Ukraine - April 3, 2022

The International Conditions
and the Ukrainian War

By the Editorial Board of the “International Workers’ Organiser”

The relationship between the Europe of Maastricht and the US in the midst of the catastrophe and the crash of the world economy

This severe crisis opened in Maastricht and in Eastern Europe started when Biden said: “Ukraine belongs to NATO” and Ukraine accepted gladly. For Putin, this was the straw that broke the camel's back because it meant that Ukraine, as well as Belarus, would be like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and the European Glacis: under US command and with the US surrounding Russia.

This happened when the construction of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline had just been completed, which constituted a huge leap in Russia's relationship with the imperialist Europe of Maastricht, commanded by the Franco-German axis.

It was the US which rocked, with their pro-NATO offensive in the Ukraine, the boat of this "business community" of Europe. The Franco-German axis had conquered its living space and a division of labor in recent decades not only in Maastricht but throughout Europe, taking raw materials out of Russia in particular. This vital space of the Franco-German axis has conspired, at every step, against US supremacy on the planet. The US then launched its offensive in Europe relying on its strength, the one that the results of the 2WW and the cold war had given it, that is, NATO, which has managed to achieve an enormous expansion towards Eastern Europe, pointing its cannons at Russia.

Out of the 30 NATO member countries, 14 are former Soviet republics subjugated and controlled as colonies or semi-colonies by the US. NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was set up at the end of World War II. Through it, the US positioned itself as "the military guarantor" of the countries of imperialist Europe. It had been the winner of the 2WW. Thus, Germany, defeated in the war, could not arm itself and was subjected to NATO under the military command of Anglo-US imperialism.
Meanwhile, the US left Stalinism controlling the masses from Eastern Europe up to Russia, on the condition it saved imperialist Europe, which had come out from the war totally bankrupt,  from revolution.

This situation has changed radically since '89, when the dual character of the Second World War was historically defined, which included imposing the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, an issue that was not achieved with Hitler's tanks but with the dollar and Wall Street finance.

In '89, Germany came out unified, with the power of its heavy metalworking and high-tech industry, and together with France they closed imperialist Europe and opened its domestic borders to impose free trade that included a "backyard" in the countries of the Glacis, with maquiladoras and slave labor, and plundering the enormous sources of raw materials, energy, food and minerals of the "great" Russia, in partnership with the oligarchs and the Putin bourgeoisie, accompanying step by step the US offensive in all the former workers' states.
France and Germany in particular began to control the European market, at the same time they disputed the colonization of the former workers' states of the Glacis with the US. The US were imposing on each of these countries an entrance to NATO for controlling them politically, while they were also integrated into the European Union.

Controlling NATO, The US asserted their weight in the European economy and with Wall Street deals they captured the investments and financial surpluses of European banks. So much so that at the outbreak of the economic crisis in 2008, 70% of the assets of banks in Europe were lost, because they were in Wall Street.
This is how the European common market as a whole was articulated and in this their connection to the world economy, which is under US hegemony.

Everything seemed fine until the global economic crash broke out. The crises of 2008 and 2019-2020, which hit the US to the core, led Europe to close more and more. The European and world market shrank.
The Maastricht pirates also began sealing side deals with Beijing in an attempt to strengthen trade and investment in China as a European bloc. This opened an open dispute between US and Maastricht, for and against China.

This is how Trump showed up “pushing and kicking” in the world economy, raising the tariffs on European products to enter the US, while demanding  Europe to open its markets, as the US had done with European companies installed in Mexico and Canada via NAFTA. Thus, an open trade war broke out for Europe, for China and for the world market as a whole.

This led Germany to deepen, together with France, its relations with Russia in the economic and political fields. This is what the construction with German companies of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline was about, which goes directly from Russia to Germany, thus making the latter the greatest distributor of gas throughout Europe, and  giving it strategic energy independence, coupling its economy with sources of Russian raw materials without going through the Ukraine gas pipeline controlled by the Biden family or the Caucasus pipeline, which goes to the Mediterranean via Turkey, and is also controlled by the US.

Thus, between the US in crisis and a Europe that was advancing more and more towards Eastern Europe, the mutual relations had already reached an unbearable level.

Nord Stream II was already finished at the start of this war. The president of the Gazprom consortium that built this gas pipeline is the former German Prime Minister, Schröder.

