Presentation of Chapter VII:
February 2022
With the Russian invasion, Putin and NATO prepare the final partition of Ukraine
First Part:
The prelude to Russia's military attack on Ukraine
In this section of Chapter 8, we will account the events that took place in the prelude to Putin's invasion, which was not a “bolt from the blue.” The prelude to the occupation of Putin's troops was marked, as we have already seen in this work, by a strong offensive by US imperialism to regain control of the European common market, which was beginning to organize the Franco-German axis from Portugal to the Russians steppes. In such plan the US hands over Ukraine as a pawn to strategically weaken the "great" Russia.
After 5 months of war, this is resulting in the destruction of the infrastructure and entire cities of Ukraine and the direct occupation of territory by Russia from the southern corridor of Mariupol to the Donbass.
US imperialism has defended its role in the world market and therefore it had to strategically weaken the Franco-German axis in Europe, which not only was disputing the "old world" to the US, but also, from there, the "silk route" to China.
There was a precedent for this aggressive US policy under Biden’s administration; they, together with England, seized the multi-million-dollar business of building 14 nuclear-powered submarines for Australia from France. French imperialism responded by sending its own military troops to Bulgaria and Romania, to defend its large transnationals installed there and to be prepared and positioned in Europe against the US offensive towards the east of the continent.
Germany was ready to cut the ribbon for the inauguration of Nord Stream 2. On doing it, it had to suspend that gas pipeline.
Meanwhile, NATO troops were already deployed in Eastern Europe and Russia started sending its army to the border with Ukraine, as stated in the note we published on January 25, 2022:
“UKRAINE: ARMED NEGOTIATION AND WAR DRUMS”
***
On the other hand, with the invasion of Ukraine that he was already preparing, Putin wanted to demonstrate that he was still the agent that imperialism needed to keep enslaved and suppressed the nations that the USA exploit, plunder, and subjugate. Putin defends Russia’s enormous wealth of hydrocarbons, minerals and commodities. He also defends its industrial-military apparatus that they inherited from the former USSR. In the latter branch of production, he also uses Germany and France’s high technology to develop it.
The "great" Russia, for now, is not a colony or a semi-colony, although it depends on the capitalist world economy. It continues to be a transitory capitalist state, dependent on imperialism, which tries and needs to advance on it in order to get out of its crisis.
For this reason, Russia defends its powerful domestic market that it conquered as a partner of the investments of the different imperialist powers within the country. It defends the current status quo that US imperialism wants to break at any cost, both in Europe and on its way to semi-colonize the "great" Russia.
Putin was surprised by the US offensive of stepping on Ukraine for NATO, after he had the support of US imperialism itself to send troops to massacre the masses of Kazakhstan and imprison the leaders of that enormous workers' struggle.
Above all, the butcher of Moscow was outraged that after containing and disarming Armenia and handing over Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan -which meant that British Petroleum kept all the oil from the Black Sea and the Caucasus-, the US paid him back by trying to take over Ukraine. But as the historical saying goes: “Rome” does not spare even its most faithful allies.
Days after the Russian elite troops withdrew, having fulfilled their entire counterrevolutionary role in Kazakhstan, in late January and early February, Biden announced that Putin was going to invade Ukraine… He knew Putin’s roadmap. He knew perfectly well that after Kazakhstan, the latter was going to pass through Belarus and occupy it, not only to reach Ukraine from its borders, but also because he had to finish crushing a huge working class rebellion against Lukashenko’s government. One of the most concentrated sectors of the entire proletariat in the region had risen up there, where there is an enormous weight of the automotive industry, from where different imperialist companies, such as Volkswagen, traded their cars with Moscow without paying taxes. For Putin, the real enemy is not NATO, but the working class of Russia and the revolted proletariat in the former Soviet republics, who question their millionaire super-profits extracted with workers’ blood and sweat.
Putin's prelude to invading Ukraine, then, was to march to massacre two revolutionary processes on its borders. That will be his role, as he has been doing so far, in Ukraine.
