June 8, 2023

Reformism's impossible mission: trying to talk properly about military issues

A counterpoint with Professor Maiello

They announce a "proxy war" of Ukraine on behalf of NATO

A big fallacy to cover up the invasion of the "Great Russia"
to an oppressed nation

Professor Maiello and his intellectual bosses of the PTS leadership in Argentina have already written rivers of ink and made pompous dissertations on military issues and on the Ukrainian question in particular. They speak “so properly” about military matters, of which they understand very little, as any serious Marxist will realize from reading their voluminous texts. One of their latest, scandalous and anti-Marxist texts is entitled "The announced 'spring offensive': Where is the war in Ukraine heading? This text concentrates the positions of this current (the FT-PTS) on the Ukrainian question, which we will respond to in the course of this document.

As we can see, this university professor in question writes on these issues in "Ideas de Izquierda" (Left Ideas), the international press that expresses the positions of the PTS, or else he is usually a "commentator on military issues" in "La Izquierda Diario" (Left Newspaper). He is supposedly the one in that current who best stands and defends their positions.
The time has come to clarify for the workers and the revolutionary youth so much nonsense on the question of war in the name of Marxism. According to Trotsky and Lenin, in this epoch of deadly crisis of the imperialist capitalist world system, war is too important to be bastardized with a program and policy that is totally opportunist and revisionist of Marxism.

The "military strategists" of the PTS talk ad nauseam on the question of war while claiming that the epoch of crisis, wars and revolutions has finished in the 1980s, i.e. almost 40 years ago.

In order to make a counterpoint with Professor Maiello, it is essential to clarify for the reader the theoretical and programmatic bases on which his current is based. These programmatic bases mean an open rupture with revolutionary Marxism in the imperialist epoch. It is on this question that we will begin the debate.

We are dealing with a pacifist current that camouflages itself under a warfare language, but as we shall see now, not only has it not taken part in any civil war, but it also states very loosely that there have hardly been any wars in the last 40 years.

The liberal democratic pacifism of the Argentinean left and its university chairs camouflages itself, threatens to discuss war, but the place where it has been going to directly, for 25 years now, is the bourgeois parliament of Argentina's decaying democracy for the rich, where they survive.

Professor Maiello and his colleagues claim that since 1989 a "new epoch" of "capitalist restoration" has begun. They argue that in this "new epoch of capitalist restoration" a sort of bourgeois stability has opened up, in which, they claim, "imperialism expands by means of more democracy" in order to control the world and not through wars. All this that we explain here and develop below was raised in an extensive document written for the last Congress of the FT of the PTS in Argentina, of which, of course, Professor Maiello was one of the drafters.

To finish this point of the debate, it would be enough to tell these "intellectuals" to look with a minimum of intellectual honesty at the "bourgeois democracy" with which "imperialism has expanded" in China, Russia, the former Soviet republics, the Middle East, the counter-revolutionary coups in Latin America which continue to develop, not to mention the Bonapartist regimes in Africa. That is to say, in the absolute majority of the planet.

In order to continue bombarding against the validity of the epoch of crises, wars and revolutions in the 21st century, they deny the opening of pre-revolutionary or directly revolutionary situations or stages such as those the masses have been carrying out in dozens of places on the planet in this century. They label them as simple "uprisings".

This is what they do with the civil war in Syria and with all the revolutionary processes in the Middle East since 2010-2011: Independent mass actions and counter-revolutionary coups as we saw in Egypt. Revolutionary general strikes as in Tunisia, which were diverted by class-collaborationist governments. Plus invasion wars to crush revolutions as in Yemen. Two US invasions to Iraq, a country in which today there’s a huge revolutionary crisis of the regime at the top.
The same happened in Sri Lanka, where the masses took over the citadel of power and imposed, in fact, that the foreign debt to the IMF is not to be paid. You have also, the huge mass revolutionary offensives in Hong Kong or Myanmar.
They even deny the opening of acute pre-revolutionary situations like in the US in 2020 against the Trump administration, and a trail of revolutionary uprisings and independent mass actions in South Africa, Madagascar in 2009, Argentina in 2001, Latin America today full of pre-revolutionary or openly revolutionary situations. All these revolutionary processes were a thousand times diverted, betrayed, or crushed with semi-fascist coups.

Within the imperialist beast, an anti-war movement arose, which actually imposed the withdrawal of the US from Iraq. Not to mention the fight against the Fifth Republic, and the ongoing rising French May in imperialist France, where huge mass revolutionary political struggles are waged. These struggles seek to overthrow the Macron government with barricade fighting, picket lines, blockades of refineries, though the PTS says that this "uprising" cannot go beyond the limits of "making the government to retreat".

To call all these revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations as "uprisings" in general is to hide under the rug that, when they start, the central task of the Marxists is to fight for armed soviets to be set up in order to prepare for the take-over of power and a victorious insurrection.

Thus, behind false characterizations that have nothing to do with reality, the reformists conceal the revolutionary tasks they should have to perform. Namely, nothing more and nothing less than the take-over of power where the conditions have opened up.

The "war theoricists" are fleeing and escaping from civil war, and especially of its culminating moment, namely the insurrection, which must be prepared and organized where revolutionary or pre-revolutionary processes have opened up.

As the reader will see, we are before a current that believes the struggle for socialist revolution is no longer an immediate task, since "capitalism has been restored". This means that the transitional programme for socialist revolution would no longer be valid; and only some of its slogans would be valid....

The validity of the epoch of crises, wars and revolutions, which they deny, also implies, by crisis of leadership, the victory of ferocious counter-revolutions. Like those that happened with the capitalist restoration at the end of the 1980s, which were far from peaceful, not only in the Balkans, but also in China with the crushing of the masses in Tiananmen, and  in all the former Soviet republics, with the jackal Putin invading them and "taking care of order" there, where he installed military bases that guarantee imperialist investments. Or again, he invaded many of them, when the masses rose up along these years.
Nothing different from what is happening today in Cuba, where a new bourgeoisie of the Castroist CP is crushing the slaves who revolted out of hunger, leading the island to a Haiti-like  catastrophe... And the pacifists continue to call the place of this ferocious capitalist restoration a "worker state"!

Undoubtedly, the lucubrations in the pseudo-Marxist chairs of academia are also far removed from the clashes between revolution and counter-revolution that shook the end of the 20th century and what has elapsed of the 21st.

It would seem that, like the ostrich, they hide their heads in order to conceal, even if they write about them, the huge world crashes such as in 1997-2001, 2008-2016, 2019-2020, which are the expression of a capitalist system where the crashes are increasingly recurrent and the cycles of capitalist development are nothing more than very short-lived exceptions.

These objective conditions of brutal crisis of the capitalist system is what sharpens, in Trotsky's words, the epoch of crises, wars and revolutions marked by abrupt changes. Capitalism no longer advances en bloc in the world economy in all countries by developing the productive forces, but on the contrary: if it develops this or that branch of production and country, it is at the expense of destroying the majority of them. And this has not changed at all in relation to the 20th century, on the contrary, it has deepened.

It seems that the professors were on a break at the university when the US itself had to blow up the twin towers to convince the US people to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, when it had  just finished drowning the Balkans in blood, with a war that made hundreds of thousands of dead. Or do they think that in China the tanks that crushed tens of thousands of workers and students in Beijing did not "chase" the "rebels" to the last corners of China?

Perhaps they did not realize it, or took their medicine wrong and in a shock of amnesia they forgot about the millions killed in Yeltsin's and Putin's invasions to Chechnya. The same about all Putin's counter-revolutionary wars and proto-fascist coups, such as the invasion of Syria. These professors should study some history and look at the wars of recent years in the Caucasus over Nagorno-Karabakh.

And now, before the war in Ukraine, they say that "perhaps the era of crises, wars and revolutions of the 20th century is returning".

Really, how can they say in passing that in this epoch of, as they call it, "capitalist restoration" there were only a couple of wars and "forget" the genocide in Congo in 1998-2004, a country that was partitioned by the imperialist transnationals to steal the coltan from one of its provinces (like in Rwanda), with 4 million dead, while the masses in South Africa were leaving tens of thousands dead to get rid of the Apartheid regime, a revolutionary process which Stalinism then openly betrayed and surrendered?

"They are just uprisings" they squeal here and there. But they do so to cover up Stalinism's betrayals of the revolutionary processes and civil wars of the last 40 years.

