Ukraine War: For a second Zimmerwald

As is well known, one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century was the fatal failure of European social democracy on the eve of the First World War. Committed to the International only in the form of songs, the European majority socialists joined the ranks of their respective national imperialists in 1914 and allowed themselves to be slaughtered in the trenches without resistance. The reason given was that the backward Russian tsarism / the arrogant English Empire / Prussia’s vile militarism represented a threat to civilization, which is why one had to commit to progress in the defense of one’s own nation. This devastating miscalculation was followed by nine million deaths, the triumph of fascism and a second, even more terrible war.

Today one has the impression that large parts of the German left want to re-enact this debacle – as a tragic farce. While some people gloss over Putin’s war-capitalist Russia by pointing to the long list of US state crimes, others have concocted a political fairy tale according to which democracy must be defended against authoritarianism with the help of NATO, the Bundeswehr and Rheinmetall.

The second position in particular has the most bizarre results in the “progressive camp” of German society. Green voters believe they can strengthen feminism with billions in armaments. Anti-Germans who have made themselves comfortable in the Springer Group or in the state apparatus call for the establishment of no-fly zones at every opportunity (unless such a zone could serve to protect Israel’s neighboring countries). And representatives of the so-called Progressive Left, a movement in the Left Party, definitely want to put a “taboo-free” debate about the construction of a European army on the agenda.

It is against this background that one must read the book “Die and let die. “The Ukraine War as a Class Conflict”, which the small trade union left-wing group Beau Séjour published recently, should be recommended to everyone who has not yet lost their minds and would like to continue to avoid this.

The name of the editorial collective says it all: it refers to the Swiss guesthouse where the so-called Zimmerwald Conference took place in 1915, an international meeting of left-wing opponents of the war. The foreword to “Die and Let Die” says: We are addressing “all antimilitarists, who are currently unfortunately just as minority as the socialist opponents of the war who disguised themselves as ornithologists in the Pension Beau Séjour in September 1915 in the Swiss Zimmerwald and who, given their dwarfishness, joked that “half a century after the founding of the First International, it was possible to accommodate all the internationalists in four cars.”

The Beau-Séjour group’s biting criticism applies both to “left-wing bellicoseism,” which imagines the armies of Ukraine and NATO as “anti-imperialist fighting units,” and to any trivialization of “Russian oligarch capitalism,” which prefers to destroy national minorities in artillery fire. According to the editors, anyone who takes either side here has already lost. The distinction between “good and bad imperialisms” is once again the great political catastrophe of the left.

Against “left bellicism” and the trivialization of Putin – the book “Die and Let Die” defends the only conceivable internationalist position on the war in Ukraine.

To explain this thesis, “Dying and Letting Die” is divided into three sections. In the first chapter, entitled “Behind the Front Lines,” war opponents from Ukraine and Russia have their say. The anarchist group “Assembly” from the besieged Kharkiv reports how it is trying to defend the right to desert in its country, but also demands that Western antimilitarists support the internal Russian resistance to Putin’s war much more actively so that the opposition to the war does not collapse amounts to indirect siding with the Putin regime. The Russian anarcho-syndicalist group KRAS talks about how elites in the post-Soviet space are promoting Russian and other nationalisms to obscure social and economic inequality. And the Marxist-Leninist “Workers’ Front” reminds us that not everyone in the Ukrainian population is convinced of the cause of the war – enthusiasm for war is noticeably decreasing, especially towards the front line.

In this context, the Beau Séjour collective does not hide the fact that these anti-national voices are marginalized in their societies. But their question still remains the decisive one: Can social and democratic rights be defended in the trenches of competition between states, or does national mobilization under the leadership of capital necessarily strengthen the very authoritarianism that one supposedly wants to defeat?

In the chapter “Whose War?” German and English-speaking authors discuss the possibilities of an antimilitarist movement. The historian Axel Berger traces how the Zimmerwald Conference positioned itself against the majority Social Democratic “defenders of the fatherland” during the First World War. Peter Nowak, a journalist from Berlin, writes about strikes and sabotage actions with which workers in Italy, Belarus and Russia tried to prevent arms deliveries. In a text that is really worth reading, Aaron Eckstein and Ruth Jackson from the magazine “Communaut” analyze the extent to which the war in Ukraine must be understood simultaneously as a Russian attack, as a Ukrainian civil war and as a geopolitical confrontation.

Finally, a final aspect – namely the geopolitical conflict – is the focus of the third chapter, which is entitled “World War and the World Market”. Among other things, an older text by the historian Rainer Zilkenat from 2014 is printed here, which traces how German great power politics repeatedly asserted a claim to Ukraine in the first half of the 20th century. From the ranks of the “Communaut” magazine comes a text about the importance of pipeline projects and energy supply for the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. And in a reprinted interview in the Austrian “Mosaik” magazine, political scientist Felix Jaitner discusses the political-economic system of Putin’s Russia.

Not all of the contributions in the anthology are equally convincing, and the specific question of how an antimilitarist movement can develop given the lack of political awareness remains open. But the mere fact that leftists are finally taking an offensive stance against taking sides in the competition between capitalist states makes the book indispensable. The basic message of “Die and let die” is that it is only social emancipation against the war actors involved can give. A position that should actually be taken for granted.

It says everything about our times that one has to call “Die and let die” the book of the hour. A small left-wing publisher has published an anthology with a low three-digit print run, which emphasizes the position that all left-wing parties, organizations and foundations should actually represent. The book is a radical statement against any national mobilization and for an anti-militarist internationalism that deserves its name. It is important to cut through the “veil of chatter about freedom, nation and rearmament,” the editors write in their foreword. They are right. In the slaughter of the trenches, nothing is defended other than the access of one elite or another to a country’s wealth.

AK Beau Séjour: »Die and let die. The Ukraine War as a Class Conflict«. The Bookmaking Shop, 208 p., hardcover, €15.