A retort to a partialist position on the Ukraine War

As retro as it is to ask a question of “class content,” let’s ask it. What is the class content of Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression?

Let’s say Ukraine is engaged in “self-defense” against Russian aggression. Which class is leading the Ukraine’s resistance? What is the social programme of that class leading the resistance? Clearly, Zelensky and co. represent the capitalists. Call them oligarchs, call them “nascent,” “embryonic” etc, etc. They are capitalists. They are committed to taking the economy, that is to say the social relations of production into the conditions advocated by the EU, the IMF, the OECD.

So would it not be correct, at this dire moment, to counter the class content of the Russian attack—which is capitalist in its essence; that essence being destruction without prospect for recovery—and the class content of the Ukrainian government with a programme that articulates the necessary, critical independence of the working class and the poor? Does a “national struggle” against an invader supersede class struggle? If so, move over the former Soviet characterization of “Great Patriotic War,” and make room for your little brother, “Ukraine’s defensive war for national existence.”

But in vain will you search for the slightest mention of necessary class struggle in the midst of war.

So the questions of class remain primary, and where you don’t raise those questions, you immediately, but hopefully not irrevocably, undercut the basis for a revolutionary programme, which pretty much proves itself to be the only way to end these conflicts.