The pipeline was now ready to go. In the dispute over the European market, the US could not allow it. This time, Stalinism and the world reformist left that first supported Obama and then Biden, broke their teeth when they proclaimed the "democratic" benefits of the bandits and pirates of the US Democratic Party: it was Biden who broke all the pre-existing agreements and carried to the end the trade war that Trump had started, and he was also the one who asserted the weight of NATO and its military control of Europe to prevent Nord Stream II from opening. Which is currently dead closed. But not because of Putin's troops, but due to the embargo imposed on Russia by the US. Thus, the latter wants to continue supplying bottled gas to Germany, which in turn has to pay much higher prices.

The interruption of Nord Stream II was to cut a decisive thread in the organization of European work from Portugal to Russia, since the other gas and oil pipelines are controlled by the US.

Maastricht was already about to complete its living space in Europe, for which Germany began two world wars. Since 2008, the US has tried to prevent this completion, first with Obama and then with Trump. Today with Biden, they have managed to impose the two  former presidents' plan, using the weight of NATO and the war. The US interposed itself between Maastricht and Russia with NATO and the military control the latter exercises in the countries of Eastern Europe.
With this US offensive, the political, economic and military balance of Europe has been broken, which has brought enormous consequences for world politics and economy.

That is why the war in Ukraine has a second, crucial character: the US went to break the Franco-German axis deal with Russia. We insist, Biden could not allow Germany and France to finish building their European sphere of influence in the midst of a capitalist morass, only comparable to the crisis of the 1930s.

The Second World War had its cause in this very same situation: Germany invaded France and then the USSR, because they believed that if they exerted their control from Portugal to the Russian steppes, they would become the dominant imperialism at the end of the war. The Second World War was because the US did not accept either German control of Europe or Japan doing the same in the Pacific. The US went all over the world market in a war of counterrevolutionary pirates for domination of the planet and their spheres of influence.
That war was won by UK-US imperialisms and even in the 21st century they assert the sharing of the world that arose from it. That is what the US crying for Ukraine to join NATO is all about: for the US to be the ones that fence Russia within her borders while they themselves have the Europe of Maastricht trailing behind them.
The year '89 gave birth to a paradox: Germany, which had been defeated in the war, emerged unified and, together with France, reconstituted a vital space in Europe and advanced to be the imperialist power that benefited most from the capitalist restoration in the USSR.

Biden's claim of "Ukraine belongs to NATO" was also a heavy blow to the pretensions of the Franco-German axis; this blow once again placed the US in Eastern Europe, trying to reach the very borders with Russia, blowing up not only the Nord Stream II, but also the deal between Germany and France with Putin and his business in Europe.

This is the dual character of the US offensive, which has caused a huge crisis in Europe and has destabilized, as we have already said, the latter's entire political, economic and military balance.

The USA are going for what belongs to them and have, for now, achieved the reluctant Franco-German axis submission. Minor imperialist powers like Spain, Italy and Portugal quickly and fully joined the US plan, showing that they have enormous financial ties to the City of London and Wall Street.

During these weeks of war in Ukraine, Germany suspended Nord Stream II, but not before seizing and nationalizing the German subsidiary of Gazprom, while it continues to receive Russian gas, although at the same time announcing that it has begun the path to energy independence from Moscow.

The fact that the Franco-German axis has agreed to temporarily subordinate itself to the US plan does not mean that it will not go aggressively into the dispute over the sources of raw materials, commodities and minerals from Russia and the former Soviet republics.
Germany has already announced a huge increase in its military budget by more than $100 billion. Undoubtedly, they will create one of the most powerful armies in Europe in a matter of weeks or months, thanks to their state-of-the-art technology.

The US, as revolutionary Marxism had posed, snapped the world control to appropriate the world market with their enormous productive forces. Thus, they managed to be one of the great winners of the Second World War for the distribution of the world, even subduing England, which quickly accepted that relationship of forces established in the middle of the 20th century.
The Wall Street pirates are the ones who led the capitalist restoration in the USSR, China, Vietnam...

And now, in the 21st century, with the fall of the Yalta Pact and in the midst of the enormous catastrophe and crisis that the parasitic capital of the imperialist countries has caused to the world-economy, the US as the dominant power tries to maintain its hegemony. But this can only be done by dealing with its competitors by prompting trade wars and military adventures, and even with regional and continental wars for grabbing the most as their spheres of influence.

US imperialism remains as  primus inter pares among the imperialist powers by dividing Europe, surrounding China with a Pacific bloc, through a mini NATO that it is setting up around its military base in Japan and Australia, first controlling militarily and then with its agents the oil routes of the Middle East, and keeping its Latin American "backyard" subdued.

These inter-imperialist relations reaffirm the Leninist thesis that if one imperialism or one imperialist bloc is doing well, the other must be doing badly. World economy is not enough for everyone. They are bandits looting spheres of influence.

