https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/02/25/pers-f25.html

“16. The intensified stress placed by the pandemic on a society already torn by extreme social conflict has brought the political system to the point of breakdown, exemplified in the attempted coup of January 6, 2021. The Biden administration, which has publicly expressed its fear that US democracy may not survive the decade, is hoping to manufacture domestic unity and project conflict outward through the medium of war. It wants to change the subject.”

We see in this a step away from Marxist materialism. The main factor inspiring the war does not come down to a conversation or a subject of any conversation, rather subjective causes. It does not rise out of some choice made by a politician, a party, or any group of intellectuals. The root cause of the war comes from the economic structure of capitalist markets, based on the exploitation of the working class through the expropriation of surplus value and the use of that profit as new capital to enter markets. Since the workers cannot consume the products of their labor, an excess of products in each country must enter into export markets. Every country, seeking to protect its productive capacity, seeks to block cheaper imports from disrupting their industries. The conflicts produced by this process in every case lead to an outbreak of war.

The country that decides not to force their exports into other countries but redistribute the products back to its own population then loses the interest of capital markets, who withdraw their investments by the hundreds of billions and trillions within a short time-frame. Production then stops in those countries, leading to shortages. Those countries that force exports onto other countries run afoul of their protectionism and bring the risk of war. They attempt to control the internal politics of other countries in the interests of their export capital, to allow for trade agreements that harm the people of those importers of capital. They manage this through the funding of political parties and news media companies, or through the funding of coups and dictators.

Russia, as a capitalist country, imperialist in its relations with some of its neighbors, despite its history of revolutionary politics, cannot escape these iron laws. Russia exports natural gas. It completed a $9.5 billion pipeline in September, 2021 called Nordstream 2. This pipeline, while complete and ready to deliver gas, could not begin operations due to resistance from Brussels, the capital of the EU, as it would give Germany an advantage in the procurement of energy. Since 80% of Russia’s gas exports went through the Ukraine before, the EU argues that deliveries should continue through the Ukraine. From 2006 to 2015, various disputes between Russia and the Ukraine led to Russia cutting off gas to the EU. These disruptions led to shortages, convincing the EU to expand through NATO into the Ukraine to threaten Russia over its gas supply. At the same time, the US engineered a coup within the Ukraine to divide the Ukrainian government from Russia and Russian interests. Russia now responds by destroying the Ukraine and its supply routes of gas through the country. As a result, oil prices have risen to over $100 a barrel from $68 in early December and seem inclined to rise much further as the war continues. Natural gas has risen from under $2.50 an ounce to over $6.25 at its recent height. The destruction of the Ukraine will force the EU to accept deliveries through Nordstream 2, helping Russian and Germany at the expense of the rest of the EU and America.

If the WSWS seriously wants to present the Marxist perspective to the working class, it must include in its analysis of the causes of the February Ukraine invasion the completion of the Nordstream 2 pipeline. To leave this out, and narrow the analysis to “subjects of conversations” betrays the basic principles of Marxism. In Lenin’s Imperialism, a great deal of discussion goes into the subject of railroads. In the 20th and 21st centuries, roads and pipelines became more important to imperialist trade routes or supply chains in imperialist military planning. The expanding network of pipelines forms the material basis for the necessity of war and not subjective, emotional “tensions,” much less the ambitions of any “madman” in power.

“17. The American crisis is only the most extreme manifestation of the crisis of world capitalism. Capitalist Russia, along with the imperialist powers of Europe, confront a deepening political crisis and are turning to war as a means to divert internal tensions outward.”

This theory of “diverting of tensions inward or outward” will not serve to clarify the economic basis of imperialist war under capitalism. It will only sow confusion among the advanced workers. Should they believe in a theory of massaging imperialist tensions? Or should they follow in the path cleared for them by Lenin and Trotsky, so they can rescue the economy from the private interests of the monopolies and banks to restore order after a systemic collapse that leads to unending and increasingly destructive war? If the SEP is ready to abandon its subjectivism, it will allow Democratic Power to organize a faction within the party to represent Marxism and materialism in opposition to the Nanobureaucracy and its policy of professional neglect. Democratic Power would demand in every country “the defeat of our own government” as the basis for international unity and as the legitimate path to power for the working class and its armed insurrection. Governments cannot continue to create and extend wars for the simple purpose of destroying excess capital stolen from its workers.

The continuation of the illegal neglect of the Nanobureaucracy, covered up with a campaign of emotional distress against its denouncers among the membership, can only end in the party transforming from a legal into an illegal party. This will put advanced workers and socialist intellectuals into dangerous situations with terrorists or convicted felons in the name of the cause of suppressing factional democracy. Turning to the principles of Marxism, the SEP could eliminate the Nanobureaucracy by following in the footsteps of Marx and Engels, who turned down official positions at the top of the First International on the principle that only working class representatives could occupy such offices. Lenin turned down any payments higher than the average workers’ salary, living in frugal conditions. Yet party bureaucrats, influenced by their connections to the entertainment industry and third world dictators, have now rejected these historical lessons of Marxism. The Fourth International belongs to the working class, not bourgeois scholars modeled after Norman Thomas, and the future of the movement depends on its assertion of this central principle.

Only the working class can really turn down the secret offers of the ruling class, the contracts of slavery, and demand the defeat of their own government in war. Only they can throw off the illusions created by the entertainment industry as chains for their minds, and in open rebellion seize the power from the war power. Such a demand, with a revolutionary content drawn from decades of conflict, contradicts the “neither defeat nor victory” approach of the Nanobureaucracy and previous generations of compromised leaders.