July 2022
Preview of the next publication of Rudolph Klement Publishing House:
Ukraine at War
It will be Soviet and independent or a protected colony
By Nadia Briante, Eliza Funes and Carlos Munzer
Preface
This work comes to light at a time when it’s almost five months since the invasion of Ukraine started. Rivers of ink have already been written on it.
In the recent Davos Summit*, Henry Kissinger –former Secretary of State for US imperialism during the invasion of Vietnam and other outrages carried out by the US imperialists on the planet– stated that it was time to end this war. He stated that Ukraine should cede Donbass and the corridor bordering the Azov sea from Mariupol to Russia.
For Biden and the US establishment, however, that time has not yet come. It remains for Ukraine to be even more destroyed, subjugated and even divided during the war. The plan of the US imperial government is also that Russia, although it conquers a portion of Ukraine, results enormously weakened and fenced politically and economically.
The fact is that the US, as NATO commander, is handing over Ukraine as a pawn to enter European businesses, from which it had been marginalized before the Franco-German axis, and to penetrate deep into Russia and keep for itself the Russian sources of raw materials and commodities. This is also about the other aspect of the character of this war. Meanwhile, the US keeps adding countries to NATO such as Sweden and Finland.
For the US, it is not only about Ukraine or the "great" Russia, but also about immediately launching a huge offensive against all the former Soviet republics. In those nations, capitalist restoration was imposed decades ago and imperialism has been plundering them. There Putin has been acting, as we will insist in this work, as the guardian of the businesses of the transnationals and the capitalists. This role is played not only in some of the former Soviet republics of Eurasia, but also fundamentally within Russia, where huge imperialist investments have been established in entire branches of production, as we will demonstrate in this work.
Before the start of the Russian invasion, Biden had announced his intention for Ukraine to join NATO, just when the key to the Nord Stream II gas pipeline, which came directly from Russia to Germany, was about to be opened. This would have transformed German imperialism into the great distributor of gas and energy throughout Europe. That is why this gas pipeline was built mainly by German companies, of which Putin and his oligarchs were junior partners, and his president was Gehrard Schröder, a former German chancellor.
The US could not allow Germany to consolidate a European vital space which, if materialized, would have left it in a privileged location to end up controlling, together with France, the most important businesses in the extraction of wealth from Russia. Much less could the US allow this in the midst of stagnation in the world economy only comparable to the crash of the 1930s. In the midst of such a capitalist crisis, the different powers are vying for the world market, which continues to shrink, while the fictitious values grow exponentially under the control of the international financial oligarchy, without any type of backing in goods.
In the Ukrainian question, the curtain is drawn open on the acute inter-imperialist disputes that have been revived around the new emerging markets of Russia and China since 1989. The clashes between the Franco-German axis and Anglo-American imperialism to control those markets and their wealth had already been transformed (whether with Obama or Trump), into open disputes and harsh trade and tariff wars.
It is clear that the powers left behind in the world market are becoming or will become more and more aggressive. This, ultimately, is what was happening with the US, which was weakened by the Franco-German axis on its way to Moscow and all of Eurasia. Given this, US imperialism aggressively redoubled its offensive. Through NATO, it stepped on Europe and Ukraine in particular.
Until now and reluctantly, on the Ukraine issue the Franco-German axis seems to have accepted subordinating itself to the US via NATO, while it waits in a crouched way for this war to end, so that in the "peace negotiations" they can define how they will be located not only in its relationship with Ukraine and Russia, but within Europe as a whole. This is very important for them because the US has once again sealed a pact with British imperialism and has set foot in Eastern Europe, disciplining the EU and NATO, to which most European countries have already joined.
It is under these conditions that the war in Ukraine is developing. We are facing preparatory moments of new jumps to inter-imperialist world conflagrations in the future, if the proletariat does not prevent it. The struggle to colonize Russia and China is currently and will be the engine of this.
However, stating that the conflict in Ukraine is the beginning of the Third World War is a fallacy.
We are facing a war of invasion by Putin and Russia to keep a part of the Ukrainian nation, while the US imperialists and NATO, without firing a single shot directly, seek to be which control the largest portion of the prey. It's been almost five months of war and the borders of a new Ukraine a thousand times subjected and tied with double and triple chains are already being drawn with shots.