If in '89 with the capitalist restoration, the sclerotic veins of a bankrupt system received fresh blood, now in the midst of the stagnation of the world economy, imperialism needs to keep those domestic markets in China and Russia, built and shaped by the strong imperialist investments.

Therefore, from the strategic point of view, we can say that the bombings in Ukraine are the first clashes of the next world war, unless the proletariat prevent it. The question here is which imperialist power ends up clutching the new markets of Russia and China.

In those countries, due to the capitalist restoration, there are extremely powerful native bourgeoisies. These became enriched, on the one hand, by the partnership they maintain with imperialism and its investments in those countries, taking advantage of their comparative advantages, and on the other, by controlling the state companies of services and raw materials with which they supply transnationals in China or  export worldwide, as Russia does.
Being the foreman and direct exploiter of hundreds of millions of Chinese workers incorporated into the capitalist world economy gives power to these native bourgeoisies, which only imperialism can break by launching a thousand and one crises, and with wars. We repeat: with wars.

The question is clear: if the Franco-German axis continues to impose its mark and consolidate a vital space in Europe and if the US loses control of the Pacific trade routes, the decline of US imperialism will begin. But no imperialist power will withdraw from the planet peacefully, and that is what we are witnessing in raging, deepening trade wars and wars of occupation and annexation.

From this point of view, we say, on the one hand, Ukraine is a pawn handed over by the US to break the division of labor of the Franco-German axis in Europe and, on the other, a massacred and crushed Ukraine is a good path for the US to encircle Moscow.

This is why, the US only sends defensive weapons to Ukraine, to allow it to be crushed by Putin's troops with great cynicism, but without Ukraine winning the war. Biden is preparing a new agreement for the partition of Ukraine, which will be protected by NATO and the US, with the "great" Russia receiving Donbass and Crimea as a prize, but economically surrounded by a fierce trade war. We cannot rule out either that imperialism turns Ukraine into a swamp for the Russian army to sink into. In this war, in which the US does not fight, they have no way of losing. The one that loses, in the first place, is Ukraine and its working class, who are crushed by the NATO encirclement and the massacre of the guarantor of imperialism's business in Ukraine: the murderous “great” Russian bourgeoisie.

With the current political offensive and economic siege against Russia, as we see today, with this ferocious trade war that takes the one started by Trump to a higher level, the US seek to decant a direct pro-American agent within "Great Russia." As the US goes for everything, they no longer need an indirect agent such as Putin’s government and its oligarchs, who are great partners in key sectors of the productive forces managed by the Russian state.

The world market has shrunk. In 20 years of the 21st century, three crashes have evaporated over 90 trillion dollars from the world-economy. Wall Street has subsidized, with billions of dollars, the large transnationals and banks in crisis and bankruptcy, just as Maastricht did. The capitalists have spent and consumed profits that human labor has not yet produced.

The ever returning crises in the stock exchanges demonstrate the devaluation of capital, fictitiously supported by credits at a zero-interest rate, as distributed by the central banks of Europe, Japan and the US in recent years. By printing money in bast quantities, they saved the transnationals and bankers in crisis.

The search for new currencies that guarantee the value of capital in the face of inflationary danger in the midst of a fierce recession, creates, on the one hand, permanent trends towards the weakness of the dollar, and on the other, pushes the US to have a totally aggressive policy towards their competitors and in the colonial world that oppresses and plunders.

The productive forces under the control of this rotten world capitalist economy have already been constrained to extreme degrees, while millions of starving people find neither a hospital bed, nor a school bench, nor a house or a country in which to survive.

While the imperialist Europe of Maastricht sought to coexist but at the same time plunder mammoth profits from its sources of raw materials from the Russia of the great oligarchs and billionaires, the largest world financial superoligarchy of Wall Street and the City of London want themselves to be the oligarchs… and also Moscow’s. Hence the cruelty with that "great" Russian bourgeoisie, the siege and the robbery of their millions and accumulated wealth. They are bandits disputing the businesses and profits of the new rich in Russia who are as oppressive, counter-revolutionary and enemies of the working class, as those who today intend to grabp their wealth.

If the UK-US offensive has not advanced even further against its competitors and the peoples they oppress, it is because the American and European working classes do not allow it. They were forced to leave Iraq and Afghanistan because huge movements against the war in Europe and the US and a huge fight by the masses in the Middle East stopped such a counterrevolutionary offensive that imperialism intended.

Under these conditions, imperialism concentrated all its forces in Syria and Ukraine. In Syria, to crush the masses and cut the chain of revolutions that threatened to sweep away the state of Israel and set fire to the entire Mediterranean. They massacred the revolted people, bled the Syrian nation, divided it and occupied it with Putin, Turkey and the US, using the good services of the fascist Al Assad.

