The following document is based on the first international declaration against imperialism signed by Trotskyist political groups existing in both England (Socialist Fight) and Argentina (Bolshevik Militant Tendency). We updated that document in the light of the current conflicts, understanding that the defeats of imperialism in the 21st century mark a turn in favor of the imbalance of the inter-state struggle in favor of oppressed countries. On these defeats we refer to Lebanon (2006), to Crimea (2014), to Syria (2017) and especially from the war in the Ukraine (2022), when Russia imposed a limit on NATO’s Eastward expansion.
Sinking of the General Belgrano, 2 Mqy 1982. 323 Argentine sailors perished. The anitique ship was sailing away from the war zone
In the four decades that separate us from the Falklands War, this is an international declaration that defends the defeat of imperialism and the victory of the oppressed country, however, without capitulating to the bourgeoisie of the oppressed country. Let us not capitulate as those who yesterday took a position of the “third camp”, objectively pro-imperialist, nor yesterday to the military regime, nor today to the “national and popular” government of the Frente de Todos and even to Kirchnerism – nor spare criticism of the Alberto Fernández government and its agreement with the IMF. . in the South Atlantic.
The Argentine population feels stripped of its territory and its riches for centuries. . . The Falklands have three times more oil than the rest of the UK.
The Falklands War was a military adventure to save the Argentine dictatorship using a legitimate vindication of the anti-imperialist cause.
On March 30, 1982, 50,000 workers fought for 6 hours in the streets against the military dictatorship in Buenos Aires, Rosario, Neuquén, Mar del Plata, Tucumán and Mendoza. It was the largest wave of proletarian mass demonstrations during the entire military regime. The height of popular repudiation was the product of the political impasse in which the regime found itself. The growing economic crisis (bankruptcy of banks and companies, inflation and record unemployment, huge foreign debt,…) accentuated the internal division in the military government, provoked the coup within the coup that defeated Viola and led to the rise of Galtieri and undermined the support of the petty bourgeoisie for the regime. Besieged, the dictatorship resorted to an artifice of distraction provoking an external enemy and appropriated a secular aspiration of the Argentine people to divert popular discontent. This tactic, despite the immense internal crisis, gave life to the Argentine military regime.
The dictatorship did not believe in the British military reaction and opted for American intermediation. He thought that his role as an enforcer for Yankee imperialism, directly supporting the coup reaction and the CIA military in Bolivia and Nicaragua, would bear fruit and, feeling trapped by the current workers’ struggles, he tried to exploit the discontent over the occupation of the Falklands by the United Kingdom, believing that its imperialist masters Americans would be condescending, trying to avoid war, and pushing the conflict toward a negotiated solution that would be favorable to them.
They did not count that the inter-imperialist economic ties against the oppressed nations, “the imperialist class solidarity” between the US and the UK were stronger than the “gratitude” for the services of bootlickers provided by the Argentine semi-colonial bourgeoisie. In addition to the complicity of the United States and other Latin American enforcer dictatorships such as the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship, Britain also demanded that France cede the secret codes to deactivate the Exocet missiles it had sold to Argentina.
The dictatorship did not believe that the result of its occupation of the island would be a war and was not prepared for such a consequence. In turn, a military victory OF imperialism against an OPPRESSED COUNTRY that did not even prepare for the struggle overcame the crisis of the British government and the other oppressed peoples. . . This new imperialist offensive was carried out in England and the United States but had a pilot experience in the Chilean military dictatorship where it was baptised as neoliberalism.
Another fear of the dictatorship itself is that, in the midst of the crisis in which it finds itself immersed, a defeat of imperialism would not guarantee its survival either, and would also strengthen its worst enemy: the Argentine labouring masses. As Trotsky argued in his famous interview with the Argentine trade unionist Mateo Fosa, assuming a hypothetical war between Brazil, ruled by a dictatorship, and democratic England:
“If England were victorious, it would place another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and strengthen control over Brazil. If Brazil, on the other hand, were to emerge victorious, this would give a powerful boost to the national and democratic consciousness of the country and lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship. In fact, it is necessary to have nothing in mind to reduce world antagonisms and military conflicts to the struggle between fascism and democracy. You have to know how to distinguish exploiters, slavers and thieves behind any mask they wear!” .
“The anti-imperialist struggle is the key to liberation”, Interview of Leon Trotsky with Mateo Fossa, 23/09/1938
Similarly, by England winning, the Argentine dictatorship would fall in one way or another, as we have already said, the war gave it survival, but the world reaction was strengthened with the victory of imperialism, both in England and in Reagan’s USA, in Chile. Pinochet, in apartheid South Africa, including Peru, the South American country most involved in the conflict by militarily supporting Argentina with fighter jets, ships and medical equipment of the Peruvian Air Force, the right led the way with Alan Garcia and followed with Fujimori.
In England,
“Thatcher has recovered from a disastrous unpopularity in public opinion polls, due to the anti-worker attacks that led to the destruction of British jobs and factories, which would surely sweep her away in the next election. This ideological victory motivated her attack on miners in 1985, anti-union laws and the privatization of public services. And we must point out the terrible consequences of this policy for the British proletariat and the whole world, while many “left” apologists for imperialism have tried to obfuscate their betrayal by presenting as an achievement something quite secondary for the world working class such as the fall of Galtieri. The British working class was ideologically leaderless under the nationalist chauvinism of Labour’s Michael Foot and the other leaders. In 1981-82, Ronald Regan, president of the U.S., and Paul Volker, president of the Fed, the U.S. central bank, defeated the flight controllers’ strike (from PATCO). While the Falklands War was at its height, Reagan launched a ruthless offensive against the American working class, which set the standard for the offensive of all capitalists against their own working classes around the world. All this prepared the coronation of imperialism with the historic world defeat suffered by the planetary working class with the overthrow of the Soviet Union.” .
Ret Marut, “FUA is the tactic, Permanent Revolution is the current strategy in the face of imperialist wars in the semi-colonial world, Socialist Fight #8, Winter 2011/2012
Bourgeois media gloat over Thatcher’s bloodlust
This victory of imperialism in the only direct military confrontation against a semi-colonial South American country after World War II was a decisive battle of the planetary class war. The outcome of the war did not necessarily have to be this, since the outcome of the Vietnam War was not as expected by imperialism and this altered imperialism’s strategic control over Asia, forcing it to seek a heterodox alliance with the Chinese workers’ state against the USSR.
As portrayed in “The Iron Lady” (2011), Phyllida LLoyd’s film , after the victory over Argentina, the triumphant Conservative prime minister addresses the British parliament to the Labour opposition: “This is a day to put aside differences, keep your head up and be proud to be British.”
The Labour Party follows Thatcher’s guidelines. The left wing of Labour also despised conflict against its own imperialist bourgeoisie and was proud of Argentina’s defeat. These elements drove the recovery of Thatcher’s popularity, the momentary reinvigoration of the British bourgeoisie, the increase in extortion of the proletariat (Poll Tax) and the triumphant reaction on the planet, in addition to highlighting the film through continuous consecutive comments from different characters:
“This rewards everything, their ratings skyrocket, from the most hated prime minister of all time to the beloved of the nation. The world was at her feet and Britain was working again. The business grows, the profits, the profits, the profits, Maggie’s millionaires, the Berlin Wall has fallen.”
In Argentina, hating the dictatorship, the working population took to the streets en masse to protest, especially against Britain, and to reclaim the archipelago. Because of this, one hundred thousand people volunteered to fight for the anti-imperialist cause. But it should be emphasised. For fear of the population, the dictatorship sabotaged the war effort of the Argentina itself, tortured the soldiers and sent them to die deliberately of cold and hunger, refused to expropriate the Bank of London and the British multinationals and ignored the foreign debt to England. More than the disproportion of forces was the political clumsiness of the dictatorship in the anti-imperialist struggle that forced Argentina to surrender on June 14, after battles that claimed the lives of 649 Argentines and 255 British.
Frustration at the defeat continued to take its toll, with ex-combatant centres pointing out that since the end of the war, more than 450 ex-combatants committed suicide because they were in a deep state of depression. This number is higher than the number of soldiers killed in battles on the islands, which were a total of 326; another 323 were killed when a British submarine torpedoed the cruiser General Belgrano. But Argentina’s defeat did not end there, and British imperialism continued to advance in a low-intensity offensive for the past 30 years.
The war is over, but the imperialist offensive in the Falklands continues
In 1986, the United Kingdom first claimed a fishing zone around the Falklands, guaranteeing the right to exercise its sovereignty from the coast up to 200 nautical miles, including the right to the bed and subsoil of the underwater platform. In 1993, the United Kingdom also proclaimed a 200-nautical-mile maritime zone around South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. The kelpers are an auxiliary force of the British garrison, as are the Zionist settlers of the Gaza Strip are of the Israeli army, they have the spoils made against Argentina after 1982, a loot that already benefits the second generation of kelpers.
British imperialism, a component of the Anglo-Saxon bloc with the US, formed a cordon linking Asunción, Santa Elena, Tristan de Cunha and Malvinas. This cordon serves the immediate and geostrategic interests of England, which are overvalued in times like the current one, of economic recession and overheating of oil prices amid the new warmongering escalation in Africa and the Middle East. In addition to the disputed oil, there is fishing – including the important resource of krill – the possibility of transpolar flights and the fastest route to other members of the Anglo-Saxon bloc made up of oceanic countries (Australia and New Zealand) and Antarctica, as a strategic reserve for the immediate future, being the Antarctic sector on which the Malvinas is projected the most interesting for the facilities for economic viability.
Geostrategic interests in this area of the globe are also highlighted, such as the control of air and maritime traffic in the South Atlantic, that is, between South America and Africa, projecting into the Antarctic seas, the control of the interoceanic route the passages between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the communication with the Indian Ocean from the South Atlantic, being important for England the maritime lines that lead to Australia, fundamental for the logistics of the twin creation of NATO in the Pacific, the AUKUS created in 2021.
Malvinas and Oil
The UK can earn up to US$176 million – as early as 2012 — from taxes levied on companies exploring for gas and oil in the Falkland Islands area. According to The Telegraph, the calculation, which was made by consultancy Edison Investment, estimates that if the four fields currently being explored can be explored by oil companies, that would be the benefit to Britain.
Loligo alone, the largest of these wells, has a potential of more than 4.7 billion barrels of oil. This figure stands out if one takes into account that, in the North Sea, the largest deposit discovered in the last 11 years only contains a total of 300 million barrels.
Added to this is the calculation that the Sea Lion field, the most developed exploration in the region, will produce about 448 million barrels in the next 20 years.
Peronism, incapable of breaking the Anglo-Saxon blockade and less of returning the Malvinas
While imperialism parades with ease, the government of Alberto Fernández does not attack British interests in Argentina, like British property in Patagonia, does not repudiate bonds from the debt with London, does not confiscate Shell, does not investigate the interests of the British crown itself in the lands of southern Argentina.
Imperialism bets on the survival of the Anglo-Saxon-Zionist bloc that historically had its eyes on controlling the Persian Gulf, from where the sap that feeds the Eurasian core comes out, especially its industrial heart (China) and is the gateway to most of Asia (Russia). in the Persian Gulf, the configuration of the twenty-first century world is decided in both the continental northern hemisphere and the maritime southern hemisphere. The importance of the Falklands today is similar to that of the isthmus of Central America, with the Panama Canal. Today with the new cold war the possibility of the Anglo-Saxon-Zionist bloc controlling the Persian Gulf is very limited which reinforces that they will not back down on what they already control in the islands of the South Atlantic.
Today, financial-speculative capital tries to reassert itself with a material base by controlling strategic extractive resources. They predict that the predominantly financial-speculative era is ending (the phenomenon of running out of betting chips in the global casino) and that it is necessary to accumulate again, therefore, they need to control strategic resources, especially extractive ones, of the “real economy” to guarantee its reconversion to match that which today manifests itself in the economic development obtained by the Chinese industrial bourgeoisie and the associated techno-bureaucracy. This sector of the world bourgeoisie can already be considered a new player, possessing important chips in the extreme south of the American continent.
In short, in the last 10 years, Chinese economic interests have grown throughout the national territory oriented above all to the expansion of the country’s productive base in complementary areas of those in China itself, aimed at making Argentina – or the Argenchina – an external and overseas economic province of China. Also, at the mining level China does not stop growing in Argentina.” in San Juan, the Chinese company Shandong Gold, owner of 50% of the operation in the Veladero mine together with the Canadian Barrick Gold, committed $ 145.5 million to extend the useful life of the deposit until 2030, which will allow the recovery of 1.2 million ounces of gold. In 2017, the Chinese acquired half of Veladero for $960 million. Before the pandemic, Shandong Gold had planned to create 1,100 jobs and his plans also show comparing Pascua Lama to Barrick.
