 So to begin with, in 1915 Lenin described capitalism, the continuation of capitalism as horror without end. Today that statement is arguably even more true than when Lenin wrote it in the midst of the First World War. The world as a whole has not been at peace since 1914. There's been a war somewhere in the world since 1914. And since then we've seen the indescribable horrors of the Holocaust, the dropping of nuclear weapons on Japan, the indiscriminate napalm bombing of civilians, I could go on and on. Thirty years ago, however, we were actually promised the end of war, along with the end of history. When the USSR collapsed with the end of the Cold War, the Economist magazine, so, you know, Western pro-capitalist publication, predicted what it called a peace dividend, and actually published articles speculating on what we're going to use all the money for. We no longer have to invest in arms production. We're no longer wasting resources on arms. Perhaps we'll be able to find a cure for cancer and so on and so forth. Obviously, that's not what we got, was it, from the end of history. What we got was the breakup of Yugoslavia with the ensuing carnage, atrocities like the Rwandan genocide, and a series of disastrous wars in the Middle East which have left parts of the region a ruin. And that's not even mentioning the continued occupation of Palestine by the Israeli state. War, in fact, has, if anything, been elevated to a permanent ubiquitous state under the so-called war on terror, where basically any country on Earth could be droned, bombed from above without a moment's notice. And now, with the war unfolding in Ukraine and the tensions between China and America rising over the question of Taiwan, the war drums are beating again all over the world, including here in Britain. But why is it that war seems to be such an inescapable feature of the society in which we live? For some people, man's inhumanity to man is its own explanation. We kill each other, we bomb each other because we can't help it, or even because we want to, we like to. But such a purely moralizing approach is not only wrong on the facts in my opinion, it actually offers us no guide to how we can struggle to end war. In fact, it rejects that struggle as utopian. That's not the Marxist standpoint, however, as I'm sure you can already tell. As Klausowitz famously said, war is the continuation of politics by other means. And politics is ultimately the expression of the struggle between social classes. And it's on that principle that we base ourselves. War today is not simply the same as war between different tribes throughout history and prehistory, or even the same as the Roman conquests. It's an inherent and necessary feature of the social system in which we live, capitalism. And in particular, capitalism in the period of its senile decay. So we can't understand war today, and wars like the war in Ukraine in particular, without understanding the nature of imperialism. Now, I think most people would acknowledge that there is a link between war and imperialism, but I tend to find that imperialism is more colloquially defined as an aggressive policy of conquest and annexations. The problem with that is it doesn't take us very far at all. It essentially amounts to saying that states invade one another because they have the policy of invading one another. It's a bit of a tautological definition really. And in order to look more deeply into this question, we actually have to look at the objective social forces and class relations which drive states to fight these wars in the first place. That's how we can get to the roots of this problem. And that's something that Lenin did in his masterpiece, imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which was published and written in the midst of the First World War in 1916. Now, when the First World War broke out in 1914, it shattered the existing socialist international with almost all of the national sections of that international, which was nominally based on Marxism, all of them basically finding one reason or other, one justification or other, for supporting their own imperialist bourgeoisie. Only the Serbian and Russian parties, I think possibly one more, opposed the war at its outbreak. And the genuine Marxists and internationalists found themselves extremely isolated at that time. And in those conditions of isolation, Lenin turned to a theoretical understanding of the essential character of imperialism to lay the basis for a new revolutionary movement. And his conclusions are as relevant today as when they were written. So Lenin actually begins his analysis, and this is where I'll begin my analysis as well following Lenin, not on the political forms of imperialism, but on his economic base, which he found in the rise of monopoly capitalism. Now, under capitalism, we're often told the market is made up of various different capitalist enterprise who are all in competition with each other in the market. Now, the extent to which free competition has ever existed in the capitalism is debatable. You know, it differs by degree. But in the course of the 19th century, one thing we do see clearly is a fundamental turning point where free competition, capitalist competition actually turns into its opposite. It actually becomes capitalist monopoly. And the reasons for this, well, there are various reasons for this, but fundamentally, as capitalism develops the productive forces, we started to see the merger of smaller capitalist enterprises in things such as joint stock companies in order to take up larger, more technologically advanced projects, such as, back in the day, things like railway construction, new chemical industries, things like that. Now, this actually started to raise a higher and higher barrier in terms of the level of investment required in order for new players to get in on the game. Gone were the days where some entrepreneur could effectively set up a coal mine or build a canal and started to compete with his fellow capitalists. Actually, the market was beginning to be restricted just by the development of the productive forces under capitalism. But in addition to that, in the inevitable crises of overproduction that struck the system, inevitably, the smaller, weaker enterprises would fail or be swallowed up by the larger, which contributed to accelerating the process of monopolization that was already beginning. And from the crisis in the early 1870s onwards, you start to see quite a rapid formation of what at the time was called trusts or cartels. So, for example, price-fixing rings between large corporations and especially the fusion of even entire different industries under a single capitalist entity. In Germany, especially in the Royal Valley, they had these things called concern, I think it's how you pronounce it, apologies if I got it wrong, where basically you had a single monopoly that controlled not only coal mining but steel production. Basically, every stage in that productive process was owned, controlled, regulated, managed for the greatest profitability and efficiency. And obviously, these gigantic monopolies are able to drive their rivals out of competition by, for example, selling even below their value, their commodities are even below their value, driving the competition out of business or simply mergers and acquisitions. I mean, Microsoft, what has Microsoft produced since the 1990s? I'm not aware of anything. They simply just update the same software and buy out all competition to establish a monopoly position on the market. And this process of monopolization is even more stark today than when Lenin was writing and certainly since the 1870s. So, just to give a couple of examples because I have to move on. Pretty much every consumer product that