The war in Ukraine has divided the Western anti-imperialist and anti-fascist left. On one hand, it describes the war as an inter-imperialistic war, a war between Western imperialism and Russian imperialism over influence and hegemony in Donbass, Ukraine, and ultimately the world, a war over energy supplies and market shares, driven by falling rates of profit; on the other hand, it is described as a great war of national liberation, an anti-fascist war in the following of the Great Patriotic War.
The first interpretation is perhaps faithful to the intellectual tradition of the anti-imperialist left, but suffers from the weakness that it is more interested the yellowing pages of the orthodox Marxist-Leninist textbook than the real-world events outside the dusty book-shelves.
The second interpretation suffers from similar defects; full of nostalgia and sentimentality it tries to prevail in the confrontation with the horrors of the meaningless war, by mastering the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness that comes from this experience. The anti-imperialist left is not defeated, no longer without alternatives, but has risen in the faith that it fights a good fight, a sacred war against fascism on the same side as the Russian Federation – the legitimate heir of the Soviet Union.
In both accounts a special role is given to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) as either a traitor of the holy cause of anti-imperialism, or as a staunch and uncompromising ally of the government of the Russian Federation and its president.
Against this background it is quite interesting and refreshing to read an article on the Ukrainian war, “Class War, Imperialist, Existential”, published on the official homepage of the CPRF, which succeeds to add a new perspective on CPRF’s understanding of the war. The article also comes off as representative of the party line, considered that it is written by a fairly high-ranked party official, Denis Andreevich Parfenov, a secretary of the party organisation in Moscow. However, it must also be recognised that I don’t pretend to have any deeper knowledge of the inner debate within CPRF, and that I’ve only relied on a machine translation of Parfenov’s article.
Keeping these caveats in mind, one cannot but notice the soberness of Parfenov’s analysis. Though Parfenov describes the Russian “special military operation” as a continuation of the “liberation war” fought by the Donbass people’s republics against the “Nazi-regime” in Kiev, he also recognises the doubleness and ambiguities of the war. Thus, Parfenov carefully recognises that the war in Ukraine is an imperialist war, in agreement with the analysis presented by the anti-imperialist left-wing critics of the war, both within and outside Russia.
Even if Parfenov sometimes gives the impression that he thinks of Russia’s war as an imperialist war in the sense that it aims at control over the agricultural lands and industries in Donbass, his background discussion clearly shows that he takes it to involve something more profound, namely Russia’s influence on the entire scene of world politics. It is also against this background that the doubleness and ambiguities of the war enter into the forefront, which Parfenov thinks cannot be explained just as a product of the historical fact that Russia’s oligarchy has grafted its imperialist war on an originally popular and revolutionary war in Donbass.
Rather, Parfenov thinks that the doubleness of the war is rooted in the conflict between the interests of Russia’s capitalist oligarchy and the imperialist policies it is prepared to support. Thus, according to Parfenov, Russia’s oligarchy wants to promote its interests in Ukraine and on the world scene, but without seriously damaging its long-term role as a Western “manager” of Russia’s supplies of energy and raw materials. This also explains why Russia’s oligarchy often behaves more like a subservient comprador class than a class of self-assertive imperialists.
Short of mentioning Lenin in this context, Parfenov’s analysis of Russian imperialism strikes as similar to Lenin’s, in the sense that he tries to take into account the peculiarities of Russia’s position in the capitalist world economy and the imperialist system. On Lenin’s analysis Russia enjoyed its peculiar status to its relative backwardness and weakness, which, in spite of its colonial possessions, largely confined it to a role as an importer of capital and a supplier of oil and raw-materials.
Parfenov’s post-soviet Russia is of course different from Tsarist Russia – among other things, it is a net creditor with a much stronger military-industrial base – but its relative economic backwardness remains, which in turn explains the despondent attitude of its oligarchy. The war in Ukraine has certainly opened up a new venue for this oligarchy, but also exposed its vulnerability as it has become subject to Western sanctions.
In the Western debate it has been suggested that Russia’s war in Ukraine cannot be described and analysed purely as an extension of a geopolitical conflict between, on one hand, the Western powers and, on the other hand, Russia, China, and the rest of the BRICS countries. Russia’s apparent strange military tactics, inefficiency, and indecisiveness has made many commentators argue that the war is a “theatrical war”. Thus, it has been argued that the war actually is a war against the peoples meant to lure them into accepting another wave of economic restructuring at their expense, this time in the name of the Ukrainian people rather than as a purportedly preventive measure against the spreading of a virus.
Parfenov does not make any references to this debate, but interestingly he shows that a parallel debate is going on within the Russian left. Thus, among the Russian leftist critics of Putin, the war in Ukraine is sometimes referred to as the “non-war” (nevojný). Even though Parfenov is loyal to the political line of CPRF and its “critical support” (kritičeskoj poddéržke) of the war effort, he partly gives the Russian left-wing critics right.
Thus, Parfenov notices that Russia didn’t use its full military-industrial capacity from the very start of the war, hesitated to strike at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, at least not before the Ukrainian strike at the Crimean bridge, etc. He also notes the shortcomings of the present military mobilisation in Russia, and how the authorities have used the war as an excuse to clamp down on opposition and to generally continue the limitation of the civic rights of the Russian people, which started already with the anti-covid measures of the Russian authorities.
However, according to Parfenov the deficiencies of the Russian war effort is not an expression of some collusion or even conspiracy between Russia and the Western powers. Rather, it is the result of a peculiarly home-brewed dysfunctionality of the Russian state, rooted in the interests of the compradoresque and submissive Russian oligarchy. Indirectly, what Parfenov suggests is that the Russian military cannot solve its tasks unless it is given the resources it needs, which depends on a “deliberalisation” of the Russian economy at the expense of the short-term interests of the Russian oligarchy.
In many ways the recent weeks (December 2022) have illustrated that Putin and the Russian government are prepared to do what it takes to strengthen the Russian military-industrial complex and the Russian state’s ability to plan the economy. But Parfenov warns that it is a delusion to think that the Russian state now is decoupling from the interests of the oligarchy. Instead, the Russian political class increasingly finds itself squeezed between its war-time military duties and the pacifying sentiments of the Russian oligarchy, which just wants to get along with the West and preserve the “liberal”, post-Soviet social order in Russia.
In sum, Parfenov’s article presents his readers with an interesting glimpse into the internal debate within the CPRF and the broader circles of the Russian left. In our dangerous and complex times such insights are definitely needed as a counter-weight to the Western leftists and their oversimplified and distorted picture of the Russian communists and their analysis of the war and its effects on the political situation within Russia.
Perhaps even more important, without a better knowledge of the Russian debate we in the West are doomed to make the mistake of reducing the Ukrainian war to a conflict between Russia and the West, which means that we will continue to ignore that this war also involves a conflict between the great power interest of the Russian state and the interests of its Western oriented and profit-hungry oligarchy. In any case, it is within this actual field of conflicts that the Russian communists and patriotic left must live and operate, if they want to correct their mistakes and regain the trust of the masses…