This would be a rare “inter-imperialist war” that NATO and the US would be fighting against Russia, when Ukraine is only given missiles that do not go beyond 80 kilometers, a couple of drones and totally defensive weapons for the artillery duel. After five months there was not a single direct military clash of Russia with NATO…
On the other hand, the imperialist powers fully understand that they still have neither the mass base nor the support of their own working class to go to big military conflagrations and send the workers to kill each other as it was in the First and Second World Wars.
The US had to abandon Afghanistan and they were expelled from Iraq not only by the Iraqi masses’ resistance, but because the US working class and also the European one and the ones from all NATO countries refused to go to die for the sake of the businesses of their own imperialist bourgeoisies. The demonstrations against the war in the Spanish State as well as the "million men march" in USA in 2008-2010 are an example of what we are saying.
The doors to the imperialist war are not yet opened, although the current conditions of the imperialist crash, the dispute among the imperialist powers and a thousand and one betrayals to the mass uprisings made by their leaderships are tragically paving the way for this.
There are still many battles to be fought, not only by imperialism but also by the world working class against their governments and regimes. This is so, because, ultimately, the path to war will be defined by the class struggle and the advances or setbacks of the world revolution.
The opening of the Second World War was imposed with the crushing of the German proletariat at the hands of Hitler and fascism, with the counterrevolutionary victory of Franco, with the diversion of the French revolution of 1936-38 and with the strategic defeat that meant for the world working class the rise of Stalinism in the USSR. The semicolonial world in the mid '30s was paralyzed and suffered deep defeats. The current situation is far from this.
Those who proclaim that the Third World War has already started are deceiving the masses about the character that it will have and the conditions for its development. Actually, first the governments of the central countries must defeat their own working class or co-opt sectors of it (as Germany did in the First World War with the labor aristocracy of the Social Democratic Party) so that they accompany the imperialist gangs to their warlike adventures
Reformism separates the working class – which is the one that fights and dies in the battlefields– from the emergence, evolution and development of the war. It seems that for the liquidators of Marxism the class struggle is suspended during the war, when actually it only becomes more acute.
To close the path to the Third World War, the task of the moment is to re-group the ranks of the international workers revolutionary vanguard to remove the treacherous leaderships from the proletariat, as they cause huge defeats or diversions to the enormous revolutionary processes opened by the masses with heroic combats.
The Third World War, if the working class does not prevent it, will be an inter-imperialist war for the spheres of influence and for the division of the new markets of Russia and China, which the imperialist powers must recolonize completely. Some of their first acts may be expressed in fratricidal wars promoted by different imperialisms, that is, proxy wars, where the different powers fight in the back room to grab this or that sphere of influence and plunder the wealth or sources of raw materials. But there is no doubt that the Third World War will begin un the dame way as the Second one ended, with atomic bombings like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and with great wars even in a continental character.
What we are witnessing today is the development of harsh trade wars, closure of markets and customs borders and acute inter-imperialist disputes, which inevitably lead to wars of invasion and for markets. That is the case of the counterrevolutionary invasions that we saw and see in the Middle East to control the oil routes, the one that is taking place today in Ukraine, the one that happened previously in Belarus, the wars that took place in the Caucasus, etc. These are just a few examples of how imperialist powers and their agents split up – sometimes by shooting or with threats of shooting – the subjugated nations.
What they want to hide in the midst of so much talk to dress the butcher of the "great" Russia in silk is that with the bloody invasion of Ukraine, Putin seeks to maintain the status quo of his role as gendarme of imperialism throughout Eurasia.
But, as we have seen, Kissinger, together with an imperialist sector of the EU, stated at the Davos Forums: "let's stop the war now and consummate the partition of Ukraine." Kissinger is warning that NATO, with Biden at the helm, has the risk of weakening Putin to extreme degrees before the US takes direct control of most of the former Soviet republics where Russia is the gendarme of the business of all capitalists. The danger is that in these disputes between Moscow and NATO, the mass movement can appear, as it happened in Kazakhstan, now in Armenia –after Russia and Turkey gave Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan and British Petroleum– or in Belarus itself, recently invaded by Putin, to enter Ukraine with his troops. These are part of the contradictions that imperialism has in its offensive.
However, for the UK-US financial oligarchy, the time to move forward is now. The Nord Stream II gas pipeline has already been closed. For now, the French-German axis is with NATO. And that is why the US and England believe that it is time to go for more and continue to wear down Moscow, even if it means handing over a destroyed part of Eastern Ukraine.
