On the 11th anniversary of the Syrian revolution…
The revolutionary open talk
on the Ukrainian question was held
organized by the Collective for the
Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI
Stand with the heroic Syrian resistance fighting the fascist Al Assad, the butcher Putin and imperialism that plunders the nation!
In Syria and Ukraine: the same fight, the same enemy!
In late March, on the 11th anniversary of the Syrian revolution, an open talk was held in a moment when Russian tanks and troops started invading Ukraine. Comrades from more than 12 countries such as Russia, Syria, Iran, Japan, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Italy, the Spanish State, etc., participated in this event. The Latin American groups of the FLTI also participated, such as Comuneros from Colombia, CROJA from Brazil, LOI-CI / Democracia Obrera from Argentina, POI-CI from Chile, LSTI from Peru and Bolivia.
In this open talk held, the political positions on the Ukrainian question (which we are publishing in this supplement of the International Workers' Organization) by the JRCL-RMF of Japan, the comrades of the Proletarian Advance group of Italy, the workers of Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Mill of Iran and Andrey Sedov, correspondent of “The International Workers Organiser” in Russia.
In this event, revolutionary fighters of the Syrian resistance intervened who are fighting the fascist Al Assad and the invading troops of Putin and Turkey, who under the command of the US imperialism have divided up Syria, an occupied nation.
Opening the event, comrade Paula Medrano, of the Editorial Committee of "The International Workers Organiser", made its introduction, which we reproduce first, since it raises what unites the 11th anniversary of the Syrian revolution to the invasion of Ukraine by the assassin Putin, who is carrying out a war of massacre and occupation so that later, in a new "Minsk pact" with the Gringos, both end up sharing it out.
Comrades Nadia Briante and Eliza Funes, Marxist intellectuals and authors of the work "2014-2017: Ukraine in civil war", also participated, presenting the position of revolutionary Marxism in the face of the national question. They also spoke about the genesis of the current war, that is, the events that shocked the Ukrainian nation in 2014, when the masses overthrew the government of Yanukovych, an agent of Putin's and the best representative of the IMF and its worst plans of belt-tighting and looting against the workers and the Ukrainian nation. Accompanying this report, we publish in the final part of this supplement of the International Workers' Organiser as an annex, Lenin's 1919 letter to the Ukrainian workers and peasants.
The event ended with the intervention of Carlos Munzer, member of the Editorial Board of “El Organizador Obrero Internacional/International Worker Organizer". In these pages we reproduce an article based on this intervention, entitled: "We must defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine!".
In a second day of debate and discussion of the groups that make up the FLTI from Europe, Latin America and Africa, held at the beginning of April, the international premises on which the war in Ukraine and the capitalist crisis are taking place were extensively discussed. As a result, a study has been carried out that we publish in this supplement. It also develops in depth the keys to the Marxist program on Ukraine and its invasion by Russia, a program that had been already extensively developed in a statement at the end of February, published in the newspaper Democracia Obrera No. 109, as well as in different newspapers of the FLTI groups. The reader can also find this statement on our website.
Of course, for the internationalist Trotskyist currents, Ukraine poses a great challenge, since it represents a milestone in the international situation and in the times of crisis, wars and revolutions of the 21st century.
As is extensively developed in the aforementioned work from the beginning of April, the United States, by the hand of Biden, has launched a fierce trade war, and on a terrain superior to that initiated by Trump, to break the commercial unity that the Franco-German axis had conquered with a vital space throughout Europe and sucking -associated with Putin's bourgeois gang- the sources of raw materials from the "great" Russia. The Gringos have carried out this offensive with NATO, the military institution with which the US, winner of World War II, "protects Europe", asserting the war result with the deepening of its military power on the planet.
How could it be otherwise, if one imperialist power is doing well, the others are doing badly. That is what the imperialist era is all about, the pillage of different bandits who compete for the world market, its branches of production and areas of influence, who manage business and trade surpluses with their financial capital, as does the Wall Street associated City of London for managing the financial havens of Cyprus, or forcing China to buy US government bonds, thus financing itself with the surplus of exports from that great Asian country.
In the aforementioned work, there is an open debate with all the positions of those who still claim to support socialism or the international Trotskyist movement, but in reality take up os postures and positions of pro-imperialist social democracy or Stalinism... The leadership crisis: That is the key that explains the lack of synchronization between the objective processes of the enormous waves of mass offensives that have hit different areas of the planet since the 2008 crisis and is what allows imperialism, supported by treacherous leaderships, to have been able to push those waves back.
Supported by class collaboration fronts, with pacifist tricks, they have managed to divert the mass revolutionary offensives. The role of Stalinism and the renegades of Trotskyism was decisive for the regimes and governments cornered by the masses to achieve their objective. This is how we saw it in the revolutionary waves of the masses in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and in the United States itself.
In the latter country, the Castroite bourgeoisie, the North American Communist Party and the currents that long ago broke with the Fourth International called to support Sanders, who in turn submitted the working class and the black people to the Democratic Party of the US imperialists. What a paradox! The traitorous neo-Stalinist reformist left that called to support Biden "against Trump" in the US, is the one that today criticizes and denounces Biden's outrages with NATO in Ukraine. How Cynic!
As we develop in the pages of this Special Supplement to "The International Workers' Organiser", those who support Putin and his invasion of Ukraine are the same ones who support all the regimes of imperialist Maastricht, which they serve from the bureaucracy of the trade unions and the social-imperialist parties. This is what the overabundance of traitorous leaderships is about, which close the path to any revolutionary offensive of the masses.
The consequence of so many betrayals and deceptions are what we see today. Faced with the crisis and the capitalist crash, the bourgeoisie begins to speak in the language of fascism and war. This is how we see it in Ukraine with the invasion of Putin, the gendarme of imperialist business in Eurasia, after crushing the proletariat in a general strike in Kazakhstan and invading Belarus.
It is that bankrupt imperialism, as we develop it in this special supplement of the International Workers' Organiser, now is going to the end. It even goes for the markets of Moscow and Beijing; and also goes to destabilize and push back what the Franco-German axis had conquered in its vital space throughout Europe. That is what NATO's role in Eastern Europe and in Ukraine in particular is all about.
As we present on the cover of this supplement: with the Russian invasion, Putin and NATO are preparing the definitive partition of Ukraine.
This material, together with the positions that we at the FLTI established on the battles in Maidan Square in 2014, in the face of the counterrevolutionary offensive in kyiv in June 2014, in our struggle against Putin and imperialism’s Minsk Pact for the partition of Ukraine, and the debates with revolutionary currents at the international level on the Ukrainian question (such as the comrades from Japan, Russia, etc.), will be part of an ebook, which is about to come out, edited by Editorial Rudolph Klement.
Ukraine has become an acid test, which clearly defines, in the ideological and programmatic field, reform versus revolution. |