We will go into this aspect in more detail later as far as Ukraine is concerned, but let us warn that the pacifism of this current has no limits. How to hide the fact that in 2022 the US spent a whopping 2.1 trillion dollars on arming itself and its allies, which is equivalent to 50% of what it spent on the whole of the Second World War that lasted 6 years?

We are facing "intellectuals" and political currents which have long ago broken with Trotskyism and which have long ago glorified the bourgeois democracy of some imperialist countries of Maastricht and the US. For Marxists, bourgeois democracy (which hides the ferocious dictatorship of capital) is still a privilege for a few rich countries, as Trotsky said, and even these countries themselves have acquired more and more Bonapartist elements. In order to plunder the oppressed peoples, imperialism needs the most authoritarian governments it can get in them. And this Marxist law has not expired. It has worsened.

It still exists even in the imperialist countries. If not let us look at the "bourgeois democratic" regime of the Spanish monarchy, which concentrates all the superpowers of the state, including the power to dissolve parliament. Monarchy that occupied the revolted Catalonia with blood and fire, as it had done before with the Basque Country, keeping hundreds of Basque fighters imprisoned, something that all the social-imperialist left wants to hide.
The totally Bonapartist apparatus of the French Imperialist Fifth Republic, which invaded Chad and Mali, to steal uranium, in real wars of pillage, has nothing to envy. The war business is still, even if the reformists deny it and want to hide it, the most important business in this rotten bankrupt capitalist system.
Here you have India and Pakistan, arming themselves to the teeth and threatening each other at every turn in border clashes, which can be used by this or that imperialist power to fight over the region.
In order to maintain its dominance, the US, far from expanding "democracy", is expanding its navy fleets and bases all over the world. How can this truth be denied, with the US fleet installed around China and over the whole Pacific, building a "new NATO" in that region? It is already well known something that the "war theoricists" hide: the maneuvers of the US gunboats accompanying their commercial wars, which are the first steps of possible military conflagrations.
We are facing an already extreme pacifism of "war theoricists". Perhaps they are specialists in war board games like TEG or Risk.
Ultimately, what disproves Mr. Maiello's theses is that, contrary to what he says, Parliamentarianism is becoming increasingly untenable. It is not only in Latin America that we have seen violent counter-revolutionary putsches, as in Bolivia, Peru, attempts in Colombia or Brazil. Even in the US this imperialist "democracy" can no longer contain the inter-bourgeois disputes and harsh class clashes, and its Congress suffered a putsch by Trump and his gang. That was a wake-up call and an announcement to the reformist lecturing that the semi-fascist or Bonapartist control of the world by the US is increasingly incompatible with the pseudo-parliamentarian forms within the US.

This question of the opening of a new historical epoch of "capitalist restoration" deserves this extensive introduction to our Counterpoint with Professor Maiello, since all his positions on the Ukrainian question are marked by or imbued with this atrocious pacifism, typical of a revisionist current which has left nothing of a revolutionary Marxist standing.

Once again on capitalist restoration
Professor Maiello, following in the footsteps of the pseudo-theory of "socialism in one country".

The current with which we are debating and to which this professor belongs, claims and hammers that by the end of the 1980s the epoch of crises, wars and revolutions would be over. They have invented the category of a "new epoch" of "capitalist restoration". That is, a historical period of capitalist expansion. They call this "the neo-liberal model".
This is a hoax. The fact is that capitalism and imperialism, controlling the world economy and world politics, has never collapsed to the point of having to be "restored".
What fell were the worker states handed over by the Stalinist scum, after betraying a thousand and one revolutions and saving imperialism from its historic crisis throughout the 20th century. The surrender of the worker states, turning the bureaucracy into a new ruling class, was one of the key bailing-outs to the rotten capitalist system.

The capitalist mode of production was saved by Stalinism. What does deserve to be restored is the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms in the former worker states, so that the latter, together with the socialist revolutions of the semi-colonial world and the imperialist countries, will be the real trenches of the international socialist revolution. And this will be done on the bones of the traitors to the world proletariat. This task can only be guaranteed by a revolutionary leadership that leads the enormous energies of the masses to the take-over of power, this time conquering it in the central imperialist countries with the highest development of the productive forces.

They talk about the restoration of the capitalist system from the 1980s onwards and deny, very loosely, that imperialism has never lost control of the world economy and world politics. It therefore restored capitalism in the isolated worker states, and turned the Stalinist bureaucracy from an indirect agent within them into their direct, i.e. bourgeois, agent.
Even the revolutionary USSR of the pre-Stalin Bolshevik party could not escape the imperialist-controlled capitalist world economy. For revolutionary Marxism, the only way to do this was with the victory of the international socialist revolution, especially in the central imperialist countries.
For the Third International, the USSR was impossible to sustain without the victory of the revolution in Germany and the rest of imperialist Europe. Because of the heroic struggles of the international proletariat, this prognosis took a long time to be realized, and we saw it in 1989.

This is precisely what Trotskyism's battle against Stalinism was about, well into the 1920s, against the pseudo-theory of "socialism in one country".

During Yalta, Stalinism deepened this deception, followed by large sections of the former Fourth International. Pabloism and other opportunists claimed that in the world economy "there were two blocs, one capitalist and the other socialist (the USSR, China, etc.)"... A nonsense. They peddled the reactionary utopia that backward worker states could break away from the world economy and control their own economy.
This is a brutish idea because the worker states were part of and could not escape from the division of labor imposed by the imperialist-controlled world capitalist economy. They had to buy and sell on the world market, and they did so not in roubles, not in yuans and certainly not in Cuban pesos, but in US dollars, through which imperialism threw all its crisis at them and took, in commercial transactions, part of the surplus value of the Soviet proletariat. Their economies were far from having the labor productivity of the more advanced countries. And they were millions of kilometres away from being able to produce everything they consumed within the borders of a single country.
 
That is why all the former workers' states were left bankrupt and totally indebted to the international banks and the IMF in the mid-1980s, and the bureaucracy became the possessing class in an economy already ravaged by imperialism, which provoked a brutal crisis of under-production that was the engine that pushed the masses to revolt. There were no longer any products to consume.

Professor Maiello faced with a Shakespearean question: "To be or not to be"?

It is very common, in academic circles, to invent definitions that everyone applauds but have nothing to do with reality.

In the left of the 21st century, totally reformist currents have evolved, which speak a "warmongering" language, and proclaim themselves "specialists in wars", but every year in their congresses, far from preparing for war, civil war, revolution and counter-revolution, in their daily politics, they search for the Philosopher Stone: "how to get a couple more deputies in the bourgeois parliament and build a revolutionary party in a reformist epoch". And year after year they answer, although they themselves do not believe it and cannot explain it... "let's make a reformist party for now, until new times of capitalist crisis come".

In this way, they are putting a carrot in front of theveyes of their militants, announcing that "it will come". It is a litany that has been going on for years and resembles a Shakespearean tragedy.

"Socialism is no more", said Fidel Castro and ended up handing over worker and peasant Cuba to the world capitalist system, turning the former Stalinist bureaucracy into a new Havana bourgeoisie.
This is repeated by all Stalinist parties all over the world. Moreover, as in China, they spoke at the beginning of this century of "market socialism", which was nothing more than "socialism" locked up in the prison factories of the new Chinese bourgeoisie associated with the biggest transnationals on the planet.

The renegades of Trotskyism chime in: "Capitalism has been reconstructed" and therefore "our struggle must be only an anti-capitalist one" they claim. What is more, in many countries they call themselves "anti-capitalist" precisely in order to affirm that socialist revolution is not an immediate task for the proletariat to live and eat. What they are saying and claiming is that without the victory of the socialist revolution at the national and international level, the working class can improve its standard of living under the conditions of this rotten bankrupt capitalist system. But life proves exactly the opposite, i.e. that the capitalists can be wrested from this or that conquest only by the method of proletarian revolution. If they give anything, it is in order not to lose everything. And if the working class does not take power, it loses anything it has conquered.

The truth is that the fact of 1% of parasites concentratimg 50% of the world's wealth is a corrective to so many reformists who think that the working class can improve its living conditions without revolution.

In Argentina's election campaign, the PTS presidential candidate, very loose in her body, waves her programme, calling for higher wages, shorter working hours, a break with the IMF... But for that "you have to vote for the left", and "socialism" will be in the future. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union didn’t go that far. "Now let us improve our standard of living and socialism for the future " is nothing more than the old theory of revolution in stages.
The leadership of the FT says nothing new. Already their political partners in France, the Pabloites of the former French LCR, proclaimed in the 1990s that the dictatorship of the proletariat was no more and removed it from their programme. Professor Maiello's intellectual colleagues spent more than a decade in that party sustaining the betrayal of the proletariat by their Pabloite leadership.

