On the Laziness of Parroting “No War but Class War”
There’s nothing radical about flexing theory on people who are being bombed and there’s something particularly ghoulish about telling working class people living under occupation that their struggle isn’t relevant based on a poor definition of imperialism from a Soviet who’s been dead for over a century. Lenin’s five hypothetical points aren’t very useful when people are being killed.
The (honestly, not only) Western authoritarian left has a talent for regurgitating revolutionary slogans without meaning anything or reading the room. Since 2022, many have avoided reality, hiding behind proclamations of “no war but class war!”
Class matters, yes. Of course it does. And the rich and privileged experience war very differently from the poor.
But this phrase has become the rallying cry of people who want to sound principled while refusing to name what’s actually happening.
It’s the leftist version of “thoughts and prayers”: a performance of moral clarity that does nothing to stop violence because stopping it would require confronting its cause. In the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it functions less as analysis and more as an alibi.
There is no “class war” when an entire population is being targeted, including the working class. There’s no proletarian unity between invader and invaded in an imperial war. Ukraine’s working class is under attack by a state that denies Ukraine’s right to exist.
Destroying the working class and infrastructure isn’t accidental.
When missiles hit apartment blocks, grain silos, farms, or energy ststems, they aren’t just killing civilians. Labor itself is under attack. Since 2022, at least 15,000 civilians have been killed and over 40,000 injured, mostly by explosive weapons used in populated areas. And the real numbers are expected to be considerably higher, as accurate statistics are difficult (if not possible) to collect from occupied areas.
Mariupol was once a major steel center employing tens of thousands at Azovstal and Ilyich. After siege, starvation, and mass destruction, these hubs of labor were left in ruins. In Kharkiv, factories are wreckage. Mykolaiv’s shipyards are gone. Across the country, tens of thousands of businesses have been destroyed or shut down, gutting the economic base of working-class life.
Farming has been hit just as hard. A quarter of Ukraine’s farmland is mined. The Black Sea blockade cut off grain exports that fed large parts of the world. The destruction of the Kakhovka dam cut irrigation to over half a million hectares and disabled up to 94% of irrigation systems in Kherson, wiping out harvests.
And farmers themselves are being targeted. In Kherson, drone attacks have been described as a “human safari,” hitting civilians in fields, on roads, and in vehicles. Agricultural workers have been killed while working, with dozens wounded and more than a dozen killed in that region alone, while hundreds of drone strikes per week turn farmland into a kill zone.
This is class warfare. The people losing homes, jobs, and lives are not oligarchs. They are workers.
Insisting on pacifism in this case is a symptom of complete detachment. “Refusing to fight” doesn’t stop violence, but it does leave people defenseless. Telling Ukrainians to lay down arms while their homes and livelihoods are being erased is absurd, as if shielding themselves with Marx’s Das Kapital or any of Lenin’s theory would magically keep them alive.
War is always catastrophic for the working class. But in a war this existential, “nonviolence” would mean total subjugation. It would mean the loss of both life and the ability to shape one’s material conditions and Ukrainian workers don’t have the luxury of debating slogans or hypothetical theory championed by privileged westerners from the comfort and safety of their European and North American homes.
When Russia invaded, socialist and anarchist groups organized evacuations, aid networks, and supply lines under fire. Class-conscious fighters exist, and they know what’s at stake. As Taras Bilous (a socialist who was recently interviewed in Jacobin and is at the frontlines) put it in an interview with Deník Alarm:
“In the first days of the invasion, I understood that the future of the left movement in Ukraine depended on whether we actively participate in the war or not. We are all largely judged by our actions at such critical moments. We—the left—are already not very influential in this country, and if we had not gone to fight, everything would have fallen apart. The left would have ceased to exist as any kind of entity in Ukraine.”
If there is no Ukraine, there is no Ukrainian leftist organizing. The idea of a neutral, pacifist left collapses when neutrality means disappearance.
So why does the slogan persist? Because it flatters people who want to feel brave while staying comfortable. It offers moral superiority without risk. It collapses reality into abstraction and recasts asymmetrical violence as shared tragedy.
Taras Bilous again:
“Left-wingers are often condescending; they consider themselves to be the only reasonable and critical ones. Yet from the inside, you can see how much of this is learned boilerplate… Instead of analysing specific conditions, they often just repeat examples taken from a completely different context and time, which do not fit the situation at all. We need to move away from these templates. Marxism is not dogma, but for some reason too many Marxists in practice reduce Marxism to a mere repetition of established dogmas. ‘No war except class war’ and so on.”
It’s easier to repeat theory than confront reality.
And if you sympathize with Russia, then consider the fact that Russia’s war machine runs on exploitation, poverty, and forced mobilization. In poorer regions, enlistment is sold as survival. Soldiers are promised material rewards and a chance at a life they’ve been systematically shut out of. But they come back in coffins instead and the system consumes its own poor to sustain itself.
If you actually cared about those people, you’d want the war to end the only way it can: with Russia gone.
There’s a moral rot at the heart of so much Western leftism. These are the people who can name every NATO bombing from the past 30 years but can’t name a single Ukrainian trade unionist or leftist organization. They can map pipelines but not displacement routes or mass graves. They quote Lenin while ignoring every living socialist actually fighting fascism in their own city.
They don’t see that slogans like “no war but class war” only work once you’ve decided some lives matter less. It’s easy to preach peace from the comfort of your warm Western home while Ukrainian factory towns are being pulverized. It’s easy to condemn “both sides” when your lights stay on.
If Russia wins, the Ukrainian working class ceases to exist and not metaphorically, but physically.
Under occupation, unions are outlawed, workers are deported, and organizers are executed. Language, culture, and labor itself become instruments of control. It’s already been happening in Melitopol, Mariupol, and Luhansk.
If you truly believe in class solidarity, then you stand with those resisting annihilation and against those enforcing it. You support Ukrainian workers defending themselves, Russian deserters and dissenters, and the laborers rebuilding power grids under fire.
Because when you reduce everything to an abstract class hypothesis or rhetoric, you stop seeing actual humans.
And when you stop seeing humans because they’re inconvenient to theory or your fragile carefully curated worldview and echo chambers, you’ve lost the plot.
radical dumpling: screaming into the void about anti-fascism and anti-imperial consistency, from somewhere between east and west.
This article originally appeared on the author’s Substack.
More content from this blog
- Rainbow Extremism, by Liliya Vezhevatova – 18 December 2024
- Disarmament, Ukrainian-style, by Adrian Ivakhiv – 3 June 2025
- Neither Islamabad nor Kabul: A Left Perspective on the Pakistan–Afghanistan War. Interview with Farooq Sulehria – 1 March 2026
- The Tragedy of the Ukrainian Working Class, by Karmína – 11 July 2022
- Kazakhstan and Russia’s Neo-Imperialism, by Dmitry Mazorenko – 29 October 2025