In Jujuy, Ganfeng Lithium disbursed $160 million to Vancouver-based Lithium Americas for 50% of the Caucharí-Olaroz lithium project, currently under construction. The Chinese company agreed on a financing schedule, which includes an investment of up to $400 million.
In Entre Ríos, the National Corporation of Technical Import and Export of China (CNTIC) is carrying out an investment of US $ 200 million to build 50 km of gas pipelines, a high voltage line of 132 kw and an extension of optical fiber, which will allow to conclude the energy closure of the north of Entre Ríos. https://argenchina.org/radiografia-de-las-inversiones-chinas-en-energia-argentina/
This expansion of the productive base – especially in the provinces of the interior of the country – hand in hand with the Chinese expansion brings a certain economic dynamization that constitutes an alternative to the financialization promoted by imperialism. But we must bear in mind that Chinese investments aim to make Argentina as we said an external economic province of China Faced with this, the national demands that may emerge – such as those that point to a development of the productive base rather than as a complement of China – can be framed as progressive in the hands of the working class but taking into account that China does not constitute an imperialist center.
The “third world”, the capitalist unity of Latin America and the “emerging” semi-colonial countries are farces, none of the other BRICS effectively has economic independence from imperialism. In relation to the Anglo-Saxon-Zionist bloc. British imperialism needs to constantly proclaim that it won in 1982 to negotiate with the geostrategic advantages that give it control of the key to the South Seas, in addition to enjoying the economic resources to negotiate on better terms within the Anglo-Saxon-Zionist bloc.
In future it is possible for nationalism in Argentina to be linked to the expansion of the Russian-Chinese pole and within that junction include relying on the Russo-Chinese pole itself in the face of the Malvinas question. That would be progressive since it makes the claims of the oppressed nation like Argentina, but we must not lose sight of the fact that this progressiveness has the limit that both Russia and China are capitalists although with a growing state capitalism.
The contradictions and betrayals of the pseudo-Trotskyist left confronted with the Falklands War
Pseudo-Trotskyist currents such as the Morenoist LIT, claimed to stand in the military camp of the Argentine dictatorship against imperialism in the Falklands War. But in Libya, Syria and Ukraine, in the name of the struggle against dictatorship, they joined the imperialist war propaganda, taking the imperialist camp against the current oppressed nations under attack.
Recently that was reinforced in relation to the NATO-Russia conflict in Ukraine with which they favor imperialism. These parties, like Morenoism in the 80s, demonstrate that their anti-imperialism is nothing more than Latin American nationalism or patriotism; a “feeling” that, despite being progressive, being the nationalism of the oppressed nation, has nothing to do with the anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. Today the matter is worse, the heirs of the LIT and pseudo-Trotskyism in general are all the more adapted to public opinion manufactured by imperialism that they cannot even be criticized for any nationalism as we did with the LIT in the 1980s.
The revisionist currents ICL-FI, IMT, CWI and Lambertism originating in the United States, England and France have taken a defeatist, third-camp position, a position that objectively serves their own bourgeoisies against the oppressed nation. These parties capitulated to their own imperialist bourgeoisie, under the fallacious justification of supporting the “self-determination of the Kelpers”, “fighting against the diversionary maneuver of the bloodthirsty Argentine dictatorship”, or because supposedly “Argentine sovereignty was not at stake”.
For the Trotskyists the only principled position must be the struggle for the defeat of imperialism, the distrust in the military junta, for the armament of all the people, the expropriation of imperialist capital in Argentina, the Bank of London and the ignorance of all the Argentine external debt with England. Today, the government of Alberto Fernández, which with its “diplomatic” tactics is objectively more servile and impotent than Galtieri was, while imperialism advances in its colonization of the South Atlantic and Antarctica from the Falklands. Revolutionaries must claim the relevance of the anti-imperialist struggle for the Malvinas, Haiti, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Ukraine. We must fight in a united front with all the political forces that are resolute for the expulsion of imperialism. At the same time, we must also denounce the collaborationism of the semi-colonial bourgeois governments that pave the way for recolonization. In this struggle, revolutionaries do not feed illusions in their bourgeois allies and demand internationalist and workers’ unity to defeat the imperialist pirates all over the world.
NATO’s Nazi-Lovers Would Starve Workers in Britain and Russia!
The media-driven war frenzy against Russia over Ukraine is linked to starving and freezing ordinary people and privatising and destroying our basic public services, smashing what is left of the system of social security, and wrecking the National Health Service in favour of privatised medicine. The pandemic has been used as a wedge for that, and now all public health protection against Covid has been junked and healthcare put under massive strain yet again. This was all going on before the war frenzy got underway, but the media-driven hysteria has given the capitalists the cover to put their foot down hard on the accelerator.
The huge rise in fuel costs, which is pure profiteering, likewise was going on before the media war frenzy began but the threat now is that the sanctions (a war measure) against Russian oil and gas will mean prices that have effectively doubled for many, may double again. On top of the cut in Universal Credit, and the NI-rate rise due in April, Inflation is already coursing through the system and increased fuel costs are driving up many other commodity prices, including those of food. The government’s ‘emergency’ response to this this, from Council Tax Rebates to raising NI allowances, is pitiful and will as usual, benefit the wealthy. And we see capitalist ideologues like Adair Turner, former CBI chief and now ‘green’ capitalist ideologue, calling for ordinary people to ‘sacrifice’ for the war drive:
“Putin thinks the west is rotted by liberalism and won’t make the smallest sacrifice to stand up to him. We need to reduce energy consumption to make an impact,” he said, citing a reduction in speed on major roads to around 55mph and turning down thermostats by several degrees as examples of how that could be achieved.”
These parasites won’t need to freeze or starve of course. That is for the oiks. We’ve seen similar garbage from Biden and other leading American politicians, from EU bigwigs like Ursula van den Leyden, from Tory MPs. Meanwhile Keir Starmer, aka Dür Stürmer, has gone from smearing Labour opponents of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as Jew-haters, to covering up for NATO’s support for Nazis and threatening anyone who questions NATO’s supposed ‘moral’ nature with expulsion from Labour. Starmer won’t fight the government over this cost-of-living attack any more that he did over the pandemic, where he did nothing to oppose the repeated sabotage of public health measures the public forced on Johnson. For Starmer and Johnson, profits came before health. In 2020 he supported Johnson in forcing kids into unsafe schools against union opposition, which undoubtedly created the conditions for the deadly, super-infectious Alpha variant which massively increased the death toll in Britain and spread around the world.
Labour grovels to the Tories on virtually everything because it supports neoliberalism and capitalism as a system: within that system there is no room for reforms anymore, only attacks. Blair’s government pioneered many of the current government’s attacks, launched predatory imperialist wars like Iraq, and even began the privatisation of the NHS through PFI hospitals. We advocate that no-one should vote for Starmer’s Labour in local elections or at all: socialists and trade unionists should form a new party to stand for a programme and strategy for abolishing capitalism, not trying to save it at our expense.
The capitalist media is covering up for the large-scale influence of outright Nazis in Ukraine. Like the Azov Regiment, part of the Ukrainian army, which uses the Wolfsangel, Death’s Head and sometimes the Swastika as its symbol. The birthday of Stepan Bandera, a WWII Nazi collaborator whose militia slaughtered numerous Russian and Ukrainian anti-fascists, and 200,000 Jews, is celebrated in Ukraine as a public holiday. The cover-up of these things is especially true in the liberal media, who some might expect to have some conscience about such things. But no, the BBC and the Guardian, who have in the past run exposés of the power wielded by Nazis in Ukraine, today systematically hide this, and suppress discussion. Even their agitation in support of refugees is racist, as the EU gives asylum to Ukrainians because they are white,and their cause is pro-imperialist. Non-whites and victims of imperialism generally are treated like dirt.
The banning of Russia Today is to suppress understanding of this, part of regimenting the population to make ‘sacrifices’ for the capitalist-imperialist war drive against Russia. The middle-class media luvvies have woken up to the fact that their lords and masters, big capital, now regard outright Hitlerites as useful to them. So, these foul hypocrites about-turn and become the most demented in shouting down everyone who questions NATO expansion, its support for Nazis and the obvious fact that NATO deliberately provoked this war.
Why do they hate Russia? Because under Putin, Russia has retreated from neoliberalism and renationalized a large part of the Russian economy that was privatised under Yeltsin. With the massive privatisation ‘shock treatment’ in Russia in the early 1990s, the life expectancy of ordinary Russians fell by six years between 1987 and 1994. That has been reversed because much of neoliberalism has been reversed. Putin’s Russia is not socialist, its still capitalist but the form of capitalism in Russia is out of step with the neoliberal world project of subjecting every country to plunder and profiteering.
US capital and its British and EU servants want to defeat, colonise, partition and plunder Russia, and then move on to China. They are quite prepared to risk nuclear war in doing so, as well as rowing back on even the totally inadequate concessions they have made to combatting climate change to try to screw Russia with sanctions. Russia and China are too big for that, this will likely just fragment the world economy and backfire against the Yankee dollar. But they are desperate enough to risk that also. Profits and plunder come before human survival for imperialist capital. The fall in profit rates that the capitalist system produces creates a desperate hunger for profit from anywhere at all, even if they must risk everything to get it.
Neoliberal capitalism has plundered and destroyed so many of the social gains previously won by organised labour in Western countries and around the world, waging brutal and genocidal wars against anyone who resists, from Iraq to Venezuela to Syria to Libya. It is in the interest of workers in the West to defend Russia and defeat the imperialist war drive, for Russia to defeat NATO and its Ukrainian liberal-Nazi proxy coalition, and to solidarise with the working class of the Donbass, who have been resisting these attacks since 2014, defending themselves against a Nazi war that has killed over 14,000 people.
Freeze/Starve, or Fight to Defeat the Profiteers and Warmakers
No to Austerity! No to the War Drive! Defend Russia! Fight for Working-Class Power!
1. Ian Donovan (Consistent Democrats – Great Britain, and LCFI)
By way of introduction, recently I was confronted by a typical NATO ‘left’ apologist who actually expressed the view that, in seeking the dismemberment of Russia, NATO were seeking to destroy something terrible: the “Russian Empire”.
What Russian empire? The Russian Empire was smashed in 1917 and its monarch put up against the wall. The US, Britain and every imperialist around the world invaded Russia and fought to restore capitalism and the empire.
Fast forward to 1991 and after. They were happy about Yeltsin and even initially Putin when they were convinced that they were doing the job for them.
But their sheer world-predatory behaviour, extending NATO to the East, gradually caused a rift.
Much of the ex-Soviet oligarchy began to back away from neoliberalism, through a process of polarisation, which is continuing, to this day, and used the technological and military power that survived from the USSR, to keep imperialism at bay.
That’s what this new Cold War is about – they still have not eliminated every trace of what grew out of 1917 and other social revolutions derived from it. Its more obvious with China because the regime even still clings on to elements of its old ideology.
But the issues are the related. This imperialist cold war is still directed against residues of 1917.
As with feudalism after the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of Louis XVIII, restoring capitalism after it has been torn out by the roots and crushed for decades is easier said than done.
That does not mean that capitalist restoration has been reversed. But it does mean that the form of capitalism that exists here is so marked by its origin in a workers’ state that the imperialist bourgeoisie considers it to be fundamentally untrustworthy.
Perhaps in a way analogous to the way the bourgeoisie once suspected its Jewish component of being surrogates for ‘communists’
That is why Hitlerism has been recreated in Ukraine under US sponsorship. The US is still trying to do what Hitler tried and failed to do. Like the Third Reich, the US and NATO need to be smashed.
Our position on this war is that we are for the defence of Russia, and we give military support to Putin’s forces based on the stated objectives of Putin, which we consider defensive.
(1) to defend the rights to self-determination of the Russian and Russophone population in the east of present-day Ukraine where they are the majority, of the two Donbass republics (and Crimea of course) but not just there.
(2) to De-nazify Ukraine, which must mean simply to defeat and root out the current neo-Nazi currents from dominance in Ukraine. This may well involve the defeat of Zelenskyy’s regime and its replacement by something more conciliatory. And (3) a neutral Ukraine, barred from joining NATO.