The reformism of the Fourth International has thus rushed into the 21st century to support the decomposed remnants, the pseudo-theory and programme of Stalinism, which the bourgeoisie has preserved fot them to betray the international proletarian revolution.

Revisionism and opportunism in the mud of the occupied Ukraine

From the FLTI we have been debating for months now against all the positions of the world reformist left who have jumped on Putin's tanks to invade Ukraine. This sector composed of the CPs and their left lackeys, proclaim the "fight against NATO", but support all the imperialist governments of Maastricht and the US itself, where they called to vote for Biden, the commander in chief of NATO.
Also, as the book we published at Rudolph Klement Publishing House Ukraine at War shows, we have been fighting a battle against another sector of the world reformist left, which is proto-social democratic, such as for example the LIT or the French NPA, whose policy is to pressure NATO to send arms so that Ukraine wins the war. That is to say, it places the victory of the war not in the hands of the international working class, even to get the weapons, but in the hands of imperialism. We are facing another nonsense, since NATO and the US, sooner rather than later, will agree with Moscow the partition of the Ukrainian nation, as it has already done long ago with the Minsk pacts signed in 2014-2015, where a "ceasefire" was established and the surrender of the Crimean Peninsula to Moscow and the "autonomy" of the Donbass were consolidated.
But in the case of Mr. Maiello and his current, we are arguing with people who raise a position that is apparently of "neutrality" in the Ukrainian war. They claim that Ukraine is waging a "proxy war" on behalf of NATO against Russia, and they claim to be against Putin's invasion and also against NATO.
We will debate then with this position of Professor Maiello, the exponent on military questions of the leadership of the PTS of Argentina.

We shall begin by pointing out that, in putting forward their position, here and there the PTS take quotations from university professors and thinkers from the big imperialist bourgeois universities on military matters, or journalists from the bourgeois press, who contribute from the academic campuses to the imperialist establishment. In general, they seek out the "fashionable thinkers", as in this case Mr. Maiello does in his latest writings with John Mearsheimer, a university professor in Chicago, and a graduate of the US air force military war college.
It is from these academic circles that Professor Maiello draws his conclusions on the development of the Ukrainian war. Thus, this professor expresses his latest "contribution" which appeared in Ideas de Izquierda on May 5, 2023 on the "wars of attrition" such as the one that is developing today in Ukraine, which we will go into in more detail later in this work.
Let us make it clear to the reader that all these professors of imperialist universities from whom Maiello draws his ideas to a large extent without citing the sources, only contribute research and points of view, but they are not the ones who define the military policy of the US general staff or of any serious country that enters the war. War is the continuation of politics by other means and its character, forms and objectives are defined not by bourgeois consultants or thinkers but by the states and the top brass of the big monopolies and transnationals, and their military commands.
But where Professor Maiello got the shock of his life was when he saw a university professor, of a certain Marxist level, like Maurizio Lazzarato, who according to them "committed the sin" of suggesting that the 21st century is marked, like the 20th century, by wars, revolutions... and fascism. This university professor, who comes from the struggles of the 1970s, did nothing more than show the reality. Maiello held his head, "lest a fellow university professor become a Trotskyist or take positions similar to these and my students realize that I don't know anything".

Professor Maiello's military policy for Ukraine is a riddle: "Neither NATO, nor Putin, then who?"

But let's get down to business after this presentation and curriculum vitae of the current to which Professor Maiello belongs. We will enter into a new debate on the Ukrainian question with people who have shown that they understand nothing about Ukraine or the proletarian military strategy.

We insist, they have a position today on the Ukrainian war, after having changed it several times without saying so, that the world working class should raise the slogan "Neither NATO nor Putin"... That is, as we said above, a neutral position. What they put forward is that neither of the two contenders can win this war.
Here they have made a mess of their own heads. Since, if neither of the two sides that according to them are clashing militarily in Ukraine today should prevail over the other, then who should win the war or lose it? Nothing. Total emptiness.
For these people, Ukraine, as an oppressed and invaded nation, has disappeared. It is a mere battlefield. Putin already said that "Ukraine exists because of the perverse policy of Lenin, who in 1921 invented that nation and gave it the right to national self-determination". The PTS paraphrase Putin against Lenin and act as if  they doesn't know.
Ukraine for them would no longer be a semi-colonial state, which "Great Russia" seeks to crush, and imperialism to subsume for now politically and economically, as it has been doing through the IMF, and plundering since capitalist restoration.

To wash their dirty linen, Maiello and his colleagues talk about a vague idea that in the future they would propose a "socialist Ukraine", but of course for them, this "socialist Ukraine" cannot emerge from this "proxy war" that Ukraine would be waging on NATO's account.
The PTS claims that what exists now is a "proxy war" being waged by the Ukrainian nation on behalf of NATO. Their programme, if they are consistent, should call for the disarmament of the oppressed and now occupied nation, i.e. that they surrender their weapons so that the Ukrainian masses "do not become NATO troops". This is what they are proposing to the Ukrainian workers, without daring to say it openly.
We are faced with an absurdity or a great deception based on a perverse confusionism: an oppressed nation as a semi-colonial state waging a "proxy war" against an oppressor nation that occupies and far exceeds it militarily? This analysis does not even respect formal logic enough to begin to seriously discuss military issues with Mr. Maiello.

It seems unbelievable that we have to explain to the "war theoricists" that in war there are military clashes, and that one is either defensive or anti-defensive, as revolutionary Marxism has proposed historically. But they insist "neither NATO nor Putin". An oppressed Ukraine, a thousand times occupied and partitioned? And its working class? Professor Maiello dictates: "Let them pay with the crushing of their cities and with their lives for being NATO ground troops".... This is what his followers unblushingly put forward and applaud.

We insist, in war, two sides clash for life or death. War has its times, which are often out of sync even with the times of class struggle and civil war. The bombs are falling today. Although war and the sufferings of the masses in it often give birth to enormous revolutions, and also counter-revolutions, as happens when imperialism and the oppressor nations succeed over the oppressed nations or over the working class and its organizations.

Here we have to answer where we stand. Professor Maiello, as Trotsky said of the "neutral" currents in the war, is in the place of Pontius Pilate, he washes his hands, while on the other hand, in fact, he encourages Putin to crush the Ukrainian nation. That is what the great "hand-washing" deception is all about.

Lenin, in his work "Socialism and War", spoke of the legitimate character of defensive wars, which were reduced to the wars against the previous medieval regime in the 19th century or else to the defensive wars of the oppressed nations against their oppressor nations. This meant and means that these are "just wars", irrespective of who attacks first. "Every socialist would sympathize with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, rights-impaired states over the great despoiling slave-owning oppressor powers."

Today it is Russia, in particular, that has invaded Ukraine, which is an oppressed nation, to wipe it off the map. This very thing the leadership of the PTS is doing by wiping it off the map as an occupied nation.

On the other hand, Lenin condemns inter-imperialist wars, as opposed to which he has an anti-defense policy on all sides. Thus he said: "Imagine an owner of 100 slaves waging war against another who owns 200, in order to arrive at a more equitable distribution of slaves". Evidently any defensist or "defense of the fatherland" policy would be a deception". Therefore, we revolutionary Marxists are anti-defense in the clash between imperialist pirates and boldly fight for the defeat of our own imperialist bourgeoisie.

Having clarified this, we must be concrete. In Ukraine, the one who today kills, invades militarily and demolishes whole cities of that country, the one who mass murders its working class, is Putin. NATO's policy today is to multiply Ukraine's indebtedness a thousandfold (including by selling military scrap) and then to take it over with new usurious credits, without firing a shot, and then to break it up and hand it over to Moscow.

You cannot put all the enemies of the Ukrainian working class in the middle of the war in the same bag.
Ukraine is invaded and it is the working class and its poor people who are dying in the war today. We insist that they stop looking the other way now. In the face of this reality, it is impossible to be neutral.
The way out for the Ukrainian masses and the invaded nation today, in order to continue to live, that is to be able to confront the IMF and imperialism, is to get rid of Moscow's bombs from their heads.
The way for the Ukrainian working class to achieve this is to fight to take political, economic and military control of the war itself, supported by the struggle of the European and Russian workers in particular. The pro-Putin or pro-NATO policy, or the slogan "Neither NATO nor Putin", divide the Ukrainian working class into a partitioned and invaded nation and separate it from the international working class. Mr. Maiello, "war commentator", leaves out the working class and its interests and its life during the war.