In this book we also affirm that while Russia seeks to annex Donbass as it did with Crimea yesterday, the US together with the IMF, the World Bank and its partners in the City of London want to suck out, during and after the war, until the last drop of the blood and sweat of the workers and of the riches of the Ukrainian nation. They do this through their transnationals and with the IMF, the World Bank and the states that impose a usurious foreign debt on Ukraine, even with the war credits that they are granting today, which mean enormous profits for the coffers of the imperialist bankers, as they seek to exhaust Russia in a military arms race and by encircling its economy.
Moscow's current invasion of Ukraine, which NATO allows only up to Donbass, also has the aim of crushing the Ukrainian working class. This is the condition to finish leaving and colonizing that nation. They did so in Syria, to then plunder all its wealth.
In Ukraine, NATO lets the “great” Russia do this “dirty work” of partition, at the cost of wearing itself out to extreme degrees. Both Kissinger and the entire US establishment are in favor of the partition of Ukraine, which would be the way to finish imposing the Minsk Pact to the end, for the definitive colonization of that nation.
Imperialism is reaction all along the line, to the point of reconfiguring through blood and fire even the nations and states that exist throughout the colonial and semi-colonial world.
Ukraine and Syria are the mirrors where all the oppressed peoples of the world must look at themselves if they do not defeat imperialism and its national lackeys, the native bourgeoisies.
In particular, all the former Soviet republics of the former USSR must be looked at in this mirror, which achieved their “independence” from the Russian Federation in 1989 but ended up being totally dependent and openly semi-colonies of imperialism, some already directly or, controlled by the bayonets of Moscow and the native oligarchs, associated in thousands of businesses with international financial capital.
The counterrevolutionary fascist foreign policy of Putin and NATO
It is crystal clear that the US promoted every fascist counterrevolutionary coup took place in the planet. They spread napalm and sent Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan to the Middle Ages. Even if they talk about "democracy" inside the US, imperialism rules the world with the guns. There are more than 500 CIA military bases advancing in the "fight against terror" as yesterday in Guantanamo, with the worst methods of fascism which could even make Gestapo blush.
The white counterrevolutionary troops of Putin do not stay behind when it's about defending the interests of the capitalists, imposing true genocides. Let's see.
Before invading Ukraine, Putin occupied Belarus, an issue that has been "forgotten" by the entire world imperialist press and is hidden by the reformist left that acts behind their backs. Russian troops invaded Belarus (where the Slavic country has a military base) to crush a huge working class strike and struggle and save the Lukashenko government, transforming that nation on a beachhead of his invasion of Ukraine.
This is nothing new: the troops of the “great” Russia had already crushed the mass uprising and the general strike of the Kazakh proletariat against the big imperialist oil and steel companies in January this year.
Putin has a record of crushing rebellions of the peoples of the oppressed nations and massacring his proletariat, while he avoids at every step any direct military clash with the imperialist powers.
It was the Moscow troops that drowned in blood the great uprising for bread that broke out in Georgia in 2008 against the capitalist government of Saakashvili. In Kyrgyzstan, they promoted fascist pogroms against the working class that had armed themselves and taken over the police stations in 2010 against the ferocious IMF attack by those infamous bourgeois governments, heirs to the old Stalinist scum.
We will address this question in a special appendix to this work so that it can never again be hidden that this infamous counterrevolutionary regime in Moscow has its hands stained with blood with the policy of extermination of the Chechen nation. Not to mention its role in Syria, which has been broken and divided and, with Turkey on the Euphrates, the US looting oil from the north and the dog Bashar in the south openly doing business with the same Sunni bourgeoisie in Idlib. Putin was the one who led the ferocious genocide of the Syrian masses, supporting the fascist al-Assad.
In all these countries the "great" Russia has military bases like in Crimea (Ukraine), which are not there to confront imperialism but to massacre the masses and favor the businesses of the capitalists. A clear sign of this role could be seen when Putin surrendered Armenia in 2020 to hand over Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan so that British Petroleum controls all the oil in the Black Sea and takes it out through the Caucasus to the Mediterranean through the pipelines under the custody of Turkey, a major NATO member.
