Ukraine - June 5, 2014

Putin… “Anti-imperialist”?
A Citibank manager and junior partner of France and Germany in the business of high military technology and carbon

The treacherous leaderships gathered in the WSF of Stalinists and a wing of the renegades of Trotskyism have been preaching about the “anti-imperialism” of the murderer Putin. This doesn’t go further than a joke, and a bad one.
From the financial point of view, Russia is tied with multiple bonds of dependency to the imperialism. The Citibank possesses, more than 10.3 million dollars only in assets, being the greatest bank in Russia, handling the financial transactions and having as customer a large part of the transnational and Russian companies that operate in the country. Is Putin “anti-imperialist”? He is a manager of the Citibank!
Other treacherous currents claim that Russia is a “military power”. The reality is that Russia has the capability of massive production of conventional weaponry that exports to backward countries, inherited from the former URSS. But Russia is far from producing peak technology weaponry. The companies of the imperialist powers make huge and bulky businesses, even providing peak technology to the Russian military industrial device.

The entire Russian navy and army depend of the peak technology of the imperialist powers. In 2011 Putin signed a contract of acquisition of two French Mistral helicopter carriers for 1400 million euros. These carriers have a maximum capacity of 16 heavy helicopters or 35 light ones, plus around 50 military vehicles, included a dozen tanks, four assault boats and a half thousand soldiers.

At the end of 2014, two more of these helicopter carriers will be built in Russian shipyards, where French imperialism will consolidate his technology in Russia to produce, in the future, at large scale, weaponry of that kind, to be sold through the world the huge chain of commercialization of weapons that Russia has in the world market (27%), only behind the USA (30%).
In 2011, Russia signed also an agreement with Germany to build a military boot camp for 120 million euros. This military camp works virtually. It is a true simulator of any war situation. A whole battalion can be trained in it. So 30 thousand Russian soldiers travel each year to Germany to be military instructed.
USA has wounds for those businesses with Russia it lost, and today are made by the French and German imperialisms. For that, USA is twice as aggressive with Russia in the Ukraine crisis. As we already saw, USA demands Germany, France and every European country to “put funds for NATO, if they want to keep their freedom”. Hollande and Merkel put the funds… to make businesses –when they want- with Putin.
The situation in Ukraine is dire, because it advances that the fight for the market of the great Russia will also be a commercial, political fight, and in the future it will be military, between the imperialist powers that are disputing and will dispute it. Only the proletariat and the revolution will be able to stop this inexorable path.

USA has built in the European East (in countries like Poland or Hungary) a missile shield that means a huge business for their transnational companies. Ukraine must be “a new US Poland”.
This is the “high technology of the transnational companies and imperialism”. Ultimately, imperialism has achieved to get out 2008 crash momentarily, accompanied by a legion of paid treacherous leaders that saved it from the proletarian revolution, increasing the exploitation of the working class, the looting of the semi-colonial world and developing destructive forces, that is, weapons, high military tech, robotic for the war, drones, i.e. forces capable of destroying the entire human civilization. From this standpoint, imperialism recomposes its rate of profit.

Everything else is a lie of reformism. Reformism says that imperialism stops its expansion, then the crisis comes, and with the same momentum similar as the one before, it expands again. It denies the decadency of the capitalism in this imperialist stage, of sinking of the productive forces, of their decline as historical tendency, and the development of destructive forces as the most determinant economical factor of this epoch. They deny the parasitic character of capitalism in the imperialist stage.
This equals to say what every apologist of the capitalism says, for example, that a company as What’s App –a computer, an internet program, 50 employees and 2 departments- is worth 40.000 million dollars, from which a few thousand imperialist parasites earn millionaire profits.

