A left-wing Russian-speaking group in Germany and their contacts in Russia are once again on the view that Ukraine is waging a justified defensive war against Revanchist Russian imperialism. This is the so-called defeatist position, as also promoted during the First World War by the German socialist Karl Liebknecht: the enemy stands domestically and a defeat of Russia is the least evil.
That's completely wrong and ahistorical. The "defeatist" position in WWI was the position that completely rejectedthe notion that any side was fighting a "justified defensive war," instead viewing as a conflict between imperialist powers. On that basis, defeatism called for revolutionary action against one's own government, whichever government that is. It was an explicit rejection of "the lesser evil."
Lenin called Trotsky out over this point very clearly and explicitly:
Theory
To desire Russia's defeat, Trotsky writes, is "an uncalled-for and absolutely unjustifiable concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, which would replace the revolutionary struggle against the war and the conditions causing it, with an orientation—highly arbitrary in the present conditions—towards the lesser evil" . . .
The phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings on a simple issue. It seems to him that to desire Russia's defeat means desiring the victory of Germany. . .
What is the substitute proposed for the defeat slogan? It is that of "neither victory nor defeat." This, however, is nothing but a paraphrase of the "defence of the fatherland" slogan. It means shifting the issue to the level of a war between governments (who, according to the content of this slogan, are to keep to their old stand, "retain their positions"), and not to the level of the struggle of the oppressed classes against their governments! It means justifying the chauvinism of all the imperialist nations, whose bourgeoisie are always ready to say—and do say to the people—that they are "only" fighting "against defeat". "The significance of our August 4 vote was that we are not for war but against defeat," David, a leader of the opportunists, writes in his book. The Organising Committee, together with Bukvoyed and Trotsky, stand on fully the same ground as David when they defend the "neither-victory nor-defeat" slogan.
On closer examination, this slogan will be found to mean a "class truce", the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one's "own" bourgeoisie, one's "own" government, whereas dealing a blow at one's own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed's information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one's own country. Those who accept the "neither victory-nor-defeat" slogan can only be hypocritically in favour of the class struggle, of "disrupting the class truce"; in practice, such people are renouncing an independent proletarian policy because they subordinate the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the absolutely bourgeois task of safeguarding the imperialist governments against defeat. . .
Whoever is in favour of the slogan of "neither victory nor defeat" is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an -enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing governments, of the present-day ruling classes.
What on earth does maintaining the territorial integrity of a bourgeois state have to do with international solidarity?