In order to play this role of gendarme of the business of imperialism, the Moscow oligarchy has established an iron dictatorship in Russia, with a farce of "democratic" elections, where only the parties that swear allegiance to Putin appears, while the prisons are full of political prisoners and the proletariat is crushed, without the right to strike, or to form unions, or to carry out a demonstration of more than three people in the street, at the risk of being imprisoned for more than 10 years.
As this book is being printed, the autonomous region of Karakalpakstan is in revolt in Uzbekistan.
The Mirziyoyev government of that former Asian Soviet republic has auctioned all the companies that are still in state hands like telecommunications, oil, the huge fertilizer business, banks and land ownership. The government also wants to impose the extension of his term from 4 years to 7 and liquidate Karakalpakstan's autonomy.
The people have risen up, not only in defense of autonomy, but because they see that this privatization plan is a big deal for the oligarchy, coming from the old Communist Party of the former USSR, and hunger, misery and slavery for the people of that region and also from all over Uzbekistan. It is the masses who suffer from the capitalist restoration.
In Uzbekistan, there’s one of the largest cotton-cropping areas of the entire region. This means there’s a need for huge slave workforce.
The new bourgeoisie, emerged from the counterrevolutionary communist parties of the former Soviet republics, attacked the working class as much or even more than the biggest exploiters and enslavers of the workers movement in late 18th Century and early 19th Century.
In mid-90s in Uzbekistan they imposed the same they did in the USRR back in the ‘80s, namely the slave work of children, paralyzing the classes in times of harvest. And we still have to stand traitors that speak on behalf of “socialism” and support, applaud and give ovation to Putin and the old Stalinist parties now turned into a new enslaver scum.
The cotton produced in Uzbekistan supplies a large part of the Russian textile industry. So, the Uzbek workers die in the cotton fields and do the worst slave works as migrants in Russia, from where they send part of their miserable wage to support their families.
The unprecedented sufferings of the exploited burst out in the different mass revolutionary uprisings in the former soviet republics. We consider an ignominy on them, typical from traitor agents of imperialism, that the left currents accuse the workers that rise in these nations of being “agents of imperialism”, as they revolt even against Putin himself, the jailkeeper.
These brutal conditions of exploitation and hardships of the Uzbek workers are an example of the path followed by all the former soviet republics, handed over by the Stalinist scum to the world capitalist market. Today, all of them are the battlefield of imperialism to finish colonizing them and of the “great” Russian bourgeoisie to keep its role of murderous gendarme of the revolted people, and also of the working class and their heroic combats to defend their gains and for their demands.
The working class in the former Soviet republics of Eurasia enters the fight for their fair demands of bread, right to a decent life, fighting against the ferocious counterrevolutionary governments and regime, fighting for the national liberation against every imperialist oppression and confronting the fiercest bloodiest order imposed by the "great" Russia and its military bases.
In each one of these struggles there’s an iron alternative for these nations: whether they end up being partitioned colonies of Wall Street or Frankfurt, or they will open the road for the fight for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary and soviet ways in all the territories of the former USSR, sold out by the Stalinist scum.
Only from this view of the international situation, of the imperialist crisis, of the dispute for the markets and the class struggle, which does not cease to sharpen under these conditions of unprecedented sufferings of the masses, we can address the current war in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic nowadays turned into a bled-out colony, partitioned and exploited by imperialism and the counterrevolutionary forces of Putin and the “great” Russia.
Ukraine, a nation a thousand times oppressed by the imperialist powers and crushed by the jackboots of Moscow
Ukraine is one of those former Soviet republics tied with double and triple chains by a native semi-fascist oligarchy, agent of the IMF, by the US plunder and Putin's bayonets' control.
We are before one of the wealthiest nations of Eastern Europe. Nature gave them one of the most fertile lands of the planet to produce cereals and food. As we will see in this work, it also possesses huge wealth of minerals and is one of the key countries of Russian gas and oil route through Maastricht.
To illustrate the point, Portugal has 10 million inhabitants and France has 67 million. Ukraine, with a population of 44 million, has almost the same population of Spain, of which no one dares to say it is not a nation or it is truly a collage of nations subjugated by the Borbons.
Ukraine is a nation with the fifth largest territory in Europe, after Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkey and France. How can this reality be ignored? Furthermore, Ukraine has a perfect understandable language for all its inhabitants, even if there are other languages spoken inside. Cynicism is a one-way path.