How can the Ukrainian workers support the revolutionary uprising of the French working class if their trade unions and workers' organizations, in the hands of Stalinists and Trotskyist renegades, support Putin who massacres their families, destroys their homes and expels them from their cities, while the Ukrainian people are not bombing and invading Russia? It is the treacherous policy of the Stalinist leadership of the European working class, supported by the renegades of Trotskyism, which is pushing the Ukrainian working class more and more to flee to Maastricht arms to escape the bombs and annihilation that Moscow wants to impose on them.

Our policy in the concrete war of Russia's invasion of Ukraine today is the defense of the oppressed nation. Any anti-defense policy... is defensive of Putin and his invasion.

What we are affirming here is the programme and military strategy of the Third and Fourth Internationals in the face of wars against national oppression, or even the policy in the face of wars of clash between bourgeois camps, such as the Spanish civil war. There, too, one could say that on the one side Hitler fought with Franco and on the other side England fought with France and the Republic.

Trotskyism fought against all neutral politics in that clash between bourgeois camps in Spain in the 1930s. It did not deny that both were enemies, but Franco's victory meant disaster and the extermination of the masses at that time, and therefore the policy was none other than to fight for the military victory of the Republic under the leadership of the proletariat by expropriating the bourgeoisie and the capitalists, in order to liberate the peoples oppressed by the Spanish imperialist state and to win victory with a revolutionary government of workers and peasants.

Fighting with the method of proletarian revolution, the proletariat was not "neutral" in the war between the Republic and Franco, any more than it can be "neutral" in the war of national liberation against all kinds of oppressor nations. Whoever was "neutral" in the Spanish civil war was in fact for Franco's victory.

The true character of the Ukrainian war

Maiello and his chief professors repeat like a litany that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Undoubtedly, they do not understand anything about politics and therefore about the war in the Ukrainian question.
Our current has written a book 6 months after the beginning of Putin's invasion of Ukraine called "Ukraine at war". There we explain how the US policy is expressed in the military field.
The real essence of the US "military" policy was to split and break Europe and the division of labor established by the Franco-German axis from Portugal to the Russian steppes.
The US plan was and still is to prevent the Franco-German axis from recolonizing Moscow and making huge deals with gas and all sources of raw materials from Greater Russia.

The US implemented this policy on the basis of a military institution, NATO, to which it has subordinated the European imperialisms that today, as Macron himself says, "do not want to end up as vassals of the US". He brought to bear the weight of NATO, which is the institution that expresses the balance of power of the outcome of the Second World War, where Germany was divided and even subjugated to the US, while in the 21st century it was rebuilding the European market from Portugal to the Russian steppes that it could not conquer in the Second World War.

The US did fire some missiles in this Ukrainian war... It was against the Russian-German Nordstream 2 gas pipeline, blowing it to smithereens. That pipeline was the one that linked Russia directly to Germany via the Baltic Sea, whose president was a German, the then head of social democracy, Schroeder. From this pipeline, Germany kept the Russian gas.

The US threw in one of its pawns, Ukraine, so that Moscow would invade and even partition it. Then, it took advantage of this to assert its weight over Europe as the victor of World War II through NATO, placing new countries, such as Finland, in NATO.

As we can see, Ukraine is an oppressed nation, and the invasion of Moscow and its partition is part of and strategically contemplated in US policy, to wear down Russia and weaken its Maastricht imperialist competitors. But to say that Russia and NATO are clashing militarily in Ukraine today is foolish to say the least.

Professor Maiello is far from understanding this war politically. What he claims is that, "since NATO and Moscow are the ones clashing in Ukraine, there is no side to defend in it".
"Neither NATO nor Putin" they insist... Be clear. Go all the way. With their abstentionist policy and halfway-truths, the PTS leadership and their academic professors are proposing to the working class in Ukraine to surrender their arms in order not to be complicit in a "proxy war on NATO's account". They will reply that they also propose "neither Moscow", but they do not call on the Russian working class and the youth of that country to set up a "new Vietnam" to overthrow the jackal of the Kremlin. In other words, they are advancing in political camouflage with Putin's infantry…
They are turning their backs on the hundreds of thousands of young workers who are either fleeing Russia or refusing to go to military service, because they do not want to go to die for Putin's war against a brotherly people like the Ukrainian. Thousands of them are in prison and in Putin's torture chambers.

It is clear that NATO does indeed send arms to Ukraine, but in dribs and drabs, only to contain Putin on the Donbass border, not to drive him out. The 10 Leopard tanks, armed with supplies from the 1970s, and an artillery that does not reach more than 80 km, are not the weapons NATO has to confront and defeat Russia if it wanted to right now. It is stupid and cynical to claim that NATO went to war against Russia in Ukraine.
Professor Maiello, who poses as a "war strategist", cannot be so ignorant... Or does he not know this? Not even an already disused F-16 aircraft is NATO giving Ukraine to defend itself, and it is promising to do so in a few months' time on condition that they do not fly over Russian territory.

The military officers and technicians sent by NATO went there to consolidate the officer corps of the Ukrainian army so that the soldiers do not organize themselves alongside the starving masses resisting in the cities attacked by Putin and take control of the weapons themselves. Or, faced with a Russian army disintegrating at the front, with its soldiers turning back, the Ukrainian masses will not rise up victoriously against all the oppressors.

The PTS, camouflaged in Putin's trenches, ultimately paints itself as a "peace fighter". "Neither NATO nor Putin"... then their programme could just as well be "no war". These people are playing hide and seek. They could go to the Vatican and camouflage themselves with the cassock of the priests and the papacy.

A scandalous concealment by Mr. Maiello: Putin's invasion of the former Soviet republics to defend the businesses of the capitalists.

But where the fallacy of what the PTS leadership proclaims about a "proxy war" being waged by Ukraine on behalf of NATO against Russia is really apparent, is in what they keep quiet and conceal. They are deafeningly silent.

Why do you lie and silence that a week before invading Ukraine, Russia had invaded Kazakhstan to crush the uprising of the workers in the imperialist oil companies plundering that former Soviet republic? Putin and his counter-revolutionary "Greater Russia" forces have occupied Belarus with over 300,000 men and placed them on the very borders with Ukraine. With this invasion, Putin finished crushing a huge Belarusian workers' uprising that threatened to overthrow Lukashenko... Come on, tell the truth! These military actions and invasions were fully and openly supported by imperialism and covered by the protective umbrella of NATO. Why do you hide this?

Professor Maiello must explain why they are in favor of the "general of all the Russias" keeping the proletariat of the former Soviet republics disciplined at bayonet point on account of defending the business of imperialism and the capitalists there.

This professor has an elephant sitting in the front row of his lectures and he pretends not to notice it. And next to this elephant, there is another one. They hide the fact that the Russian army invaded Armenia in December 2022, in agreement with Turkey (a NATO member), so that Azerbaijan could take Nagorno-Karabakh and British Petroleum could take all the oil from the Black Sea via Erdogan's pipelines from Baku. Why do you lie?

Precisely, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Putin's bombings today is to fight for him to continue to be the gendarme of the capitalists' business in Eurasia, including an armistice with NATO that comprises the Donbass and Crimea being under his control.

In Belarus and Kazakhstan, shortly before now, and yesterday in Georgia and the Caucasus, as in Syria, it is Putin who is waging a proxy war on behalf of NATO. Can anyone look the other way and hide this truth from the advanced workers of the world?

The FT-PTS, in the Syrian question, with a political agreement with Kurdish Stalinism, have ended up on the political and military front of al-Assad and Putin and their proxy war on behalf of all the imperialist powers

The "military specialists" of the PTS always declare themselves "neutral" in specific wars. For them, “imperialism is always behind one of the contenders” and always “there are two enemies”, therefore, their flag is the white flag of peace, even if they blush and don't want to say it. With this policy they always end up helping one of the shameless enemies of the working class, either by omission or direct support.
In other wars, they look for what would be the "lesser evil". But this does not apply in Ukraine. In Syria, they did find the “lesser evil”. There they supported the Kurdish Communist Party (PKK), which ended up agreeing with al-Assad on a common military front. And together with Putin and the Iranian guard they ended up crushing a heroic revolution.
But in his pact with the PKK, Professor Maiello has an additional drawback. In Syrian Kurdistan there are the US imperialist military bases, which command and control Rojava. They sought the "lesser evil" and found themselves, with their Stalinist partners, under the banners of the Gringos and NATO, who are plundering oil from northern and eastern Syria by means of Erdogan's oil pipelines.