They also turned their forces to Ukraine. They used Putin in the Minsk pact to split that nation and keep the gas businesses, expropriating the mass uprisings of 2014. Thus, they prevented the unity of the working class of Eastern and Western Europe, and on the other hand, the United States have not allowed France and Germany to consolidate their living space throughout Europe.

If this counterrevolutionary victory prevails in Ukraine, in which imperialism has been engaged for years, as it was already imposed in Syria, the imperialist pirates will be given a freer rein to go on new military offensives and also to double their attack against the working class of the central countries.

As in the 20th century, in this 21st century the masses have not stopped fighting...
It is the crisis of leadership that closes the working class their path to victory

As we have stated, the strength of the imperialist armies that had to flee from Iraq and Afghanistan did not stop the enormous revolutionary mass actions that took place in these two decades of the 21st century.

In Latin America, two waves of mass struggle were diverted by the treacherous leaderships and their perfidious policy of class collaboration. First it was with the scam of the "Bolivarian Revolution" and now it is hand in hand with the so-called "New Left" that has constituted class collaboration governments disguised as "left", which are direct agents of imperialism, such as Castillo (Peru), Boric (Chile), Arce (Bolivia) and those who are preparing in Brazil with Lula and in Colombia with Petro. These governments come to apply the worst plans of imperialism, after taking the masses out of the streets with "siren songs".

Imperialism has also tried fascist and counterrevolutionary solutions, such as the coup in Bolivia in 2019, and tested the conditions for it in Brazil, as they did with Bolsonaro.

The bourgeoisie, US imperialism in particular, uses all its agents, to control its “backyard”.

The great betrayal of Stalinism becoming the new bourgeoisie in Cuba, crushing the uprising of hungry workers as they did in July 2021, is a milestone of the shots in the back that the working class of Latin America and the United States received in their fight against imperialism.

The diversion of the mass revolutionary waves of recent years is what prepares the conditions for new direct counterrevolutionary offensives by imperialism and its regimes on the continent.

We have seen the renegades of Trotskyism being part of all these traps and frauds against the working class and calling publicly to support these class collaboration governments that Stalinism, the union bureaucracies and the left bourgeois factions promote to deceiving the masses, getting them off the streets and letting the repressive forces crush and imprison the best of the revolutionary vanguard, as we have seen in Colombia, Chile, Bolivia and Peru.

The role played by the reformist leaderships in the face of the revolutionary uprising in the US was also sinister, with the US working class fighting with pickets, strikes, street fighting, etc. raising the slogans of "dissolution of the police" and "no justice, no peace".
But it was not Biden’s arch-reactionary government or the phony “democratic socialists” of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez that watered down and controlled this mass uprising; it was Stalinism and ex-Trotskyists who acted as left-wing servants of the US pirates calling to support first Sanders and then Biden… “against the fascist Trump”. Today these leaderships complain and shout all together "Out with NATO!"... "Out with the US!"... "Enough with Biden!”, after they called publicly to support him in the US, taking the rebel masses off the streets.
Biden is but a new Trump who has come to promote his counterrevolutionary offensive at the international level on a terrain a thousand times higher and on a larger scale.

It is the crisis of the revolutionary leadership of the working class that has allowed these military adventures and these counterrevolutionary policies of brutal attack on the masses by imperialism and its regimes.

As an example of what we are saying, there are unions and workers' organizations in the hands of Stalinism, recycled by the capitalists and their regimes, who preserved it after '89 so that they can control the world labor movement as an internal police force. They are the ones who have given the counterrevolutionary regimes and governments of Beijing and Moscow a green light, so that they can be the true gendarmes and guardians of the capitalists’ businesses all across the world. And they can play that role because they are based on the historical and strategic defeats they have inflicted on their own working classes, after surrendering and betraying the socialist revolution in the West throughout the 20th century.

