Ukraine - September 9, 2023

General strike of the Mariupol workers in the area occupied by the butcher Putin

For the unity of the Ukrainian working class to defeat
the invader and end the IMF plunder!

Putin out!

For a working class, Soviet and independent Ukraine!

Undoubtedly, today Ukraine is one of the hottest spots in the international class struggle. But in spite of the rivers of ink and hours of television devoted to this war, the world bourgeoisie -and even the currents that claim to be Marxist- have made an effort to hide two key facts in this war: that the ones who die and suffer the costs of this invasion are the UKRAINIAN WORKING CLASS and that Ukraine is a nation invaded by an oppressor nation -such as Russia- and plundered by imperialism.

They wanted to hide the fact that Ukraine is an eminently working class nation, concentrating one of the central battalions of the European proletariat and which today is bleeding to death in the heart of Europe under Putin's bombings. Taking into account only registered labor, of its 44 million inhabitants, 15 million are workers, and two million 300 thousand industrial workers, with more than 5 million agricultural workers, and more than three million mining workers, and hundreds of thousands of dockers.

However, despite the fact that they want to silence this fact, a war cry of the Ukrainian working class comes to put it on the scene: it is the call for a general strike against the invader which emerges from the rubble of the destroyed Mariupol, once known, prior to Putin's invasion, as "the steel capital", where the largest steelworks of the country is located. This city was especially targeted by Moscow, systematically bombed, sinking and destroying all its infrastructure.

The strike of Mariupol has as main demands the resistance against the occupier and the claim for wage arrears, since the invader hasn't paid the workers for months and months. But today in Mariupol not only wages are not paid. Thousands have been killed and the cost of living has skyrocketed, making life impossible for the masses, who in many cases do not even have a place to live: the occupants have not solved the housing problem for those whose homes have been destroyed. Mariupol has become a ghost town. On the streets you can see how even the weeds are not removed. With his boot, Putin is in charge of persecuting, interrogating and torturing anyone suspected of opposing the invasion. He has banned the use of the Ukrainian language and has populated the offices, town halls and schools with his face and those of the occupation mayors.

The working class of this city has stood up, calling for a general strike this September 10, called by a Committee for a general strike. The same September 10 when a farcical and fraudulent elections guaranteed with the butcher Putin's gun will be held in the occupied zones. Mariupol, as we have said, concentrates the most important steel mills of the nation, as well as key ports from where grains and minerals are exported to the world. From there the working class, from the resistance to the invasion, goes out to fight with its methods of struggle.

The Mariupol strike marks the road to defeat the invader and put an end to the plunder and pillage of the nation by Putin and imperialism with the IMF. The workers of Mariupol with their call put on the agenda the immediate unity of the working class of Ukraine in a single demand and a single struggle. The working class of the entire Ukraine must respond to this call and join the strike. Because whether under Putin's boot, or under Zelensky's rule, the workers are suffering the most aberrant hardships. Let us remember that one of the first resolutions of the Ukrainian president at the beginning of the war was to allow dismissals without cause and without compensation, as well as legalizing the non-payment of wages.

This is why the call for the strike of the Mariupol workers immediately raises the point of the unity of the Ukrainian working class, which has been split in this war between the workers of Kiev under Zelensky's control, and the workers of the Donbass occupied by Moscow. It is necessary to unite the ranks of the workers of the Donbass to Kiev!

But this general strike also poses the unity with the Russian working class, since the same demands unite them and they face the same enemy: the butcher Putin, he who throws the youth and the workers to die in a war that is not theirs and that is why they flee by thousands, emigrate and even sabotage and set fire to the Russian enlistment posts on a daily basis. And we say that they have the same demands because the butcher of Moscow is already in the habit of not paying wages and hundreds of thousands suffer this in the Russian lands. The Russian working class has in its hands to provoke Putin a real "Vietnam" in Russia by revolting against this oppressor who crushes his own working class and all the former worker republics of Eurasia. This we say, is the most powerful missile of the Ukrainian working class, as welding the unity with the Russian working class is for the Ukrainian workers a question of life and death.

Only an independent proletarian strategy for the victory of the invaded nation can lead Ukraine, allied to the European and Russian proletariat, to defeat Putin and put an end to the imperialist plunder

Recently, the Leon Trotsky Encounter in São Paulo, brought together currents that have even opposing positions, for example, on the Ukrainian question and the war today.

Among them, there were those who openly defend Putin's criminal invasion and we ask ourselves, what would they say today in the face of the general strike in Mariupol? Will they continue to ride Putin's tanks to crush it with iron and fire?

And those who submit every struggle of the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian resistance to NATO, will they call from Kiev for a general strike in defense of all the workers' conquests taken away, and will they fight to take military control of the national defense?