To tell the truth, the difference with the Spanish State is that Ukraine is a plundered nation, which has all its goods totally under embargo as warranty of a great foreign debt with the IMF, which today is drown in loans for guns given by imperialism for more than four months since the Russian invasion.
When the imperialist press brags about “aid to Ukraine” with millionaire loans of the European banks, we are not before “non-interested donations” or expenses of a NATO that had entered to war. It is not so. All the contrary. What the imperialist countries are giving is a 15% yearly interest loans in dollars, which only increases Ukraine’s foreign debt which comes down to 88 billion dollars with other states, the imperialist banks, the IMF, the World Bank and the European Union.
Cynicism reaches such a degree that in the middle of war and invasion of Putin’s murderous troops, imperialism and the international banks demand Ukraine to pay the foreign debt and its interests it has to pay this year. This is done in the middle of the plunder of Crimea and Donbass which Moscow wants to increase, as collecting a payment for their services as gendarme of the capitalists in the entire region for 30 years. As we said, this was the role played by Putin in Georgia, in the Chechnya genocide and in the counterrevolutionary intervention of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the Caucasus. We won’t get tired in insisting on this because they try to hide it at all costs. They want to silence what the butcher of Moscow did in the last years in Syria. From the Geneva and Astana conferences, with the US sent Putin as a fascist centurion to support al-Assad to crush the Syrian masses and contain the revolution in Middle East.
Those who talk about a “irreconcilable split” between NATO and Moscow “forget” that what’s is in question are the terms of the partition of Ukraine and the conditions of surrender of the nation to Russia, NATO, the IMF and the imperialist transnational companies.
A clear example of this we mention is that Putin left intact the French imperialist steel plant that belongs to Arcelor Mittal, located less than 500 km away from Mariupol (a city razed by the Russian bombs), Zelensky praises Johnson of England as the “most solidary government in the war against Russia”. This is a lie and an infamy.
The total foreign debt of Ukraine, with the IMF, the World Bank and all the states that lent funds to them, has a warranty namely that any altercation or anomaly will, settled in… London court. For that reason, the British pirates are so confident in selling weapons to Ukraine and Johnson travels to Kyiv to embrace his employee Zelensky trying to pose as benefactor. Another cynicism!
The British Supreme Court of Justice, led by William Blair - brother of Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister- still hasn’t ruled for Ukraine, after four months of invasion and massacre so it does not pay the foreign debt to Moscow of more than 3 billion dollars, saying those loans were given by a private company and bank and not the Russian state.
This is even worse than the imperialist bourgeois policy of relationships between states established by the UN, which guarantees that an assaulted country doesn’t have to pay its debt to the aggressor. They don’t want this example to be extended to the subjugated countries not paying the debts to the ones that plunder and harass them, while London, Wall Street and Frankfurt don’t recognize the debts they have with Russia, they put embargo on Russian funds and on trade. Such a paradox!
On its side, the lackey government of Zelensky, far from suspending the payment of the debt to the imperialist creditors to put all the economy and the wealth of Ukraine to defend the assaulted nation, is paying and is willing to continue paying the whole foreign debt, except the one claimed by Moscow.
As if another fact was needed, it is more than clear that the Ukrainian working class and the people cannot defeat the invasion of plunder and death of Putin and the “great” Russia with the lackey coward bourgeoisie of Kyiv. Let alone with NATO, which only wants to deepen the plunder of Ukraine during the war in order to partition it with Moscow.
For all these, we insist that any policy on this war that does not start by conquering the national liberation of Ukraine, by crushing the Russian invasion and breaking with imperialism to do so, under the leadership of its working class allied to the workers all across Europe, is not a Marxist policy. It is rather a policy of lackeys of imperialism or of the plunder by the Moscow oligarchy.
This is the way for the Ukrainian working class to conquer the political and military leadership of the war for the workers not to be the ones paying for the crisis, the imperialist plunder and the terrible hardships of the "great" Russian occupation.
Putin is the guarantor of the looting of the IMF in Ukraine and all the nations of Eurasia
In this forward, it is necessary to insist on a clear definition: countless times, Ukraine has been oppressed, looted and surrendered to the greed and dispute of the imperialist powers and to Putin's role as counterrevolutionary gendarme who seeks to maintain this role and its privileges in Eurasia. This has been the case for 30 years, starting in 1989.
