Letter to the 60th International Antiwar Assembly of Japan from the Collective for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International - FLTI
Whether under the jackboot of Putin or that of NATO, Ukraine will still be a colony under tutelage
To the Executive Committee of the 60th International Anti-war Assembly
To the revolutionary Zengakuren youth
From the Collective for the re-foundation of the Fourth International – FLTI, we are sending our internationalist revolutionary greetings to the assembly you are holding. We here adopt as ours your war-cry:
“Working people all over the world, let's unite to crush Putin's war!”
We adopt as ours the call of the workers of Milan, who 30 days ago called to the general strike to defeat NATO and stop the massacre of Putin in Ukraine to the war cry:
“War on the war!”
We, the internationalists, call to defeat the counterrevolutionary offensive of Putin, who wants to complete the crushing of the Ukrainian working class, from Donbass to Kyiv, to impose the same plan that the IMF has sought to impose to that subjugated nation for years.
We denounce that the US imperialism, at the command of NATO, is handing over Ukraine as a pawn to a war of massacre and partition, for itself to enter in the European business, of which the US were marginalized by the French-German axis, in order to be the one that deeply penetrates into Russia and gets its whole sources of raw materials and commodities. This is what the other character of the ongoing war is about.
Maastricht Europe was threatening to take the huge oil, gas and raw materials reserves of the “great” Russia as well as to control also other key branches of production. USA couldn’t allow this, or else it would be risking losing its hegemony in the world market.
The US “is now in the front row” in the fight for Moscow, leading the European continent and its rival powers to a brutal energy crisis, an increase in the prices of commodities and food, which have made inflation to sky-rocket. Meanwhile, it besieges the “great” Russia with a huge trade war.
The shutting down of the gas pipeline “Nordstream 2” indicated that, for now, the European imperialist powers have subordinated to the US offensive, which commands NATO.
After three world crashes in the 21st century, the US imperialism returns to the world to throw its entire crisis on it, and recover its hegemonic role in the world economy which it had begun to lose.
Comrades
These inter-imperialist disputes, the disputes for the new markets of the “great” Russia and the powerful China are paid by the masses with massacres, as in Ukraine and in Syria and Middle East before, just to give an example. They are paid by the working class, while the capitalists do big businesses with the war, selling weapons and guaranteeing, as it happens now, the circulation of grains from the bombed ports of Ukraine at extraordinary high prices for which Cargill, Monsanto and other imperialist cereal companies have been scoring record profits.
The big oil companies, such as Exxon, Shell, Total, distribute tens of thousands of millions of dollars in dividends to their shareholders for the increase in the price of energy and fuel. The transnational companies save themselves from the catastrophes by emptying the treasuries of the states, printing dollars, currency and values without backup. And by throwing to the workers of all the continents a brutal inflation and increase in the cost of living, which turn the subsistence of the exploited class impossible in the whole world.
There’s also the example of the “powerful” China in which a housing bubble exploded, in the same caliber as that of Wall Street in 2008, sending millions of savers to ruin and increasing the sufferings on the working class.
In this moment, the one bleeding out is the Ukrainian working class, today divided between the Russian invasion and the “siren songs” of the EU, which peddles that the workers would have the wellbeing they need inside it. They want to impose the Ukrainian workers the alternative that either they stay on the burning embers of the EU or in the boiling oil of the “great” Russia, crushed by the jackboot of the butcher Putin.
IT IS A LIE! Whether under the control of Moscow or NATO, Ukraine will be a colony under tutelage.
The one paying the war is the Ukrainian working class. The very Zelensky government has decreed, in the midst of Putin’s bombing, that the capitalists can fire the workers as they want, without compensation, and are even able to not paying their wages. While in Donbass, which is under the control of the Russian troops, the dismissals of thousands of miners and the mine closures continue, as the IMF has demanded for years and is still doing.
Comrades,
The counterrevolutionary forces of Stalinism and broad sectors of the renegades of Marxism have “joined Putin’s tanks” and supported his counterrevolutionary invasion to Ukraine. They make one of the biggest enemies of the working class, such as Putin, appear as an ally before their eyes. The excuse is no other than to say that he and the “great” Russia confront US imperialism and that Putin would be invading Ukraine “to crush fascism.”
IT IS A LIE! In Russia, the workers on strike, and moreover if they set up independent unions are convicted to jail and death penalty. Thus, thousands of workers and youth who refuse to go to fight in Ukraine are located in the dungeons of the counterrevolutionary regime of the new wannabe Czar of Russia.