you will ever buy will be owned and produced by one of 10 global monopolies. That's it. You might have even seen on the Internet, there's a very good diagram in my opinion where in the center of a circle there's these 10 companies and then literally every single consumer brand you could possibly recognize spanning out from all of them. So often if you, you know, there's this idea that under capitalism, the reason capitalism is superior to socialism, you have consumer choice, right? If somebody's producing a bad product, you can choose to buy off someone else. Actually, when you're looking at the shop shelves and you're deciding which chocolate bar do I want, usually you're basically just choosing between different faces of exactly the same company. And this is not just the case in consumer products. I saw one statistic that a single Taiwanese company, TSMC, accounts for 54% of all microprocessor production, not in Taiwan or even in China as a whole, but in the entire world economy. So a majority of the world's production of a single product is taken up by one country. And I think the island of Taiwan actually accounts for over 90% of semiconductor production. This is the intensity of this concentration and centralization of capital that's taken place. And hand in hand with this industrial monopolization comes the rise of what Lenin describes as finance capital. Now banking in one form or another and finance has been present through the evolution of capitalism from its very, very earlier stages. But earlier in capitalism's development, the banks more served as a, they didn't dominate and drive the economy. They served more as the role of middlemen. You know, surplus, the surplus accrued, profits accrued by the capitalist that couldn't be immediately reinvested in production were pulled effectively in the forms of these banks that would then lend it out of profit, which played a progressive role in the development of the capitalist economy. But with the accumulation of capital which is going on in this period and the concentration of capital as well, this excess of this surplus profit accumulating actually gives the banks an increasingly central role in the economy itself. The level of investment that is required to go into these larger, more advanced projects that I talked about actually started giving the banks an extremely important position in lending out capital. And eventually the banks actually start buying up controlling shares in the very industrial companies and the monopolies I talked about. What we see is a fusion. Finance capital is not simply high finance. Finance capital is the fusion of the banks with industry that the banks actually start to become the dominant capitalists in the world. And of course again, this process has only intensified in our own era where we see the number of gigantic banks which effectively are now the nerve centers of the economy and dominate the economy has shrunk in relation to when Lenin was writing but also the banks have acquired a too big to fail status and we saw this in 2008 where a crisis which was triggered by the rampant speculation of the banks ended up the banks themselves having caused the crisis were bailed out by the state because they were considered too big to fail. What that meant was if they collapsed the entire economy would go with them and if the American economy went the world economy would have gone. All this underlines another important feature that is actually the fusion of the state with finance capital and the interests of finance capital that one interesting feature of 2008 is when the Barack Obama newly elected Obama government was discussing what to do with the representatives of Goldman Sachs a gigantic bank was actually in the room this is somebody who was personally directly responsible for the crisis telling them exactly how much money they needed to give him and his company in order to keep the economy running and that is completely logical from a Marxist point of view of how the state works that is completely logical a bourgeois state is based on bourgeois property it's based on the interests and property of its own bourgeoisie its own capitalist class if that class has become increasingly concentrated into the monopolies and dominant banks then can a capitalist state really act outside of the interests and the wills of these monopolies? I would say not and we see that today where the markets effectively decide who and who is not in government I have absolutely no sympathy with Liz Truss and Quasi Cartank but they learnt to their detriment the power of the markets and finance capital under capitalism today but I've only spoken really about a situation within a given country but capitalism is an international system and the international character of the capitalist market and capitalist production means that these monopolies I talked about show tendency actually to grow beyond their national borders into international monopolies and trusts which basically carb up the world economy between themselves the EU is actually a very good example of that ironically the first kind of incarnation of the EU was the European coal and steel community and when they introduced it they intended it to be a free trade area and they broke up the major monopolies like the German Concernor but 20 years later they were all back the monopolies were back price fixing was back and the European coal and steel community basically became a gigantic now European wide coal and steel cartel that shows that this is not simply a question of a policy but this is actually ingrained within the nature of capitalist production today but even more significant was something that a learning called the export of capital now capital by its very nature what is capital? Marx called itself valorizing value a quantity of value money for instance usually money which transforms itself into a greater quantity of value again let's say money but in order to do that that requires markets to sell once goods it requires resources, workers to exploit in other words new fields for exploitation now this inevitably provokes competition not only between capitalist enterprises but also between capitalist states and national markets but with the accumulation and concentration of capital in the hands of a few monopolist and big banks the surplus capital being accumulated is simply too great for the limitations of the national market not only the buying power of the masses within that market is restricted need to export goods but even more important actually the rate of profit available in that market and the possibilities for fresh profitable investment are greatly reduced and so we start to see actually these gigantic monopolies and banks exporting capital to other usually less developed countries in order to buy up resources for example the buying up of mines in Africa Latin America by European or other imperialist countries and the reduction of the local population to workers living on if anything below the bread line and turned into basically producing super profits sorry for these capitalist imperialists or imperialist capitalists rather and to give just one example like the most obvious example or very stark example you might have heard of the countries in Barbway what you might not know is that prior to being called in Barbway it was part of what was called Rhodesia now Rhodesia was named after a single British individual who was a gigantic mining magnate a monopolist whose company whose mining company literally took over what is now in Barbway in order to achieve for himself a monopoly over diamond production so a single billionaire monopolist basically taking over a country as a field for investment that's kind of the most that's almost like the idea of Elon Musk