The one that handed over Ukraine to international financial capital decades ago was the rapacious Ukrainian bourgeoisie and the "great" Russia, which emerged from the former Stalinist Communist Parties of the former USSR, as they also did in China, Vietnam and lately in Cuba.
The audacity of the Stalinist parties branding Putin as "progressive" who wants to "limit" imperialism’s control on the planet is not only a falsification, but also a cruel scam and deception.
In case further proof is needed, when Ukraine proclaimed its "independence" in 1991, it had no external debt and today it is one of the most indebted countries in Eastern Europe, treated as a banana republic by the IMF. Today, adding the private and public external debt, the debt to the IMF, to the World Bank and the internal debt of the state, the subjugated Ukraine owes more than 130 billion dollars.
From the military base in Crimea and with puppet governments like Yanukovych's, Putin was the guarantor that Ukraine could meet all its commitments to imperialism and other looters of the nation. The Moscow jackal wants the prize from himself, but in inter-imperialist disputes there is no longer even a place for him.
This crisis of the Ukrainian nation was caused by a rising oligarchy, a direct agent of imperialism, who has indebted the nation since 1989 as well as taken control of the entire nationalized economy and did not return a penny of that economic scam, as it happened in all the former Soviet republics "independent" from Moscow throughout Eurasia and even in "great" Russia. That is, they plundered the Ukrainian state and people to finance the restoration of the capitalist parasites causing unheard hardships.
They, the Stalinists, handed Ukraine over to NATO. Zelensky is an heir and representative of that oligarchy that emerged in Ukraine 30 years ago in connection with the imperialist world economy.
In Ukraine, the bankruptcy of the currents coming from the former Trotskyist movement comes to light again
In a recent debate conference of the Frente de Izquierda y los Trabajadores - Unidad (FIT-U) of Argentina, the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS) -as well as many other currents around the world- declared it was "neutral" in this war, while the Partido Obrero openly supports Putin.
They all deny that there is a national liberation struggle in Ukraine. They hide that this has become a nation fiercely oppressed by imperialism, as happens with any country in Africa, Latin America or Eurasia. The businesses of the transnationals and the Ukrainian bourgeoisie were properly protected by the regime of Kyiv oligarchs and Moscow guns.
These currents invent that there is a war between NATO and Russia. According to them, Ukraine would merely be the battlefield of that confrontation. They hide that the war in Ukraine is for the plundering, pillage, colonization and partition of the nation, which, as we have said, is one of the richest in the region and has a strategic location for the transit of goods throughout Europe. Today Moscow is in charge of bleeding out Ukraine to maintain the privileges of the "great" Russia and its businesses in Eurasia. The more Putin crushes Ukraine, the more the masses of that country will look to the US and Europe as their possible “saviors”. This is the tragedy caused by the betrayal of the leadership of the proletariat to the Ukrainian working class.
This policy, put forward by the reformist leftist parties around the globe, is an open break with the anti-imperialist program of any current that claims to be so, since war, as we said, sharpens the national oppression of Ukraine. If Putin wins, it will be tied with double and triple chains to the exploitation of the oligarchs of Ukraine and Moscow, to a double looting of the IMF and the imperialist transnationals, and it will be subjected to the Europe of Maastricht more deeply. If Ukraine is split, the result will be the same and it will be bled dry as a nation.
Today, Ukraine is a prey being fought over by lions, hyenas, jackals, who bite each other, but the battle is for the prey. Then they will settle accounts between them. Today Putin is the one who is “hunting the prey”. The US are waiting... They know that, for now, the Franco-German axis has been left out of the dispute and they clearly perceive that Putin will give them most of the prey, just like a hyena that will not seek to exceed the relationship of forces with the lions.
The “neutral” policy of these currents expresses the degree of anti-Marxist decomposition reached by broad sectors of the world left, which years ago called themselves members of the Fourth International.
If the Ukrainian working class remains isolated and without the solidarity of the Russian, European and world workers in its struggle against the Russian invasion and imperialist plunder, they will be subjected to their own bourgeoisie, to the Moscow massacre and bound with double chains to imperialism.