They still have to explain this position in the face of the massacre by al-Assad and Putin, who without a doubt waged a true "war of occupation" and at the same time "a proxy one" on behalf of all the imperialist powers to crush a heroic revolution of workers and peasants, who had armed themselves back in 2011-2012 to defeat the regime. A revolution that was a decisive link in the chain of revolutions that impacted the Middle East starting in 2011.

We are arguing not only with university professors but also with quarterbacks who have already lost several times. Already in 2012-2013, while al-Assad massacred the 200,000 Palestinians in the Yarmouk camp in Damascus, and together with the Iranian Islamic Guard massacred the workers of Homs, when the FSA generals began to surrender cities from within such as Qsair, they fled Syria stating that "nothing more could be done, since the revolution had become militarized." They are horrified when a revolution becomes militarized… although this is what usually happens in them. What we say here is in their texts; they wrote it without blushing. The "war specialists'', when the civil war begins, grab their bags and flee in terror.

Today in the Syrian question all the masks have fallen off. The curtain rises. It is becoming increasingly clear that al-Assad and Putin did carry out the aforementioned proxy war in a Syria today plundered by all the imperialist powers in its oil wells and pipelines. It is clear that, along with al-Assad and Putin, Turkey, which is a member of NATO, had to intervene decisively. Turkey freed the ground for Putin and Assad to massacre while it, with its agents of the Sunni bourgeoisie, handed over all the rebel cities.
Putin and NATO are not irreconcilable enemies. They are partners that sometimes dispute, at times acutely. But they need each other. And this is what all the anti-Marxist currents in the war in Ukraine deny.
We insist, the silence about Syria, in the face of that "proxy" and counter revolutionary war stains and condemns them. They were squires of al-Assad, supported by Putin, with whom the Kurdish Stalinist communist party made a pact, betraying the fight for self-determination of their own people.

Another example of pacifism and how they flee from the battlefield when the class struggle becomes militarized was the intervention of Professor Maiello and other of his colleagues in Egypt. They went to that country when the masses were overthrowing Pharaoh Mubarak. They went with their partners from the King's Socialists of England from the SWP (Socialist Workers Party), who had a sister-party there. They were excited to start unions and see if they could start a FIT there. They were looking for an electoral spring. But once again, as the house of cards of pacifist illusions crumbled and the clashes of civil war began, the return tickets were quickly bought. We are facing a current that openly deserts the civil war.
Far from fighting to break up the murderous Egyptian army and arming the masses, the SWP and all their partners proclaimed together with the liberal bourgeoisie the breakthrough of a “constituent assembly”. The "heirs of Pharaoh" called for it and handed over power to the opposition bourgeoisie and also to the "democratic" bourgeoisie, first to the Muslim Brotherhood and then to the April 6 Movement, which in turn called on the generals to massacre the masses. But by then, the "socialists" were already far away.

The time has come to say it. They are specialists in military issues and civil wars of which they never participate, wages only in test tubes of bourgeois universities. They have not directly participated in any of them.

The position of Marxism before wars

As we have already said, in wars between states, as Lenin said, one can have a defenseist or anti-defensist policy.

We revolutionaries defend any workers' state attacked by a capitalist or imperialist country, just as we defend a union against any attack by the bosses and their states, regardless of whether or not it has bureaucratic leadership. The reason is that the bourgeoisie does not attack the unions to defeat the bureaucracy, but to liquidate the conquest of the workers' organization. Hence the program of the IV International in World War II was "Long live the USSR, out with Stalin!".
We are also defenseists before any imperialist attack or a great power against an oppressed, colonial or semi-colonial country, regardless of the government it has, since if the oppressor country prevails it will leave that nation tied with double and triple chains of exploitation, looting, backwardness and a defeated working class, with its head bowed and with the whip of imperialism or the oppressor nation on its back. Actually, the working class, under conditions of defeat by an oppressive nation, will be left in a million times more difficult conditions to reconstitute its forces and fight for its demands. This is what is happening and will happen in Ukraine if the course of the current war does not change.

On the other hand, bankrupt US imperialism is currently disputing its backyard with Maastricht and even Moscow. The partition of the Ukraine by Russia, the wear and tear that this means to Moscow is part of that Gringo strategy. Although the hard-headed professor does not understand it, ultimately, Putin's war has a double character, both of oppression of Ukraine and of a "proxy war" to remain an agent of imperialism in all the latter's business in Eurasia. But asking Professor Maiello, who did not pass the first term in military matters, to understand this is like trying to make a silk purse out of a pig's ear.

For the reasons mentioned above, we Marxists are in favor of the military victory of the oppressed country, of the colony and the semi-colony, in the face of the aggression of an imperialist or oppressive power, no matter what the former's regime could be. Taking into account that Putin's defeat in the Ukraine would be based decisively on the uprising of the Russian youth and the masses of Moscow it would open the beginning of the end of the Bonapartist and semi-fascist Kremlin' regime and government, and consequently, the control of the former Soviet republics and Eurasia would be totally destabilized.

This is an area of the planet which the imperialist troops have millions of geostrategic and military difficulties to control directly. This happened at the time of the tsars, of the Napoleonic invasions and that of Hitler in the Second World War. All imperialism or dominant power needed Great Russia to finish controlling and oppressing the working class of dozens of oppressed nations in the region. Either with Putin in “Great Russia” or with a native pro imperialist army, dozens and dozens of nations can be controlled, which are either still inside oppressed “Great Russia” or outside of it.

A Ukrainian victory would leave Moscow weakened and its oppressed working class and people better off. The latter two would remain with arms in hand, to deepen the struggle for their demands and for power both during and after the war. It would be a million times more difficult for the IMF and the great Ukrainian oligarchy to redouble the plans of looting and enslavement that they have prepared for the Ukrainian masses if the latter emerge victorious from the national liberation struggle, arms in hand. And it would be more difficult for NATO to subdue the nation, since NATO does not come with bread under its arm or to bring democracy to Ukraine. It will come to disarm the masses and impose the worst plans of the IMF and the oligarchy.

This is what the military program of the proletariat is about in the wars of liberation and against national oppression. With a defenseist program, the best conditions would be created, during and after the war, for the proletariat to settle accounts with its own bourgeoisie.
We revolutionary Marxists have no doubt that this Ukrainian bourgeoisie will be the first to surrender the national struggle against Putin. This Zelensky will do when ordered by NATO.

We want to highlight that other types of war between states have also developed and are developing, where the position of “neutrality” of the PTS does not enter anywhere either, from the point of view of the working class and Marxism. We are referring here to the fratricidal wars between two colonial or semi-colonial states oppressed by imperialism.

In case there is a clash between two semi colonial countries, which can be driven from behind by imperialism or by different powers, the Marxist policy is not to be neutral either. In this case it would be for the fraternization of both peoples, of their troops, to shoot together against imperialism, getting rid of the fratricidal bourgeoisies and preventing any nation from touching a square millimeter of the other.

A military clash of this type was the tragedy of the Iraq-Iran war, which left the working class in the Middle East divided between Shiites and Sunnis, with a river of blood in the midst of 4 million deaths that is still difficult to overcome.

If they continue with their "neutral" and pacifist policy, we insist, they must go to the Vatican. There, the papacy, always willing to mediate the peace of the powerful, would be happy to receive them. They must ask for a hearing.

The working class and the war

For these anti-Marxist currents, the proletarian policy against the war is a forbidden matter. This means that for them the interests of the working class in the different types of war do not matter. It is precisely during the war when the class struggle is most exacerbated, something these "theoreticians" want to hide.

They affirm that the war is the “midwife of revolutions”, but they do not have any program or policy for the working class to carry out during or after the war. They are cynical people.

