left. Lenin’s analysis of WWI, although more than a century old at this point, is still a major compass for much of the left wing in understanding the attitude to any particular conflict that ends up in open war.
The positions against support for Ukraine
But what did Lenin actually say? And how would one apply his analysis to a situation like the Ukrainian war? This is far from obvious, as will become clear. While most of the left – I think it is fair to say – has generally sided with the Ukrainian state in its struggle against the Russian invasion, there is a perhaps substantial minority that takes a different approach. In particular in (self-identified) Marxist-Leninist circles there seems to be a considerable sympathy for the Russian stance in the conflict, in particular insofar this is presented as opposing an expansion of American imperialist hegemony. Some openly support the Russian side. Others, probably a more representative group, rather argue on the basis of Lenin that the war is not an imperialist war of a larger power against a smaller nation, and that therefore the usual anti-imperialist position – to defend the smaller nation in such a case – does not apply.
Based on Lenin’s thought, so the reasoning goes, we should focus on opposition to any war and any participation in war, and this extends to opposing any support for one of the belligerent powers (in this context, primarily Ukraine, e.g. through providing supplies or weapons) or warlike punitive measures against another (primarily Russia, e.g. sanctions). There is clearly not much prospect at the moment for converting the war into class war, so we see instead the return of neutrality, but under the banner of Lenin.
I want to examine both of these arguments – the denial of the Russian invasion as imperialist in Lenin’s terms, and the claim that Lenin’s arguments suggest we should either support the Russian position as directly aimed at American imperialist hegemony or take a neutral stance between the belligerent states – and argue that they are ill-founded. They are, I suspect, based rather in the popular legacy of Lenin, the kind of simplified figure that emerges from instrumentalized selective quotations and secondary summaries of his work as popular in various small Leninist parties, than in Lenin’s actual writings and thinking.
Examining Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism
First I want to address the question of imperialism in Lenin’s work. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that in the ‘popular Lenin’ few works loom so large as his classic Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in the first half of 1916. If Marxists are likely to have actually read anything by Lenin at all, it is usually this work, and as a result they tend to take it as a pars pro toto for Lenin’s thinking on imperialism altogether. But this book is actually a rather specific argument and one at a rather high level of abstraction. In order to understand what it does and does not say, we must discuss the book at some length. Because this book tends to be the foundation and cornerstone of virtually every ‘Leninist’ argument about war and imperialism, this is worth some detailed attention.
In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, as Lenin himself explained in a later written introduction, he set out to prove analytically two things in particular: that WWI was an inter-imperialist war, and that it was driven to become so not because of diplomatic errors but by the logic of capitalist accumulation, in particular by the specificities of the development of finance capital in the period leading up to the war.
For Lenin, the era was an era of what he called “monopoly capitalism”, when big trusts and large concentrations of capital were the dominant motive force of capital as a whole. This monopoly capitalism had in the leading capitalist countries become more and more subject in turn to the rule of financial capital (itself equally concentrated). This led to the division of the world in terms of spheres of control, where the leading powers were animated by competition over superprofits on the export of capital, driven by the interests of finance capital. His political (rather than theoretical) argument is subsequently that these superprofits allowed the emergence of a labor aristocracy in the superprofiting, richest nations, which in turn formed the social base for the right-wing of social-democracy that had just betrayed international solidarity by supporting the war.
Lenin’s argument in this book has to be understood as consisting of different aspects. Most of the book is in fact dedicated to a series of empirical arguments, in which Lenin sets out to prove that advanced capitalism is in fact everywhere of the “monopoly” type, that finance capital has arisen as a single motive force out of the union between mercantile capital (banks) and industrial capital (industry), but with the “financial oligarchy” in charge, and that the primary profit-seeking method of this finance capital is the export of capital. This covers chapters I-IV. He then speaks of the division of the world into the spheres of influence, both through the global colonial empires and through what he calls “financial and diplomatic dependence” of small independent states on the major powers. Again, for Lenin the primary driver of this process is the “monopoly” aspect of capital, the desire for each financial-capitalist mega-interest to achieve superprofits by essentially extracting the rents of monopoly power over and above average profits obtained in competition. This argument is explained in chapters V-VI.