Those demands are supportable in defensive terms, but they are not our aims. We are for a Ukraine free of imperialist control financially and militarily. For the legalization of leftist and workers’ parties and the banning of Nazi and 2014 coup parties.
For expropriation of imperialism’s multinationals, controlled by the workers,
For democratic referendums be held emulating those of the people’s republics, for whatever status its inhabitants decide.
We do not support the prolonged occupation or annexation of territory where Russians are not the main population: that would be both wrong in principle, and dangerous. But those do not appear to be Putin’s war aims.
We could defend Russia on the grounds that it is a backward capitalist economy, not imperialist, and a semi-colony therefore. But that would not be quite correct. Firstly, because Russia is very advanced in some things, from military technology to medicine, more so in some cases than the US. It is not uniformly backward, but rather uneven.
It is certainly not imperialist. We totally reject the rationalisation of the third campists, and others who have made errors on this (e.g. the IBT). It is clear that Russia does not derive its economic strength from the continuing exploitation of backward countries, as do the US, Britain and all the imperialist countries, in the last analysis.
But it is also true that Russia is more independent of imperialism than any semi-colony. This is partly because as part of the retreat from neoliberalism, the degree of statification in the Russian economy has massively increased since the days of Yelstin’s mass privatisation.
This is a classic means by which dependent and semi-colonial countries defend themselves against imperialism – there are many examples of this from Iraq to Ireland. But in the case of Russia, this is massively enhanced by the military and technological might that it inherited from the USSR.
That is what has happened, and as NATO began to go on the offensive at the end of the 1990s, the central element of the oligarchy retreated from neoliberalism. We have an anomalous form of capitalism here, that is out of step with imperialism; its power to defy imperialism is still indirectly a product of the revolution. The degree of Russia’s dependency is sharply limited by this.
Trotsky’s permanent revolution posited that democratic gains, including genuine national independence, can only be established by overthrowing the bourgeoisie. But capitalist restoration does not automatically reverse that as both Russia and China show.
Which raises the question of China. Trotsky himself said that if a counterrevolution happened in the USSR, the new regime for a prolonged period would have to retain much of the nationalised economy. This is more applicable to China than Russia, as things turned out.
Those who maintain that China is a workers’ state have to realise that it has more billionaires than the US. In that sense, the position that it is a workers’ state denies reality in a symmetrically opposite sense to Gerry Healy’s denial that a deformed workers’ state had come into being in Cuba after 1960.
But China’s billionaires are much less wealthy than those in the US. And they are not a fully consolidated bourgeois class. They are a hybrid oligarchy, much more cohesive and disciplined than the oligarchy in Russia. And the degree of statification in China is considerably greater.
But China is not imperialist any more than Russia, it requires the same revolutionary defence. Again, somewhat similar to semi-colonies. But China looks even less like a semi-colony than Russia does.
This war is partly about revenge for Syria. Because Russia was key in defeating imperialism in Syria, and they know it. But it is not predetermined that they will not be defeated here also.
Those who say that Russia (and China) are not imperialist … YET … are also somewhat deterministic. There is no teleological reason why they should become imperialist in future. This is not determined in advance.
This whole phenomenon is an unforeseen consequence of the delay of the world revolution, and then the counterrevolution of 1989-91. It may be that imperialism is not capable of ultimately consummating these counterrevolutions. It may be that these contradictions may themselves create opportunities for resuming the world revolution.
2. Robert Montgomery (ClassConscious – Australia & US)
Good afternoon comrades and friends. I am glad to join with you at this auspicious historical moment. I’m old enough to remember The Cuban Missile Crisis almost 60 years ago when all the adults in my life thought the world was about to end in the mushroom cloud of nuclear war. And today we may be heading towards that brink again. I’m Robert Montgomery speaking from Rhode Island for ClassConscious. We are a small Marxist website based in Australia and the US. Our 3-person editorial board has between us a combined 70 years of involvement in the Trotskyist movement. We have published work on the character of China, Marx’s theory of crisis, the threat of war and fascism, a history of policing, ZeroCovid, and cultural reviews. All our material can be accessed at classconscious.org.
For today’s purposes I would refer you to our two recent documents published by Davey Heller and myself:
Setting the Record Straight on Imperialism: Russia, Ukraine and the US
Imperialism Harnesses the anti-war movement to prepare for World War 3.
I’ll be paraphrasing these documents to keep my remarks short.
Firstly, we see today’s events within the context of the deep crisis of world capitalism. The law of value is asserting itself in long-term falling rates of profit on a world scale, and most acutely, in the US. The thirst for increased profitability has turned into a ravenous hunger driving the US and its allies to redivide the world in search of expanded markets for the export of its capital and to capture for itself an increased the share of available surplus value. In response to its crisis of valorisation US capitalism is intensifying its attack on the working class at home and abroad. Today it is positioning itself geopolitically against Russia. The aim of the war is to reduce Russia to neo-colonial status to open its vast mineral, agricultural and energy resources to unhindered exploitation by imperialist capital. The ongoing mobilization of military and economic power against Russia is reminiscent of the Nazi Operation Barbarossa 80 years ago.
The regional war in Ukraine cannot be separated from the US drive to crush both its strategic rivals, Russia and China in order to maintain its declining global economic hegemony. US hegemony is under threat, both from its own internal contradictions and from the rising economic strength of China.
Recently, the US has been stymied by a combination of semi-colonial and lesser capitalist states acting in concert as we saw in Syria. Having failed in its regime change war in Syria due largely to Russian and Iranian military assistance, the US wants to remove the Russian thorn from its side.
The inner logic of events is unfolding towards a massive military confrontation between NATO and Russia that could draw in all major powers and result in a nuclear holocaust. The conflict in Ukraine is not between “poor little Ukraine” and Russia. To be clear: this is a proxy war between imperialism led by the US, and Russia.
We see once again, as we did a century ago, the case of a peace movement that supports imperialist war.
The demand for “action to save Ukraine” gives political cover to the war, as do all the anti-war groups campaigning under the banner of “no to Moscow and NATO”.
To demand peace in Ukraine is simply to join the chorus demanding that Russia and China submit to the Pax Americana and open themselves up to the untrammelled looting of their material, natural and Human Resources.
The mistaken assumption of the peace movement is that war can be avoided by allowing US and Western imperialism to exploit the world’s resources without limit. This is a delusion. The only real anti-war position is to fight US imperialism’s effort to dominate the globe, including by encircling and dismembering Russia, and to support the right of all countries in the cross hairs of imperialism to defend themselves.
We extend critical support to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is because we classify Russia, not as imperialist, but rather as a nationalist and dependent bourgeois regime in conflict with imperialism. We support Russia’s right to defend its national sovereignty against imperialist aggression on its borders, up to and including the use of military force.
We extend military but no political support to the reactionary, nationalist Putin regime. We call for the Russian working class to oust Putin and the oligarchs he represents. Should Russia be defeated by, or capitulate to imperialism, it will mean a “double chain” for the working class as it toils under the dual domination of its own ruling class, and that of imperialist capital.
The same imperialist knife at the throat of Russia is at the same time also menacing Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba. The ultimate target of this military and economic eruption is China. And as always the butcher’s knife is at the throats of all the working masses of the Global South.
We believe a military victory by Russia against imperialism would be a blow against imperialism everywhere.
I suspect that these sentiments are shared by those here who agree on the high stakes involved in imperialism’s proxy war in Ukraine.
So, once again the question is before us: “What is to be done?” Or conversely, “What must be Undone?” As all the rotten opportunist groups bend the knee before bourgeois public opinion. And as they give their objective support to the imperialist onslaught against Russia we need to ask, “Is it time for a Zimmerwald Manifesto for the 21st century?”
In the teeth of the ongoing onslaught against Russia it is our hope that we can move forward in a united front of all revolutionary forces to call for the defeat of imperialism without qualification or equivocation. For an end to all war, violence and fascism and for an abundant life for all, forward to the world socialist revolution!
3. Alan Gibson (Bolshevik Tendency)
I would like to start my remarks by briefly outlining how the Bolshevik Tendency understands the current situation.
For us the recognition that Russia is not an imperialist state is central to our understanding of the current conflict. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia emerged as a capitalist, regional power, with an economy that is primarily centred on energy exports, not the extraction of super profits from other countries.
American imperialism has reneged on its assurances made to Gorbachev that there would be no NATO expansion into Eastern Europe and has instead continued to up the ante to the point of trying to include Georgia and Ukraine in the bloc. The ultimate objective of US imperialism, expressed by Dick Cheney among others, is to chop up Russia into several smaller more manageable states and gain control of its immense natural resources.
Since the 2014 US sponsored right-wing Maidan coup, the various Ukrainian governments have effectively been US puppet regimes run from Washington. We therefore regard the current war as being fundamentally between US/NATO imperialism and non-imperialist Russia. Unfortunately, these events take place in the absence of an organised revolutionary workers movement able to pose the question of power: in this context Marxists favour the victory of non-imperialist Russia over the Ukrainian proxy of the US/NATO imperialists.
The section of the left that considers Russia to be imperialist (with all the varied political content they give the term) either sides with Ukraine (and therefore US/NATO) or they are neutral and call for revolutionary defeatism on both sides.
There are also those who regard Russia as non-imperialist but who do not favour victory of the Russians (like the Spartacist League and the Internationalist Group) this is ostensibly because they do ot consider this a conflict essentially between the US/NATO imperialists and Russia but rather one of capitalist Russia invading capitalist Ukraine.
Then there are anarchists, who argue that even if there is a distinction between imperialist and non-imperialist, it makes no difference as they are both capitalist—although in many cases they side with poor innocent Ukraine.
What they all share in common is a failure to grasp the central importance of defeating the rapacious imperialists.
The role of the fascists in Ukraine needs to be addressed. It is clear that the fascists were key shock troops in the 2014 coup and as a result were able to lodge themselves inside the state apparatus. They have played a criminal role in the 8 years of violence against the Donbass Peoples’ Republic and the Lugansk Peoples’ Republic which has resulted in some 14,000 casualties.
However, for us the presence of the fascists in the Ukrainian military and wider state apparatus is secondary to the role of the US/NATO imperialist military alliance. For us the key issue for revolutionaries in this conflict is opposing US/NATO imperialism.
A related question to this is recognising what fascism is and the danger it poses for the left and workers’ movement. Ukraine provides us with valuable lessons in this regard.
If for instance we were to compare the activity of the dangerous, organized fascist formations in Ukraine to the incoherent rightist populism of Donald Trump, who riled up his base (which included a minority of fascists and other ultra-rightists) in a riot aimed at overturning the results of the US 2020 election on 6 Jan 2021, I think the difference is clear.
The fascistic elements in the Jan 6 Capitol building riot would have wanted to have come out of that process as something equivalent to the Right Sector and Azov Battalion following the 2014 EuroMaidan protests and subsequent coup. But they did not. They were not the decisive factor in that event and there was never any question of them having significant influence over the state machinery or even the movement itself, unlike The Azov Battalion and other formations in Ukraine, who are heavily armed and organised fascists.
We view this meeting as a small step in affirming the Bolshevik understanding of the role of imperialism in the world against the barrage of war propaganda coming from the bourgeois mass media. There is always huge pressure to adapt to prevailing forces as we unfortunately see in the response of most of the left.
It is also important to see the current conflict in the wider geo-political context of the imperialist, particularly the US, desire to destroy the Chinese deformed workers’ state and open it up to direct and punitive exploitation. The cancer of capitalist social relations has been allowed to take root in China. The bureaucrats heading the deformed workers state are playing a dangerous game trying to contain the interests of capital while at the same time maintaining living standards of the working people. This tension will have to be resolved and the danger of a capitalist counter-revolution is great – however that has not yet happened, and China remains a deformed workers state which must be defended.
Going back to the current conflict. The Russians so far seem to have pretty much done what they intended to.
It was all about ensuring that Ukraine will never join NATO, degrading the fascistic elements within the Ukrainian military who threaten Russia, solidifying/expanding the DPR and LPR to encombass most of the Donbass, and creating a land bridge to Crimea and as part of that, opening up security of water supply to Crimea. Some 75,000 or so Ukrainian soldiers are surrounded in what the Russian’s are calling cauldrons and over the next week or so those soldiers, many of them Nazi sympathizers, will either surrender or be liquidated.