These governments, like those of China and Russia, also rely on the support provided by all the treacherous leaderships at international level. In the first decade of this century, they did so by proclaiming the infamy of “21st Century Socialism” and “Market Socialism”. Later, when they took off their mask in Syria supporting the fascist al-Assad and the assassin Putin, or the Stalinist government in Beijing that crushed over 200,000 revolts of the Chinese masses, they changed their lie. Now they are presenting these governments as the supporters of a "multipolar world" that supposedly weakens US hegemony. As if a world of multiple counterrevolutionary poles would be of any use to the working class and the oppressed peoples! Fraudsters!
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Yesterday, Stalinists, native bourgeois swindlers of their peoples, renegades of Trotskyism and various union bureaucracies set up the so-called "anti-terrorist front". They met in Tunisia in 2013 and 2014 to state that "in Syria, we have to crush terrorism." Thus, they let Assad, Putin, Erdogan and even the US to mercilessly massacre and commit genocide in Syria. They are responsible for isolating the Syrian and Middle Eastern working class and masses from the international proletariat.
Now in Ukraine, they are "neutral", they preach the "white dove of peace" or they openly support Putin with the lie that he is marching to "crush fascism in Kyiv"... Now, the Putin government, full of fascists and counterrevolutionary forces, which has produced anti-strike and anti-worker measures and laws that would make Hitler pale, is not at all irreconcilable with the fascists of Kyiv, with whom he has ruled with his oligarch friends since 1989.

Putin mobilized to tear the Ukrainian nation apart; he mobilized to crush their people in order to negotiate his relationship with the imperialist powers of NATO and with the US in particular.

With the capitalist restoration, the masses of the former workers' states were crushed and taken out of the picture. Today when they return to the fight, as in Belarus and Kazakhstan, and before in Romania, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine, these currents accuse them of being "agents of imperialism", just as they slander the thousands of workers and youth who are taking to the streets in Moscow and in different cities of Russia to stop Putin's massacre against their siblings in Ukraine.

Imperialism not only counts on the Stalinist scourge turned into a new bourgeoisie as a partner for the plundering of the wealth of China, Russia, Vietnam and now Cuba; it also counts on all the treacherous leaderships of the world proletariat that support them. They also count, as we have seen, on the renegades of Trotskyism who, breaking with the Fourth International and its legacy, support all of them from the left.

The latter circumstances amount to the greatest defeat and crisis of the subjectivity of the international proletariat. For example, the renegades of Trotskyism are together with the parties of the monarchy such as Podemos in the Spanish State; they are supporting French imperialism or supporting Lula and his front with the bourgeoisie in Brazil. These currents that proclaim “socialism” organized the “international” for the billionaire Sanders, who gave his votes and the support of the American working class to Biden. Let alone the cretin and disorganizing parliamentary politics of the workers' vanguard of the FIT-U in Argentina. All of them met in Havana to support the left wing of Castroism that is surrendering the Cuban revolution, while openly supporting the fascist al-Assad and Putin, who directs the carnage in Syria and Ukraine.

Such betrayals committed in the name of the Fourth International, which include shameless support for anti-worker bourgeois governments, direct agents of imperialism, such as those of the "new left" in Latin America, as they did before with Syriza in Greece, are the hardest blow dealt to the left wing of the world working class in recent decades.

These currents have sunk the clean banners of the Fourth International into the swamp of class collaboration. They have supported the government of Boric, who named as finance minister the trusted man of Wall Street that led the Central Bank in Piñera’s administration. They called for a vote for Castillo and his class collaboration front in Peru, which has openly attacked the masses and launched a high cost-of-living plan that not even Fujimori himself would have dared to implement. They are preparing to support the PT in Brazil, which kept the masses at bay during the Bolsonaro government.

Revisionism has placed the Fourth International as part of the block of leaderships that are willing to save the capitalist system and not to fight for the socialist revolution.

This board of traitors, defenders of the businesses of Wall Street, the City of London and Frankfurt, today supported on the left by the renegades of Trotskyism, feels offended by the “political backwardness” of the Ukrainian or Syrian workers. What do these people expect? When they, in the name of "communism" and "socialism", have openly supported the governments that in alliance with Moscow applied the worst plans of imperialism and the IMF in Ukraine. And to make matters worse: they supported the fascist al-Assad, supported by Putin, who committed a real slaughter against the Syrian masses… and we will denounce this tirelessly. On this matter, these leaderships will have to settle accounts with history. We won't keep quiet, regardless of how silent the traitors are.

Those who today are shouting “against NATO”, supported the NATO government of Syriza in Greece. They are the ones who gave up the struggle of the French working class that defended 35-hour shifts and confronted the plans for labor flexibility against the NATO government of the Fifth French Republic. They are the ones who, as we have said, supported Biden. They are the ones who surrendered the revolutionary struggle of the masses in Colombia and all of Latin America. They are the ones who openly support the infamous counterrevolutionary regimes of the Pacific. They are the ones who, from the South African government, act with the Pretoria army as gendarmes of all the black masses of South Africa. They are the ones who saved the imperialist companies that were cornered by the rise of mass revolutionaries in the Middle East as of 2011.

This is what the current crisis of the world working class is about: the overabundance of traitorous leaderships that constantly destroy what the masses build with their struggle, and the already open move of ex-Trotskyists to the ranks of opportunism and reformism.