The next two chapters expand on the economic argument. Here (although still using empirical claims to buttress the overall reasoning, of course) Lenin moves to attack Kautsky’s political attitude to imperialism and to instead establish his own. Helpfully, Lenin here even provides a definition of imperialism, for the purposes of the economic analysis in these chapters:
“(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch07.htm
This may serve as a very useful summary of the economic argument of the book as a whole. So what is his beef with Kautsky? Well, it is simply that he accuses Kautsky of having missed the specificity of imperialism in the present context (that is to say, in the 1910s) as being finance-dominated monopoly capitalism, and of having advocated the possibility that such capitalism could and would resolve itself peacefully in the long run, leading to a global unified capital rather than a conflict of capitals. Note that Lenin does not here make any political arguments about Kautsky’s attitude to WWI or the general Marxist attitude to war, as is often supposed, but argues against Kautsky on the grounds that his economic analysis of the capitalism of the time was faulty.
It is only in chapter IX that Lenin moves to a political discussion of the correct Marxist view on imperialism as he defined it above. This entire chapter essentially builds on his argument against Kautsky above, where the fundamental point is that Kautsky (according to Lenin) wrongly considered a peaceful development of the capitalism of his time possible, whereas Lenin thinks it is not possible, and uses WWI as an illustration of the kind of inter-imperialist conflict he considers inevitable.
For Lenin, Kautsky’s political errors stem from his failure to understand the economic impetus of his time and the specificity of the capitalism of his time. As he sums it up: “Kautsky’s theoretical analysis of imperialism, as well as his economic and political critique of imperialism, are permeated through and through with a spirit, absolutely irreconcilable with Marxism, of obscuring and glossing over the fundamental contradictions of imperialism and with a striving to preserve at all costs the crumbling unity with opportunism in the European working-class movement.” The final chapter actually adds little more to this, other than to provide a very summary historical discussion of the origins of the monopoly capital system Lenin had described in the book.
So, what is the upshot of all this for the problems of the Ukraine war and our attitude to war and imperialism in general? I think two things. Firstly, that Lenin’s argument in Imperialism is primarily an economic and empirical-theoretical one, not a political one. By this I mean it is an empirically supported argument about the economic structure of capitalism in his day, from which he derives a series of intermediate level theoretical generalizations for the system as a whole – monopoly capital, capital export-driven value flows, and superprofits. These in turn support an actually rather small set of political conclusions, still at a high to intermediate level of analysis: that capitals will compete with each other and come into direct conflict, rather than developing peacefully (as he accuses Kautsky of thinking), that every part of the world is or will become subject to the competing spheres of influence economically and politically, and that the superprofits allow opportunism to arise in the working class of the advanced nations.
The significance of this is that Lenin’s argument is fundamentally contingent: it is predicated on him having analyzed capitalism in the 1910s correctly, and it applies to capitalism as it was in the 1910s. In fact, Lenin goes out of his way to emphasize the specificity of this analysis to the capitalism of his time (hence the title of Chapter VII in the standard English translation: “Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism”).
There has been a great deal of debate among economic historians and theorists since Lenin’s time about whether his analysis of capitalism around WWI was correct in the first place, which I need not go into now. More important is to keep in mind that the very structure of the argument is such that its applicability stands and falls not with the correctness of any particular generalizations about Marxist views about imperialism and war, but with the economic analysis of capital in it. Even if one thinks Lenin’s view of capitalism around 1916 was correct, it is not exactly a reach to say that global political economy has drastically changed since those days, and not least in exactly those spheres he based his discussion on: formation of trusts and concentrations of capital, the predominance of capital exports from metropole to periphery, the existence of large colonial empires, and the emergence of an integrated global financial market that crosses the boundaries of states and powers.