It is imperative that the reader have direct access to Putin's "adventures" on his march to Ukraine. It is key to inquire into how his counterrevolutionary policy is to crush the uprising in Kazakhstan, where the working class, fighting for bread and decent wages, confronted all the imperialist oil companies and large transnational steel mills that loot and plunder the wealth of that nation.
That is why we publish an article dated on January 10, 2022, in which it can be accurately observed Putin's counterrevolutionary performance and his actions as an agent of capitalist order in the former Soviet republics that surround Russia. To follow Putin's roadmap from Kazakhstan to Ukraine is to understand what he is doing in the latter, demolishing that nation and massacring its people.
So we publish:
“Kazakhstan: Putin, with his fascist black hundreds, seeks to crush the insurrection”
This note is accompanied by a proclamation of the Collective for the Re-foundation of the Fourth International / FLTI under the title:
“A Revolution Outburst in Kazakhstan”
In it, as we have already said, we denounce how Biden himself greeted Putin's counterrevolutionary action there and prepared a friendly meeting with him, while the gunboats were shown and the drums of war heard.
Here, it is exposed that Putin, in a demagogic and farcical way, raised the war cry of "crush the Nazis in Kyiv", when it was the oligarchs of Moscow who protected and supported openly fascist and counterrevolutionary governments such as those of Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Caucasus and that of Kyrgyzstan, as it had done before in Georgia and in the Chechen genocide.
Of course, in his invasion of Ukraine, Putin is not willing to fire a single shot at NATO or overthrow the "Nazi" government in Kyiv -as he likes to call it-, but wants instead to negotiate and agree with him and through him, with NATO and the Americans.
The method of invasion of nations by Putin and the "great" Russia (as we see today in Ukraine as well) is the same military strategy used by the Nazis and fascism when they invaded the USSR in World War II, reducing their cities to rubble, as happened in particular in Stalingrad.
Syria is the example and the most important testimony today of what we are saying here. Putin, supporting al-Assad, demolished 80% of the cities of that country to crush a great revolution.
Back in 2010, Russia promoted fascist gangs and pogroms in Kyrgyzstan, as the tsars had done in the 1905 Revolution, to crush the armed workers' councils that were beginning to be set up and were attacking the property of the capitalists, threatening to overthrow Bakiev's government with a revolutionary insurrection.
The "Anti-Nazi" Russia has military bases in most of those countries, some next to British or US military bases, from where they coordinate the oppression of those peoples... But the US does not and will not respect Putin and will act against him in the same way or worse than it does with imperialist competition, such as it is tresting the Franco-German axis.
US goes for everything. In two decades, three world crises hit the planet, only comparable to the crisis of the 1930s.
Marxism states that, in the imperialist era, the transnationals and finance capital, which are all monopolies that have countries supported by the states armed to the teeth, systematically and permanently push their competitors out of the way by making them to kneel down, by hook or by crook, in the competition for the world market. As the US treats Europe's competing imperialist powers ruthlessly, cutting off their business routes and the labor division that they had established, it will do far more, as it is doing, with Putin and the "great" Russia and even in the future with China.
But the world and Eurasian working class in particular has not stopped fighting in great combats so far in the 21st century, although they want to ignore it.
We could say that in the 20th century the powerful battalions of the Eurasia working class had a revolutionary epicenter in what used to be Petrograd and in Moscow and from there they spread to the borders of the old tsarist empire, as happened in the 1905 revolution and in February and October 1917. Unlike this, today, in the 21st century, the revolutionary processes take place in the former Soviet republics of Eurasia and go towards Moscow, where the greatest fortification of the counterrevolution is located. Not only is imperialism advancing there with its economic, political and military offensives, but also the working class of the former Soviet republics, which has its greatest ally in the center of "great" Russia, which is not the assassin Putin, but the national liberation struggles of the peoples it oppresses within the Russian Federation, and the powerful Russian proletariat, that is destined to be the one that definitively resolves, together with the working class of all of Europe, the destinies of the entire civilization in that area of the planet.