A revolutionary regrouping of the ranks of the working class becomes essential, under the banners, the program and the theory of the Fourth International and Bolshevism, which have passed the test of history.

Putin's anger at Lenin is a tribute to the revolutionary program of Bolshevism and its policy on the national question in particular. And it is a condemnation of all the scourge and left overs of Stalinism and the betrayers of the Fourth International who support it from the left.

In the hands of the bourgeoisie and imperialism the whole society is threatened to falling into barbarism, while the traitors of the proletariat have already proclaimed that "socialism does not work anymore" and that "another world is possible", without the proletarian revolution, without the working class seizing power again.

Today, Ukraine has become the key acid test of the world class struggle. As we have already seen, in the international Marxist movement, there are different opportunist and treacherous programs and positions outlined on the war in Ukraine: the anti-defencists, the “neutrals”, those who openly support Putin or those who plan to defeat him with the support of "democratic" imperialism.

For a revolutionary program against the war

What has not been said in the debates and the positions of the currents that claim to belong in the world working class or call themselves "anti-capitalist" is that they defend the positions of Bolshevism, Lenin and the Third International on Ukraine.

The Bolsheviks were the ones who waged a decisive fight in defense of the oppressed nations against the imperialist gangs and the oppressor nations. They had the courage to face the first inter-imperialist war with the cry of "fraternization of the workers on the battlefront and turn the gun around, to transform the war into the beginning of the international socialist revolution in our countries." Stalinism liquidated this program a long time ago, not to mention – to the tragedy of the vanguard of the world proletariat – the currents that openly renounced the Fourth International and its legacy.

No people that oppress another can liberate itself. "The enemy is at home" should be the war cry of every worker aware of the imperialist countries that oppress the colonial and semi-colonial countries. In the semi-colonial countries, the central task is to expel imperialism and dispute the leadership of the working class to the native bourgeoisies. Only the working class, allied with the poor peasants, and seizing power, will be able to free the nation from any oppression.

The policy of Bolshevism that seized power in 1917 in Russia was based on this revolutionary Marxist thesis, which not only fought for land for the peasant to establish a revolutionary alliance with them. Not only did they call to "turn the gun" with the war cry of "the enemy is at home" during the war, but they also waged a ruthless fight against the Mensheviks and the Russian SRs around fighting Great Russian chauvinism and putting all the forces of the proletariat, the Soviets and the Red Army to give them the right to self-determination, and even independence to the nations oppressed for centuries by tsarism.

This program and this fight were a crucial point of support for the proletariat of the nations oppressed by tsarism to lead, with the peasants, the socialist revolution. Thus, the USSR and the Federation of Socialist Republics arose.

We Trotskyists fight under the banners of Lenin and Trotsky, of the III and IV Internationals.

We unconditionally stand on the side of the Ukrainian nation, crushed and invaded by "Great" Russian troops. We are for the military defeat of the white counterrevolutionary troops, commanded by Putin, the successor of Anton Denikin, the commander of the counterrevolutionary forces of tsarist Russia who launched an offensive to invade Ukraine when the Bolsheviks seized power.

We fought with Trotsky's position that stated that in order to stop and weaken Germany's invasion of the USSR in World War II, removing the Stalinist boot of oppression from Ukraine was crucial. In the struggle, the revolutionaries openly called to respect the right to independence of Soviet Ukraine. Otherwise, fascism would find a mass base as a result of the desperation of the exploited to free themselves from Moscow's Stalinist oppression. On the contrary, an independent and Soviet Ukraine would be a bastion against Hitler and fascism.

We denounce that US imperialism, with NATO, has stepped on Europe to take command of the imperialist bandits, who are trying to get hold of all the wealth of Russia. For now, they have imposed on the Franco-German axis to follow them, under NATO’s command.

The key fight against NATO is the fight to defeat it in the US, where its real commanders-in-chief are, i.e. the murderous Wall Street regime.

This is why, the working class' breaking away with Biden and the pirates of the Democratic Party is a crucial matter, as they are continuators of Trump's economic, political and military wars. The US reformist left is guilty of having submitted the fighting workers to the Democratic Party to get them off the streets.

We must turn to fight again because the lives of the masses of the Ukraine, the Middle East and the world working class also matter!

The American workers once again have the chance of putting forward the motion for the dissolution of the murderous police that kills the black workers in Minneapolis and all over the United States and in the same way, for fighting to stop the NATO war machine. This will be a task for the armed American working class in the workers' and soldiers' councils.

US workers have wide experience in crippling NATO's war machine. The struggles for the defeat of imperialism in Vietnam and the return of its soldiers, and the movement of the "million march against the war" in Iraq, make the American working class a central ally of the oppressed peoples invaded by imperialism.

