this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Lenin's "The Defeat of One's Own Government in the Imperialist War" | GZD Reading Group | Week 12, 2024
(lemmygrad.ml)
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.
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While the notion is simple, i find this text very hard to digest. The world was very different when Lenin wrote this, it was a very multipolar world in that time, albeit these polars were imperialists competing for the distribution of the world while multipolarity now is about the right of self-determination.
The case of Russia is very interesting, a capitalist country that is ideologically reactionary but one way or another is found itself fighting for a globally progressive cause, the weakening of US hegemony throught the disarment of Ukraine, an US satellite state. Would this be the moment for the working class of Russia to organize to topple their oligarchy? Maybe it would be the prime time to do it even if it could potentially lead to an US invasion?
This is the reason I commented on the other thread about "On Protracted People's War" and how it talks seemingly similar conditions but take very different stances. One is written from the perspective of revolutionaries on a reactionary country waging a war that is principally imperialist in character, the other from the perspective of a reactionary country defending from such a war.
The war in Ukraine is somewhere in-between, as there will be sectors of the Russia bourgeoisie that benefit from this war, but it also weakens the global hegemon (I disagree that we already have a multipolar world). On the other hand, it assures some measure of self determination for the peoples of Donbas and Ukraine.
From a very distant and somewhat ignorant perspective, (actual) revolutionary communists in Russia should not defend the overthrow of the Russian bourgeois state as an immediate objective (but a long term one). But they should have advocate for the immediate overthrow of the Ukrainian regime and, controversially, non-antagonistic autonomy from the Russian state and socialist restoration for the Donbas and Luhansk.
Organization is an ongoing project, but taking power without the support of the army would likely lead to a civil war, and now is not a good time for Russia to be destabilized
This is exactly the position Lenin critisises in this text. Lenin is quite clear:
Yes but the global context is different, the imperialist hegemon would benefit from a civil war in Russia, a communist revolution in Russia at this moment could very well be found itself fighting for the globally reactionary class war. In fact, the US would absolutely fund such a group, just like in Syria with the SDF.
Again this is exactly the kind of thinking Lenin is railing against in the very text we're discussing.
Again, this is not the same context of the WW1, this is not one imperialist state fighting another imperialist state, this is an imperialist state trying to subjugate another state through their proxies Ukraine and NATO.