Now that Ukraine has lost the war, it is time for the revolution

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. Karl Marx, ‘The Communist Manifesto’

The real enemy of any government or regime is in the last analysis its own people. This is the entity those who rule fear most, and is accordingly why so much effort is devoted to ruling class propaganda — propaganda primarily designed to sustain the myth that there exists a national interest to which we all are bound regardless of socioeconomic status or actual lived experience. But there is no ‘national interest’ in truth. What there is are the interests of the dominant ruling class presented as such. Thus heavy lies the crown and lightly is tread the line between legitimacy and illegitimacy.

This dynamic is never more pronounced than in a time of war. Men with guns sent to fight other men with guns are never more dangerous than when the initial warm glow of patriotism, responsible for them readily marching towards their own demise, is replaced by the grim reality of the suffering and slaughter experienced. It is then when that most dangerous of all things, a soldier who starts to think and reflect, emerges.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 is the historical example, tout court, of how poor soldiers thrown in the maw of combat develop a revolutionary consciousness which succeeds in superseding the national one they’d set out with There was also civil unrest in France and in Germany after this war to end all wars, though in both cases the forces of capital proved strong enough to overcome the threat from below.

Ukraine has lost this conflict. The Kursk offensive and occupation has at this writing turned into a disastrous rout. Further still, a manpower shortage has for the Ukrainians reached the point of critical mass, to the point where no amount of EU and UK financial and material support will be able to salvage or change the reality on the ground.