Presentation of Chapter I:
The objective premises and international conditions of the war in Ukraine
In Chapter I we develop the objective premises and the international and national conditions of this war, and the genesis of the enormous crisis that shakes Ukraine as an oppressed nation.
With the handover of the workers' states by Stalinism in '89, Ukraine could only become what it is today: a depleted semi-colony disputed by the different imperialist powers and looted by the IMF.
In this Chapter I we develop fundamental questions about the premises of the enormous events that have hit the Ukrainian nation since 2014 to the present.
Likewise, in this Chapter, through different articles, we draw the veil on two issues that we consider key on the Ukrainian question. One of them refers to the enormous weight of the working class in that country and the other, to the big deals that Putin and the Moscow oligarchy have with imperialism and the transnationals, where the deep relations between them are fully demonstrated.
In this Chapter we are editing the article that was published in "The International Worker Organizer" at the end of March 2022, entitled:
“The international conditions of the capitalist crash and imperialist offensive that have driven Putin and Russia to invade Ukraine”
The Stalinist currents and some renegades of Trotskyism, to justify Putin's invasion of Ukraine, tear their clothes apart denouncing the enormous weight that NATO and imperialism have in the latter. This is a self-exposing confession. It was they, the old Communist Parties' apparatchiks, who handed over, stealthily during the '80s -and already decisively in '89 from Moscow- Ukraine and the entire USSR to Reagan and Thatcher (the heads of NATO), to the transnationals and the international finance capital. It was from them that the new possessing classes of the countries of the former USSR, Ukraine included, came from, all lackeys of imperialism and direct agents of the IMF, which enslave these oppressed nations.
It was the new ruling class, emerged from the bowels of Stalinism and the CPSU, which was associated in '89 with Citibank, the City of London, Frankfurt and Wall Street. They, the former Stalinist leaders, became a millionaire super-oligarchy in "great" Russia and in all the former Soviet republics, as we will not cease to insist. In Ukraine, which is a fundamental link between Russia and the rest of Europe, the bourgeois fractions were configured, whether being these that look at and are intertwined in business with the European Union, or the gangs of pro-Moscow oligarchs, who have established fabulous business with Russia. But both have thousands of ties with the IMF and international financial capital, as minor partners of the latter in the plunder of the nation.
In short, there is in Ukraine a handful of big bourgeois from the Communist Party who control the key levers of this nation's economy, associated with imperialism or the Moscow bourgeoisie. They handle the grain business with Cargill and the mineral business with the big trusts and cartels of the world economy. They are the ones who charge commissions, associated with companies such as those of Biden himself from the US, for the transit through Ukrainian territory of Russian gas wealth, like the Soyuz Brotherhood gas pipeline.
What are the currents coming from Stalinism in the former USSR and their obsequious ex-Trotskyist appendages who support Putin's invasion of Ukraine complaining about, if Yanukovych, Poroshenko and even Zelensky himself are all sons and heirs of the old Communist Party, sellouts of the heroic October Revolution?
***
This first Chapter could not fail to mention what they are also trying to hide under lock and key in the ongoing Russian invasion, which, as we have said, is the enormous weight of the powerful Ukrainian proletariat. The working class makes one of the richest and most looted nations in Eastern Europe function and it is the one who puts the dead in this war, just like yesterday in Maidan Square and later on in Donbass.
Like the rest of the proletariat of the former Soviet republics, the Ukrainian working class, due to the betrayal and surrender of Stalinism, has been suffering historical defeats since 1989 with the fall of the USSR. In a contradictory way and going through serious crises, the Ukrainian proletariat has began now to recover and stand up. The elements of its immaturity are the absolute responsibility of Stalinism, which handed over the working class in Eastern Europe and dealt them grave setbacks with its betrayals in the West. That is why the Ukrainian proletariat is a new labor movement, the child of a great betrayal.
We therefore present the article
“The Ukrainian proletariat, one of the key detachments of the European working class”
It is enough to see the destruction of large factories and workers' concentrations in each city occupied by Russian troops to understand what we are saying here. In Mariupol, one of the largest steel mills in the Ukraine, which used to have tens of thousands of workers, was crushed and demolished, while the ArcelorMittal plant, the steel company of French imperialism, of course, was preserved by Moscow from its bombardments.
