April 2022

The Russian invasion of Ukraine
must be defeated!
Under the boot of Moscow or NATO Ukraine
will remain a protected colony

by Carlos Munzer

The Russian invasion of the Ukraine has developed a wide discussion in the currents that claim to belong to the international Marxist left.  Wide sectors of workers want to know what it is about.  On television screens and through social networks, a Russian war of invasion of Ukraine is entering the homes of millions of workers around the world.

 A huge apparatus of the Stalinist currents and other remnants of the Kremlin try to make the exploited masses of the world believe that Putin is an “ally in the fight against NATO and imperialism”.  This constitutes a true lie and a gross deception on the part of those who proclaim themselves defenders of a "multipolar world", which is nothing more than the defense of "multiple poles" that exploit the world working class and plunder the oppressed peoples in the planet.

 It is essential for Trotskyists to state the position of revolutionary Marxism in the face of this event, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the actions of the murderous bandits from Moscow are repeated, as they entered Georgia, then Belarus and recently Kazakhstan to crush huge mass uprisings, in defense of the businesses of the capitalists and the imperialist looting of those nations of Eurasia and the Caucasus.

A class policy on the question of war

 The first thing a Marxist tries to do in front of a war is to define what the interests of the working class are in that particular war.  Any policy that does not start from this premise is neither socialist nor does it serve the workers to liberate themselves.  Whatever character the war in question may have, those who fight and die in wars are the workers.  Not having a class policy in the face of wars is then an open break with the revolution and socialism.
We revolutionaries start from Marx's premise that "no people that oppresses another or collaborates in doing so can liberate itself."  It is from this point of view that we Trotskyists are establishing our position in this conference regarding the war and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

 The proletariat intervenes in different types of wars but does so always fighting for its interests.  Vulgar Marxism, of true pacifists in particular, takes a certain element on the definition of war, but isolates it and separates it from the class struggle.  It does so by stating, as Clausewitz said, that "war is the continuation of politics by other means."  There is no doubt about it.  But that technical-political definition of war does not in itself state what it means for the working class.  How does the proletariat express its politics and its needs during the war?... The charlatan who wants to portray himself as radicalized by discussing the war ignores its substance and what it implies for the working class.
The Marxist who does not answer this question is not only unserious but also has no understanding of war and class struggle.
Trotsky insisted a thousand times, as the Third and Fourth International did, that the war means a moment of exacerbation of the class struggle.  In it, class civil war, the arming of the masses and the decisive combat against the bourgeoisie are placed on the order of the day, on the condition that the workers and exploited, led by a revolutionary party, have a correct policy.  Lenin was not merely making a figure of speech when he stated that war was a great midwife of revolutions.

In the face of inter-imperialist wars, where imperialist gangs dispute the spoils and the respective spheres of influence in the colonial and semi-colonial world, as was the case in the First World War, or are also trying to define who would conquer the USSR, as was the case in the Second one, the anti-defencist slogan of the revolutionaries was to state that we workers should not kill each other for the interests of each other's imperialist bourgeoisie.  The internationalists called for fraternization on the battlefront and turning the gun around because the "enemy is at home," they said.  That was the policy of Lenin and later on of the Fourth International: to turn the gun around, that is, transform the inter-imperialist war into the beginning of the socialist revolution.  So much so, that this was the program with which the proletariat took power in Russia.
For Marxism, this is what war, which is the continuation of politics by other means, is about; but for the working class that means the exacerbation of the class struggle to an extreme degree, which puts on the order of the day the struggle for the revolution.

 To reaffirm what we say here, let's see the military policy that the proletariat had for its Red Army to defend the October 1917 Revolution in Russia.  In the strategy of the Bolsheviks to win the war against 14 imperialist armies that invaded the USSR after the seizure of power, only 10 or 15% of it referred to the military technique to be used in those very hard combats.  What was essential was to have a bold program of "social reforms" by the proletariat, as Trotsky, the head of the Red Army, claimed.  Granting independence to the peoples oppressed by the tsars, giving the land to the peasants, conquering peace, fraternizing with the German proletariat and calling the European working class to rise up, was the key to the victory of the Red Army, beyond that it had at its head military geniuses like Trotsky and the Bolshevik General Staff, who applied the best military technique with their "war of maneuvers" to defeat the imperialist enemy.
We insist, the Red Army was the iron fist of the Soviets to develop the class war to extreme degrees in the territory of the tsars and to expand the revolution throughout Europe and internationally.

Let us begin by affirming then, against the vulgar Marxists who proclaim their supposed knowledge of the war but understand nothing about it and flee from all of them (as is the case of the Albamonte group in Argentina, the PTS), that for revolutionary Marxism the key in any war is to develop the civil class war, since the arming of the masses is set as an immediate task.  The highest point of this civil class war is the insurrection... The art of insurrection, that is, of seizing power under the leadership of a revolutionary party, supported by the armed masses of the Soviets and by the blind force and hatred of millions of exploited who attack the citadel of the power of the exploiters to demolish it.
As we see, the civil war manual for the working class, which includes and subsumes the question of military technique, is the decisive element that every revolutionary leadership must understand.  It is the parliamentary and social democratic currents that speak of war in general, although in order to renounce the civil war and the struggle for the revolution in it in particular.