The task of the moment is the struggle to expropriate the powerful war industry and high military technology of the US imperialism without compensation, surround Wall Street and expropriate without compensation the financial oligarchy, that 1% of parasites that monopolizes 50% of the world’s wealth, to put these funds at the service of decent jobs, health and education systems and housing for the workers and the poor people of the United States.
The enemy is at home! We must transform the fight against NATO into a revolutionary civil class war!

A decisive struggle of the American workers in solidarity with the workers of the Ukraine would mean a key step in the fight for the unification of the working class of that country, so that it takes the leadership of the war.

The Maastricht bandits have constantly pulled their nails out and attempted secret negotiations with Putin, as did Macron or the German government. Juicy businesses are at stake due to the sanctions to Russia. For example, French presidential candidate Le Pen, representative of a sector of the French big bourgeoisie, is calling to break Maastricht, to make their own "Brexit", while, like Trump before, she supports Putin when stating that he is no genocidal. She is the voice of the large French transnationals that have enormous investments and fabulous fortunes extracted from Russia and consider that without Russian gas flowing to Germany directly through Nord Stream 2, a bloc with Frankfurt would be pointless.

Huge deals with Russia have been closed and fenced off to great Germany. Germany has refused to send weapons to Ukraine, not even defensive ones. Reluctantly, and looking for the first opportunity, they will have no problem making deals or breaking them, either with the US or with Putin, since it is about business. It has already announced that for the first time since World War II it will arm its own German army with a $100 billion investment.

The leaderships of the trade unions and the workers' organizations of Maastricht have subjected the proletariat to their imperialist regimes and governments. They are infamous union bureaucracies and labor aristocracy that live off the crumbs that fall from the super-profits obtained by imperialist looting. The fight to break any policy of collaboration with the imperialist Maastricht, the call to unify the struggle and the demands of the European working class with the immigrant workers, the fight to set up a revolutionary leadership of the trade unions that guarantees the unity of the demands and the struggle of the European proletariat, are crucial tasks in the fight to defeat the imperialist powers of Maastricht and NATO. This will only be achieved with the revolution of the European workers and soldiers councils.

We fight for the immediate withdrawal of military bases and counter-revolutionary Moscow troops in the former Muslim Soviet republics, such as in Kazakhstan, and the withdrawal of the butcher Putin army from Belarus.

We call on the workers of Eastern Europe to unite with the workers of Maastricht, to fight for their common class interests, confronting imperialist Europe and the governments of the Glacis countries, true maquilas of the European transnationals. We call to stand up and demand the withdrawal of invading troops from Ukraine and to go and aid the Ukrainian working class.

The Russian proletariat has in their hands the capacity to paralyze, from within, the war machine of the Moscow jackal. The bourgeoisie pushes the most exploited sectors of the working class and the masses to the battlefront so that they are the ones who die in the war in Ukraine. The workers of Russia do not see the Ukrainian people as their enemy; it is in Moscow, and it is the infamous capitalist restoration regime of Putin and his counter-revolutionary gang of super-rich. Fraternizing with the Ukrainian workers and moving to the resistance with their weapons is a task that the conscious workers must organize within the oppressive army.
 
In Ukraine we are fighting for the generalized arming of the workers and the people, an issue that the Ukrainian bourgeoisie and imperialism are very careful not to allow happening. We fight to put the control of the armament of the reservists and of their preparation and military instruction under the responsibility of the unions and mass organizations.

We call on the soldiers to set up their committees to choose their chiefs and officers, to take into their hands, together with the workers' committees in each factory and each city, the political and military leadership of the war, starting by expropriating all businesses, lands and companies of imperialism and the oligarchs, associates of the assassin Putin, in the Ukraine. We call for the nationalization without compensation and under workers’ control of the transnationals and the big companies of the Ukrainian oligarchs, to make them produce to win the war and for the people to eat and live with dignity. We call to put under the control of the workers' organizations the entire lot of industrial activities and all the links in the food and supply market chain that provide the people of essential goods.

For a National Council of Ukrainian workers and soldiers that fraternizes with the Russian reservists and rank-and-file soldiers, the base of Putin's army, to stop this monstrous war machine and for them to go over with their weapons to the field of defense of the oppressed nation and their class siblings from Ukraine!

Believing that NATO and the governments of the imperialist bandits of the Europe of Maastricht, the greatest murderers of the oppressed peoples, will act as "liberation troops" of the Ukrainian nation, or arm it so that it can triumph, is a reactionary utopia and a brutal deception to the workers. The imperialist bandits of NATO and Maastricht, while expanding NATO in Eastern Europe, have left Ukraine to be massacred by Putin, to later divide it up. This is how they seek to keep the best businesses, closer to Moscow and then go for it.