setting up a country or taking over a country sorry calling it muskier that is the kind of scale that things can reach it doesn't have to be like that though it doesn't have to take place in the form of direct conquest because actually today we still see imperialists intervening in order to ensure their economic interest but the economic domination of the former colonies semi-colonies takes place just as surely to be honest through foreign investment and through debt and even so-called foreign aid you have this situation where countries name any country really in Africa but countries like Ghana who are very heavily indebted not only to foreign states but also to foreign corporations and foreign banks and if they find themselves unable to pay back that debt which is of course very difficult when their national assets are owned by foreign companies if they're unable to pay it back the International Monetary Fund comes in, gives them a loan to stabilize things and in return they have to basically privatize even more of their national wealth who buys up that national wealth? Is it small-time investors in Ghana? I don't think so usually it's foreign imperialists it doesn't just happen in Africa in the so-called third world it effectively happens to Greece where Greece in return bought from what was called the Troika effectively had to sell up its national wealth to various different foreign investors this is imperialism in action it doesn't necessarily have to establish a formal political colony although that has often been the form it's taken and it's not just in Greece I mean to speak about the EU again briefly when it was founded one of the founding declarations is called the Schumann Declaration based on a French minister foreign minister and in it he said oh the purpose is to stop war in Europe a war which would have been impossible because of the weakness of the European powers and the presence of the American military but still nice sentiment but more importantly he said with the fusion of our resources Europe can achieve its primary task namely the development of Africa now when a French let's be fair to the French when a European minister talks about the development of Africa I think we have some kind of influence based on history what exactly he means that is the real purpose of these imperialist trade box and institutions like the World Bank the IMF and the Dwell Trader Organization are just as imperialist institutions than the Pentagon for example it's not simply a military phenomenon fundamentally it's an economic phenomenon politics is the most concentrated expression of economics and the export of capital abroad eventually necessitates some form of growing military power and military intervention from the imperialist state not only to protect its interest from the locals if they try to rise up but also to secure its spheres of influence and spheres of investment from the intervention of other powers the scramble for Africa is an example of that and often you see regime change and squabbling over resource rich countries for instance the attempt to overthrow the Bolivian regime which sits on very important lithium reserves very important for the production of car batteries now I don't want to oversimplify things and make it sound like every single imperialist war is solely fought over the grabbing of markets and investment and resources it is possible for imperialists to fight a war simply to defend for a purely military defensive position to maintain a buffer state but also even for the sake of prestige that an imperialist power if they seem to be declining and they lose a sphere of influence they worry well what's the impact on all my other colonies or semi-colonies going to have it's not quite as simple as it's just purely about economics but usually the imperialist states will commit military resources in order to guard ultimately the profits of their own imperialists and there are many many examples of that well this means that war is absolutely inevitable under a social system like this war is inevitable not only wars of so-called regime change colonial wars to subjugate part of the world that might take the form of just a direct annexation nowadays it tends to be things like peacekeeping forces being sent to countries like Haiti for example to keep the peace what does the peace mean exactly it means keep, maintain order in the interest of the dominant imperialist power or special military operations or something like this it's still a continuation of war but in addition to that you also now have the prospect of wars in between the world powers themselves things like world wars and this is precisely what led to something like World War I German imperialism was later on to the stage it was a younger capitalist industrial power it was actually more efficient if anything stronger than the older powers like France and Britain but the problem is it was already cramped in by the division of the world that had taken place between the pre-existing powers it had come too late basically to gobble up as much of the world as it liked this poses a bit of a contradiction how is German capitalism supposed to continue developing and a capitalist it's like a shark it must keep moving and it must keep debowering otherwise it will enter into crisis so either German capitalism has to go into a huge crisis and re-adapt itself to the straight jacket basically imposed on it by the other powers or it has to break that straight jacket which means ultimately in the case of World War I pushing to the east against the decrepit Russian empire but also snatching colonies from the declining French imperialism the basis of that war was laid in the very nature of capitalism itself but perhaps most important of all again concludes that imperialism is not simply a policy which could be changed depending on who the government is or it depends on how democratic the regime is or something like that a fascist regime that's imperialist but a democratic regime that's different now he says that imperialism is an inevitable stage in the development of capitalism itself what it actually expresses is the fundamental contradiction of a system in which production is more and more socialized and yet appropriation is on a private individual basis but also confined to the now barbarous limitations of the bourgeois nation state is a gigantic social contradiction but that means not only that brutal wars are inevitable under capitalism but it also means that imperialism it's not just a policy but also it's not simply a fixed relation between specific countries or states for all times that you have the rise of imperialism in the form of Britain, France and in the rest of the world remains colonies or semi-colonies that's obviously not what's happening in history the very fact that imperialism is a stage in the development of capitalism makes it inevitable that newer capitalist powers will arise on the basis of their own capitalist development Germany and the United States are obvious examples of that Imperial Japan is an example of that and today we have in the form of Russia and China states that I mean Russia was an imperialist power but an extremely backward one both at one point worker states on the basis of the revolutions that gave birth to those worker states actually managed to in the case of China developed the productive forces build up industry and actually a certain industrial power for themselves and on the basis of restored capitalism in countries like Russia if you have a capitalist nation so large and powerful with such huge powerful monopolies is it not inevitable at a certain point that those monopolies will once acquire new markets and spheres of influence is it not inevitable that they want to invest and export