A modern application of Imperialism‘s argument, therefore, would have to take all these things into account, and consider how much we can still speak of monopoly capitalism, union between industrial and finance capital, division of the world into spheres of monopoly superprofit extraction, and capital export as the primary driver of global economic activity. I suspect in some respects these elements are present, and in some respects they would need to be drastically revised; just as I think that Lenin’s analysis in his own day was partially quite insightful and partially mistaken (although certainly better than the one he attributed to Kautsky, which was his primary point). But one can have any number of constructive discussions about this. What remains is the empirical contingency of the argument, and its insistence on specificity: it would not be in any way strange to analyze (say) WWII and its origins in totally different terms than Lenin did for WWI, nor would this have to imply contradicting Lenin’s theses in Imperialism.
This brings me to the second conclusion: what the book does not do. What it does not do is provide that thing which it is probably most often mistakenly thought to provide: a general Marxist argument about how to relate to war and imperialism in any period of capitalism, or even in any particular conflict within such a period. Lenin does have such argumentations, at least of the latter kind, but they are precisely not formulated in this book (aside of course from his opposition to Kautsky’s attempt to “pacify the workers and reconcile them with the social-chauvinists who have deserted to the side of the bourgeoisie”).
Lenin on the lesser imperialist powers
For those we can much more productively look elsewhere, at texts much less popularly known, but dating to the same period. These may help shed some light on the claims invoking Lenin in the case of the Ukraine war: the arguments that anti-imperialism demands we support the Russian invasion, or alternatively that it demands we oppose supporting Ukraine in the conflict, either because it is a rightwing bourgeois state or simply because of the necessity of an antiwar stance.
The first of these arguments is simple, and runs essentially like this: America (through its alliance of vassal states, NATO) is the primarily imperialist hegemon in the world right now. Russia is opposing the extension of the American imperialist sphere to its border regions. Being clearly a weaker power in every respect than the US is – economically, militarily, diplomatically – and because it is oriented against the hegemon, we should support it. Against the hegemonic imperialism of the existing great power (the US) and its smaller power supporters (especially Britain, but also Germany and Japan), we must as anti-imperialists support a multipolar system. This means supporting the national interests of the anti-hegemonic powers (Russia, China; perhaps the so-called BRICS as a whole). This, the argument goes, is the implication of anti-imperialism, and Lenin is often invoked to defend it (the ICFI being a salient example).
It is not difficult to find a direct answer to this kind of argumentation in Lenin’s own writings, when transposed to the relevant terms and powers of his own day. Lenin discusses precisely this reasoning in an (unfortunately) much less read text, one which deals much more directly with the political attitude towards WWI and its theoretical basis: Socialism and War: The Attitude of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party Towards the War (1915). Especially the first chapter is enlightening and contains general theoretical principles that are much less contingent than those found in Imperialism. In the course of defining different types of wars and emphasizing that WWI is an inter-imperialist war, Lenin discusses the argument that one should support the German (or Central Powers) side since it is the anti-hegemonic power, acting against the big imperialists with extensive colonial possessions. To this he answers the following:
“From the standpoint of bourgeois justice and national freedom (or the right of nations to existence), Germany would be absolutely right as against England and France, for she has been “done out” of colonies, her enemies are oppressing an immeasurably far larger number of nations than she is, and the Slavs who are oppressed by her ally Austria undoubtedly enjoy far more freedom than those in tsarist Russia, that real “prison of nations.” But Germany is fighting not for the liberation, but for the oppression of nations. It is not the business of Socialists to help the younger and stronger robber (Germany) to rob the older and overgorged robbers. Socialists must take advantage of the struggle between the robbers to overthrow them all. To be able to do this, the Socialists must first of all tell the people the truth, namely, that this war is in a treble sense a war between slave-owners to fortify slavery.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/s-w/ch01.htm (emphasis added)
In other words, the argument that one should support the less hegemonic power