In addition to this enormous concentration of workers in the metal-mechanic and steel industry there are hundreds of thousands of mining workers, as we have already said, plus thousands of agricultural workers who are the ones who extract and produce all the wealth of the nation. The more than 80,000 port workers are the ones who ship 95% of Ukraine's exports from Mariupol, Odessa, Mykolaev and Kherson.
The Ukrainian proletariat is one of the worst paid and most self-sacrificing working classes in all of Europe. Two million of their people have migrated to Maastricht countries as cheap slave labor to support their families from abroad.
The average worker's monthly wage is 200 euros, in the midst of an unbearable cost of living exacerbated a thousand times by the ongoing war of invasion, as we report in the article we are publishing here.
The reader should know that on top of all this, and as if it were not enough, Zelensky, president of Ukraine, has just issued a decree in the middle of the war by which the capitalists will be able to fire the workers at will and pay their wages whenever they want. As we can see, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie does not give a damn about the lives of the exploited and is very far from “defending the nation”, as they claim to do, because they only defend their profits.
Crushing the Ukrainian working class and their struggle has been the reason for the counterrevolutionary offensives, the civil wars and the tutelage deals like those in Minsk imposed by both the US imperialists and Moscow and their agent governments. Their objective, as in this invasion, is to split the working class, divide its forces and plunder the riches of Ukraine.
In the service of this, Putin recreated in the Ukrainian East the pantomime of a fictitious nation called "Novorossia", to divide the Ukrainian workers' movement, to subjugate the militant mining proletariat of the Donbass area, to which the IMF-imposed plans of layoffs and closures of state mines had to be applied. On the other hand, the Ukrainian big bourgeoisie, through deceit and repression to the workers in the West of the country, promised them that they would get out of hunger and misery with the accession of Ukraine in the EU. But, as we know, Ukraine in the EU will only be another colony and sweatshop, as it happens with all the countries of Eastern Europe that are in Maastricht or have been struggling to be there for decades! There are already 7 European countries that are applying to join the EU, treated as "second class" by the Franco-German axis. There are also 8 countries that, being in the EU, do not have the Euro as their currency, which means transforming them into cheap colonies and their labor force into slaves of the European imperialist powers, as is essentially the case of the countries of the Glacis.
The partition of the Ukrainian working class is then the key factor that allows imperialism to plunder that nation. This is so because the proletariat is the only national class that has no business or compromises with the transnationals or the IMF, as the big oligarchs and the Ukrainian bourgeoisie do have. The Ukrainian proletariat is linked by thousands of ties to the European working class of the West and the Glacis, and from the Donbass, also to the Russian working class as the Ukrainian mines produce the necessary minerals for the production of Moscow's military industrial apparatus which is on the other side of Donbass borders.
***
That is why this first Chapter dedicated to the international conditions of the current war in Ukraine and the role of each of its actors, includes an analysis of who Putin and his oligarch partners in Moscow are. It is a question of defining the relations that "great" Russia has established with the world economy and the transnationals, with which Putin's gang is intimately linked.
The article we present here unmasks what "Putin's friends club" are trying to hide at world level, which is, nothing more and nothing less, that the big international finance capital of London, Paris, Wall Street and Frankfurt have enormous businesses in partnership with the "great" Russian bourgeoisie in that country. Together with it, the imperialist transnationals control a large part of Russian domestic market and its financial system, and own an enormous proportion of shares in the companies in charge of extracting and conducting the gas and oil they suck from the "great" Russia.
Intending to make Putin and his band of Russian bourgeoisie assassins look as "anti-imperialists" or as capable of "putting a brake on imperialism" -with which they are very keen to conciliate and do business as their junior partners-, is a lie, a fallacy and a brutal deception. Putin's "mighty army" is only there to oppress nations and crush revolutionary uprisings. If not, we challenge his epigones to tell us where there was a direct military clash between Putin's troops and NATO. Moreover, in Syria the death flights of American, Turkish, Russian and fascist al-Assad's aviation are coordinated to massacre the masses.
The Moscow oligarchy is involved in thousands of business deals with the European imperialist powers. To give just one example, as we stated in the Prologue of this work, most of the board and shareholders of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline is in the hands of big German companies, while Gazprom, the Russian gas company, has 49% of its shares in the hands of British Petroleum and German BASF/E.on. These facts are just a sample of the business and investments that imperialism has in Russia.