their surplus capital into other countries regardless of the history up until that point in built in the nature of capitalist production and we're starting to see in Venezuela for example Venezuela is trying to turn away from American imperialism because it's under constant attack from American imperialism and their cutting deals with Russian mining monopolies for some of the mining wealth in the Venezuela and Andes we see plenty of examples of China for example lending out capital big lending huge amounts often to states under the Belt and Road initiative lending interest for example our Pakistani comrades told me an example of where a factory was to be set up with a loan from China the loan was lent out at 14% and one of the conditions the loan is they had to buy the machinery that was going to go into the factory from China and this is now a secondary feature but the machinery they sold the factory in Pakistan was basically knackered secondhand machinery and so they ended up having to effectively pay twice this is a small example of imperialism because it is the nature of capitalism itself and so actually this also is an important piece of context for the wars and tensions that are starting to arise the war in Ukraine is not an isolated conflict between Ukraine and Russia as it's being presented here which is you know poor little Ukraine versus Russian imperialism Ukraine is a proxy war between the NATO alliance some of you have gone to the NATO tour but a military alliance with American imperialism right at the center fundamentally representing the interests of American imperialism fighting collectively in order to push back Russia from its own kind of sphere of influence in order to achieve greater influence in Ukraine incidentally after I prepared this lead off I heard on the radio that Ukraine happens to be one of the top five reserves for rare earth materials which is an extremely important resource and that last year Europe signed an agreement for the exploitation of those resources unfortunately for Europe most of those are found in the east of the country that might be one of the reasons why Europe is particularly invested in the defense of Ukrainian democracy whatever that is that might also be that there's no idea of a fraternal relationship with those rare earth materials we'll have to see how the war pans out but you can't really understand why this war is even taking place without understanding the nature of imperialism and so that's how things really stand but is that how it's actually presented at the time when war is breaking out of course not and in every single war the imperialist nations taking place present things underneath these vague abstract seemingly absolute unquestionable principles and that is deliberate by the way because one of the purposes and effects of the declaration of war and war and imperialism is to secure a certain degree of class peace so that they can prosecute the war but also for its own sake sometimes they declare war in order to gain the class peace at home often with disastrous circumstances and these kind of vague hypocritical phrases are used in order to confuse the workers rally the mass of the population around this state in order to wage the war and I just want to give some examples which of course is reactionary both in intent and in its implications just to give an example here in Britain the R&T which is the rail transports the transport workers union went on strike over something completely unrelated it was over wages and conditions and the telegraph at Torrey paper said that they were Putin apologists because that's the climate that's well we're fighting for Ukraine and we were supporting Ukraine against Russia and you're there harming the world don't you know there's a war on Ukraine at the same time lots of celebrities and politicians in Europe in America all over the western world saying like the rising prices inflation is the price we're paying for freedom in Ukraine first of all they're trying to link the crisis solely to the war in Ukraine which is a lie but also they're basically trying to say all the suffering that we are inflicting on you for the sake of our profits is actually a bond of fraternal brotherhood with the people of Ukraine and that's deliberately intended as I'm sure you can work out yourselves to lull the workers confuse the workers and actually cut across the class struggle at home to make life easier for the imperialists at home and some of these I don't really have time to go into detail about these but I'm sure you've heard things the aggressor whoever started it therefore is the kind of the evil party and it's the task of all kind of sensible democratic nations in order to defeat that power it's almost like war is reduced to a schoolyard fight in fact most teachers would know not to really be that interested in who started it but here's the question is it really difficult to work out who the aggressor is in relation to Ukraine obviously Putin launched the invasion but the Russians say we're intervening in a civil war that's been going on for 8 years that's not false is it there has been a civil war in which both Russia and NATO have been intervening themselves where do we lay the blame if it's simply a question of laying the moral blame here's a bigger question who was the aggressor in World War I Alberto who was the aggressor in World War I Austria Austria Austria after a member of their ruling family has been assassinated by terrorists they have no right does Austria not have the right to defend itself Pascal and you know they present a perfectly reasonable ultimatum to Serbia who's harboring these terrorists just like the Taliban with Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein in Iraq and then of course what choice do they have but to take decisive action against this terror who they hate our way of life they hate our Austrian democracy whatever that was at the time they hate our Austrian Germanic civilization and they need to be put under heel meanwhile if you're in Russia surely we have to defend our Slavic brothers World War I when we look back at history and even in British schools World War I is taught fundamentally as an imperialist war that they say Germany needed colonies and so on and the Britain was in its way and France was in its way but we need to remember comrades that that's not how it was presented at the time just because at this distance we can look at it in those terms it doesn't mean that's how it was presented what you might not know is that World War I was the defence of small nations and the right to help determination it might sound odd now but Russia was only fighting to defend the right of the South Slavs against Austrian aggression meanwhile Germany was only fighting for poor Poland against Russian despotism wasn't it and Britain what about poor Belgium what about the national sovereignty and independence of poor little Belgium poor little Belgium of course which was massacring and maiming 10 million Congolese in one of the largest and most vicious colonies on the planet but still they were neutral weren't they and wasn't it German aggression weren't the Germans the aggressors in that war therefore we can go around in circles all day I could spend the rest of this lead off just repeating all of the lies and nonsense turned out by the European imperialists to justify a war that they'd intended to launch years before they'd intended to launch that war as early as basically the turn of the 20th century and they knew it because they knew that that's where their interests fundamentally lay they were all the aggressor and self-determination the communist at the time or the true internationalist pointed out that the small nations are always just loose and change to