The Russians have complete control of the air (hence the calls for NATO to enforce a no-fly zone) and could have levelled any city had they wanted to. Yet apart from Mariupol, which was a stronghold of the fascistic Azov Battalion, they have attempted to minimize damage to urban areas. For instance, all the civilian infrastructure (water, electricity, heating gas, communications etc) remain operational in Kyiv and Kharkiv. I don’t know if people saw the Newsweek report, from and American intelligence expert, who was arguing this very case, that Russia was not attacking civilians. Continuing the war will only bring more chaos and suffering for ordinary Ukrainians.
The refusal of the Ukrainian government to settle the conflict by acceding to the Russian proposals can only mean more needless suffering—although this seems likely to be what the US and its NATO allies are aiming at. By continuing to enflame the situation and prolonging the conflict they are playing with the possibility of this war turning nuclear a prospect that could mean the end of human civilisation.
We welcome the chance to participate in this event alongside other leftists who understand that the central question is opposition to US/NATO imperialism.
It is necessary to seek to regroup and reorganize those forces that are seriously committed to the difficult struggle to reforge a viable mass revolutionary workers’ organization on an international basis. But this desire cannot be achieved by papering over significant programmatic issues in the interests of projecting a degree of unity which is not real.
Comrades might have seen that at the beginning of the week Left Voice called for a new Zimmerwald. What we really need in this circumstance is a Zimmerwald Left based on intransigent opposition to imperialist aggression—whether directly or through its proxies. Such a formation would necessarily see that US/NATO aggression against Russia through their Ukrainian proxy is occurring in the wider framework of increasing imperialist hostility towards the Chinese deformed workers’ state.
For those unfamiliar with our organisation, the BT stands in the tradition of the revolutionary Spartacist League of the 1960s and 70s before its programmatic degeneration into a braindead obedience cult. This political heritage would frame any discussions on a more substantive unity.
For people wanting to know more about our wider programmatic perspectives you can visit our web site bolsheviktendency.org
4. Communist Revolutionary Action (KED – Greece)
Hello comrades, I hope that you can hear me clearly and on behalf of the Communist Revolutionary Action – Avant-Garde I would like to say thank you for inviting us to the present discussion. It is an honour to be among other comrades in the world having the same internationalist stance on the context of the latest developments.
I would like to start my talk with a small excerpt from our history. It was when the convention of Zimmerwald took place the remaining international socialists that participated there. Trotsky made a small comment while they were going towards the village. The internationalists that participated in Zimmerwald said Trotsky could fit in inside a small horse-drawn carriage. He was making fun with the other comrades saying that how crazy it was that the whole second internationalists, the only internationalists that survived from the second international could just fit in inside a horse-drawn carriage.
Well, if I could make this parallel between this moment and us, I would say that I’m very happy to be part of this present digital carriage between us. So okay let me now continue with the more serious part of my intervention today
The problem regarding Ukraine from a left-wing perspective is actually a problem of a historical, thus political essence. What I would like to say is that what is happening right now in the majority of the communist and socialist organisations in the world is that they are trying to mechanically project previous situations, of the past, into the context of today’s problems.
What I mean right now is that most communist organizations, what they are doing is copy-pasting the line regarding the first world war and they say that the situation is the same, is just a fight between two imperialists, so defeatism is the proper line. We take no part between either imperialist.
The issue that is that the reason why they are leading to towards this very simplistic copy paste is because of a much deeper issue. Which is the fact that they are mechanically trying to use Lenin’s five famous criteria for designating a country as imperialist. So the rationale is very simplistic in a way. What they are saying is Russia has financial capital oh Russia has exports of capital so in a very simplistic way they are defining Russia as an imperialist nation.
The problem regarding that is that if we take the same rationale and project it to other nations, we could also say that Iran, Syria, China is imperialist, or even Mexico is imperialist, and from a logical perspective if we define that, we say right now that the whole the whole world is full of imperialists. Then the interpretational value of the word “imperialism” loses its value. Because if everything is imperialist then nothing is imperialist.
This logical problem: in our opinion there is a somehow like a falsification of Leninism and the issue is that they are not truly Leninists, the people who are using this kind of rationale. The five criteria are not actually used.
What is inherent in their methodology is actually a very classic liberal understanding of designating nations. what they are actually using is explicit violence as a criterion so what they are saying in in our opinion is that whoever invades anyone is actually an imperialist and it’s not by chance that the same people, the same organizations who are defining right now Russia as imperialist, in the past they have said that Iran is an imperialist, that Syria wages an imperialist war against other nations,
etc. So what we believe is that in essence there is a liberal thought of how they are designating countries an externalist, a phenomenological aspect, not an essential and with this criterion they’re actually breaking from historical materialism.
So, the issue is that this liberalism works as somehow a hijacking of their thought. So, to the extent that their thought is hijacked by this liberal thinking, the political issues that they are that they raise, are a leftist expression of bourgeois politics. They are implementing bourgeois politics in the left-wing expression. And due to that that thing even though these comrades might say that they are internationalists, communists and I don’t know what else, in essence they are sovereigntists. they are social sovereigntists because sovereigntism is expressed in in the dire moments of the existence of an imperialist system. In the most problematic, the most critical stance of a system is sovereigntism truly expressed.
But let me continue with the next part of my intervention because it’s not enough to criticize other organizations, it’s very important to positively define what is imperialism today, and I will try to do so in in a few sentences
In our opinion there is a very dire need for redefining how the map looks like. It’s very important to define how modern imperialism is expressed, is structured,
etc. The viewpoint that best describes ours is the notion of Empire. This is the historical analysis that we make. After World War II Western imperialism joined with each other and created one singular bloc, one singular imperialist front, which was used against communism, and to fight for the survival of colonial structures. Right now, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the EU, the OECD are aspects of the structure of this empire.
The petrodollar is actually a very strong tool of the Empire. All these are mechanisms and part of the structures of the Empire, and of course this empire is called the American empire. it’s because the American government is the primal organiser of this modern imperialism and represents its core. So, what is defined today is imperial. We don’t need to use all these five criteria of learning. But whoever participates in this system is part of the imperialist structure. So, in our opinion the EU, America, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand are the only nations which can only be defined today as imperialist. All others are not imperialists. And we can also see that by also following a very close-minded economistic analysis by saying per capita income, who exploits the world today? Of course, these are the nations.
So, in the context of this analysis, what we are seeing right now in Ukraine is actually part of the general plan of the American Empire and its proxies to generalize its authority and power to unconquered lands. After the dissolution of the USSR, NATO and the US have been engaged in trying to establish orange revolutions, groups and invasions all over the Earth, and we in Greece have also experienced that in our close neighbourhood by seeing the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and of course the orange revolution in Syria.
We see Ukraine right now as the latest plan of imperialism of balkanizing one of the last adversaries on Earth, which is the Russian Federation. Other comrades also discussed about this part, but Russia, by inheriting from the USSR this powerful military, this is why it is still capable of surviving, of having some kind of independent political life. So, what we are seeing right now in Ukraine is only the result of imperialist aggressivity. So the staging of the Maidan coup, the strengthening of the Nazi militias, the rewriting of history: all these are part of NATO’s plan of doing to Russia what they did to the Middle East and Yugoslavia. And they tried to do that in the past with a not very well-known conflict in Chechnya, and in the Caucasus region in general.
Many organizations have a problem using this kind of rationale. We could also use some other criteria. Do these organizations recognize that right now we’ve had almost 15 000 dead Russophones in Donbass and Ukraine in general? Isn’t that defined as a genocide? Because the west defined as a genocide other mass-murders which were less gruesome than this one. Like in Bosnia for example, yes?
So, what I’m trying to say is that we should not we don’t have to get too fine. We could also use Lenin’s criterion of the right of the nations to self-determination and we should respect the decision of these populations for self-determination, and the Marxists who are proclaiming themselves as Marxists and they do not acknowledge these criteria for these populations are actually sovereign, they are representing the rights of their own bourgeoisie.
So, in our opinion internationalists, communists and of course all the progressive people of the world should want the crushing of the enemy. We should want the crashing of the Ukra-Nazi militaries, who have stolen the right to represent the Ukrainian people. Another important fact is who are fighting in Donbass or who are supporting Donbass. it is not without chance the fact that we have seen Iranians, people from Africa wanting to fight in Ukraine because they understand the historical and world significance of this fight for their own countries. They are more conscious of the global implications of the destruction of the NATO hunt in Ukraine than internationalists in the first world. These people who might also not be communists are more conscious of the implications of this issue in their own country and this is why they want to fight them.
So, I would also like to close by saying that this fight is also very significant for us, people who are in the first world, people who are part of the privileged part of the world. Because as history has shown when imperialism’s plans are defeated, then the defeat is internalised. It comes home and it’s not without chance the fact that May 68 in our analysis was a product of Vietnam, and of the defeats in Algeria, in Morocco. So, in our opinion the best possible scenario would be the destruction of the Ukraine Nazis and the NATO militias because this will not only facilitate the survival of the people of Donbass, but it will also facilitate the maximization of class struggle in Europe, in the US, in Australia, etc. This is what I wanted to say. Again, thank you very much for inviting us. Comradely regards to everyone. Hope we have a good struggle. Thank you, a lot.
5. Greg Butterfield (Socialist Unity Party – United States)
Good afternoon comrades from here in New York, and whatever time it is where you are in the world right now, we want to thank the organizers for inviting us to participate in this important event.
As Davey said at the beginning of the meeting, there are turning points in history, where the principles of organizations and individuals get tested and clarified, and this is one of those moments. It’s been coming for a while and some of us who have been deeply engaged in the struggle around Ukraine and Donbass over the last eight years have been trying to put up an alarm around it. And certainly, here in the US it’s been very difficult to get any traction, and now we’re seeing the consequences of that. In the past month we’ve seen so many anti-war and left formations bow to the intense pressure of imperialist propaganda and putting catering to the cowardice of funders and fellow travellers ahead of anti-imperialism, and the interests of the workers and oppressed.
The other side of that coin is that the war crisis is separating the wheat from the chaff. Leaders and organizations that have coasted through recent years and decades on past accomplishments are now forced to show where they really stand. And at the same time, I think as this as this forum is an example, groups that maybe were separated by historical differences and secondary issues may now find a new basis to work together and learn from each other.
The Socialist Unity Party and Struggle/La Lucha newspaper called for the victory of the Donbass republics and Russia in their defensive joint military operation to de-nazify and demilitarise Ukraine. What this really means is to end the eight-year genocidal war against the people of Donbass. To remove the Neo-Nazi boot-heel from the neck of the Ukrainian people. To reverse Ukraine’s transformation into a NATO war base that poses a constant threat to Russia, and return it to the formerly neutral status before the coup of 2014. We call for the defeat of US imperialism which instigated this war and is a combatant in it as surely as it is in Yemen or anywhere else.
Washington’s proxy wars are carried out. After this week’s NATO summit the imperialists are moving closer to direct intervention which of course could as we all know precipitate an unprecedented global war. We think it’s very important to elevate the struggle of the people of the Donbass region, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Too often their struggle is ignored by the left, or following the lead of the corporate media is written off merely as Russian separatists or Putin’s proxies.
But such a view can only be argued by people who are completely ignorant of the Donbass and the anti-fascist struggle of the people there over the last eight years, how they’ve persevered through constant terror by the Ukrainian armed forces and the Neo-Nazi battalions. How they’ve survived through very brutal blockade. How it draws upon the deep traditions of internationalism and anti-fascism inherited from the Soviet people and how that resistance found an echo in Russia. Or it’s argued only by those who know better but are adapting their views to the needs of imperialism which is much of what we see in the movement right now.
Revolutionary Marxists look below the surface to understand the class forces and contradictions at work. Those who focus on Putin and the Russian capitalists’ reactionary ideology ignore the dialectical relationship between Russia’s struggle to maintain its sovereignty against the US and NATO, and the anti-fascist struggle in Donbass and Ukraine. that same dynamic exists on a global scale. Looking at it purely on the surface level of political pronouncements, you could come to the conclusion that there’s little difference between Russia and Bolsonaro’s Brazil or Modi’s India, but unlike those countries whose ruling classes are fundamentally tied to imperialism, the life and death struggle of Russia not to be dissected and swallowed up by imperialism has pushed it into the camp of countries and movements resisting the US. Including Venezuela, Cuba, China, the DPRK, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
With our modest forces here in the US we’re doing what we can to clarify the issues and bring a genuine anti-war position to the working class. We’ve launched a campaign called ‘Stop the War Lies’ which is aimed at exposing the US/NATO role in Ukraine. Exposing imperialism’s cozy relationship with the Ukrainian fascists. Educating about the cause of Donbass and exposing how Wall Street, Big Oil and the military industry profit from the war at the expense of people here.
