"Fate la rivoluzione in casa vostra!"

A response to WF's article, "Where are the International Brigades?"

I agree with WF in their argument that we should support Ukraine's right to seek arms for its self-defence, and with WF's call for us to campaign for strings-free economic aid to Ukraine to survive the war and to reconstruct after it, and for cancellation of debt.

I don't think WF's call for "International Brigades" for Ukraine could have the meaning or effect they wish, though.

The International Brigades in Spain, organised by the Communist Parties after a Comintern decision in September 1936, and with recruitment vetted by the CPs, were not an alternative to the Republic being hegemonised by its main big-power arms supplier, Stalin's USSR.

On the contrary, they were a complementary means to the same goal. See Stan Crooke's Workers' Liberty pamphlet on the International Brigades, Lions led by Jackals.

In the run-up to the Civil War, the Spanish CP was weak compared to the anarchists and the social-democrats, and not that much bigger than the POUM. The International Brigades gave the Stalinists a significant military force under their direct control. They helped the Spanish Stalinists to recruit and to gain leverage with the military commanders inherited from the established Spanish Army, a large chunk of which, outside the colonial army stationed in Morocco, sided with the Republic in June 1936. They served the Stalinists' plan of suppressing the workers' revolution which erupted from June 1936, while simultaneously trying to fend off the fascists.

Aid from the USA, UK, Poland, etc. is designed to stall Putin. It is not to suppress a workers' revolution in Ukraine. Of course the US, UK, Polish, etc. governments would want to suppress a workers' revolution in Ukraine, but there is no such revolution there.

Most of the volunteers for the International Brigades saw things differently. They thought they were going to Spain to fight fascism. They did fight the fascists, and many died. But they did that while being duped and coerced into Stalinist politics.

The International Brigades were designed to recruit workers (often unemployed workers, in the conditions of the mid-1930s) with military experience (from World War One, the Irish War of Independence, etc.) Although short of military and other supplies, they had some military effectiveness. The Spanish Civil War was a low-tech war. The fascists, too, were short of air cover and heavy weapons.

The socialist-internationalists who went to Spain to join POUM or anarchist militias (George Orwell, Benjamin Péret...) were too few to make any military difference.

Even if we socialist-internationalists had mass parties these days, of the size of the Popular Front period Communist Parties, and large numbers of chronically-unemployed workers with military experience were at our disposal, any International Brigades we could organise would be of little military use in the relatively high-tech war now underway. And I don't see that they would have political leverage against the right-wing direction of the Zelenskyy government that the left and labour movement in Ukraine wouldn't have. For the agency of change, we look to systematic organising among the working class where we are, not footloose military operations.

To the extent that we can send material support to Ukraine, better the sort of convoys already sent, by example, by French unions and groups of the left, focused on helping the Ukrainian left and labour movement rather than the Ukrainian government. Similar convoys were organised by British leftists via Workers' Aid to Kosova and Workers' Aid to Bosnia, and helped develop some political as well as material links with leftists in those countries.

If Russia were to conquer large areas of Ukraine, and the war then to turn into a guerrilla war (relatively low-tech) in the occupied areas, then that might change the military calculus a bit.

Probably not, though. Generally guerrilla wars against occupiers (Ireland 1919-21, Vietnam, Algeria, Indonesia) have not sought International Brigades. Che Guevara's efforts to be the hero-from-outside of guerrilla battles in Latin America did not work even in their own terms. There has been some Islamist "international-brigade" recruitment in some recent wars (Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosova, Daesh in Iraq and Syria), but it's not clear to me that it has been militarily very effective, and besides, in any case, the political-leverage result has been reactionary, not democratic.

The Vietnamese Stalinist leader Ho Chi Minh, when asked by a visiting delegation of Italian leftists how they could help Vietnam's struggle against the USA, had enough echoes from his communist past in his head to reply: "Fate la rivoluzione in casa vostra!": make the revolution in your own country. Or, more broadly: pursue the working-class struggle in our countries, and help the Russian and Belarusian leftists fighting their governments in their own countries.

Ukraine sought to get closer to NATO right from independence in 1991. "Partnerships" and such were set up. All that was all in accord with Russia, and there was even talk in the 1990s of Russia joining NATO.

Russia signed treaties with Ukraine in 1994 and 1997 promising not only to respect Ukraine's borders but also to help Ukraine defend them against external attack! The USA and the UK also signed the 1994 treaty as "guarantors".

Russia's reneging from the treaties and its attacks on Ukraine in 2014 and 2022-3 have probably slowed the possibilities of Ukraine joining NATO rather than accelerated them. The NATO powers evidently reckon that Finland's and Sweden's borders are well-established enough that a tight NATO "tripwire" committing NATO to action if Putin invades will deter Putin rather than drawing NATO into a bigger war than they want. The NATO powers want no such tight "tripwire" for Ukraine. They want to keep their hands free to coerce Ukraine into accepting a deal of some sort with Putin breaking the 1994 and 1997 treaties.

The more military equipment that individual NATO powers give Ukraine now, the stronger will be Ukraine's ability to resist pressure from those and other NATO powers for a rotten deal with Putin. (And it's all from individual NATO powers, not "NATO as such"; some NATO powers such as Hungary and Turkey don't want to aid Ukraine.)

More NATO aid now makes Ukraine less subjected to NATO, not more so.

As with Vietnam. Military aid that Vietnam had received from China during its war with the USA made it more, not less, able to repel the Chinese invasion of 1979.

Of course Zelenskyy uses Ukraine's UN votes and such to help sweeten NATO powers (and non-NATO powers with large military resources, like Israel) which he hopes will give Ukraine more, or some, aid. He's a neoliberal bourgeois politician: was before the 2022 Russian invasion, still is after it. But it is not the case that association with NATO compels Ukraine to support predatory military action by NATO powers. Several major NATO powers vehemently opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Post-war Ukraine will depend heavily on foreign aid to rebuild, and surely will be subject to IMF conditions (as it is at present). We fight against the strings on aid, and to help the Ukrainian left and labour movement defend and extend social provision and workers' rights. (Obviously we can't send an "International Brigade" of "alternative", socialistic, billionaire lenders to Ukraine...)

However, we should be wary of seeing evils in Ukraine's economy as just what might follow from "post-war neoliberalisation", as if the pre-war or even pre-2014 was somehow preferable. It wasn't. It was a corrupt, oligarchic, and very unequal economy. To the extent that Zelenskyy's government acts as one "for the millionaires, against the billionaires", we counterpose not defence of the old billionaire-dominated order, but the interests of the working-class millions. In particular, we should not corner ourselves into necessarily opposing anti-corruption measures requested by the European Union as steps towards joining the EU.