We’re starting off with a very short one for the first week. This text was published in 1915, two years before the October revolution, and is sadly still highly relevant in the imperial core.
This reading group is meant to educate, and people from any instances federated with Lemmygrad are welcome. Any comments not engaging in good faith will be removed (don’t respond to hostile comments, just report them).
You can post questions or share your thoughts at any time. We’ll be moving on to a new text next week, but this thread won’t be locked.
You can read the text here.
I’m saying when a reactionary capitalist power invades another reactionary capitalist power I want both those powers to come out of it as weak as can be. I am saying a world with 2 reactionary world powers at each others throats is more conducive to proletarian revolutions than a world with a single world spanning reactionary capitalist power. Wanting my enemies to fight each other is not campism.
Ukraine was building up a sizeable force to reinvade the donbas. Should russia have just sat by while a genocide unfolded on their doorstep?
The violence and suffering in would have happened somewhere. The usa doesn’t take breaks from murder. It doesn’t like its weapons going past their due date. If they didn’t push for war in ukraine they’d be doing murder in africa or south america. Maybe they’d have started shit in China. Then they would have invaded Russia after the pogroms in ukraine were over.
I’m not cheering on the suffering in Ukraine but I am happy that the usa isn’t doing another Iraq which killed 4x the civilians that Russia’s SMO did in a country half the population. I’m happy that They gave the guns to incompetent ukrainians who couldn’t use them to the same devastating effect that usa would have.
The usa did not achieve its aims. It said from the start its goal was to weaken Russia for cheap. This did the opposite. Europe was going to fascism anyways. Don’t blame Russia for what the euros are doing. Spending more on weapons doesn’t make more weapons it just makes weapons more expensive.
Go read it again. Revolutionary defeatism isn’t the idea that communists should want Russia to lose every war. Its wanting your capitalist government to lose the war so you can turn it into a civil war. Do you not understand the context this was written in? If Lenin and Trotsky were Germans Lenin would be advocating that Germany lose the war.
My country is supplying arms and funds to ukraine thus I should want ukraine to to lose because it degrades my governments military and erodes trust in my government. That is what Lenin is saying.
If you are Russian then yes you should want Russia to lose in Ukraine but you better be planning a fucking civil war if they do.
Everyone in this thread agrees communists in the West should facilitate their governments defeat. The only disagreement is whether Russian communists should practice defeatism or not.
Cool, we agree then.
I think ultimately all communists should seek victory and topple their bourgeois goverments, but in certain circunstamces it should be understood that there is a larger struggle at place. The CPC and the KMT understood this and established a temporary alliance to fight the larger threat, we should learn this historical lesson.
The US has historically been very succesful at channeling these inner grievances between factions in other nations for their own advantage, Syria being the most recent example.
I think the Russian communist party is big enough to try and do something.