We and allied groups have been getting out into communities with fact sheets, holding picket lines and speak outs. Just last night our comrades in the City of Baltimore held a rush-hour banner drop, and leafleting action. Today folks in New Orleans and San Diego are doing community outreach, and for next weekend on April 2nd, which is the anniversary weekend of Martin Luther King’s assassination, we’re building protests in New York and Los Angeles. Also tomorrow, March 27th we’re organizing a webinar featuring speakers from Donbass to help inform the anti-war movement and the left in the US about the reality of the US-Ukraine war, and we’re planning and working on a speaking tour for this spring.
Those are some of the actual, concrete things we’re working on right now. We invite organizations here on this call to join in this effort. We’re open to collaborating with groups here in the us and internationally. This is a moment to overcome secondary differences and build a united front against imperialism and war that can lay the foundation for future revolutionary struggles.
Thanks again.
6. Gerry Downing (Socialist Fight – Great Britain)
Okay, can I say first that this is a very inspiring meeting, and being that I’m speaking last after the main speakers most of the stuff I was going to say has already been said, so I can’t actually repeat it all, so I’ll make some observations that I think are relevant.
First of all, on the question of the united front. The Socialist Fight has actually participated in three versions of the united front up to now. We’ve got our own Socialist Fight leaflet that that you can see which calls for “No to NATO Aggression, The Main Enemy is at Home”. We have the Socialist Labour who are people who were in the Labour Party but have now been expelled actually, and it has the same headline, and the “Victory to the anti-fascist forces of Donbass and their Allies” jointly with the Consistent Democrats, the New Communist Party and the Posadists, so those are three united fronts.
But I do endorse Robert Montgomery’s position and the ClassConscious position, the call for a new Zimmerwald. Certainly, I think that that should be the top of the agenda to draw together everybody that recognizes US imperialism as a global hegemonic imperialist power that organizes all the other imperialists
Biden has just boasted that never was NATO so united as they are at the moment. Then those people that recognize that it is the main enemy of all oppressed humanity and the working class, then I know Zimmerwald is necessary so that would be the fourth united front but we’ve just heard the call for the left Zimmerwald. Well we do remember the left Zimmerwald fitted into a horse carriage apparently. Well we would mention that that in the left Zimmerwald there was there was Lenin, Trotsky Zinoviev and then Karl Liebknecht, to mention a few. Now I don’t know who here is the Lenin and who is the Trotsky and the Zinoviev or the Liebknecht, but but I’m sure somebody will want to fill those roles in and as the struggle develops.
A few other points. The sanctions on Russia are very severe but there are people that are questioning how these sanctions are going to work and if in fact the impositions of these sanctions on the banks and everything will in fact bring into question the global hegemonic position of the dollar itself. If Russia and China are supposed to, are forced to collaborate together closely using their own currencies. Russia is now saying that that it will only accept payment in roubles at the moment we have peculiar phenomenon developing. And in that we have India took a neutral position on this and although Boris Johnson and Biden put all the pressure they could on Saudi Arabia, it did not promise to increase its oil supplies and a whole swathe of third world countries are not accepting the imposition of US domination to the extent that’s necessary. So, it would be a very interesting development if the whole question of what that hegemonic power is built on which is basically the dollar as the world trading currency and the world’s reserve currency and its ability to sanction whoever it wants…
Oh, by the way I have differences with Alan about whether China is a deformed workers state or not, but at the same time I’m quite certain that it’s not an imperialist power. It cannot do any of that stuff that that the United States does in terms of sanctioning other people. It cannot, it doesn’t dominate the International Monetary Fund and it doesn’t dominate the World Bank it is not at all in that position although it is a part of the World Trading Organisation.
Just a few more points quickly. I would have thought that the question of who are the outright supporters of imperialism on the left, well that that accolade undoubtedly goes to the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. This is Chris Ford’s baby, and I would mention that the Weekly Worker have a very interesting article today by Paul Houston: “A toxic operation” but he mentions of course like we mentioned back in 2014 when that that whole Maidan coup thing broke out that actually Chris Ford’s origin was in a an organisation that was funded by the CIA in London. As it happened while people say he was a willing idiot and he didn’t know, well if you’re in an organization that the CIA is prepared to fund then you’re definitely moving in absolutely the wrong direction.
Of course, we have the other participants. The AWL. Well who would expect anything else from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s Sean Matgamna, a man from the County Clare in Ireland who supports basically the loyalist community in the North of Ireland against the nationalist community, well we wouldn’t expect any, but by the way he says proudly “I am a Zionist”. And poor old Martin Thomas who’s the second in command, the secondary leader he said well “I’m a bit of a Zionist” not the full shilling, but just a bit of a Zionist, so that’s that organisation. Unfortunately, also in there is the USec group, the Anti-Capitalist Alliances as they are now: Fred Leplatn who spoke at Labour Representation Committee, they participated in in this as did a number of other former leftists so it is a very nasty situation
Lastly then on the question of the influence of fascism within Ukraine. Well, they say the Svoboda only got something like 1.25 percent in the last election as compared to the vote that Marine Le Pen got in France. But I’m sure Marine Le Pen would give her right arm for an organization within the armed forces such as the Azov Battalion to back up her politics. Knowing that at a certain point a coup was possible against the Jewish president and the Jewish president of course is very careful that he doesn’t upset the far right. He promised that at the beginning to bring the country together but he didn’t bring it together too much. As soon as the Azov Battalion let him know where he stood in the situation.
And lastly a word of warning Putin also has far-right scoundrels within his camp. He’s got the National Bolsheviks, and he’s got the Wagner group. Now they tell us that the Wagner group has got 40 assassins ready to assassinate Zelenskyy, his family and the leaders. I would suggest that these 40 assassins their main task would be to watch out for any revolutionary movement within the working class in Ukraine and assassinate them. We must never forget uh as anti-imperialism is our main slogan what happened to the Shanghai Soviet back in April 1927 when they abandoned the defence against the bourgeois nationalist Chiang Kai-shek, and how he dealt with them. So going too far and in that direction is something we must be very careful about. Thank you.
Additional Contributions (from the floor, in effect)
1. Devrimci İşçi Partisi (DIP) – Revolutionary Workers Party – Turkey
I’m participating for the Revolutionary Workers Party (DIP). Hello everyone. Well while as the DIP (Revolutionary Workers Party) we are here as observers, I want to thank Davey and all the organisers for letting me take the floor to briefly introduce the position and activities of the Revolutionary Workers Party on the strategic issue that is the war between imperialism and Russia, and I would also like to thank Class Conscious and Davey for making this very important event happen.
Let me start by underlining that as a revolutionary Marxist party in the region, DIP has been long paying attention to the evolution of the situation in Ukraine, well before the recent acceleration of events turned it into a global hotspot, and this attention includes included numerous articles in Turkish from our monthly paper Gerçek, which is the Turkish namesake of Pravda (Truth). As well as an international campaign we organized along with numerous organizations and individuals on the occasion of the fascist massacre in Odessa in 2014. The text published for this last campaign and many others could be found in English on RedMed, a website publishing in in a dozen languages, that we run with our comrades from the EEK (Workers Revolutionary Party) in Greece. And therefore, in mid-February before the outbreak of war, we published a joint statement bringing together the Christian Rakovsky international socialist centre, and RedMed web network uniting revolutionary organizations from Turkey, Greece, Russia, France and Finland.
The call of the statement was built around the slogans of: workers of the NATO countries work to destroy NATO, and in case of war, work for the defeat of imperialism. Throughout the last period leading to the open war between Russia and Imperialism, DIP underlined that Russia was not an imperialist country, has been fighting a defensive war, and the Revolutionary Workers Party ran its
political campaign around the slogan of: Out of NATO, Destroy NATO. The initial statement of DIP on the issue of war when the open war started stated clearly that the way to peace is through the military defeat of NATO and its proxies. It affirmed that the war is not between Russia and Ukraine, but rather the Zelenskyy government is but a proxy of NATO, and Ukraine is only fighting a proxy war in the name of imperialism. Accordingly, both in Turkey and on an international scale DIP organised several events and demonstrations as a part of its bid to bring about the defeat and destruction of NATO.
To begin with on February 18th, which was the 70th anniversary of turkey joining NATO, DIP had been one of the initiators of a demonstration that brought together several revolutionary and left groups under the slogan of: Out of NATO and Close imperialist bases. The rally took place in a historically charged place where the revolutionary youth of Turkey had once thrown the Navy men of the US Sixth Fleet into the sea. accordingly the slogans of the demonstration included: imperialists and lackeys do not forget what happened to the sixth fleet.
Also, on March 11th the English edition of our theoretical journal Revolutionary Marxism organized a webinar on the issue of war which brought together revolutionary Marxists from Turkey, Greece and Russia. Finally DIP along with several other groups in Turkey commands the political campaign under the title: ‘The Nemesis of World Peace is NATO and Imperialism’, and in this recently started campaign we have so far organised a nationwide petition with the participation of organisations, militants, trade union leaders and artists. But more is to come, and we the DIP, the Revolutionary Workers Party, are undeterred to fight for the defeat and destruction of NATO, the biggest terrorist organization known to humankind.
Thank you, comrades.
2. Bolshevik Group – South Korea
After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, outrageous anti-Russian racist sentiment is raging over the regions under US influence.
Only handful of left-wing organizations point out the march of NATO eastward, led by US, as the cause of the war and call for “the defeat of NATO and the victory of Russia.”
Perhaps most of the organizations gathered here today belong to this category.
I don’t know if all the organizations gathered here will go along together, but the political line shared today by the comrades gathered here will be one of the core programmes of the new international.
In this regard, this meeting is meaningful.
And we welcome comrades from BT for joining this ranks.
Although it was not announced, BT comrades, along with us, took a position of supporting Russian victory in the 2008 Georgian War. And today in 2022, these comrades also submitted a position almost similar to our position that the Ukrainian war is a “war of self-defense conducted by neo-colony Russia, Belarus and Donbass.”
But there’s something I have to point out. It is a question of position regarding the Euromaidan movement, which changed Yanukovych regime into a pro-NATO regime in 2014.
We believe that we should have formed a united front with Yanukovych regime against the pro-NATO coupsters at the time. Ukrainian coup in 2014 was a pro-imperialist regime change operation which shares the same characteristics with Libya in 2011, Syria in 2011, Egypt in 2013, Turkey in 2016, and impeachment of Brazilian president in 2016. If the working class under the leadership of the revolutionary Party at the time had taken the line, it would have avoided the destruction of the left-wing labor movement by the pro-imperialist Nazi regime and the suffering of the people due to the 2014-2022 civil war.
At that time, BT knew that Ukrainian Euromaidan movement was a pro-imperialist regime change operation and a fascist movement that will wipe out the labour movement. Nevertheless, neutrality was proposed as a conclusion.
The correct response should be coordinated with the correct analysis of the cause. However, they analysed the cause correctly in the first place, but immediately suggested an erroneous conclusion. Then, they labelled those self-contradictory, anti-working-class conclusions as “Marxist”.
The same logic can be found in the 2011 Libyan and Syrian war. We believe that this opportunistic neutralist line is a reflection of Anglo chauvinism based on the super profits of US-British imperialism, which has enjoyed hegemony for more than 100 years.
How do you think about it?
Can BT’s correct position on the 2022 Ukrainian war today be considered as the beginning of self-reflection and correction on the past opportunistic neutralist lines, including position on Ukraine in 2014?
Bolshevik group in South Korea
Our thoughts on Ukraine, Russia, NATO and left opportunism Russian military action is a just retribution against provocations of NATO puppet regime
Revolutionary greetings from the Communist League of Brazil. It is with great pleasure that we organize and participate in this forum. 8 years ago we denounced the Nazi Euromaidan revolution, and defended the people’s republics of Donbass. Putin recognized them and started defending them very late, after nearly 15,000 dead.
We are very happy to be able to share a broadcast and video with comrades like Greg from La Lucha newspaper, we follow the good work they do in defence of the people of Donbass and fighters like those of Borotba. I agree with you that the war is separating the wheat from the chaff, as the first and second wars also did. We will join the SUP’s “stop the lies of war” campaign.
We were happy to see comrade Gerry Downing again, even though we are in different organizations today.
It is once again a pleasure to be with my comrades GM from Argentina and Ian from the UK.
