When major events happen such as the American and British decisions to allow Ukraine to use Atacms missiles to attack targets inside Russia, one naturally reads across a spectrum of opinion. Sometimes you see a piece and think that it is cogently argued and thoughtful but still disagree with it. Other times you read an article you don’t agree with and think that it’s unhinged and appears to have been written by a splenetic piece of AI software translating from Russian.

As one of the few people alive who has actually read Reason In Revolt by Alan Woods, a work in which he sets out what might be charitably called quixotic views on the Big Bang and steady state universe, I can confirm that his recent article An angry old man, a deranged Ukrainian, and World War III is genuinely his own work. He is the inheritor of that school of English language political writing which remoulds everything into the style of Max Eastman’s translations of Trotsky, but without the originality or stylistic grace. Despite the title, it is not an autobiographical piece.

Two things make it significant. One is that his group the Revolutionary Communist Party is currently recruiting appreciable numbers of young people and convincing, them that they, and they alone, will save humanity from capitalist barbarism. The other is that it is an interesting example of how people who see themselves as the sole heirs of Lenin and Trotsky have arrived at a position where they are producing material which agrees with Putin in every significant particular. The people concerned have too much integrity to take Moscow’s money, but they are delivering its arguments. In this they have gone much further than other strands of the left which sees the Ukrainian struggle as a proxy for NATO going to war with Russia.

Dracula and Hitler

After a weird opening about Dracula, Woods indicates that he spent a few minutes on Wikipedia to give us the heights of Zelensky and Kim Jong-Il in metric and imperial measurements. Zelensky, we learn is 5ft 5 ¾ (167 cm) as if this is relevant to anything other than trouser size. An editor with more gumption might have said something like “it’s a good point Alan, but word count…”

Woods then goes on to compare Zelensky to Hitler. “Zelensky is now displaying exactly the same psychological symptoms that Hitler showed in the last days of the German Reich”. While no doctor would assess a patient they haven’t met, a version of the Marxist method unencumbered by any medical expertise is used to make an absurd link between a regime and individual responsible for World War Two and the elected leader of a relatively poor country conducting a defensive war against one of the largest armies in the world.

And his enthusiasm for the Russian army is palpable:

“It must be pointed out that Russia is not merely a country with a large, well trained and equipped army that has proven its value on the Ukrainian battlefield. The Russian army is actually more than a match for all the armies of NATO in Europe put together.

Moreover, Russia is the world’s most powerful nuclear state, with a huge arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of hitting any target in the world.”

Never mind that it is throwing unknown thousands of members of national minorities, criminals and anyone without the connections to avoid getting press ganged to fight in meat grinder operations to deplete the Ukrainians by weight of numbers. That is the exact opposite of strategic brilliance. Moreover, the Russian army is the army of a section of the Russian ruling class which is again carrying out a war of expansion in the bloodiest traditions of European imperialism. Not once does Woods mention that Putin invaded Ukraine and his dictatorship is responsible for the war. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, always forgets to mention that too.

Trump plays it smart

When Woods moves onto Trump, he is almost congratulatory in tone.

“So far… Trump has not made any comments about the latest developments. This is probably the right thing to do, since his political enemies in the media are circling like vultures, waiting to pounce on any mistake he might make.”

As if that weren’t enough, he sticks the boot into Biden who showed “complete contempt, not only for the President-elect…” Now, while Biden should be in the dock of a war crimes trial, being mean to Trump is the least of his sins and it is an odd kind of socialist who gets upset on Trump’s behalf.

What this article does reasonably well is to offer an assessment of the success of the Russian advance, even if it does not mention the cost in the lives of the barely trained Russian troops meeting their deaths. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that the Russian tactics of attrition have significantly degraded Ukraine’s offensive and defensive capabilities and Ukrainian commanders have been telling European and American journalists that they are hanging on by their fingertips. Contrast this with the unlimited support the Republicans and Democrats have pledged to the Israeli eradication of Gaza and its population.  

Utterly missing from Woods’ article is any critique of Russian aggression, any assessment of what a Putin victory would mean for the working class in Russia and Ukraine or even a word of consideration for the tens of thousands of Russians Putin has had killed or maimed for his gangster capitalist government.

No article in The Communist is complete without a quote from Lenin or Trotsky, so let’s close with what Trotsky said of Lenin’s views on Ukraine:

“The right to self-determination, that is, to separation, was extended by Lenin equally to the Poles and to the Ukrainians… Every inclination to evade or postpone the problem of an oppressed nationality he regarded as a manifestation of Great Russian chauvinism.”