the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Mar 17, 2025
The following is excerpted from the February 28, 2025 issue #2952 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
On the third anniversary of the start of the war in Ukraine, European states presented a motion to the United Nations demanding the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops. The U.S. voted against it, as did Russia, of course. They voted against it again in the U.N. Security Council….
The Kremlin making common cause with the White House is nothing new. Far from it. For Russian president Vladimir Putin, like his predecessors at the head of the Russian bureaucracy, seeking common ground with the global bourgeoisie and its leaders has been a constant in their policy….
A recent example: just before Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine began in February 2022, the Russian army was sent to suppress major strikes and a mass uprising in Kazakhstan that January. Putin saved the Kazakh bureaucracy and the interests of Western corporations active in the zone of Russian influence where the U.S. could not have intervened directly.
Now, American imperialism has decided that it would be more profitable to reintegrate Russia into the U.S. game. Washington pulls the strings by dropping support of Ukraine in order to stop the inconvenient war as quickly as possible, by dealing only with Russia, and by associating Russia with a possible reorganization of the world order.
This pivot fulfills the dream that the Russian bureaucracy has had since its origin a century ago: to find its place in the capitalist world, to be recognized, and to be able to take full advantage of the wealth Moscow drains from its zone of influence and the exploitation of workers under Moscow’s thumb. Whether this will happen is another question. American imperialism has not abandoned its old project of one day making Russia suffer the fate of Ukraine, which Washington has made dependent and is plundering.
Can the American–Russian talks lead to a truce in the coming weeks? That remains to be seen. But to believe that this would usher in an era of peace, as some say Trump will do, is a serious mistake. War is an indispensable tool in a global capitalist system dominated by the race for profit. Any “peace” is only a truce between two wars.