Comrades, the revolutionary Marxists must openly confront Stalinism and other renegades of Marxism and neo-Trotskyist currents that support the butcher Putin. His bayonets point to the Russian working class and the masses in the former Soviet republics. They have been sent to kill the masses in Syria in a true genocide. They have supported al-Assad and, with Turkey and the US, they shared among themselves the businesses of a partitioned and bloodied Syria. The same thing they want to do in Ukraine, under Russian troops occupation.
With its military bases in Armenia, Moscow guaranteed Nagorno Karabakh to Azerbaijan for British Petroleum and Turkey to steal the oil from the Black Sea for the route of the oil pipelines across the Caucasus.
Months before invading Ukraine, the counterrevolutionary shock forces of Putin went to crush a revolutionary general strike of the workers of Kazakhstan, who had risen up against the plundering and brutal exploitation of the imperialist transnational companies, its oil companies and big steel factories such as Arcelor Mittal. Before invading Ukraine, the route followed by Putin was Belarus to crush the workers which, in political struggle and huge strikes, sought to defeat Putin’s ally Lukashenko government.
This counterrevolutionary raid of Moscow is a response to the entering to the fight of the enormous battalions of the working class in the former soviet republics, in both, the Muslim republics and the ones of Europe itself. The heroic struggle of the Ukrainian working class over these last years are the expression of it.
Comrades,
The pro-Stalinist left at international level declares itself an “enemy of NATO”. This is a lie. They, together with Podemos and the PSOE from the Spanish State, are in the same government supervised by the Bourbon monarchy. The last NATO meeting was held there, where Stalinists, social democrats and other traitors were their hosts. Likewise, in France, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain itself, the Stalinists control the most powerful unions in Europe. From them, the Stalinists, as internal police within the labor movement, support and protect the regimes of the imperialist Europe of Maastricht, all members of NATO.
The Stalinist left and other traitors to Marxism called to support Biden with the excuse of supporting "democracy" against Trump's "fascism": Traitors! A thousand times traitors! Biden, as Trump before, is the commander in chief of NATO and the U.S. government that, from the majority of the IMF directory, imposes the worst looting plans in the semi-colonial world, and in Ukraine in particular, which is indebted at more than 88 billion of dollars, which are paid for with the hunger, super-exploitation and misery of the people.
This class collaboration policy is what has also diverted and strangled the revolutionary uprisings in Latin America in Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Cuba itself. A bourgeois and pro-gringo "new left" is trying to stand up to close the road to socialist revolution, while the new lackeys of the Cuban bourgeoisie, from the island's Communist Party, have crushed a hunger uprising in the streets of La Havana filling Cuban's jails with political prisoners.
The war and the massacre of the Ukrainian working class, then, as before the counterrevolutionary crushing with the massacre in Syria, is the consequence of a chain of betrayals to the world working class by Stalinism, the remnants of social democracy and the renegades of Marxism.
Comrades,
In Ukraine, the way to finish defeating the Russian invasion is to recompose the unity of the working class so that it takes the military leadership of the war against national oppression everywhere. Only with a united working class will Ukraine be able to defeat the invasion of Putin and Moscow and stop the pretensions of NATO and IMF to plunder it. That is why our battle cry is:
Out with Putin and the invading troops! Out with the IMF! Out with imperialism!
Enough of misery wages! Nationalization without compensation of all the mines, the lands, the transnationals and the banks that are in the hands of the oligarchs associated with imperialism or the butchers of Moscow!
These are the minimum demands with which the working class can unite their ranks from Donbass to Kyiv, open the path to take the military leadership of the war, putting under its command all the military forces of the nation.
The unity of the Ukrainian working class, leading the fight against the butcher Putin, would arouse the enthusiasm and win the support of the European working class from Portugal to Moscow.
From Ukraine, a military workers' command of the war would incite tens of millions of exploited Russians to rise up against Putin and close the path to the "peace of the graveyards" and the division of Ukraine that Zelensky, the lackey of the U.S., is preparing, together with Putin, as soon as imperialism gives him the order.
Meanwhile, a pro-social-democratic and pro-imperialist left proclaims that through NATO and “democratic imperialisms” the masses will get the weapons to defeat Putin. This sinister policy is promoted by the so-called "anti-capitalists" in Europe, pro-social democratic currents like the LIT, which treat NATO as if they were liberation troops and not tools for subjugation, counterrevolutionary wars and oppression.
