/ Spanish /
Part of the support for the Ukrainian government is based on the defense of the right to national self-determination. In conventional bourgeois theory, which is necessarily idealistic, it is affirmed as the legal basis for peoples to be able to live freely. However, in bourgeois material practice, in reality, competition is affirmed tooth and nail, which leads to competing with the greatest possible display of force and cunning against competitors. This reality is dominant in the world of capitalist relations, which since the end of the 19th century has expanded to the most dynamic and economically significant part of the planet. Therefore, capitalist imperialism is the framework within which this right to national self-determination must be understood.
That is to say, this ‘right’ is the cover for some states with greater economic and military capacities, individually or in collaboration with others, to interfere and exert pressure and forms of domination over others. Others, with lesser capacities, more limited in economic and military terms, have to adapt to a status of manipulation by others, which they usually do by trying to obtain some advantages or by shifting their potential of force to pressuring others in worse situations. Forces aspiring to statehood but not yet there, or those with some control over unstable proto-state structures, have to operate in this field of imperialist capital conditioning.
Ukraine has been an instrumental force used by the foreign bourgeoisies to advance against Russian imperialism. In this effort, the dominant bourgeois factions have relentlessly deployed their totalitarianism. The Zelensky government is an example of this. Now it is asking for support from the EU because the U.S. is limiting it and doling it out according to its own imperialist interests.
Self-determination has served as a rallying cry, a deadly lure, for the proletariat to abandon its own interests and dedicate itself to alienating itself in the interests of the bourgeoisie by working hard, accepting all kinds of sacrifices, tolerating militaristic efforts and the iron fist of Ukrainian nationalism. Of course, this means hating “the Russians,” that is, hating the working class in Russia, which suffers from the exploitation and domination of Russian and international capital.
All kinds of calls for the defense of the right to national self-determination are necessarily a way of satisfying capitalist interests and promoting the working class as an alienated force in the daily quarrels and wars between the bourgeois forces, for the distribution of the booty of surplus value, for raw materials, for areas of high economic and military strategic interest… It is a weapon against the necessary revolutionary internationalism that the proletariat needs, at the risk of allowing the militarist deployment that leads on a large scale to a Third World War, if all the conditions necessary for its emergence are met, and to a large number of wars called local or regional, all imperialist, all turning on the carousel of disputes between forces, states and blocs of imperialist capitalism.
Source
Aníbal, El derecho de autodeterminación nacional en el marco de las relaciones de fuerza del capitalismo imperialista : https://inter-rev.foroactivo.com/t13610-el-derecho-de-autodeterminacion-nacional-en-el-marco-de-las-relaciones-de-fuerza-del-capitalismo-imperialista-edicion-en-espanol-e-ingles#122850. 24-3-2025