these imperialists look at the way that Yugoslavia was broken up between various different imperialist powers and look at the impact of that on humanity is that really the defense of self-determination of nations self-defense how many atrocities have been justified under the rubric of Israel's right to defend itself do states not defend themselves anyway do they need to apply for permission at some international tribunal this abstract notion of the right to defend itself is usually just used as a disguise and a distraction and the biggest one of all we talk about the aggressor who was the aggressor in the Iraq war? was Saddam Hussein the aggressor first it was wage for self-defense because he had all these weapons of mass destruction and then when we realized that actually he didn't have any of those weapons of mass destruction it was fought for perhaps the biggest abstraction and the biggest lie of all which is democracy Saddam Hussein was a dictator therefore it was progressive to overthrow him so that the Iraqi people could have democracy what good did it do them? they had a constitution that was written by American advisors which explicitly opened up the country's oil wealth or an investment was that democracy? where is the democracy in Iraq now? the country has basically disintegrated between various different powers and now we're told Ukraine is fighting for democracy not just Ukrainian democracy democracy everywhere but the day before the invasion the European Union said that Ukraine can't ever join the European Union because it's too vulnerable for state capture state capture is code for the state is run by a few mafia oligarchs and there is no democratic government in Ukraine that's what they recognized the day before the invasion but of course then the invasion took place and we've all got support democracy in Ukraine don't you know there's a war on? this is how they operate but to be honest I don't want to spend too much time on what the imperialists say because actually if it was just the imperialists and their media and their schools and so on churning all this stuff out its effect would be relatively limited the working class has its own organizations it has its own traditions and it also has its own leadership the problem is if the leadership of the working class takes up this rhetoric to justify the war then it completely confuses and paralyzes the working class and actually its the biggest security the imperialists need to wage war in the first place and this is something that Lenin called social chauvinism and perhaps the classical expression of this is the German SPD it wasn't just the German party but the German social democratic party in 1914 at the declaration of war and I have a quote from the SPD just to give you a bit of a laboratory example of social chauvinism a party based on Marxism so much is at stake for our people in its future if Russian despotism stained with the blood of its own people should be the victor the danger must be averted the civilization and independence that one again of our people must be safeguarded in the hour of danger we will not desert our fatherland and then so that's pretty much straightforward chauvinism here's the social part in this we feel that we stand in harmony with the international which has always recognized the right of every people to its national independence with the international in emphatically denouncing every war of conquest I should add that it was Germany that declared war on Russia in this particular case it was a cynical disguise to basically present the exact same line as the imperialist but directly into the heart of the labour movement and it had an extremely reactionary impact but that's the and they're just a cynical today I'll give you one classical example Hilary Ben gave a very famous speech in support of bombing ISIS in Syria I think it was 2015 when Stalin under Corbyn was not to support it he stood up and gave the following speech so given that such action would be lawful and I'll try to do my impression of it under article 51 of the UN Charter because every state has the right to defend itself why would we not uphold the settled will of the United Nations did they uphold the settled will of the United Nations when they invaded Iraq? no, did he support that war? yes and of course we should give humanitarian aid and of course we should offer shelter to more refugees including in this country which other country are they going to put them in? Rwanda and of course we should commit to play our full part in helping to rebuild Syria when the war is over how is that going? and then here's an extra socialist veneer as a party we have always been defined by our internationalism and we are here faced by fascists and what we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated and it is why as we have heard tonight socialists and trade unionists and others joined the international brigade in the 1930s to fight against Franco invoking the international brigade which he would not have supported in the 30s if he were alive in order to send bombers to drop bombs on ISIS this is the same moderate rebels that they were supporting previously against the regime now of course they are sending lots of arms to fascist militias and fascist military paramilitary groups in Ukraine in order to fight against so called fascism of the Russian state this is what we see with the imperialists and the showstress over this not so much of Karl Marx but Groucho Marx here are my principles if you don't like them I've got others because they are clever enough to understand that they can deploy these whenever they want for any war they want the problem is I've mentioned the right wing reformist but there is a distinction to be drawn between the left and the right there is a struggle that goes on between the left and the right let's not lump them together and the fundamental distinction on war between the right reformist and the left reformist is the right reformist simply repeat the lies of the imperialists whereas unfortunately the left actually believes them to be more dangerous I would say and to give just an example of that I often give the example of Owen Jones I've got nothing against the guy but he tends to be quite an adequate example of left reformism he tweeted anti-war doesn't mean being fascist sorry pacifist in the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine it means opposing Russia's war of aggression that one again which means supporting Ukraine's armed struggle of liberation against it and supporting a military defeat he then went on to clarify that yes this is a principle that applies in all cases wherever you have an aggressor he said on that basis I also oppose Saudi Arabia in Yemen he's not calling for the British state to arm the Yemeni people he's not calling for defeat to Saudi Arabia he's simply saying no this isn't a bad idea also this isn't a good idea sorry he did oppose the war in Iraq well it's giving credit for that but he didn't say victory to Saddam did he and he didn't call on neutral countries like France to arm the Iraqi army it's this sort of it's less a kind of cynicism and more a kind of hopeless opportunism which I would say is actually more reactionary in its effects at least than the deliberate chauvinism of the right because it completely decapitates and confuses the workers movement at the outbreak of the war and if you do that you give the imperialists a free hand to do whatever they want usually amplifying the horrors of the war and actually making a you know a democratic or progressive piece less likely not more likely and the blame for that has to lie at the feet of the leaders of the labour movement now I'll get on to what Marxist should put forward and I think I need to hurry