We revolutionary Marxists have the program and the strategy to win, inherited from the combat of the Bolsheviks and the Third International and from Trotsky's combat against the Stalinist scourge. The way is none other than setting up the combat:
FOR AN INDEPENDENT SOVIET UKRAINE
This conquest would undoubtedly be a bastion of the struggle for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms, without Stalinists or traitors, in all the territories of the former USSR, as a decisive link in the struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe.
Comrades,
Like yesterday in Syria, in the combats in Chile, Colombia and Latin America, fighting for the freedom of the world's political prisoners, fighting against imperialism that threatens to lead the entire planet to barbarism, the internationalist Trotskyists of the FLTI have met you fighting together in the same trench, now in the Ukraine, fighting the same enemy.
The working class has not given up and has put up huge battles. The forces of the proletariat of the imperialist powers prevent the latter, for the time being, from leading the civilization to new large-scale military conflagrations. First, the imperialist powers, in their disputes, must crush their own working classes, which yesterday forced them, like in the U.S., to leave Iraq and Afghanistan. That is the path that the Russian working class must follow in order to defeat the Russian war machine from within.
The alternative, comrades, is not only war, but also that the road to international socialist revolution remains open. The working class has not been defeated. Therefore, the alternative is and remains to be:
“socialism or war”
The tragedy for the masses, the one that pushes here and there to setbacks and partial defeats, is not their weakness in their combats, but the betrayal of their leaderships... The war cry that reformism has raised on the planet and the so called "New Left ” is that “socialism is no more”. It does so at the moment of the greatest catastrophe of the capitalist system, which threatens to lead human civilization to barbarism and widespread famine.
Comrades,
In different countries, where the masses have entered the fight, the regimes of the expropriators of the people take hostages that they keep locked up in the dungeons of their states. Palestinian youth, Greek and Chilean youth, the rebels in Cuba, the oppressed in Moscow who refuse to accompany Putin in his military attack on Ukraine, among others, are locked up in the prisons of the capitalists.
The leaders of the SiCobas and USB unions in Milan, Italy, have recently been arrested. They are the ones who put forward the motion:
“War to war throughout Europe and for the general strike”
They fought to combat Putin's invasion of Ukraine and NATO's counterrevolutionary forces. They are the most advanced, together with the combative trade unionism of the Spanish State, of the internationalist forces that are regrouping in Europe to fight alongside the Ukrainian working class and stop the NATO war machine.
In the prisons of Greece, the young anarchist Giannis Michailidis is on a hunger strike fighting for his freedom. He was at the head of the fight against the infamous Troika regime and supported, from the dungeons of the regime, the Leon Sedov Brigade, which left its martyrs in the fight for the Syrian revolution.
Comrades, there is no time to lose. We must unite the forces of revolutionary Marxism. The time has come to set up an internationalist bloc to confront all the traitorous leaderships that paralyze the working-class offensives.
The time to promote international days of combat, as the Zengakuren youth did when marching to the Russian embassy in Tokyo, to defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has come.
The time to jointly call for an international campaign for the freedom of the workers of Milan, the vanguard of the fight against Putin's counterrevolutionary war on Ukraine and NATO has arrived.
Not one more day the rebellious youth of Greece, the revolutionary Chilean youth, the revolted youth of the hungry in Cuba, should be repressed by the Stalinist scourge, nor the tens of thousands of tortured, mutilated and murdered in the prisons of the fascist al-Assad, may stay in the prisons of the bourgeois regimes!
Freedom now to all the political prisoners of the world working class!
Comrades,
In wars, be they of oppression and looting or inter-imperialist, the unity and centrality of internationalist revolutionary Marxism is put on the order of the day to transform them into the beginning of the socialist revolution and to present a battle to reformism throughout the world.
The hour of the great world military conflagrations is approaching. Only the socialist revolution can stop it. This is what the battle of the revolutionary Marxists is about.
Carlos Munzer, Abu Muad, Paula Medrano, James Sakala and Milenka Lopez
for the International Secretariat of the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI
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55th Antiwar Assembly
Speech of Carlos Munzer in the national political plennary of the JRCL-RMF in December 2019
Demonstration of the Zengakuren youth to the Zionist embassy in Tokyo, supporting the Palestinian masses (May 19, 2021)
Building reduced to rubbles by Putin's bombs in Ukraine
 Mariupol: Common graves of civilians kulled by Putin's troops
Russia: crackdown on a demonstration against the war
June 2022: NATO summit in Madrid
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