We were happy to see the comrades of the Greek KED again, and I thought the criticism that the comrade from the Greek has just made of the liberal leftist mechanism of transposing, too lazy to think, the situation of the first war to the present time, was brilliant.
Welcome to the comrades of the South Korean Bolshevik group, and we are pleased to meet the comrades of the Turkish DIP.
Unfortunately I don’t speak English and comrade Vinícius from Brazil is here to help me, as is my new friend Davey. Before I forget, we will support Robert Montgomery’s position for a new Zimmerwald, I think my LCFI comrades are in full agreement with that.
And it’s a great pleasure to meet comrade Alan from BT.
We consider that the characterization that Russia is waging a just and defensive war (as the Turkish DIP comrade has just stated) against imperialism can only be born of organizations that learned best from the method of Trotskyism, that were born in the revolutionary defencism of Trotsky in his political battles against the petty bourgeoisie within the Trotskyist movement at the beginning of the 2nd world war.
Now we are on the eve of the 3rd World War and we find it necessary to strongly rescue the revolutionary defence legacy, now that we need to unmask the imperialist war propaganda, propaganda also propagated by the petty bourgeois and pro-imperialist, pro-NATO and pro-AUKUS fraction of Trotskyism.
30 years ago, we were inspired by the IBT’s audacious and defensive stance in August 1991. From 2008 onwards, the IBT capitulated to the pressure of Anglo-Saxon imperialism and began to characterize Russia as an imperialist nation. But Russia is a backward and dependent country. Russia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the size of Brazil’s GDP, after Brazil suffered a coup d’état, a pandemic and a Bolsonaro government that sank the Brazilian economy. Russia does not exercise imperialist domination over any people. For us, Russia is not even a capitalist power, because after all, it does not exercise power over other peoples for its capital, but for the dependence that the world has on the energy matrix of oil and gas. But Russia is not the same as Brazil or India because when it returned to capitalism, it had solved tasks that semi-colonial countries like Brazil and India did not solve, and this makes it a different capitalist country, albeit a capitalist one where a new revolution is needed. Social.
The IBT is probably one of the forerunners of the characterization that Russia is imperialist in Trotskyism, a low trick not to oppose imperialism, it puts an equal sign between the oppressed and the oppressor, a trick as low as that of renouncing defence of Iraq, Libya or Syria against imperialism on the grounds of the supposed undemocratic character of these governments. This has nothing to do with Marxism, Trotsky said he would even stand with the semi-fascist Getúlio Vargas against democratic England. So, what interests us here is not the Putin regime, against which the workers will have to rise up one day to resume the course of the 1917 revolution, but cannot be manipulated by the CIA, which can even resort to trade unionism, in order to create yet another colour revolution.
From the LCFI we recognize the important role of BT as the progressive heir of the IBT, in its stance on the August 1991 coup. We also recognize the advanced position of BT comrades in opposing imperialism today. Doubly advanced positions coming from within the imperialist countries themselves and bearing the pressure. But we need to record that the IBT disbands after 25 years without having progressed organically during this period and I think that the fact that it did not create sections beyond the imperialist centres is due to the pernicious legacy of the pro-imperialist policy of Spartacism that failed to win over the communists in the semi-colonies and for that reason he was organizationally trapped in a kind of conservative sectarianism.
So, as we understand in the LCFI, we need to understand the issue of the current war from the point of view of revolutionary anti-imperialist defencism and the conceptions of revolutionary permenantism in the 21st century, as my comrade GM from Argentina will better explain.
For the end of NATO, death to imperialism and long life to revolutionary Marxism!
4. Bolshevik Militant Tendency/LCFI – Argentina
Greetings, I am GM of the Bolshevik Militant Tendency of Argentina, a member of the LCFI
We consider that in order to understand the war and the conflict between imperialism, on one side, and that of China and Russia, on the other side, it is necessary to use Trotsky’s method in the thesis of permanent revolution. In that sense, let us consider that it is necessary to use the method of permanent revolution to understand the current situation. What we consider central to the permanent revolution to understand today’s dynamics is the conception that the pending bourgeois tasks can only be carried out with methods of proletarian dictatorship. The bureaucratized proletarian dictatorship of the USSR overcame the pending tasks of backward Russia.
I want to emphasize that for us from the LCFI the cases of Russia and China for having been workers’ states advanced in the pending bourgeois tasks. That is why when they returned to capitalism they did not return to the previous stage, from 1917 or 1949. Rather, they returned with industrial development, energy sovereignty, nuclear independence, etc. That makes them something qualitatively different from the set of semi-colonies on the planet. Nor are they imperialist countries.
Therefore, the cases in which we are dealing with Russia and China have to be understood according to the interpretation of the permanent revolution in the 21st century. That is, as a by-product of the cycle of proletarian revolutions of the 20th century. that gave rise to the mega-worker states of the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China. It should be clarified that this is more evident in the case of China. In Russia, with the capitalist restoration there was a strong setback in the 90s with Yelstein and under the shock doctrine similar to the one that was imposed in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship and neoliberalism was founded, they dragged the USSR to a semi-colonial condition or colonial for a decade. State planning had been abandoned and leading to the economic collapse of the country.
But the setback was as brutal as the dialectical reaction of the Russian economy to defend itself from the deep robbery, and the former bureaucrats now turned into new bourgeois, aware of the Russian wealth and that a little nationalization would allow them the logic of the capital accumulation at a higher level than Yeltsin’s neo-liberal neo-colonization propelled the Putin era. In a later period, the lived experience of the Soviet Union of having completed the pending bourgeois tasks led to the remnants of the workers’ state, especially at the arms level, which allowed the Russian Federation to consolidate itself as a dependent country after 2000. In other words, qualitatively different from a semi-colony taking advantage of the advances of its heritage as a workers’ state at the nuclear, spatial, etc. level.
For this reason, to defend itself from this robbery and the siege of Russia, the Russian capitalist economy defended itself by returning to certain elements of sovereignty conquered by the USSR, re-nationalizing the military-industrial and energy complex, about a third of the economy, to keep a greater part of the Russian wealth and military power, which imperialism does not admit and that is why it advances in the offensive and in the NATO encirclement of Russia.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has quickly became a defining moment for the Marxist movement. The failure of the majority of Marxist groups to support Russia’s right of self-defence against NATO has effectively subordinated them to US imperialism. Given that the proxy war between NATO and Russia in Ukraine cannot be separated from the accelerating drive towards World War 3, this is of historic significance.This crisis however is also an opportunity for those Marxists groups who unequivocally oppose US imperialism and support those in its cross hairs to regroup and draw together. They need to become the kernel of a real anti-imperialist, anti-war movement.
As part of this process Marxists from classconscious.org and Liga Comunista in Brazil have organised a forum on March 26th. The forum entitled “Russia’s right to self-defence against Imperialism- Marxists speak out”.Groups speaking include:
Class Conscious (Australia, US) Liaison Committee of the Fourth International (Argentina, Brazil, UK, US) Bolshevik Tendency (Canada, Germany, Ireland, UK, US) Κομμουνιστική Επαναστατική Δράση – (Greece) Devrimci İşçi Partisi of Turkey Socialist Fight (UK) Struggle-La Lucha newspaper and the Socialist Unity Party (U.S.)
The forum can be watched as a livestream on the classconscious.org Facebook page and will be uploaded later to Youtube. If you are interested in speaking please email cl************@********il.comMarch 26th – Saturday 8PM (UTC) 4 PM – Boston 5 PM – Brasilia, Buenos Aires 8 PM – London 10 PM – Athens March 27th – Sunday 7 Am – Melbourne#
*Note the time has been chosen to avoid anyone in Australia, Europe or Nth or Sth America having to speak in the middle of the night.
Socialist Unity Party / Partido de Socialismo Unido, based in the US (https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/). it is adapted from their fine statement, which is here.
On Feb. 24, the anti-fascist Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, together with the Russian Federation, launched a military action with the goal of “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine. It is in the interest of poor and working people, anti-war and anti-imperialist forces in the U.S. and other NATO countries, to take an unambiguous position in solidarity with the anti-fascist forces. The real war danger comes from U.S. and NATO forces surrounding Russia. The government in Kiev is their proxy, with no regard for the people of Ukraine.
In March 2014 British foreign secretary William Hague lied to the House of Commons when he said that the removal of Viktor Yanukovych was in accordance with the Ukrainian constitution, saying “It is wrong to question the legitimacy of the new authorities.
In fact, Yanukovych’s removal met none of the Ukrainian constitution’s provisions: there was no special commission of the Rada, no review by the Constitutional Court, and the Rada passed a bill removing Yanukovych from office with a simple majority of 328 votes, 10 short of the two-thirds majority laid out in the Ukrainian constitution. No doubt Hague was “badly advised” by his Foreign Office advisors!
Over the past 8 years Ukrainian military and US-backed fascist battalions incorporated into the National Guard killed 5,059 people in the Donetsk People’s Republic, including 91 children (figures obtained from Donetsk last week), so the figure for both the anti-fascist republics is probably around 8-9,000 people including well over 100 children.
This war began in 2014 when Ukraine launched the “Anti-Terrorist Operation” (ATO), just over a week after the CIA Director John Brennan visited Kiev to meet senior Ukrainian intelligence officials to “foster mutually beneficial security cooperation”. This was an all-out modern military offensive with tanks, artillery, missiles and aircraft. The ATO was still ongoing when the Russian intervention began last week, in fact it was being rapidly stepped up.
Millions of Ukrainians have been driven into political or economic exile since 2014, over two million now living in the Russian Federation alone. Many fled as a result of fascist death threats.
Up to 100 anti-fascists were murdered by fascists and nationalists at the Odessa Trade Union House Fire on May 2, 2014. No-one knows exactly how many, since there has never been any investigation.
Where was the media hysteria, and the calls for peace from the left and the peace movement, when men, women, children and the elderly were being bombed and shot by snipers in the Donbass for the past eight years?
Since November, the U.S. has pushed Kiev to a new murderous invasion of Donbass, while claiming that the real threat was from Russia. The U.S. rejected Moscow’s just demands to guarantee Ukraine’s neutrality. Russia recognized the independence of Lugansk and Donetsk on Feb. 21 –eight years after the people of Donbass overwhelmingly chose independence in a referendum, rejecting the pro-Western/neo-fascist coup government in Ukraine.
Washington and NATO deliberately and methodically pushed the Donbass republics and Russia into a corner, from which there were only two options: submit or fight back.
The People’s Militias of Donetsk and Lugansk are fighting to drive back the Ukrainian Armed Forces, including neo-Nazi battalions armed and trained by the U.S., Canada and NATO, that constantly threaten the lives of their residents. The anti-fascist military action, forced on Donbass and Russia by the Western imperialist powers – principally President Joe Biden and the U.S. government – has exposed confusion and equivocation in the anti-war movement, even among socialists and communists.
Modern capitalist Russia is not an imperialist country. It had no means to become one after the counterrevolution in the USSR. It is a regional power akin to India or Brazil, primarily an exporter of commodities, not capital. To maintain its independence, Russia had to ally with other countries in opposition to imperialism. Ukraine’s coup regime, by contrast, is a pawn of U.S. imperialism that has been waging a brutal war on its neighbours for eight years and offered itself as a base for NATO aggression against Russia.
Our responsibility is to stop U.S. imperialism and its wars in all forms, and to stand in solidarity with those who fight against U.S. domination.
· Victory to the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and their allies!
· Justice for those murdered in the Odessa Trade Union House Massacre!
· Solidarity with the anti-fascist underground and exiles of Ukraine!
· U.S./NATO: Hands off Russia! Get out of Ukraine and Eastern Europe!
· Dismantle the imperialist NATO war machine – bring all the troops home now!
We are publishing this statement is by the Bolshevik Group (볼셰비키그룹) – South Korea because we consider it to be a principled statement of revolutionary Marxists, with which we concur.
Russia’s attack is a just punishment for the provocation of artillery by the Kiev regime, an imperialist minion.
Let’s resist the colonial expansion policy of NATO imperialism !
Let’s defend the people’s right to self-determination in the Donbass area
On February 24 , Russian forces under Putin launched a military attack against the Kiev regime in Ukraine . The attack is a counterattack against a military provocation by the pro-Nato Kiev regime in Ukraine . Kiev’s Zelensky government bombarded various parts of the Lugansk region, which wanted independence from Ukraine , from February 17th to 23rd , just before the start of the Russian counterattack at the latest , destroying important infrastructure such as broadcasting stations and power plants and causing casualties. .