up so apologies. The first thing is that the Marxist position as you can probably gather is not predetermined by abstractions like who is the aggressor and simply the right of nations to self-determination which we do defend as a democratic right but nor is it a pacifist position we don't oppose war simply on a pacifist basis first of all there are wars that we would support revolutionary wars of national liberation and obviously the wars of a worker's state against imperialism we would support and I'll say more about this in a moment but also but mainly pacifism actually seeks to return things to the same unbearable point they were at the war that things had reached before the war they basically said oh can we not go back to the Minsk agreement in relation to Ukraine can we not basically just pull all the pieces back to where they were at the beginning of February this year well what are the things going to happen surely the whole situation is going to replay again if we could turn back time it's more utopian than calling for worker's revolution which we're often attacked for but some perhaps more intelligent or consistent pacifists don't so much say well let's just go back to how it was they say okay well let's settle this in a democratic way let's everything should be solved democratically by referenda in the different regions by free elections the demobilization of the fascist units I mean I'd agree with all that but what they say on what basis is that supposed to be achieved they never clarify that they think the people who are supposed to be demobilizing the fascists are Zelensky in Ukraine NATO and Putin that's not going to happen is it they're basically saying that imperialism should cease to be imperialism and that's an interesting point how can imperialism cease to be imperialism imperialism can only cease to be imperialism if it is an overthrown by the working class which is the only force in society capable of overthrowing it and so that means that they're actually a progressive genuine end to war the only way to struggle for a meaningful permanent peace is to strive for the overthrow of capitalism in any one of the belligerent imperialist powers and this is where we come to the question of principles because we we're not we're not bound by these kind of simply purely abstract principles where you almost mathematically deduce or as simple as okay well who was the aggressor where we're going to follow the entire policy just come straight from that we don't have such easy shortcuts but it's not that the case say that we have no principles we don't just proceed in a purely empirical sense which would usually mean actually supporting our own imperialists our principles the principles of Marxism are fundamentally a guide to action they're not a cookbook that was somehow written before the beginning of time and before war even came into being some moral code they are principles derived from the real experience of the working class and the fundamental principle at place at play here is that pro that proletarian internationalism and class independence because that because of course what are our principles the fight for socialism and without these two things socialism is impossible a good quote that gives us this principle I would say is in the communist manifesto in the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries the communists point out and bring to the front the common interest of the entire proletariat independently of all nationality what this means in practice under imperialism is that the Marxist policy who we support or don't support the position we take in any given war is fundamentally determined by the impact the place of that war in the global struggle to overthrow capitalism it's a concrete question guided by the principles of class independence and genuine proletarian internationalism and an example of this can ironically you might think we found in the second international itself in a resolution of 1907 drafted by Rosa Luxemburg which said you know the people in the imperialist countries could tell that war was coming in case war should break out it is their duty as a socialist to intervene in favor of a speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize this is the key part the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule not simply appeal for arbitration not support one imperialist power against the other because maybe maybe German capitalism is slightly more progressive than Russian imperialism but actually to convert the formulation that Lenny used to convert the imperialist war into a civil war what he meant by civil war is the war of the working class against the capitalist class a revolution a workers revolution so rather than softening or suspending the class struggle at home almost saying okay we'll pick this up again after the war but for now we're going to fight together it should actually the role of Marxist should be to intensify the class struggle during the war to drive a wedge between the workers and the belligerent imperialist capitalists in their own country and eventually mobilize the workers for the seizure of power as soon as is genuinely possible not just trying to launch a general strike out of nowhere but actually to work towards the seizure of power by the workers now obviously all but the parties I mentioned betrayed that in the second international but that principle still remains and what this means in the first place speaking a bit more practically is always tell the truth and I know that seems really obvious and easy to say or we must tell the truth but actually it's an incredibly difficult thing to do in the midst of imperialist war where you're not even sure what the truth is on the ground that means that our first duty is to point to the lies hypocrisy the machinations and the real intentions of our imperialist at home and that's the only way that we can give the workers the clearest picture of the real international and national situation in order to prepare them for the struggle of power if we deprive them of that there will be no working class independent movement class independence is based on having a true evaluation of the facts but what also flows from this is what Lenin calls the policy of revolutionary defeatism which I think has been often quoted but often misunderstood during World War I the internationalists were reduced to a run and under a huge amount of pressure to support at least the kind of defence of their own countries this kind of defences pressure Lenin very firmly opposed this he actually said the defeat of one's own government would be the lesser evil and he wrote further during a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its own government but here's some clarification is required does that mean that a Marxist should simply support the victory of the other side so should the British Marxist be calling for victory for Putin and should the Russian Marxist right now be calling for the victory for Zelensky and NATO I think that would be an absurd position it wouldn't be internationalism would it basically calling for each other's defeat it would be an inverted chauvinism wouldn't it it would be almost trying to escape the thorny problem of an internationalist position by just saying oh well let the other ones win that would be a blow against our own imperialism and Lenin never called for victory for Germany in fact in an article he wrote that he explicitly criticised the idea that desiring Russia's defeat means desiring the victory of Germany so the defeat of Russia is still the lesser evil but he's not actually desiring the victory of Germany because of course the victory of German imperialism over Russia would not have progressive ramifications it wouldn't actually liberate