Zelensky’s government recently enacted a resolution tailored to the transnationals and the great Ukrainian oligarchy: employers can fire workers without compensation, cut down wages, extend the shifts, even on Sundays and holidays... In the midst of war, the “native bourgeoisie” and the Ukrainian oligarchs prove to be a totally anti-national class, which will make a pact and hand over the nation as it suits their business when they deem it necessary together with their imperialist bosses.
The "neutrality" of ex-Trotskyist currents gives Zelensky a green light to super-exploit the working class, the IMF to strangle the nation, and Putin and his counterrevolutionary troops to shovel the rubble of bombed-out buildings and collapsed with hundreds of dead in each one of them, as happens in Mariupol. Russia hopes to stay there controlling the ports through which most grain exports leave. This is a very profitable business for the Moscow oligarchy... and Cargill.
The brutality of this “neutral” position in the war led one of the top leaders of the Argentine PTS, a university professor, to state, without batting an eyelid, that this is a "reactionary war" and that “neither side should be supported.”
This pseudo-intellectual member the Argentine reformist left, without blushing, called for the working class to wait for a revolution to break out somewhere in the world under the conditions of war... Not in Russia, not in the Ukraine, not in Europe … This gentleman and his party have long been far away from the objective conditions of war, which are what create the conditions for revolution on the battlefield itself.
They have openly broken all anchorage with a minimally serious anti-imperialist program and policy to be considered Marxists.
Why don't they declare themselves "neutral" in the face of the looting of Argentina by the IMF and they do so with Ukraine? Because whenever there is war, the pacifist's vision blurs, their brain becomes a knot and they only seek to escape. Miserable.
Throughout this book we will delve into the political swindles of revisionism against Marxism and the tradition of revolutionary Marxism on the question of the oppressed nations in Europe.
No less opportunist and anti-Marxist is the position developed by currents such as the International Workers League (LIT-CI), International Workers Unity (UIT-CI) and others that create expectations that with NATO and the European Union and without defeating to the agent of imperialism in Ukraine, Zelensky’s government, the oppressed nation can win the war. This is a fallacy of the "theorists" of the “two-stage revolution”, whose premise is: "first let's win the war with anyone, and then settle accounts with the Ukrainian bourgeoisie." We are facing a totally reactionary and anti-Trotskyist position. Without a proletarian leadership of the war that expropriates imperialism and unites with the Russian and European working class, Ukraine will never win against the Russian invasion or against the imperialism that oppresses it. This is how the masses in Vietnam, China and Korea defeated the most powerful armies on the planet: the American and the Japanese.
The world reformist left is moving between the positions of "neutrality", getting in Putin's tanks or waiting for NATO missiles to rain down to defeat the Russian invasion. They have all given up the struggle to expel the invading troops from Moscow, break with imperialism and win the war with the method of the international proletarian revolution.
The book presented here tries to rescue the Marxist theory and program as the only one for national liberation, to let the working class, which is the one that really dies and fights in the war, to transform it into the beginning of the socialist revolution.
Current conditions have made the alternative of socialism or barbarism red hot in war and in life itself; communism or fascism.
We make this foreword of this book “Ukraine at War” paying our tribute to all the murdered workers from Kyiv and Donbass, the workers from the divided invaded Ukraine and which will be split a thousand times soon.
Our tribute also goes to the brave miners of Donetsk, Lugansk and Odessa who, since 2014, confronted the fascist forces of Poroshenko who expropriated the fight against Yanukovych, Putin's ally and the biggest IMF agent in Ukraine in recent decades. The broken and divided Ukraine needs the unity of its working class. And this will only be possible under the banners of a revolutionary program. This contribution that we, revolutionary Marxists, are making is in order to conquering it.
Our solidarity is with the workers and youth who are the rank-and-file soldiers in the Russian army who refuse to fight against the Ukrainian nation. Thousands of them are in the prisons of the Russian oligarchy. They are and will be the key to stop Putin's murderous war machine, the executioner of Eurasia.
Our call also goes to the European and world working class to take the fight against the Russian invasion and the imperialist looting of Ukraine into their hands, to reopen the only path to an independent Ukraine that will be a free and Soviet Ukraine or else, it will be a broken, bled dry and tutored colony.
In this book we also want to pay tribute to all the workers and peasants who, as is happening today in Mariupol, were massacred in the cities of Syria at the hands of the fascist Al Assad and Putin's gunboats in a partition pact between that nation and Turkey, NATO and the imperialist oil companies.