In that regard, we regard this Russian military counterattack as an act of legitimate self-defense against the provocation of the Ukraine Kiev army, which was ordered by NATO . We support military retaliation against the government of Ukraine by the Russian military . The military retaliation includes an attack on the Ukrainian army and critical installations that discourages future provocations .
However, the Putin regime in Russia is also not a revolutionary regime of the working class . Although there is a difference in that the Kiev regime in western Ukraine is a subordinate regime of NATO imperialism led by the United States and Russia is being harassed as its prey , the Putin regime also oppresses the working class . See also Thermidor and Bonapartism ] .
In that sense, if the Russian army is trying to establish a pro-Russian regime by continuing its military occupation through excessive greed , it is a dangerous gamble and is not beneficial to the working class . It is a violation of the Ukrainian people’s right to national self-determination . It is highly likely to intensify the nationalist confrontation with Russia by stimulating the right-wing nationalist sentiments of the working people of the western Ukraine region . Furthermore , the aggression of NATO imperialism’s strategy of expanding power after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc will be hidden .
The current situation in the Ukraine war is not unfamiliar and resembles the Georgia – Russian war of 2008 . In August 2008 , US imperialism instigated the Georgian government of Saakashvili to invade South Ossetia under Russian protection . It was one of the strategies of western NATO imperialism’s eastward strategy that had been continuing since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that is , ‘ establishing pro-imperialist governments in former workers’ countries such as the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, incorporating them into NATO, and subjugating them under imperialist influence ‘ . The Russian army immediately counterattacked . They repulsed the Georgian army invading South Ossetia and advanced further, even temporarily occupying several Georgian cities with military facilities . But at that time, Russia was not greedy for more than that . After weakening the military power by counterattacking the provocation of the Georgian Saakashvili government, which believed only in the backbone of the US, the troops withdrew from Georgia within 15 days of the start of the war . This Ukraine -It is highly likely that the Russian war will unfold like that .
Illustration from the 2008 Georgia-Russian War: US President George W. Bush instigates Georgian President Saakashvili to poke the brown bear Russia. When Saakashvili tells you to do it, the bear gets angry and beats him up. The US then giggles and turns its back on it. After the Euromaidan coup in 2014, Saakashvili also played a role in making Ukraine pro-imperialist, such as moving to Ukraine and serving as governor.
Following 2008 , Western imperialism centered on the United States used the life of the pitiful Ukrainian people as a tool for its own purposes . They used the Ukrainian subordinate regime to harass Russia to exhaust its power and to imagine the Putin regime’s combat posture, and sacrifice the lives of the local people .
All support for Russia’s military action for the defeat of the Nazi government in Kiev, NATO/US/ European Union front man! By worker-controlled People’s Republics across Ukraine!
The left and the workers’ movement must fight for all nations to recognize the right to self-determination of people’s republics! For People’s Republics throughout Ukraine!
Putin has launched a war operation against the Kiev government. His aim is to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. Zelensky ordered martial law in Ukraine. Ukrainian airspace was formally closed by the Kiev government, which, however, no longer controls it. The Russian army is carrying out a successful attack, impossible to defeat, with few civilian casualties. Russian Special Forces units advanced towards Kiev. Paratroopers descended on the capital. The Ukrainian navy was destroyed. Dozens of Ukrainian border guards fled to Russia. Several Ukrainian army units abandoned their positions.
The military action was preceded by a selective hunt for Ukrainian Nazis. On February 23, the Russian Secret Service (FSB) averted an extremist attack on Crimea, prepared by “Right Sector” militants supervised from Kiev. Rumour has it that the head of the Nazi Azov battalion of the Ukrainian National Guard, known as the “White Leader”, Andriy Biletsky, has fled to Poland. Putin said he will bring justice to the Nazis who have barbarized the country in recent years and will find them wherever they are.
Putin was buffeted by the historic demand of the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk to formally recognize their independence from the Kiev government, which he did on 22 February. Recognition of the republics by the Russian Federation was supported by the countries of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CTO), Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Syria and the Houthi government in Yemen. But important though this formal international recognition was, it could not stop there while Kiev’s bombing of the recognized republics continued. That would be a profound demoralization for Putin. Zelensky provoked the Russian military response. He has not been able to defend himself against Russia so far, and he has not had the military support he expected from his imperialist masters.
Imperialism
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said “There are no NATO forces on the territory of Ukraine, nor are there any plans to send them there. We support Ukraine, but we provide firm security guarantees only to NATO allies. What we’re doing is defensive.” Stoltenberg noted that the deployment would include part of NATO’s 40,000-strong rapid reaction force, including a highly prepared unit of 7,000, mostly French, and an air wing under French command. NATO will meet on February 25th to activate a defence plan from its member countries.
The imperialist media that desperately create factoids to demonize the Russian special operation is the same one that for the last eight years supressed, or at least minimized, the Nazi atrocities against the oppressed peoples of Ukraine. All the imperialist war media outlets hid the attacks suffered by the Russian population throughout Ukraine. And now they censor information about the fact that in recent days, supported by the US and many imperialist countries, Kiev has increased attacks against the Donbass region, hitting schools and homes. The mainstream media hides the fact that these attacks were preceded by barbaric atrocities such as those committed against the Federation of Trade Unions of Odessa, the House of Trade Unions, on May 3, 2014, when 43 anti-Maidan people were tortured, executed by shooting, or burned alive while imprisoned in the Federation building that was set on fire by the “Right Sector”. Another 174 trade unionists and communists were injured. The leftist organizations, PCU and Borotba, suffered the most. Most of those who were burned at the Casa dos Unions were their members. None of these media outlets today want to remember the Mariupol massacre of May 9, 2014, when more than 100 people were shot by Nazi death squads, on the day of commemoration of the USSR’s victory over Hitler’s Nazism in 1945.
The pro-imperialist “neither-nor” world left
The majority of the world left, much of which constitute a petty bourgeois media layer, follow “critically” the orientation of the big bourgeois media, assuming there is a supposed ‘third camp’ in the war. They defend an ideal wall on which they climb so as not to directly assume the positions of imperialism, covering their shameful capitulation with a supposed policy against all capitalists. That left that imperialism likes says “neither Russia nor NATO, for Ukraine!”. This left calls itself Marxist, and justifies its pro-imperialist defeatism because Russia would be “imperialist” for “invading” Ukraine. But this position is opposed to that of Marxism. For Marxism, imperialism is the expansionist policy of finance capital, which demands economic domination over other nations. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 he did not turn Iraq into an imperialist country. Russia, despite its military and energy might inherited from the USSR and developed in recent years, is still a backward country, whose GDP is practically the size of Brazil after all the damage that the 2016 coup against Dilma Rousseff and then Bolsonaro did to the country. Putin may want to lead an imperialist power, but this status in the struggle between states does not depend on his will.
We also reject the imperialist version that it all started with “the Russian invasion of Ukraine”. War is a relationship. A dialectical relationship far beyond the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. First, it is a war provoked by the insatiable expansionism of finance capital towards Eastern Europe since the 1980s, an offensive that ended up playing two historically symbiotic nations one against the other, from the moment it sparked a Nazi insurrection in 2014. against the pro-Russian government. This also refers to the future of how imperialism will respond to Putin and how Putin will respond to imperialism’s response.
The appetites of imperialist finance capital have no limits. After the counter-revolutionary tragedy in the USSR and Eastern Europe, after 30 years of NATO expansion to the East, of cumulative economic sanctions to strangle Russia, in the last eight years they resorted to using neo-Nazis as front men in their expansionist march to the East. Of the 30 NATO members, 14 are former Eastern European workers states or directly former Balkanized USSR republics (Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Albania, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia , Latvia, …). With Ukraine joining NATO, no less than half of the countries in the Atlanticist alliance would be made up of countries captured from the enemy, from the old Warsaw pact.
For all these reasons, we believe that workers and oppressed minorities benefit from this anti-fascist and anti-imperialist action and therefore should support it. Just as they must reject all economic sanctions from imperialism to strangle Russia and even more we must reject any military reaction from NATO. And beyond that, the workers of the world must take advantage of Russian preventive-defensive military action against the expansion of NATO on its borders and we defend the full democratic right of the people’s republics of Lugansk, Donetsk, Kharkov and any other, of all national minorities for self-determination in relation to the Ukrainian central government, puppet of imperialism and xenophobic in relation to the other peoples of Ukraine, and the extension of this right to remain independent republics or unite with Russia, if they wish.
We advocate that the workers’ movement in each country fight for all countries to recognize the right to self-determination of people’s republics!
We advocate that this anti-Nazi, anti-imperialist and national liberation struggle becomes a socialist struggle for workers-controlled people’s republics throughout Ukraine!
The Liaison Committee of the Fourth International welcomes the recognition of the Independence of the Lugansk and Donetsk republics, within their original frontiers, by the Russian government of Vladimir Putin, following the vote in the Duma last week calling for such recognition. It appears that the Russian government is determined to defend these republics against attacks by the fascist-infested American neo-colonial regime in Kiev. Our tendency has been calling for such recognition since 2015: they should have been so recognised concurrently with Crimea, as the previous temporizing by Putin has emboldened the far-right coalition in Kiev to attack and partially roll back these republics, reducing their territories and subjecting much of the Russian-speaking population in the broader region of East Ukraine to terrorization by the fascist-dominated Ukrainian neocolony.
This is part of our defence of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan against imperialism, and against the programme of ‘regime change’ that US imperialism is desperate to propagate against both Russia and China. The New Cold War, though it has major differences from the earlier conflict of imperialism against the USSR and the former Chinese workers state, also has important commonalities. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the restoration of capitalism in China shortly afterwards, the United States expected a limitless future as the sole imperialist hegemon of a ‘unipolar’ capitalist world. But it has proved not so simple, as the capitalism restored in the great nations of both Russia and China has proven at odds with the imperialist system whose pressure destroyed the workers states. In a world dominated by imperialism, subject peoples are supposed to do as they are told, as indeed are subjected, defeated states that rule such peoples.
But Russia and China, in different ways, do not conform to the world that the imperialists want to dominate. Their still highly statified economies, marked and shaped by decades of economic planning, still give these states an unprecedented ability to act independently of the imperialists whose economic domination and pressure caused the collapse of the workers states. The contradictions of Chinese and Russian capitalism with imperialism are still residual achievements of each of the revolutions, despite their current bourgeois governments. A basic tenet of Trotsky’s program of Permanent Revolution was that genuine national independence could only be achieved by oppressed peoples overthrowing the bourgeoisie.
Despite the deformed character of those revolutions (degenerating post-1917, and 1949 from the start), both Russia and China benefited from this material fact of expropriating the bourgeoisie as a class. The proletarian dictatorships in these countries, with their various terrible deformations, solved pending bourgeois tasks, overcoming part of their semi-colonial characteristics, which did not happen in any large or populous semi-colony like India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, Ethiopia or Egypt. None of these countries was able to carry out its pending bourgeois tasks or stop being semi-colonies. In turn, in Russia and China, countries concentrating an enormous mass of land, energy, technology and military power (Russia) and labour force (China), the restoration of capitalism did not and could not make a complete return to those backward and semi-colonial conditions of 1917 and 1949.
After a momentary low during the first period of the social counter-revolution in their status within the relationship between states, during the 1990s, the very contradictions of these countries’ economy with imperialism forced them to establish policies of resistance to imperialist parasitism that wanted to appropriate the larger share of the production of surplus value than the Chinese State and in Russia, the containment of the country’s military and energy capacity. Then Russia and China rebelled against assuming semi-colonial status. Paradoxically, the restored bourgeoisies of Russia and China are still benefiting from that and can thumb their noses at the United States, the world hegemon which is now in major decline. Despite the bourgeois nature of the regimes in both Russia and China, this contradiction in today’s capitalism has the potential to create revolutionary opportunities that can help the world proletariat to rearm itself for world socialism.
The defeat of US imperialism by Russia or China, or a combination of the two, would provide an opportunity for the working class to strike out independently for its own class interests. Just as in a slightly different way, the defeat of imperialism by a recalcitrant semi-colony would be a blow for the working class, the defeat of US imperialism by these rather stronger hybrid forms of capitalist regime would be an opportunity, not just to defeat imperialism, but potentially to roll back the counterrevolution that has robbed the proletariat of these countries of their own state power. The bourgeois regimes of these countries are in an insuperable contradiction, as part of the source of their ability to defend themselves against imperialism has its basis in the overthrown, but not transcended, social revolution. Therefore, Putin agonizes in a very visible way about the role of the Bolsheviks in creating the anomalous conditions in which his regime is forced to operate, whereas in China the hybrid state-capitalist regime dominated by a more numerous class of billionaires than in the USA (though nowhere near as wealthy) is forced to maintain the name of ‘Communist’ and pay lip service to ‘socialism’ as its objective.