This is derisory. This is parasitism. This is inventing fictional values that human work didn’t create. They are as fictional as the expansive cycles based in trash hypothecs in the USA, or in unpayable foreign debts… Gentlemen, capitalism, in order to survive, it expands itself by throwing to the trash entire sectors of the planet and entire branches of production. It grows in a pole of the market, and sinks the majority of it.
Capitalism concentrates itself, with its cartels, and prepares war, that is, the production branch that produces commodities for an unlimited market, as they get destroyed. This is imperialism and what it develops: destructive forces.
This discussion isn’t secondary in the Ukrainian question. They are disputing the powder keg of the human civilization between imperialist gangs and bands.
A defeat of the Ukrainian working class, new defeats and slaughters as in Syria, if not advancing toward new leaps forward in the European and worldwide revolution, imperialism, to get out of his crisis and to endure, will advance inevitably to the most important economic factor of this epoch: the war. The alternative of the civilization, now more than ever, is socialism or war.
The last word hasn’t been said. In 2008, there was a huge crisis of the world capitalist system of historical character. This crisis has begotten a revolutionary offensive of masses, which stroke in every continent. It has its highest peak in the tendencies to the synchronization of the revolutions in the semi-colonial world with those in the imperialist countries, and they were des-synchronized by the treacherous leaderships. We’ve seen this with the revolutions of the Maghreb and Middle East that threatened with setting fire again the spark of Athens, and from there the entire imperialist Europe. That is how we’ve seen it with the US defeat and retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, which opened a “Vietnam syndrome” in the USA and stopped it from attacking with new military offensives in the entire world as Bush did.
Because of this, USA, the World Bank and the IMF have stabilized their domain based on counterrevolutionary agreements, as the ones that we see today in Ukraine with Putin, or as we see with the same characters in Genève 2 supporting the murderous al-Assad. This matter is what has guaranteed imperialism that it could launch new counter-offensives and generalize them to the entire planet, despite its crisis.
With agreements with the new Castroite bourgeoisie, imperialism has ensured the support of the American working class to Obama, the disarming of the Colombian resistance, and that the “Bolivarian governments” (as the one of Bolivia, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, etc.) not only expropriate the revolution of the sub-continent, but also that today they are going forward in a true attack plan, on behalf of the transnational companies, against the Latin American working class.
To get to this point, imperialism had to command and organize the role of all of its agents. The popular front and the fronts of class collaboration slow down the masses, divert the revolutions, kneel the exploited to their executioners, as today they try to take the masses to feet of the murderous Putin, to which they are trying to make him pass as an ally of the oppressed people, as yesterday Qadafy in Libya or the jackal al-Assad in Syria.
As we have seen also yesterday with Syriza in Greece, these fronts of class collaboration only slow the masses so that afterwards the generals come and impose a counterrevolutionary order. In Egypt, this is already a cruel reality.

In Ukraine the veil is off. The agreement of Putin with Merkel, Hollande and Obama seeks to close the crisis on the top to close the revolutionary irruption of the Ukraine masses. New “Balkans” and new “Syrias” are being prepared. The European proletariat and Russian in particular can’t allow it.
On the one side of the trenches is Obama, Maastricht, its hitman Putin and all the treacherous leaderships of the planet, with some of them tied to the apron-strings of the financial bourgeoisie of Kiev, which is the one that commands the slaughter today of the workers of Donbass with the same repressive forces that yesterday slaughtered in Maidan Square under the Yanukovich government.
Another variant of this left, as the PTS in Argentina, each time that there is war, each time that the fights of the workers’ movement “are militarized”, the class struggle ceases for this Kautskist social democrat gentlemen. The workers’ movement disappears for them. They will say that in Ukraine a war between Putin and Obama exists, where the masses don’t intervene, when they are the one that die in the battlefield. The cynicism of these other currents has no end. They want to make the proletariat believe that the bourgeoisie makes wars where the fight amongst bourgeois takes place and don’t use the exploited for it. They are neutral in any kind of war, even in the civil war. They are confortable in their parliamentary seats. They can’t distinguish the interests and needs of the working class in the wars, in the class struggle or even in the polls.
But, on the other side of the barricades and the trenches in Ukraine, there are the workers of Donbass, defending the capital of a revolution that yesterday was diverted and aborted in Kiev, and today arises in the East. For that reason this “holy alliance” was set up to crush them, as yesterday to the exploited of Homs in Syria.

Imperialism focuses its forces in the capitals of the revolution. Yesterday, it did it in Athens, to put down the spark of the European revolution. It concentrated all the treacherous leaderships to extinguish the fire of the Latin-American revolution and the anti-imperialist uprising against the war of the American working class that got to besiege Wall Street.
These leaderships are the one that stop the world proletariat from concentrating their forces to hit imperialism centralized in its neuralgic points, which means no other thing to unite the combats of the semi-colonial proletariat with the ones of the working class of the imperialist countries.
The fight to re-found the Fourth International and solve the crisis of the proletariat leadership today is a sharp speed race between the perspective of victory of the proletariat revolution in the historical period that has been opened, or else the opening of the path to the war. This isn’t solved yet. Every tendency of the masses at international level –as we see today- to enter in offensive fights of class must deal strategic blows and defeats to these treacherous leaderships that imposed the actual siege to the world revolution.
We see this in China today, with harsh workers strikes against the party of the red businessman, the friends of Putin, the infamous bourgeoisie that hides the most brutal attack to the working class on behalf of the transnational companies, with its apology of the “market socialism”.
Those are strategic blows of the exploited, because they disband the leaderships that subordinate them to their executioners. That is how we see it in Brazil, where the left of the social pact today can’t even get into the Brazil of the exploited, the Brazil of the outraged, which rises today, despite and against the parties of the labour bureaucracy and aristocracy.
The forces of the ones that fight to re-found the Fourth International prepare for this perspective, for this strategic combats. Subordinating the Ukrainian working class to Putin or the murderers of Kiev is to prepare the path to the defeat in advance.