the Poles for example so what he meant was that the workers of any and all the imperialist states must strive to convert this war the imperialist war into a civil war like the Paris Commune and what that means is you continue revolutionary agitation against your own government you mobilise the workers on an independent basis and you raise demands which if anything hamper the discipline of the army if that's a relevant consideration in favour of the working class and aim towards the conquest of power such as the Bolshevik agitation in the Trenches in 1917 now what kind of effect did the democratic agitation of the Bolsheviks in the Trenches in 1917 have done the army it had a disastrous effect from the standpoint of the Russian general staff and the waging of the war but I would say it had a very good effect from the standpoint of the working class because it contributed directly to the seizure of power in one of the imperialist countries and Trotsky summed up this policy when he said military defeat resulting from the growth of the revolutionary movement is infinitely more beneficial to the proletariat and to the whole people the military victory assured by civil peace in other words what it's the lesser evil compared to is not simply the victory of German imperialism or Russian imperialism or NATO imperialism it's the lesser evil compared to the mobilisation of an independent workers movement capable of ending the war on a socialist basis if building that movement makes it harder for your state to fight the war and makes it more likely it will lose then so be it that's the position which when you think about it is simply a consistent revolutionary socialist position all it means is all it demands on us is that we continue our revolutionary agitation we build to the conquest of power and not postpone it until after the war and Trotsky quotes Carl Liebniks he described it as an unsurpassed formula of proletarian policy in time of war the chief enemy of the people is in its own country now I'm not going to engage in a bit of hypothetical speculation I don't want to spend too much time on it but I would ask the question if within the Ukrainian army I don't know more working class units start to actually mobilise themselves more on a class basis if they take steps to try and disarm the fascists within their own ranks even if they start trying to seize the property of some of the oligarchs and I'm not suggesting any of that is really happening I'm presenting a hypothetical but if that were actually to take place what impact would that have on the war effort I think that would have a terrible impact on the plans of Zelensky and NATO and on the defence of the Ukrainian state as it exists and therefore would have a terrible impact on the defence of Ukrainian sovereignty and democracy and Christian civilisation and all those things and I say good because it would have a very good impact on the consciousness of workers not just in Ukraine but worldwide and it would actually raise the possibility of a workers revolution and you can apply that in the same logic to Russia if the proletarian anti-war movement in Russia gains traction independent of the liberal kind of pro-western wing which is completely discrediting movement and again I'm not trying to point to I'm presenting a hypothetical here but if the anti-war movement and the working class movement in Russia had an independent position and actually started reaching out to soldiers on both sides would that have a good impact on Putin's fight against fair fascism I think it would have a detrimental impact it would actually be demoralising soldiers but it would be doing it from a working class basis which would be a progressive outcome and this is something that we should look towards and support where we find it but we mustn't be utopians I'm putting forward those examples just to try and clarify the theoretical point I'm not aware of evidence of that happening on the ground if it does develop then we should support that and what I mean by the working class anti-war movement in Russia which I think is the task of internationalists how can we do that if we are giving support for NATO and Ukraine in its war for democracy how can we do that if we're demanding that our government or a labor government sends as much weapons to Ukraine as possible in what way are we reaching out to the Russian working class against the war and against their regime let alone supporting sanctions which mainly attack the workers but it's not just that it's reactionary to attack the workers anyway but it's also you are driving sections of the Russian workers towards the Putin regime because when they see Western imperialism placing sanctions on you and arming people with false angles on their arm then what conclusions are they supposed to draw I think it's a perfectly justifiable conclusion for them to draw the conclusion that this is an international pro-fascist attack on Russia as a whole and that's precisely the kind of movement that Putin is trying to draw from why should we be trying to undermine that with genuine working class solidarity and this brings me to another important point how do we show working class internationalist solidarity I feel like the word solidarity has been worn out in the last few months I hear it all the time first of all solidarity is not the same as sympathy but also how on earth can you give solidarity to the workers of another country through your own imperialist state how on earth does that work I've lived long enough I don't think you have to live very long to know this to be honest but I've lived long enough to see this happen many many times when Gaddafi when the revolution broke out against Gaddafi Gaddafi was unsurprisingly attacking and killing his opponents and leftists in Britain said people are dying we need no fly zone to stop people dying so they got a no fly zone and where are they now? where is Libya now? Libya doesn't exist there is no Libyan state it's descended completely into barbarism run by warlords with slave markets on the African coast so that's the benefit that they gain from western solidarity how about the in Afghanistan the brave freedom fighters of the Mujahideen against Soviet occupation not my words the word of Rambo 3 by the way and the Reagan government they needed arms didn't they for their freedom fight they got them and where are we now I'll let you make your mind up about the situation today in Afghanistan or Syria the revolution breaks out against the Assad regime and the Tory government starts giving aid and solidarity to the so-called moderate rebel that's what they call them in those days the moderate rebels the moderate jihadis who of course basically just blended into ISIS at the end of the day and then we started bombing them too the point is that imperialist solidarity not the working class working class solidarity imperialism is incapable of achieving anything progressive by its own by its own means at all that means that the working class can never rely on the imperialist state to give aid or solidarity to any people even in a war I don't have time to go into depth about them into these unfortunately but even in a war where Marxist would actually support a genuine war of national liberation now I've seen some people trying to justify the NATO war effort by reference to this being some kind of colonial liberation fought by Ukraine against Russian imperialism I think some of you might have attended the session on the Ukrainian national question maybe that's a confront to this I'm very conscious of time I will limit myself to saying I think that that claim is highly dubious I don't think that this is a revolutionary war of national liberation against Russian imperialism I think that this is a