The recognition of Lugansk and Donetsk has caused apoplexy among the imperialists whose antics over the last few weeks have been truly bizarre, repeatedly screaming that Putin was about to attack and occupy Ukraine, evacuating their nationals as if expecting carnage, ostantaneously moving their own diplomatic missions from Kiev, the capital, to Lvov on the far Western end of Ukraine, etc. They have been completely wrong-footed by Putin’s response and are getting more hysterical. In this hysterical yomp the German government, under pressure, has suspended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline agreement with Russia to supply Germany with natural gas. In this way, the economic sanctions, supposedly against Russia, will also fall on Germany, which will pay more for the energy that will be sold by the US. This is a capitulation to the US of a country that has been militarily occupied since 1945, a capitulation that give the appearance, at least, of a humiliating, vassal character of the German government, accentuated by the SPD’s very ‘Atlanticist’ social democracy. But this may not be sustainable, and when the dust settles seems unlikely to last.
Putin has not invaded and subjugated Ukraine and clearly has no interest in doing so, as he has not done in Georgia (2009), Kazakhstan (2022), or at the outside of Western fantasy, Syria (2016) despite this bizarre ‘invasion’ narrative that is even more threadbare than the lies used to justify the US/UK invasion of Iraq. If Russia does not allow the Donbass to be recolonized by the Kiev Nazis, it will be carrying out a progressive role as it did in Syria, preventing the country from being barbarized and recolonized as happened with Iraq and Libya. Biden, Johnson and co will be judged by history as not only liars, but stupid liars at that. The only objective of the current nationalist regime is to protect Russia, and to protect those that it regards as its own nationals, not to attempt to subjugate the (probably) rather brainwashed and nationalistic Ukrainian population, which would not be wise from the standpoint of the defence of Russia. And at this point the rational and effective defence of Russia coincides with the interest of the working class.
We, a group of comrades from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Russia, appeal to you: we must prevent the war! No to the war that the Western imperialists are planning to unleash by playing off Russia and Ukraine against each other!
This fratricidal war is beneficial only to the tycoons of financial capital. In the contemporary world, capitalist predators understand that any war between nuclear powers is unpredictable in terms of consequences and presents a real threat of humankind’s destruction, using the piles of lethal weapons that have been accumulated over the years. Therefore, bloodsucking imperialists benefit from local conflicts in which an openly chauvinistic, terrorist dictatorship of financial capital itself, that is, fascism, can be used.
As the highest stage of capitalism, imperialism already once divided the whole world into zones of its influence. Note that countries don’t exist for financial capital, but regions of influence do. Capitalism in its development has approached a perilous state: it is now a decaying swamp that is poisoning the lives of the entire planet’s inhabitants. This rotting swamp is already taking people’s lives with its wars and devastation. Capital is incapable of resolving the sharp contradictions of the bourgeois society. Capital also means constant economic crises, and capitalism overcomes crises by starting military conflicts.
Who can halt the bloody agenda of financial capital? Only the working class and the progressive intelligentsia engaged in the proletarian struggle! The slogan “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” is more relevant today than ever. “Peace to the nations!” the Bolshevik revolutionaries once proclaimed.
So today, we appeal to all humankind: No to war, No to the imperialist plans of the USA and their vassals in Europe! Peace to Ukraine, Russia, Peace to all humankind!
We are against war, but in case of war we defend Donbass, Crimea and Russia against NATO and its allies.*
We urge everyone to repost or share this collective statement on your feed as a sign that you support it and/or consider yourself a signatory of this appeal to the world FOR PEACE.
If you would like to be added to the list of signatories please contact us via e-mail at in**@*******************nt.org
Signatories:
Iskra Group: Askar Aysin (Kazakhstan) Botagoz Datkhabaeva (Kazakhstan), Alexandr Naydenko (Russia) Anti imperialist front – Belarus MadaarSorkh – Iranian communist collective United International Anti-Imperialist Anti-Fascist Front Bulgarian Slavic movement Public organization “OPLOT Bulgaria” Laboratory of the Future (https://vk.com/flab20) Patriotic public association “Fatherland” (Belarus) Public Association “For Democracy, Social Progress and Justice” (Belarus) Consistent Democrats (Great Britain – LCFI) Liga Comunista (Brazil – LCFI) Tendencia Militante Bolchevique (Argentina – LCFI) Socialist Workers League (United States – LCFI)
* the sentence in bold was suggested as an addition by the LCFI groups. However, since several groups had already endosed the statement by that time, the organisers, while stating their agreement with it, considered it too complex to re-approach all the signatories with it for amendment, which is understanable. Therefore this is the proposal of the LCFI groups only.
(this is republished from the website of the Australian revolutionary organisation Class Concscious.)
Headlines recently went around the world describing how the Australian Government detained and then deported high profile anti-vaxxer and world number one tennis play Serbian Novak Djokovic. Djokovic had come to play in the Australian Open in Melbourne but refused to be vaccinated. Many around the world would have interpreted this as the continuation of strategies in Australia that had largely suppressed Covid19 resulting in a far lower death toll than Europe, the US and many other countries. However, looks can be deceiving. The deportation of Djokovic was in fact just a political manoeuvre to give cover to the abandonment of the policy of suppression and a switch to letting Covid19 rip through the working class.
Whilst its true that the Australian Government originally wanted to let Djokovic in to be a draw card in the Australian Tennis Open, which is a huge money spinner, once the public got wind that Djokovic was being given a bogus “exemption” public furore resulted. Not surprisingly after two years of health measures to restrict Covid19, the sight of an entitled multi-millionaire being allowed to thumb his nose at restrictions did not go down well.
Sensing a political opportunity, the far-right Federal Liberal Government moved into action and turned deporting Djokovic into an example of it taking strong “border protection” action to protect public health. “Djokovic’s visa has been cancelled. Rules are rules, especially when it comes to our borders. No one is above these rules,”, pontificated Prime Minister Morrison from his Twitter pulpit. The Liberal Party in Australia has branded itself the party of “border control” for over twenty years boasting of its murderous and cruel policy of turning back refugee boats at sea and imprisoning indefinitely any poor souls who made it by boat to Australia seeking asylum.
The sheer cynicism of this posturing was breathtaking. Whilst the press was tirelessly covered the deportation procedures against Djokovic, a massive Omicron wave was being deliberately unleashed on the Australian working class. Despite knowing that Omicron was so much more transmissible than Delta, all state and Federal Governments (except West Australia) removed nearly all public health measures to suppress Covid19. Quarantine at the international border and between states was removed. This was possibly the most important policy in addition to Test, Trace, Isolate and Quarantine (TTIQ) that had kept large parts of Australia virtually Covid19 free for almost two years were removed. Limits on nearly all retail, hospitality and public events were lifted.
Some of thousands of tennis fans crammed into the arena during the mens’ final.
The sad irony was that the focus on the supposed threat to public health posed by one unvaccinated player at the Australian Open disguised the fact that the entire event was super spreader. Tens of thousands attended the event no doubt playing a role in spreading the virus. Unlike in March 2020 when on health advice the Melbourne Formula One Grand Prix was cancelled at the start of the pandemic, nothing was going to stop the tennis going ahead. The Labor Party in Australia is the social democratic party that rests upon the support of the trade union bureaucracies. The Labor Premier of Victoria, Dan Andrews, had dropped his earlier commitments to public health and adopted the Boris Johnson “let the bodies pile high” mentality. Letting Covid19 rip is truly a bipartisan project in the Australian capitalist class.
The result of letting Covid19 rip over the busy Christmas/New Years period were as tragic as there were predictable. Up to 1 in 12 Australian’s caught Covid within a few weeks. The supply chain was threatened as workers sickened or were in isolation. This problem was of course “solved “ by the weakening of isolation rules. Testing was quickly overwhelmed. This was “solved” by restricting who could get tested. Fifteen hundred people died in January 2022 alone which at that rate made Covid19 the largest single cause of death in the country. Hundreds died miserable deaths in Aged Care facilities. Like elsewhere it is the vulnerable who pay the highest price for letting Covid19 rip.
Like in Europe and the US, there was endless bourgeois propaganda that this was the new “normal” and Australian’s simply had to accept that suppressing Covid19 was impossible. Of course the fact that large sectors of the country had been free of Covid19 for most of the last two years had to be conveniently “forgotten”. It does without saying that the continuing success of China must be alternatively ignored or demonised as “Communist tyranny” at work.
The Covid19 pandemic is causing deep ructions in Australian politics. Public support for the Federal Liberal Government has collapsed just months out from an election. This is fuelling yet another round of conjecture that an Australian Prime Minister might be rolled before the election. There has not been an Australian Prime Minister that has served a full term of three years since 2007, reflecting the conflicts within the ruling class since the outbreak of the GFC.
Like elsewhere around the world, the Covid19 restrictions and the impact they have had an ordinary people has been used to whip up an extra-parliamentary anti-science, anti-public health far right or fascist movement. This has seen trade union offices attacked in Melbourne, “freedom” marches of tens of thousands and most recently a large gathering in Parliament.
The confused rallies have been funded and exploited by far-right billionaires like the coal magnate Clive Palmer. It is part of a project to not only defeat public health measures against Covid19 but to create a far right “anti-establishment” movement along the lines of MAGA in the US. Such a movement can help ensure far right parties, both fringe parties and the Liberal Party control of Parliament at the cost of their social democratic rivals. However, the ultimate target of this movement is the working class as both the drive to war and the class struggle more generally intensifies. As in other countries of course the movement has also been used by explicitly fascist forces to recruit from the disorientated petty-bourgeois and lumpen proletariat layers attending. Trump flags and Q Anon imagery has been common at the rallies.
No mass workers or socialist parties exist in Australia; therefore the Left has not been able to intervene significantly in the politics of the pandemic as yet. The Labor Party at a national level has faithfully towed the line of the Federal Government for two years. The state based leaders, despite some earlier resistance, have all fullen into line with the let it rip agenda. The Trade Unions bureaucrats have carried out a historic betrayal in not fighting for either safe workplaces or the suppression of the virus more broadly. The few squeaks now heard from the likes of Australian Council of Trades Union (ACTU) Secretary now being made are a last-ditch effort to try and herd popular discontent behind the reelection of the Labor Party and not into industrial struggles.
The small Trotskyist parties have also struggled politically. Some such as the Cliffite Solidarity party followed the dangerous trend of trying to “win over” the disaffected “freedom” protestors by trying to give a left gloss to anti-public health demands. The Australian section of the ICFI has published many useful articles on the pandemic in Australia but are of course ham strung by their own sectarianism and ultra-leftist “rank and file committee” strategy. Socialist Alternative another Cliffite/IST grouping which is perhaps the largest of the small Trotskyist group in Australia, did mount a “Health Before Profits” Campaign in support of the maintenance of public health measures. This was a campaign I participated in. However, the campaign has failed to become more than an online propaganda campaign. The campaign is also crippled politically as it has not taken a consistent and strong line working to expose the trade union bureaucrats’ betrayals.
There are signs that the dam on working class resistance may be cracking. A very significant strike has broken out amongst New South Wales Nursers and Midwifes. They struck on February 15th for the first time in a decade, demanding higher pay and better staffing nurse to patient ratios. Health care workers in Australia have of course been pushed to the brink by the ongoing onslaught of Covid19 patients straining an already underfunded public health system. Most significantly perhaps the strike in NSW was carried out in defiance of a last-minute injunction from the Industrial Relations Commission to stop it. Australia has some of the most draconian anti-strike legislation in the world and any real struggle by workers with have to be done by breaking free of the shackles of the Industrial Relations Commission and the misnamed Fair Work Commission.
Nurses protesting in Sydney (From NSW Nurses and Midwives Facebook page)
The decision by the Australian ruling class to switch to a “let it rip” policy is a crossing of the Rubicon moment in the class struggle. Intersecting with other factors such as the ecological crisis which saw so much of Australia recently burn, the deepening economic crisis and of course the drive to war with China and Russia, it will continue to push the working class into struggle and the ruling class further towards authoritarianism.
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