***
Finishing the definition of the developments of the prelude to the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the point of view of imperialism, the location of Putin and the events that have been shaking the former Soviet republics of Eurasia, without specifying the state and the situation in which the Ukrainian working class and masses had been left after years of counterrevolution would be, at the very least, unilateral on our part.
The Minsk Accords, which were not yet settled as we saw in the previous Chapter -due to an enormous resistance of the Ukrainian working class both in Donbass and in Kyiv, had subjected the proletariat to worse hardships than those suffered before 2014.
The working class of Ukraine received this war as a true hell, which was not only the bombs and missiles of the butcher Putin that began to fall, but also the unprecedented sufferings to which it was led not only by the pro-Moscow oligarchs but also the pro- NATO ones.
The reader will see this in the note entitled:
“After the installation of the 2015 Minsk Accords…
The life of the workers and the masses of Ukraine:
A hell in Kyiv, a hell in Donbass”
It is under these conditions that the butcher Putin enters Ukraine.
***
SECOND PART:
After Putin had crushed the anti-capitalist rebellion of the workers of Kazakhstan and Belarus
The invasion begins
In the face of Moscow’s offensive, which threatened to “reach Kyiv” on February, US and NATO, with economic, political and military measures, and being perfectly aware of Putin’s role, allowed him to reach only Donbass and the southern border of Ukraine. In some of those areas, the currency is ruble and the state management is already Russian directly.
US cynicism when they say that with NATO they support Ukraine, hides that they are actually willing to cede Donbass to Putin, but just when they considered it necessary and appropriate, according to their businesses in the entire Europe and how is their situation politically and economically, they would advance over Moscow.
The subjugated, occupied and partitioned Ukraine is a bargaining chip of the US with the rest of the imperialist powers and Moscow.
In part 2 of this Chapter VIII, we therefore publish the first Manifesto of the Collective for the Fourth International / FLTI which was published in February 2022 on the Russian invasion:
“The Russian troops invade Ukraine”
In this statement, the trench in which we Trotskyists are in this war is defined clearly: with the Ukrainian nation, invaded by Moscow, calling to fraternize with the Russian workers that are the rank and file soldiers of the Russian army, and calling the European working class to paralyze and defeat the counterrevolutionary forces of NATO, to join the struggle for the national liberation of Ukraine. These goals can only be conquered through the proletarian leadership of the war, which, attacking the capitalists, oligarchs and imperialism, encouraging the European working class to rise, crushes the war machine of the butcher Putin and his counterrevolutionary officers.
In this Introduction, we reaffirm this revolutionary program, which is continuity of the one raised by the Bolsheviks when they led the seizure of power in the USSR in 1917 and extended it to the whole of the nations that were dominated and oppressed by the Czars.
Those great battles of the proletariat were able to take place because at the front of the revolution there was a world revolutionary party, the Third International, led by Lenin and Trotsky, which settled its victories in the international combats of the European workers which defended the Soviet proletariat. Without that internationalist battle, the conquer of the USSR wouldn’t have been able to be kept under the conditions of war, counterrevolution and isolation.
The Ukrainian working class, today more than ever depends on the solidarity of the European proletariat, from Portugal to the Russian steppes, and of the proletariat of the entire Eurasia. That would be an electric shock for the Ukrainian proletariat to gain momentum in the war and the class struggle. Preventing this from happening is the role of the treacherous leaderships, agents of imperialism, the opportunists tied to their programs of betrayal and shame.
A General Strike of the working class in the entire Europe is the only one that, as a step forward in the unitarian struggle of the European proletariat, can weaken NATO and make it tremble, move the Russian workers and bring the Ukrainian working class closer to gun controlling, without which they cannot defeat either Putin, NATO or the Kyiv oligarchs.
