Contribution of Workers Party of Ireland

Two years since the commencement of the imperialist war in Ukraine, this bloody and destructive conflict continues. For as long as it persists, it exemplifies the brutal consequences of imperialist rivalry between the competing capitalist powers.

This devastating war has inflicted misery and suffering, destroyed vital infrastructure, including homes, schools, hospitals, and water, gas, and electricity supply systems. The Donetsk and Luhansk regions which had already suffered greatly from years of war continue to suffer. Millions of people have been forced to flee their homes, and many are still internally displaced throughout Ukraine, while others live as refugees abroad. Since the start of the war, the UN has stated that there have been 29,579 civilian casualties -10,242 people killed, including 575 children, and more than 19,300 injured, including 1,264 children.

In addition to the immense human suffering and the loss of Russian and Ukrainian lives, the extensive environmental destruction, including the devastating toll on nature, ecosystems and animal and bird life, the dramatic increase in toxic waste and its dangerous long-term consequences are but a few of the consequences of this war.

Meanwhile NATO military spending is rising. Ukraine’s military budget increased nearly nine times to $31.1bn during 2023, a figure that excludes foreign military spending, while Russia expanded its military expenditure in 2023 to $108.5bn and plans further increases. Despite intensive fighting and losses on both sides a stalemate has been reached.

The war in Ukraine has revitalised the necessity for communists to reemphasise Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and to correct the errors of those who, under the guise of “anti- fascism”, end up subordinating the class struggle to the geopolitical rivalries of the imperialist powers. On the one hand, there are so-called “left” forces which, subjectively and objectively, have allied themselves with the US, NATO and the EU. Sinn Fein, the fake “left” party in Ireland which allies itself with Syriza in Greece, was loud in its support for the expulsion of the Russian Ambassador from Ireland and for sanctions against Russia while it was reluctant to call for the expulsion of the Israeli Ambassador over the genocide in Gaza and remains a willing participant in the forthcoming 17th March celebrations in Washington with the US President.

On the other hand, other “left” forces have swung to the defence of Russia’s role in Ukraine, attempting to suggest that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was for some “progressive” motive rather than the military and economic interests of Russian capital.

In his seminal work, “Imperialism: The Highest State of Capitalism” defining imperialism as the monopoly state of capitalism, Lenin highlighted the growth of huge, monopolistic enterprises and the centralisation of capital. Lenin understood that the imperialism that gripped the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – the era of the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’ and the seizure of territory across Asia by Europeans and the United States – was not simply a continuation of older forms of colonialism and empire. The metropolitan capitalist countries towards the end of the nineteenth century were compelled to export capital abroad. The epoch of monopoly capitalism (imperialism) connoted the end of liberal laissez faire economics and this new situation turned the “old capitalism”, the capitalism of the free competition age, into the capitalism of giant trusts, syndicates and cartels.

In 2024 the originality, relevance and power of Lenin’s argument remains undiminished. We still live in the era of monopoly capitalism. The unceasing drive by the monopolies for markets, critical materials,  equipment, energy supplies, natural resources and securing travel routes continues and intensifies.

Lenin fearlessly exposed those “socialists” who supported their own bourgeois governments at the time of WWI. He, like James Connolly in Ireland, condemned the opportunist betrayals of workers by those in the Second International who placed the interests of their own ruling class before class struggle and socialist revolution. Today, the so-called World Anti-Imperialist Platform and its social democratic allies make the same egregious error. They have failed to learn the fundamental lessons of proletarian internationalism and the vital necessity to avoid the dangerous allure of nationalism and opportunism.

Capitalist Russia and capitalist Ukraine with their reactionary nationalist rhetoric are no friends of the working class.

Lenin’s analysis continues to explain the intensity of the rivalry among competing imperialist blocs and the barbarity of imperialist aggression and war around the globe leaving death, destruction, inequality, exploitation, oppression, poverty, misery, hunger and environmental devastation in its wake.

The imperialist war in Ukraine has provided the opportunity to address an ideological weakness in the international movement which threatens the historic mission of the working class unless it is exposed and corrected. This weakness stems from a failure to properly study and understand the Marxist-Leninist analysis of imperialism. Adherence to the principes of Marxism-Leninism requires a commitment to proletarian internationalism. The enemy of workers in each country is their own ruling class.

Imperialism, and the competition between imperialist powers means war. The imperialist war in Ukraine bears this out with catastrophic consequences for the working people of both Ukraine and Russia.

The Workers Party of Ireland endorsed and signed the Joint Statement of Communist and Workers’ Parties on 3rd March 2022: “No to the imperialist war in Ukraine!” Our Party remains committed to the analysis set out in that Statement and to its central demand – “An independent struggle is needed against monopolies and bourgeois classes, for the overthrow of capitalism, for the strengthening of the class struggle against imperialist war, for socialism!”

Long live Marxism-Leninism!

Long live Proletarian Internationalism!

Workers of All Countries, Unite!

Gerry Grainger

International Secretary

Workers Party of Ireland