regime that can't even negotiate peace independently without the say so the NATO powers who will probably negotiate that peace independently of whatever Zelensky and his regime works at once it's a corrupt oligarchic regime on the front it's a battlefield for a war between NATO and Russia this is imperialist war and I would say if I am wrong and some of these so-called Marxists who say it is a colonial war of liberation that has to be supported by imperialist means are right then I would say that the Bolsheviks were wrong in 1914 because what they should have been doing in that case is supporting Serbia's heroic fight for national liberation against Austria and the Bosnian Bosnians against Austria by supporting Tsarist Russia who of course was fighting for the liberation in a similar method to today I would say the chief enemy of its own people of the people is in its own country and but that wasn't even the most important point in relation to this the most important thing I wanted to bring up is Trotsky says something I think extremely important for us to remember in the run-up to World War II he said yes it's an imperialist war nowadays people talk about World War II it's purely a just war simply because it was against fashion that's not the case it was an imperialist war for the re-division of the last war and our policy should be a continuation and intensification of the same policy of revolutionary defeatism however applied to the real concrete facts and those facts contained the defense of the Soviet Union against fascism but also the possibility of colonial wars of liberation such as in India for example breaking out in the midst of the war and he said if that were to take place and the imperialists for their own reasons gave support for example Britain being allied with the Soviet Union they're still imperialists but he said no one's been sent say from Britain to the USSR from fascist Italy to Algeria he said no that would be pointless in what sense was that helping the world revolution but I've seen that used to justify positively calling on your own imperialists to send arms that's not what you're talking about he was putting forward a fairly sensible practical negative position and what he said further which really sums it up is the workers of imperialist countries however cannot help an anti-imperialist country through their own government no matter what might be the diplomatic and military relations between the two countries at a given moment if the governments find themselves in a temporary and by the very essence of the matter unreliable alliance then the proletariat of the imperialist country continues to remain in class opposition to its own government and supports the non-imperialist ally his own quotation marks through its own methods in other words through the methods of the international class struggle agitation not only against their perfidious allies in other words agitating against the lies and machinations of in this case British imperialism but also in favour of other countries boycott strikes in one case rejection of boycott strikes in another case in other words the principle continues to be the same simply applied to the real conditions the principles of class independence first and foremost and genuine proletarian internationalism we support the workers of other countries by our own means the imperialist thank you sorry the imperialists are simply incapable even if you think that they are defending a progressive cause or they're slightly more progressive than other fascist the ancient Roman historian he said they create a wilderness and call it peace that's the kind of peace that imperialism creates the Soviet Union actually instructed parties in India the communist party in India basically suspended the independence struggle against Britain why? because Britain was fighting fascism but surely if the Indian people wanted to fight fascism they need to start with British occupation and the British Raj which Shosya explained at the time the British communist party van strikes basically didn't support strikes within Britain with American imperialism in Mexico who was the bigger enemy to the Mexican workers working class Hitler or Roosevelt it was American imperialism and actually despite suspending the class struggle and strengthening the western imperialists who were their allies at that time it meant that the end of the world second world war was the most brutal inhumane disgusting that it could possibly have been the dropping of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima, Nagasaki and so on fire bombing of German cities but also their allies surprise surprise turned again into imperialist countries that wanted to encircle and destroy the USSR so actually the USSR found itself would have found itself in a much weaker position if it hadn't been for the spread of the revolution to other countries but even then ultimately it had grave consequences for the workers movement even the common turn itself was dissolved in 1943 in order to satisfy its so-called anti-fascist allies who then when German fascism was overthrown they kept Nazis in the government they kept the emperor of Japan and many fascists in the government there and actually they put pressure on French capitalism to evict the Communist Party while withdrawing martial aid so the Soviet Union actually managed to weaken its position and I'll furnish here because Albert is looking increasingly worried what now I've talked quite a lot about principles and guides to action and so on what now what does this mean now and I just wanted to refer to an article I read in Navarra Media where it was saying we need a robust anti-war movement a peace and pushing Ukraine towards a further prolongation exacerbation of the conflict and I agree with that one point I would aside I would make is it's only now they're publishing this article they would not have published the article in February or March when it was all about solidarity with Ukraine the difference is now the cracks are beginning to show winter is coming to coin a phrase and many of the European powers are starting to worry about social explosions in their own countries and so they would much rather see a deal so now the left reformist in Britain are starting to talk about the need is before the war breaks out and during the war not when it's actually starting but the real point I want to make and the really important question this person raises is why isn't there one already we are 2 million people out on the streets in opposition to the Iraq war where has that movement gone what has happened to it and this tells us something about that an anti-war movement a genuine anti-war movement cannot be built in isolation from the class struggle it takes more than anti-war slogans to bring together a movement strong enough to resist the pressure of imperialism which is incredibly strong and the basis would only ever lie in a genuinely independent revolutionary wing I would say a Marxist wing of the British labour movement it's interesting that one of the very few unions who put out a statement criticising NATO at the onset of the war was unison only because there was a Marxist on the NEC of unison that happened to be on the committee that drafted that document that's a small example of the very small things could be achieved with small forces but this is a point the reason that the anti-war movement is so small is because that genuine class-independent revolutionary labour movement is extremely small not to build a working class anti-war movement that raises itself on class independence and proletarian internationalism we need to build that revolutionary wing of the British labour movement here in Britain obviously and worldwide on that I'll finish thank you