We call on the workers in the ports and carriers around the world to boycott all weaponry shipments that will strengthen the NATO or Russian war machine, and to deliver any weapons that will strengthen the resistance of the Ukrainian nation.

The Ukrainian working class has in their hands the only way to end the massacre and to unite with its siblings in Donbass. This path is to raise the demand for "full right to self-determination of Donbass" and the fight against the lay-offs and privatizations that imperialism and capitalists promote in all the mines in Ukraine. The road to the unity of the Ukrainian working class means also, and decisively, raising a set of demands that contains as a first point the rupture with the IMF and the disregard of the fraudulent foreign debt to get higher salaries, education and a decent life. Out with Putin and out with the IMF from Ukraine!

The demand for the immediate return of Crimea to the Ukrainian nation is part of the struggle facing the partition that the Zelensky government is negotiating with Putin and NATO, secretly and behind the people’s backs,.

The unity of the Ukrainian working class with the Russian and European proletariat would once again put on at top of the agenda the struggle for a workers', Soviet and independent Ukraine, which would reinstate the dictatorship of the proletariat, but under the leadership of the red workers and soldiers, and not of the Stalinist lackeys who handed it over to imperialism in '89, and do it over and over again.

The unity of the European working class would put at the top of the agenda the fight to put an end to the imperialist Maastricht and advance to conquer the United Socialist States of Europe.

Under the banner of the Fourth International we affirm, with the Transitional Program of 1938, that “The bourgeoisie and its agents use the war question, more than any other, to deceive the people by means of abstractions, general formulas, lame phraseology: “neutrality,” “collective defense,” “arming for the defense of peace,” “struggle against fascism,” and so on. All such formulas reduce themselves in the end to the fact that the war question, i.e., the fate of the people, is left in the hands of the imperialists, their governing staffs, their diplomacy, their generals, with all their intrigues and plots against the people.”

It is necessary to help the masses to discover the interests of the working class in this war. That is why we fight for the disarmament of the bourgeoisie by the workers, and to achieve this, we fight for their generalized arming of the latter during the war. We are not neutral; as the Transitional Program says: “But the proletariat is nothing like neutral in the war between Japan and China, or a war between Germany and the USSR.” We defend China and the USSR through the proletarian revolution, "not through the imperialists, who will strangle both China and the USSR."

In this case, we defend Ukraine as an oppressed nation with the international unity of the working class of both Maastricht and Moscow, to put an end to the imperialist EU and the guardian of its businesses in Eurasia, the butcher Putin.

When the Ukrainian workers speak of the "defense of their nation" or their "homeland", they are referring to the defense of their house, their family and other families like theirs against the invasion, the bombs and the massacre. They are defending their right to have a nation that is not looted or oppressed by alleged "protectors". For the capitalists, the "defense of the fatherland" means enlarging their business, the seizure of colonies and new markets. Pacifism and bourgeois patriotism are total liars.

"War is a gigantic commercial enterprise, especially for the war industry," states the Transition Program (our bolds). And then it continues: " Workers’ control of war industries is the first step in the struggle against the “manufacturers” of war" (our bold). That is the first immediate task that the working class must take on in all over imperialist Europe, in all the countries where NATO has presence and also in "great" Russia in particular.
We call on the workers of Russia and throughout Europe to confiscate war profits and expropriate war industry or place it under workers' control where it is nationalized. Not a man, not a penny for the war machine of the countries that oppress other peoples and slaughter their working class!

In secret meetings between the cowardly Ukrainian bourgeoisie, NATO and Putin, in the midst of a sea of the Ukrainian people's blood, every step of the invasion is being negotiated and also the new borders of Ukraine, with cities entirely destroyed and demolished, as Mariupol. Down with the desls, which like Minsk before, today prepare the partition and colonization of Ukraine!

Against the infamy of the reformist left, which ties the fate of the war to the victory of jackal Putin or to the false illusions and deceptions of the Ukrainian masses that NATO is going to liberate them, we affirm that the only "lesser evil" in this war is the victory of the Ukrainian nation against the counterrevolutionary forces of Moscow. This would leave the oppressed nation in the best position to defeat imperialism and its plans to transform Ukraine into a protected colony and would quickly put the working class on the offensive. This victory can only be guaranteed by the proletariat leading the national war against the Ukrainian bourgeoisie and its infamous pacts, always ready to surrender the oppressed nation for the benefit of their businesses.