In 1989, the new ruling class that emerged from the CPSU stole all the wealth and kept the fundamental branches of production of the former USSR, without putting a penny. This new ruling class hid the rubles they usurped from the former workers' state in the banks of London, Cyprus, Switzerland and Monaco and in other tax havens and also in Wall Street. Thus the "great" Russian bourgeoisie has remained intertwined and subjected in thousands of businesses to international banking, through which the imperialist gangs discipline it, limit it in its ambitions and advance on Russia's own domestic market.
We publish then the note:
“Imperialism, the fundamental partner of Putin's businesses in Russia
Are Russia and China imperialist states?"
***
In this first Chapter we also address the Ukrainian national question. This is a central point of the debate among the currents which claim to be part of the Marxist movement. For us Trotskyists, it constitutes a question of the first order to anchor a revolutionary position before the war. That's because the national question, as Trotsky affirmed, is nothing more than the "labyrinthine form in which the class struggle expresses itself".
The Ukrainian national question is one of the great keys to approach the war in Ukraine from a minimally serious point of view.
Therefore, in this first Chapter we display in depth the Marxist policy on the national question. This topic is developed in the April 2022 article:
"The Ukrainian national question and the position of the Leninist-Bolsheviks."
The reader will get to know the position that Bolshevism and the Revolutionary Third International had on the national question and the Ukrainian question in particular. Bolshevism was the only revolutionary Marxist current that resolved and gave a way out to the Ukrainian nation, as well as to all the nations oppressed by Czarism that later federated in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) after the triumph of the October Revolution of 1917. This is the only possibility, with the victory of the socialist revolution, to liberate the oppressed peoples and Ukraine in particular. Most of the ex-Trotskyist currents have openly broken with the only program that will save Ukraine and its working class from catastrophe and barbarism.
Bolshevism was the only current, first in Lenin's lifetime and then its continuity, the Fourth International, which gave an answer to the question of the oppressed nations. Thus Bolshevism considered Czarist Russia -and later the Fourth International considered Stalin's Russia- as a true "prison of nations".
The policy of Bolshevism from 1917 to 1924 aroused all the hatred of the counterrevolutionary butcher Putin, and he denounced that the "damned invention of the Ukrainian nation" came from Lenin, as if the existence of a nation or dozens of them, as happened in the former USSR, depended on the thinking of one man or even of an entire party.
Today we see left currents and former Trotskyists who long ago broke all ties with the Fourth International denying and hiding this central point. They are divided in subjecting the Ukrainian and world working class to two different "bourgeois camps". On the one hand, there are those who sustain and support Russia's current war and massacre in Ukraine, guising Putin as an "anti-fascist", when in reality he is a counterrevolutionary government that with open fascist methods, maintains order and discipline against the masses, defending the business of capitalism in all Eurasia, as we have already said. They "march on top of Putin's tanks".
On the other hand, the pro-social-democratic currents of the former Trotskyist movement, pushing for a real front with the supposed "democratic" imperialisms, are asking NATO and the imperialist powers to defeat the Russian invasion by sending arms to Ukraine. This position is the continuity of the policy of Stalinism of World War II and of the Yalta and Potsdam Pact: the support touted by Stalin for the "democratic allies against Hitler", which allowed the massacre of more than 20 million Soviet workers and peasants, since the US imperialism policy during that war was that Nazi Germany should demolish and destroy the USSR... but without winning the war, that is, without keeping Russia for itself. That loot was for the USA, a matter which it could not achieve due to the heroism of the Soviet working class and the workers of all Europe.
Intending to stop Putin's bloody invasion and the US imperialist offensive, which at the command of NATO is at the head of the European imperialist powers on their road to Moscow, without the Ukrainian working class taking the leadership of the war with the method of the proletarian revolution, and uniting with the workers of Russia and the whole of Europe, is at the very least a reactionary utopia.
***
For this reason we consider to be decisive that the reader knows that there is another position, strategy and program opposed to the variants of reformism. The position of Bolshevism, which our current raises, the one we defend in this work. This is decisive to be able to give an answer and a revolutionary program before the crisis of Ukraine today. A program for the working class to take the leadership of the war -and in the course of it, the power- to crush the counterrevolutionary gang of Moscow and break with imperialism, expropriating the transnationals and ending with all commitment to pay the phenomenal foreign debt with which the IMF and the international finance capital strangle the Ukrainian nation.
We publish then a text of December 1919, which is key to understand the hatred aroused in the counterrevolutionary butcher Putin by the position of the revolutionary Bolsheviks, whose program maintains all the actuality:
"Lenin's letter to the workers and peasants of the Ukraine on the victories over Denikin"
|