We publish here a statement of the Trotskyists of the Spanish State, signed by Benito Toribio Morales, which, striving for a Soviet independent Ukraine, claims:
“Only a workers leadership of the war can defeat Putin and end the plunder of Ukraine by imperialism and the IMF”
Calling to promote a
Revolutionary General Strike in the whole Europe!
This part closes with a key article that gives account of the position of revolutionary Marxism in the face of Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. imperialist offensive on the planet. This note signed by Carlos Munzer, co-author of this book, reflects his intervention in an open virtual debate with hundreds of participants from all over the world of the Collective for the Refoundation of the IV International / FLTI in March, 30 days after the start of the Russian invasion. This was the same day of the 11th anniversary of the Syrian revolution.
In this debate there were also participating Syrian revolutionary fighters who have long suffered the attack, and are fighting against the same enemies that crushed by iron and fire a heroic revolution that broke out in that country in 2011, as one more link of the mass uprisings un the Maghreb and the Middle East. Putin arrived there as a gendarme of imperialism to support the fascist al-Assad in Damascus.
This happened in all the Syrian cities that received the bombs from Putin and al-Assad, with the complicity of the US and Turkey that liberated the skies for 11 years. Nothing different from what is happening today in Ukraine, when we see the destruction and demolition by artillery and aviation and the siege warfare on cities like Mariupol, Kharkov, Odessa and even many of those around Kyiv.
In this book we are going to reflect that action day of the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI of discussion and solidarity with the masses of Ukraine, where the members of the Editorial Board of the newspaper "The Truth of the Oppressed" of the socialists from Syria and the Middle East played a decisive role.
We then reproduce the intervention of Abu Muad, co-author of the books Syria Under Fire I and II, explaining the importance of the lessons of the Syrian revolution today for the war in Ukraine, in the article:
"The lessons of the Syrian revolution: key issues to fight against the massacre and the partition of the Ukrainian nation"
We also present the voice of Abu Izen from Idlib, calling for a joint struggle with the Ukrainian people who face the same enemy they themselves are facing in Syria: Putin who, together with al-Assad, massacred more than 500,000 exploited on behalf of imperialism, and left the nation destroyed and reduced to rubble:
"In Syria we are fighting the same enemy that is invading Ukraine today."
Of course, the voice of the Syrian partisans could not be absent, with the intervention of Khero Abu Mustafa, raising as a call:
"The working class must not only receive refugees,
but also to rise up to help the Ukrainian people to fight and repeal this invasion."
As we said above, this session was closed by Carlos Munzer. We publish his article here:
“Revolutionary Marxism and War”
This note clearly defines the three positions that are formally raised in the face of the war in Ukraine, although by their content there are merely two positions that face each other in the class struggle field.
On the one hand, those who profess the old treacherous theory of "revolution by stages", even doing that in the name of Trotskyism, falsifying the latter, either supporting Putin and his counterrevolutionary troops with whom they say they are going to "liberate Ukraine", or conversely, crying out like beggars, requesting NATO to act in a “democratic” way and free Ukraine from the savage Great Russian invasion.
Along with these two, there is a position of underhanded support for Putin, which is the one that declares itself "neutral" in the military clashes in Ukraine. That is to say, it is for Russia to win, which occupies that nation with more than 150 thousand men of one of the most powerful armies on the planet. These are cretinly parliamentarist currents that only “make war” through pompous speeches in the bourgeois parliaments, as is the case of the PTS in Argentina.
On the other side, on the other barricade and trench of this war, we find those that as we do, are defending the theory-program of the Permanent Revolution and the Transitional Program, which state that only the working class together with the poor peasants, taking the leadership of the war, will be able to defeat the Russian invasion and, supported by the revolutionary struggle of the workers of Europe, they will be able to seize power in Ukraine, liberate the oppressed nation and place it as a stronghold of the European socialist revolution and as a fundamental link to restore the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms in the former USSR.
***
|
.jpg)
.jpg)