They conceal that with the invasion of Moscow, what is left divided is not only Ukraine but its working class, which is now even receiving from its governments, be it in the occupied Donbass or in the territory under Kyiv, the same treatment of slavery and salary reduction, working hours enlargement and even layoffs. This is what has happened in the mines in Donbass where 50,000 workers were laid off and have not received their salaries for 6 months. In Kyiv, labor flexibility was imposed by decree.
As Trotsky proposed, a program of social demands, such as an immediate salary increase, work for all, a break with the IMF, a tax on great fortunes to rebuild the shattered nation and for the people to eat, is the only one that can unite the working class and give it a central role during the war. The unity of the Ukrainian working class, which includes the right to self-determination of the peoples of Donbass, is the most powerful "missile" it has to take the leadership of the national war, crush Moscow and create the best conditions to defeat imperialism and its own government.
Not to fight for defeating Putin's invasion, that is to say, to keep the divided Ukraine as "simply a battle territory where NATO and Moscow clash" is to take the Ukrainian working class out of the picture, and therefore the Russian working class as well as that from all over Europe.
This is the key to the military program of the proletariat in the invaded Ukraine. As Trotsky stated in the Spanish civil war, the key to winning the war, which Professor Maiello and his colleagues will never understand, depends 90% on the program and political strategy and only 10% on technical issues. Giving the land to the peasant, bread to the worker, signing peace and giving nations the unconditional right to self-determination were the great “missiles” with which the Bolsheviks conquered and were able to maintain power in the former USSR and move the European proletariat, which was its great ally against the troops of 14 imperialist armies that were invading it.

This is what all the Stalinists deny, from Stalin to Gramsci, and even the ex-Trotskyists, who spend their time arguing and writing on Trotsky and the war of maneuvers, of which they understand nothing. They have not even read the first page of the military writings of the leader of the Fourth International. That's because they deny that all questions of the red army's war strategy are subordinated to the program of the revolution and to establishing the worker and peasant alliance.
Only on that basis could the daring, genial and victorious military technique of maneuver warfare be applied throughout the course of the civil war when the USSR was attacked by 14 imperialist armies.
The Red Army could not establish a war for control of its invaded territory, due to its enormous extension and the enormous number of forces that attacked it. How did the red army fight, then? Moving the great worker and peasant masses with the program of the Bolsheviks in power, handing over the land to the peasant, expropriating the capitalists and fraternizing at the front with the German soldiers and fighting for peace at all costs.

Maneuver warfare, with which the Red Army concentrated on one point to hit and dislocate the enemy, was a military maneuver to develop armed worker and peasant insurrections, to occupy the territory and transform it into a trail of civil war. That was the role of the Red Army and its great political and military strategies.
Everything else is "highbrow" verbiage from academicians to give themselves splendor. Without a program to revolt the working class and poor peasantry of Tsarist Russia and the entire European proletariat, maneuver warfare, as a brilliant military tactical maneuver, would have been largely useless.
Professor Maiello is a staunch follower of the Stalinist Gramsci, who while preaching "socialism in one country" called for the massacre of all Trotskyists who were for the theory of permanent revolution. Such a teacher!

Professor Maiello and his colleagues have invented the pseudo-theory of "hybrid wars"

The leadership of the PTS, with the excuse of the "proxy war", has invented a kind of limbo for military issues, which we could call "hybrid wars", where the exact conditions are created for its pacifist and anti-militarist position, typical of the parliamentary social-democratic parties, which, as we see, is the mask that they put on to legitimize Russia's offensive in the eyes of the European proletariat. Since, what European worker would not be in favor of the defeat of NATO? This is the policy that Stalinism imposes... "Out with NATO, let Putin win", who is the one who today kills and massacres the Ukrainian masses.
They are presenting Putin, the best partner NATO and the imperialist butchers of Maastricht Europe have ever had, as an ally of the European proletariat. They are wretched sinners.

We affirm that the real army and military force that imperialism has used since the year 1989 to keep on with its business in all of Eurasia is the armed forces of “Great Russia”. With this, imperialism has kept under control all the oppressed nations there, which for centuries were trodden by Tsarism and then Stalinism... The PTS, with its "neutrality" always covers the left flank of the great "proxies", "Great Russia" and Putin. Who attacked Ossetia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, the Caucasus, Georgia, Chechnya, leaving 4 million dead, annihilating all males over the age of 14... And as if that were not enough, they went to support al-Assad.

Maiello and his university professors want to impose their hybrid policy of neutrality with dramatic blows. "NATO sends weapons to Ukraine!" they affirm. Yes, but it does so to the extent that Ukraine cannot defeat Putin, who is breaking it up, and he does so also as a part of the US imperialist policy. Yes, NATO sends weapons to Ukraine, but only "enough" for Putin not winning the war while not preventing him from devastating Ukraine.
It will not be the first time that the US or an imperialist power has used this policy. The USA and England did it against Japan's invasion of China in the '30s. They did so in the face of Italy's military expeditions in North Africa before the Second World War, what Trotsky called "colonial expeditions", where the imperialist powers, taking over this or that sector of the world market, tried not to attack each other, when in reality they had began to dispute it mail and teeth. But that was not why the revolutionary Marxism of the 1930s adopted an anti-defensist policy, quite the contrary. Always in times of the revolutionary Third International and of the Fourth International in the 1930s, revolutionary Marxism was fighting in the trenches of the oppressed nations, defending that nation against imperialism.

Of course, it is blind not to seep that behind a progressive war (against imperialism or oppressive nations), very possibly there is this or that imperialist power using it to weaken the one it attacks. But we revolutionary Marxists know very well that no oppressor nation will support the struggle for national liberation of an oppressed people all the way, much less the victory of a revolution in the attacked nation. That this can happen, ultimately, is the opinion of another wing of the former Trotskyist movement, which says that putting pressure on NATO, that is, on “democratic imperialisms”, Putin can be defeated.

But let's keep talking about Professor Maiello and his “neutrality” policy, about “Neither NATO nor Moscow”. Invitations continue to arrive from Rome... Perhaps in the corridors of the Vatican people say that the day and time of the meeting has already been scheduled as they have to preach peace alongside Pope Bergoglio...

Trotsky in his article "against defeatism in Spain" (a policy that explicitly clarifies that it is also used for just wars against national oppression), states the following, which applies to the millimeter to the war in Ukraine:

“Two ships with weapons and ammunition leave France or the US, one for Franco and the other for Negrín (the republic). What attitude should workers take? Sabotage the transport of the two or only Franco's?"

We could transfer the question to today: should we sabotage both the one that goes to Ukraine and the one that goes to Russia, or only the one that goes to Russia?

To this, Trotsky replies:'

“We are not neutral (and neither are we). We will let the ship with ammunition for Negrín pass. Without illusions, we know that, of these bullets, 9 out of 10 will be directed against the fascists, but at least one against our comrades. But of the ammunition destined for Franco, 10 out of 10 will be directed against our comrades." (our bold)

We clarify and reaffirm that we are not neutral. 10 out of 10 bullets from Russia fall on the working class and the Ukrainian people. One in ten is sure that the Zelensky government uses it to shoot against the partisan sectors and the mass movement that are trying to gain a degree of independence from its military policy. It is because of this situation posed by the concrete war that we call on the port workers not to let Putin's ship pass.
It would be quite another thing if a policy of intervention, decisive and independent of the working class, developed in the midst of the Ukrainian war. Let him take the direction of the war into his hands, expropriating the oligarchs and capitalists, choosing his officers from the rank and file. In that case, all the weapons would go to the insurgent working class. But in the meantime, we wholeheartedly advocate that Putin not fire those 10 bullets on the working class and the devastated cities of an oppressed Ukraine.
But the PTS and Maiello continue their “hybrid warfare”, which means no munitions shipped to Ukraine, and Putin dumping all his weapons to crush the oppressed nation. At this point in the game, it is clear that the PTS's “hybrid wars” generally benefit Putin.
They do not claim or demand, from the chairs of the University of Buenos Aires, the immediate withdrawal of Putin's troops from Crimea or Donbass, which belong to Ukraine... Faced with this, one cannot be "neutral".

An apocryphal analogy to justify his "anti-defense" policy of the oppressed nation

At the beginning of the war, colleagues from Maiello's same party, said the stupidity that Ukraine should not be supported against Putin's invasion, as Lenin did not support Serbia against the Austro-Hungarian empire at the beginning of the First Great World War.
Let us remember that, in July 1914, more specifically on July 23 of that year, a Serbian “terrorist” killed the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire. For Lenin, it was not really necessary to support Serbia, which was finally disarmed by that empire, since that was an episode at the beginning of the First World War, which began on August 4, barely 15 days later.
What does this episode of the beginning of the First World War between France and England against the Austro-Hungarian empire and Germany, which broke out with the excuse of that individual attack, have to do with the mobilization of troops that today occupy Ukraine? Quickly this tale collapsed like a house of cards.