At the same table in São Paulo there were the declared "neutrals", those who say that we are facing two reactionary sides, that it is a war in which NATO and Moscow are confronting each other and that it is not possible to take sides or place oneself in either of the two trenches. This is the position of the British SWP, replicated by parties like the PTS of Argentina. Faced with the Mariupol strike, will the neutral gentlemen say that the Mariupol workers "through an intermediary" are "playing into the hands of imperialism" by confronting Moscow? Will they remain "neutral" in the face of the strike against the invader?

But in fact, a defeat of Putin at the hands of the Ukrainian masses would not only leave them in better conditions to confront the lackey government of Zelensky's NATO, but it would be a breath of struggle for the masses of Syria who are today returning to combat, an encouragement for the proletariat of the former workers' states of Eastern Europe and Eurasia, a thousand times crushed by Putin's boot, to return to the revolutionary torrent! Pontius Pilate raises his shoulders among the corpses and flees well away from the bombs with his white flags.

But on the contrary, a victory of Putin, crushing the proletariat and the oppressed masses of Ukraine would mean a strategic defeat for all the ex-Soviet masses, so that they would never again dare to rise up. That is why imperialism lets the war and the massacre of the Ukrainian masses go on. In this way the masses of all the former worker states are being chastised.

That is why today, more than ever, the need arises for the working class, unifying its ranks from the Donbass to Kiev, to take the leadership of the war, since it has been more exposed than ever that with the leadership of the bourgeoisie and the lackey Zelensky it is impossible to defeat the invader. The program for Ukraine to achieve its national independence and not be oppressed by Moscow and NATO, is none other than for the working class to take the leadership of the war and intervene with the methods of the proletarian revolution, expropriating the expropriators of the people, taking control of the production, and putting all the resources at the service of defeating the occupier.

Today the position of Trotskyism is confirmed that the national question can only be fully and effectively solved by the working class and its allies, the poor peasants, having seized the power… That is to say, through the dictatorship of the proletariat. As in every colonial and semicolonial country, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie is linked with a thousand and one businesses to imperialism, and its fate is tied to it and its businesses. On the contrary, the working class and the poor peasants have their lives at stake in carrying to the end the democratic tasks of national liberation and agrarian reform, which they can only achieve by combining these tasks with socialist tasks, with a successful revolution which will be a link and a decisive step of the international and, in this case, European socialist revolution in particular. So it happened with the triumph of the October Revolution, the only moment in history when the Ukrainian nation could be, as SOVIET AND INDEPENDENT UKRAINE, federated by its own will in the USSR.

The European working class today more than ever must stand up alongside the Ukrainian working class!

Ukraine can be the key link to unite the European revolution from the Russian steppes to Portugal

The break of the working class of the imperialist countries of Europe and the USA with their counterrevolutionary governments and regimes and plunderers of the oppressed peoples, is the key and decisive question for the liberation of the proletariat of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics from any oppression and slavery. The European working class must come to the call of its Ukrainian brothers and sisters to say: "The enemy is at home!".

And this is what all the Stalinist leaderships are very well silent about, which, supporting Putin the butcher, shout against NATO, but are very careful not to raise the struggle of the workers of the central countries against the NATO governments, since it is the Communist Parties who lead the European trade union centers. And even the currents that pose as "pacifists" and like Pontius Pilate say that we should not support any side because they are all reactionary, they tell the Ukrainian working class that not only Putin should be defeated, but also the Ukrainian working class, a working class of ONE nation should defeat NATO... Incredible. Thus they silence and do not put forward their internationalist tasks to the working class of the imperialist countries, restricting any possibility of unified struggle of the European working class, and with the working class of the USA.

But NATO is not the one fighting in Ukraine; there are the workers and the Ukrainian people, crushed by Moscow, who fight beyond the bourgeois and arch-reactionary political leadership of the national war, because as we try to pose, without the support of the Russian working class and all of Europe, the Ukrainian proletariat will not be able to take the lead of the war. Although they try at every step, as we have seen yesterday in Mariupol when the workers barricaded themselves in the steel mills to resist the invasion, and as we see in the call for the strike on September 10 that states: "The strike is the voice of those who "... have to live under the dictates of the occupier, be deprived of human rights and national independence."

The Ukrainian working class needs to unite its ranks in defense of the nation invaded by Moscow and plundered by imperialism. But they won't be able to do it alone. Traitor leaderships, worker bureaucracies and Stalinism divide the ranks and the fighting of the working class of the oppressed countries, their European and Russian siblings. This allows the imperialist powers and Putin to unleash the entire attack against the masses in Western Europe, in Russia, in the oppressed Ukraine and in all the nations of the colonial and semi-colonial world.

That is why the European and Russian working class must take in their hands the lead and fight alongside their Ukrainian brothers to stop Putin's war machine, disarm NATO, expel the IMF from Ukraine and nationalize and nationalize without compensation and under workers' control all the imperialist enterprises and the assets of the millionaire oligarchs allied to Moscow or Frankfurt in the plunder of Ukraine and the super-exploitation of its working class.

Eliza Funes and Nadia Briante