NATO, Turkey, Putin and Al Assad left Syria with the excuse that they were "fighting terrorism"... The traitors of the world left covered up such a mass murder against the workers and exploited of Syria and the Middle East.
Our tribute also goes to the peoples of the Caucasus and of Kazakhstan in revolt against the imperialist transnationals and oil companies that plunder them. Our appeal is that their revolutionary struggle does not stop, because the defeat of the butchers and murderers of Moscow, far from strengthening NATO, will reopen the path to the struggle for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat in all territories of the former USSR, without the Stalinist scum. This fight will be waged under the banners of the Fourth International, the continuators of the Bolshevik-Leninist struggle, with whom the right to independence and freedom of the Ukrainian nation was won, under the leadership of the working class and its alliance with poor peasants and workers throughout Europe.
Recently, the workers of Milan called for a day of struggle against the war. The faster the European working class rises to help its brothers in Ukraine, as it did against the imperialist invasions, the closer the workers of Europe will be to starting to claim for the gains seized by the imperialist butchers.
The Stalinist leaderships of the European trade unions, allies of the butcher Putin, received as hosts in Madrid the meeting of NATO chiefs and commanders on June 29 and 30. Izquierda Unida, the Stalinist brother party of Putin and his henchmen, and the PSOE paid tribute to the NATO generals in the Spanish State. They, who support the Moscow jackal, are far from confronting NATO.
Despite the fact that they lead the most important unions in Europe, from where they support the NATO governments, they were enemies of transforming the Spanish State into a "hell" at the arrival of this summit.
They call for "confronting NATO" in Ukraine but they paralyze the forces of the European unions and of the Spanish State in particular, as they are unable to call for an active general strike and revolutionary struggle in the streets to prevent that meeting of murderers of the world was held in Madrid and to initiate an internationalist combat plan of the European working class to stop the imperialist war machine and defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
They are liars. They are who surrendered the USSR, despite the fact that hundreds of groups of ex-Trotskyists cover them with a cloak of "progressivism" and "socialism".
The Stalinist and fake Trotskyist currents, with the excuse of “confronting Trump”, supported Sanders of the Democratic Party, who later supported Biden… And now these leaderships are tearing their hair out because the NATO commander, Biden, is going for Moscow business.
We Trotskyists, fighting against Putin, against the US and NATO, together with the Ukrainian working class, fought under the banners of revolutionary Marxism, of Bolshevism, those of the Fourth International, that aroused the hatred of Putin, who denounced that Lenin and his party are the ones who "invented" the Ukrainian nation in 1921 when it became independent and federated with the USSR.
Far from it, it was the tsars and then Stalinism, betraying the legacy of Lenin, who disregarded, crushed and censored the national right of the oppressed peoples. In the Ukraine, the dictum of Marxism that no people that oppresses another can liberate itself, is sharply confirmed.
Surely the reader is wondering how we came to publish this book that accounts for the historical events that shook Ukraine and all of Eurasia in the last 10 years, at least. This work was not written during the five months of war. It is the expression and reflects all the revolutionary elaboration of our current, the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI, which since 2008, has concentrated a considerable part of its forces into Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, then into Ukraine and into every struggle waged by the masses of the former Soviet republics, among other spots of revolution and counterrevolution. We linked our fate to the class struggle in those nations, as we have done in Syria and the entire mass revolutionary wave that broke out in the Middle East since 2011.
We have concentrated our forces on the two key spots of world revolution, counterrevolution and war, where imperialism focused its forces to contain and punish the mass revolutionary offensives of the 21st Century. Meanwhile, reformism, with its "siren songs" and supported by the bourgeois regimes, concentrated its forces in the enemies’ parliaments, agreeing with them or co-leading with Stalinism most of the unions that strangled any serious struggle of the proletariat in the 21st Century.
Sharing this elaboration with the reader is one of our main objectives, in order to explain our position regarding "Ukraine at War" and affirm, as we do in the title of this book and throughout it, that it will be Soviet and Independent, or just one more colony, guarded by imperialism, under the bayonets of Moscow.
The banners of Bolshevism then remain in the hands of those who continue the fight for the international socialist revolution. That program and those flags are of great topical importance. That is what this work is about.
The authors
* The annual Summit of the Davos Economic Forum that brings together representatives of international financial capital, was held this year (2022) in Switzerland from May 22 to 26.
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