There was an uproar in Professor Maiello's chair and now they try to regulate the mortar and say that the devastated, demolished Ukraine, with its massacred working class, is simply a battlefield between NATO and Russia... as Serbia was in a sense for a week. After a year and a half of war, this is already nonsense.
It is as if the two contenders (according to them, NATO and Russia) had said to each other "we have to select some place to fight, is it okay with you in the black lands of Ukraine or in the Donbass?" You know by what chance of fate, they chose Ukraine, which is one of the most oppressed and looted nations of the former USSR, both by the West and by "Great Russia". Why didn't they meet in France or Poland to fight?
Carrying the thought of these people to the end is nonsense. The invention of "proxy wars" on behalf of third parties in Ukraine is an infamy. The 90% of the Ukrainian population, who receive bombings to their heads and have to take refuge in basements, would not welcome the PTS telling them that they are fighting for NATO. To the workers and poor people, with their cities demolished and while they search for their children under the rubble, Professor Maiello says "they deserve it for being NATO proxies"... This is miserable.

These pseudo-intellectuals want workers not to know that Ukraine is an oppressed nation. However, it is a colonized nation, plundered by imperialism and the great Russia, as big as many of the largest nations in Latin America or Africa and has one of the most concentrated working classes in Europe, brutally exploited, without receiving their salaries, laid-off for thousands, or made flexible or wandering in the deserted streets of destroyed cities without a piece of bread, a working class that today is divided and dislocated by the partition of the nation.

The plan for Ukraine is partition, and the one who guarantees that today is Putin. The trench warfare established today is not a war of attrition in general, as “Comandante” Maiello claims, but a military demarcation of the sharply defined limits of the partition of Ukraine, where the Donbass and Crimea will remain for Moscow.
In this supposed “hybrid war”, Professor Maiello forgets that the IMF has been sucking up a large part of the wealth of the Ukrainian nation for decades, both with pro-Russian or pro-US governments in Kiev. It is already in debt up to the marrow with the imperialist banks and will now be doubly indebted with the war credits. These are the "missiles" that imperialism shoots, supported by Putin's bombings, so that Ukraine remains a direct colony of NATO.

From the University of Buenos Aires and from the political commandos of the PTS, there has already happenned an open break with all Leninist policies with which the USSR and the Third International were conquered through the revolution of 1917. It is precisely by fighting against all oppression or invasion of any foreign imperialist power, including the USSR, and giving Ukraine full rights to self-determination and independence, the Bolshevik party could seize power in Ukraine and unite its working class with that of the USSR. Bolshevism was not neutral towards any of the attacked, occupied or oppressed nations of the Soviet republics.

Proposing that Russia and the invaded Ukraine are on an equal footing in this war brings Professor Maiello closer to a current that did not have the slightest compassion for a nation being attacked, occupied and oppressed. We are speaking of the infamous regime of the Stalinist counterrevolutionary bureaucracy. Light needs to be shed on this discussion. It 's time.

Regarding Professor Maiello's military notes: he did not pass the first semester of the first year of college

We must educate the workers to demystify so much charlatanism of university professors on military issues. According to Trotsky, the war between armies is a technique. Art is, in the civil war, the insurrection and the seizure of power.

In war, all political, economic and military resources are used to defeat and break the will of the enemy. Marxism has two positions before war, as we said, it is either defenseist or anti-defensist, or in the case of fratricidal wars it is for the unity of the peoples to confront imperialism.

The leadership of the PTS, pretending to be military strategists, is sunk in the swamps of the black lands of Ukraine and they have already run out of supplies. We have already made it clear that the F-16s, in their old versions, never made it to the battlefield.

Now, let's see Professor Maiello's new nonsense that appeared weeks ago in Ideas de Izquierda. A nonsense that is already absolute. It is said that military analysts laugh at such stupidity. They affirm very irresponsibly that at the beginning of the invasion Russia launched a Blitzkrieg to Ukraine trying to reach Kiev like Germany when it arrived in Paris at the beginning of World War II. This nonsense, in itself, contradicts the anti-defensist policy of Ukraine that the "military strategists" of the PTS of Argentina had from the beginning.
Since, if so, Moscow wanted to take Kyiv from the outset (and couldn't)... so why didn't Maiello defend Ukraine? If these people thought about what they write and say, they would not walk with the white flag on the war fronts and they would have avoided the shame of the analogy with Serbia in 1914 that they even proclaimed in public events.

But let's get to the specifically technical aspect of this claim they make. We clarify that we take the tedious job of following the fanciful military writings typical of petty-bourgeois thought, from people who have already seen many fictional films about the war.
Putting feet on the ground, do these people mean that Russia launched a Blitzkrieg by sending all its military forces to take Kiev and was stopped by a couple of artillery pieces from NATO and the Ukrainian army? What are you talking about? In other words, NATO did not use to stop a Russian Blitzkrieg either its aviation, nor its navy, or its advances in the highest technology applied to warfare, from which Moscow is light centuries away?
Moscow troops could not even, for more than a hundred days, take Bakhmut, as before they had done at Mariupol, with a group of mercenaries. Ridiculous! Only an audience of parliamentary charlatans can believe that.

The famous Russian "Blitzkrieg" is just a demarcation with war trenches of the Donbass and Crimea, with which Putin wants to split Ukrainian territory. Everything else is long-distance bombing of Ukrainian cities and their infrastructure to force them to negotiate a partition. Undoubtedly Moscow regulates its attack on the Ukrainian nation. It disputes the Donbass and Crimea recklessly and also the conquest of new ports to the south. That is the political goal of the Moscow war.
The analogy with the German Blitzkrieg is a brutality of a military ignoramus. The Blitzkrieg, in World War II, meant that Germany used all its forces (navy, aviation, all land troops) to hit the enemy at one point, break his front, disperse his forces and arrive, as Hitler did, at Paris gates. Russia was far from it in Ukraine. What are these people talking about?

Even as a war correspondent, Mr. Maiello is unreliable. He is unaware that Russia has been totally left behind in high-tech weaponry. It is so in relation to artificial intelligence and the virtual war simulators that the advanced countries of Europe and the US have.
While Russian gas flowed like a big business to Germany, this country trained 30,000 Kremlin's troops a year in virtual war simulators that Russia does not have. France sold Russia 4 frigates with optics and an attack detection system to which you could not hide even a pin closer to 500 km. NATO's military command possesses the artificial intelligence that enables it to convey a large-scale concentrated attack from all its coordinated military branches at the same time, with zero friendly fire losses.

Someone please explain to Mr. Maiello that all technological revolutions, including his cell phone, have always been a product of the conversion of war tech to a civilian branch of technology. And state-of-the-art war tech is in the hands of the most advanced imperialist countries.
They confuse the sale of improved conventional weapons, which turns out to be the true branch of production that the capitalist system develops and where it reconstitutes its profit, with the high war technology that the most advanced imperialist countries have in terms of labor productivity.
Comparing the US military devices, with its advanced robotics and artificial intelligence, to the drones that Russia buys from Iran with which it is now attacking Ukraine, is nonsense. According to off-the-record journalists' say, this pseudo-intellectual vision from Buenos Aires has become the laughing stock of all international war specialists. Please, someone from Professor Maiello's party put him to study seriously or give him another job. War correspondent is not his specialty.
Even more, in this war in Ukraine, the US took 30% of the arms market from Russia, while the latter massacres Ukraine and wears itself to the bone. But this does not matter to the leaders of the PTS, since they deny that what is most developed in the world capitalist economy and where the states invest the most and the transnationals parasitize, is in the production of destructive forces. There is an unlimited market for them. The harder this war of massacre and occupation is becoming, the bigger the market the war industry has.
In this war in Ukraine, after a year and a half, the warehouses of old war supplies have already been emptied and they even had to start mass-producing ammunition. And they still cannot supply not only the war in Ukraine, but also the entire rearmament that the vast majority of states on the planet began in 2022. Of course, for the gentlemen of the PTS, at a time when "capitalism was restored", the productive forces develop harmoniously and capital, here and there, recomposes its rate of profit. A political scam.
Imperialism means looting, war and parasitism. We are going to give some data from the information we mentioned above.
In Trotsky's words, war is the biggest commercial enterprise on the planet and a decisive economic factor. And if US imperialism cannot go further in military operations, it is because it is still engaged in preparatory trade wars with which it seeks to overcome the will to war of its opponents before firing a shot. And if he does not advance further in its military actions, it is because its working class and the oppressed masses of the world are preventing it from doing so for now.

The wars that “wear out” university professors

The last report of war that comes from the front of correspondent Maiello, when he sees the current trench warfare, is that a "war of attrition" is taking place in the Ukraine. Good news! After a year and a half, Maiello realizes that the US imperialist policy is to wear down Great Russia on the blood of the masses and the territory of an oppressed nation.
Let's see if our correspondent goes one step higher and also realizes that in Ukraine there is a war of attrition by the US imperialists against European imperialism to block the latter's way to Moscow and march, with their navies, to Taiwan and beyond (China).
It wouldn't hurt to go up another step and understand that the US is not firing shots in Ukraine today. It is doing business. As is doubling and tripling Ukraine's debt by selling her weapons.
"A war of attrition"... Who against whom? Our professor fails to distinguish essence from appearance. The appearance would seem to be that we are in the Ukraine in trench warfare like in the First or Second World War. But it's not like that. By means of these trenches, the borders and the partition of the nation are marked.
US imperialism, looking at from abroad, has no problem that "everyone wears out", including the Franco-German axis. And this is a political question that the dominant imperialism develops to try to maintain its world hegemony that is being questioned.

Our journalist in question only talks about commonplaces. He repeats the opinions of any charlatan journalist from the bourgeoisie and passes them off as his own. Wearing down the enemy is an objective, at least momentarily, of any war. The plan of imperialism and NATO is to partition Ukraine, and today it is Russia that is doing it, we insist. And there is no militaristic verbiage that can hide it. And the war will end with an armistice when the Ukraine is divided and its borders are redrawn along the trenches that are being built today.

At this point it is time to affirm that the real war that is brewing in these regional military clashes, ultimately, is the dispute between the different imperialist powers, both Maastricht and Japan or the US, for the new markets conquered in '89, such as Russia and China... There, the imperialist powers need direct agents. Keeping the powerful Chinese domestic market, as well as Russia's huge sources of raw materials.
We are already seeing how Europe swallowed Cuba. USA swallowed Vietnam. Maastricht was sucking up all the wealth of Russia and organizing the European market under the aegis of the Franco-German axis, and the US cut off all the conduits to it. Meanwhile, everyone goes for China, as we said, for its internal market that they all contributed to developing, super-exploiting millions of workers from that nation there as slaves. Everyone is going for Russia and China in the face of this deadly crisis of the explosion of the world capitalist system, which has not found a bottom since 2008.

And since we are talking about NATO, we must remind Mr. Maiello that the US has already created a "new NATO", this time in the Pacific, that is, a PTO with 14 countries, encircling China politically, economically and already militarily.

Notes and orders arrive from London. Maiello repeats in a camouflaged way the positions of his leaders, the reformists of the English SWP...

This “neutral” position that Maiello and the PTS leadership are raising today is the position of a “socialist” party (the English SWP), a servant of the King of England that for decades has been an appendage of the UK Labor Party. Mr. Maiello has teachers who are in London, such as Professor Callinicos, who already promoted this policy in the 1982 war between Argentina and the UK for the Malvinas/Falklands.

In those years, when the Royal Navy marched to the extreme south of the Atlantic, they raised "Neither Thatcher nor Galtieri." For decades they had affirmed "neither Washington nor Moscow", and that is why the leadership of the PTS cannot show them in society if they want to maintain the Trotskyist appearances... This would have meant having been neutral before the Nazi invasion of Stalingrad in World War II (Quite a teaching!).

But returning to the Malvinas/Falkland war, as was inevitable, without the support of the English working class, which applied the SWP policy, and with the leadership crisis of the Argentine proletariat, which was unable to take the leadership of the national war, everything ended with Thatcher crushing Argentina, with a NATO military base in the Malvinas, 200 miles from the continent, always ready to attack any revolutionary uprising of the oppressed peoples of Latin America.
That is to say, beyond the democratic liberties conquered, the ones who paid for the military defeat of Argentina were the workers and the people, since the nation was tied with double and triple chains by the IMF that goes on plundering and sucking it mercilessly to this day, as we have seen for 40 years of this farce of democracy for the rich. The brutal economic crisis in Argentina, sucked in by imperialism, is the daughter of this brutal national defeat in the war and the leadership crisis that prevented the proletariat from seizing power, despite having waged huge anti-imperialist battles.
This same SWP today in Ukraine says again that "in the course of a year, the West and Russia have turned Ukraine into the site of a deadly proxy war" ... and Maiello in the Río de la Plata repeats the same thing. He is a good pupil.
It seems that Professor Maiello's latest theses got approved, but with him copying his friend Callinicos. We saw them! At least he should have announced the true copyright owner.
But, oddly enough, what is happening in Ukraine is more serious than what happened in Argentina. Putin's counter-revolutionary invasion will throw Ukraine a million times over into the EU and NATO. The people massacred by Putin will seek to flee from the Moscow massacre, as they tried to do before from the tsars and Stalinism.
The socialists of the English king and of the Argentine bourgeois parliament interchange the notes from their lectures and copy each other in their exams, but even so they do not approve the simplest questions about the military strategy of the proletariat.

An iron alternative for a nation militarily crushed by Moscow and plundered by imperialism: Ukraine will be Soviet and independent or it will be a guarded colony

Not to organize the revolutionary program in this war around the only immediate task that can solve the tragedy of the oppressed nation, which is the fight for an independent Soviet Ukraine, taking up the Bolshevik program, is to give up the fight for the proletarian revolution that resolves the crises of the today tormented former Soviet republics and makes the Russian working class return to the center of the world working class scene. It is ultimately to separate the European working class of Maastricht from its Eastern European brethren.

Now, the charlatans, with their "admonishing finger", from their university chairs, will be able to scream about the "low level of subjectivity" of the Ukrainian workers, when the entire Stalinist left and "anti-capitalists" worldwide either look the other way when they are massacred by counterrevolutionary troops from Moscow, or support Putin directly.
What the PTS from the bourgeois parliament of Argentina is asking of the Ukrainian workers is that they alone defeat Putin's troops and NATO, put an end to Zelensky and, albeit being divided, reach socialism... Please! Stop whipping and stabbing the Ukrainian working class in the back!

Without the intervention of the European proletariat supporting the Ukrainian nation against Putin's invasion and confronting NATO, without the support of the rebellious youth of Russia who do not want to go and die for Putin's counterrevolutionary government, there can be no liberation of Ukraine or working class struggle. This necessary participation of the working class of the imperialist or oppressive country did happen in Vietnam, where the war was won in New York... or in Iraq, where the war was won in the streets of the European imperialist powers and with the Million March against the war in the US.

With this support from the international working class to the oppressed Ukrainian masses, Zelensky would barely last a few days leading the national war and that would be the only way to defeat NATO and imperialism.

We are facing a bunch of fakers, stealthy friends of Putin, enemies of the struggle for the national liberation of the oppressed peoples.

These people denounce Zelensky, but they do not say that this scoundrel and the Ukrainian bourgeoisie will not die in the war... They seek to sign the peace of the graveyards... as soon as the Gringos order it. Because for the bourgeoisie, the "defense of the homeland" is the defense of their businesses.

There you have Mariupol, which reaffirms what we say, bombed to the rubble. What is the only thing left standing in the region, unlike Azovstal, where the resistance had to hide? The ArcelorMittal factory in Krivi Righ, the world's largest French steel company.

Basically, what Maiello and his colleagues are saying, with their "neutrality" military policy, is that Moscow is crushing the Ukrainian working class, because they have a government that is an agent of imperialism... Are they saying that the exploited, the slaves, in Kiev do have the master they deserve?

In Ukraine, all the reformist leaderships, and in particular those that come from the ranks of the former Fourth International, are actually hanging from Putin's troops backpacks or begging NATO for solutions, or else, camouflaging themselves in the Vatican fighting for peace and leaving the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Kazakhstan working class, today occupied by “Great Russia,” to be crushed.

It would be important that this "war correspondent" actually goes to war and writes from there. He could go to Bakhmut. The apartments are now very cheap in Ukraine. There he could even invite his intellectual associates to tea…

Come on, they must put the body to what they preach. Act like real war correspondents. Go and tell the workers who are defending their homes and their families to disarm themselves. Things wouldn't go well for PTS correspondent there...

Once again, reformism only understands parliamentary maneuvers. Regarding wars, revolution and counterrevolution, they have shown that they live in the sea of ignorance and “neutrality”.

Editorial Board of the International Workers' Organizer