There are different types of state: imperialist, semi-colonial, colonial, economically dependent but relatively independent politically, nations that have not managed to emerge in the imperialist era as such and that are subsumed and oppressed by other nations created and drawn by imperialism for their benefits and business.  For example, there is the Kurdish people in the Middle East, Palestine occupied by the Zionist-fascist state of Israel, the nationalities of the Iberian Peninsula that are oppressed by the financial capital of the Bourbons such as Catalonia and the Basque Country, Ireland in England, etc.
Different types of states also suggest that there are different types of warfare which, in Lenin's words, ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ECONOMIC FACTOR OF OUR TIME.  The development of destructive forces is the biggest business on the planet because it means the production of goods for an unlimited market, since weapons are destroyed.  For example, the US today spends the military budget per year that it spent during the entire Second World War to keep its army in control of the planet.  That is also what the role of Putin is about, who inherited the industrial-military apparatus of the former USSR, which today is in the hands of a handful of oligarchs and big bourgeois who, by controlling the state, manage this enormous and fabulous business.  They do so in partnership with high technology from France and Germany.  The latter have been training 30,000 Russian soldiers per year in war simulators that worked virtually, while France sold it four helicopter carriers, but only gave it two, without giving it the technology, because this business was suspended by the US in 2014. It is this Russian "great" bourgeoisie which has true joint ventures with all the imperialist transnationals in all branches of production.  This even happens in the state companies, such as Gazprom, Rosneft and in agriculture with Cargill, Monsanto and Dreyfus, which take a large part of the agricultural income from the largest wheat exporter in the world, Russia.

 So, there are different types of war that impose precise tasks on the working class so as not to die for the interests of their executioners under the capitalist system and in this imperialist era of crisis, wars and revolutions... We insist, of wars and revolutions.

The Trotskyist movement, which was Bolshevism in resistance within the USSR and the Third International, throughout the 20th century called on the international proletariat to unconditionally defend the workers' states from any military attack by imperialism, regardless of whether they had the Stalinist bureaucracy at their head.  This task is summarized in the "Manifesto of the Fourth International and the imperialist war" of 1940, with the slogan "We defend the USSR but we do not support Stalin who surrenders it at every step with his policy of collaborating with imperialism."

 There are other types of wars, which are those of national liberation against imperialist oppression.  Trotsky argued that if "democratic" England invaded "fascist" Brazil, the proletariat must stand "with 'fascist' Brazil against 'democratic' Great Britain.  (…) If England won, they would put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and bind Brazil with double chains.  If, on the other hand, Brazil were to emerge triumphant, the national and democratic consciousness of this country would gain a powerful boost that would lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship.  At the same time, the defeat of England would deal a heavy blow to British imperialism and give a boost to the revolutionary movement of the English proletariat."  ("The anti-imperialist struggle is the key to liberation. An interview with Mateo Fossa", September 23, 1938)
Therefore, in the wars of national liberation, the task of the workers' movement is to fight with the method of the proletarian revolution against imperialism and against any nation that oppresses another or sectors of it.  The fight is for the working class and the peasant and popular masses to take the leadership of the war against imperialism, developing the generalized armament of the exploited, expropriating imperialism and all its assets in the oppressed nation and calling the proletariat of the aggressor country to rise up against its own imperialist or oppressive bourgeoisie.  These are, and there are no others, the conditions for victory.

 As Trotsky stated, beyond the differences in the type of state that exists between imperialist England and the "great" Russia oppressor of the peoples of Eurasia, in no way did Putin invade Ukraine to replace Zelensky with a radical democrat... The jackal of Moscow would put in his place a centurion with a saber in his hand worse than Zelensky's and who, without a doubt, would report to Wall Street and the IMF, to enslave Ukraine together.

 Another example of a war of occupation was the US invasion of Iraq, which ended up taking that country to the quasi-Middle Ages and divided it into three regions, extracting all its oil and wealth, a thousand times more than under Saddam Hussein, and imposing a regime based on a million dead by the invading troops.
We also saw the US invasion of Afghanistan and before that of Vietnam, where US imperialism was defeated by the uprising of the US working class against the war, just as it had happened before, at the end of World War II, with the brutal defeat suffered by the Gringos in the Korean War.  Back then, it was the Maoist bureaucracy that held back the masses at the 38th parallel from moving forward to seize power throughout the Korean peninsula.

There are currents, like the PTS in Argentina, that have written entire books on the relationship between Clausewitz, Marxism and the technique of war, but have not understood anything about it.  For them the class struggle disappears or is suspended when there is a war.  This is how they put it in Ukraine with a totally anti-dialectical and therefore anti-Marxist syllogism: “war is the continuation of politics by other means”.  And they go on to say: “NATO policy is to support Ukraine.  Russia's policy is to invade it.  We are not politically with NATO or with Russia. Therefore, we call for peace.”
And what about the Ukrainian working class?  And the Russian proletariat dying like common soldiers?  The petty-bourgeois pacifist looks the other way and raises the white flag on the battlefront.
Millions of Ukrainian workers today are refugees at the borders.  Others die under the bombs of the invading Putin troops.  Tens of thousands of Russian workers have already been arrested for mobilizing against the counterrevolutionary war of the Moscow dictator, who is fighting to be the executioner, on behalf of imperialism, of the peoples of the former European Soviet republics... The PTS slogan of "peace" does not take into account this, nor the Ukrainian national question.  Although the leftist bureaucrats do not want to admit it, Ukraine is a nation that only achieved its independence as such with the victory of the socialist revolution and the civil war in the USSR and it did so with the victory of a Soviet and revolutionary Ukraine.
To liquidate the national character of the war in Ukraine, today invaded by Russia and plundered by imperialism, is to be an abject servant of Putin, since it means validating that Ukraine is Russian territory, as the tsars affirmed yesterday and it is done from Moscow today.
NATO is using the territory of Ukraine so that Putin can finally crush it and bring it to its knees, and also to weaken the "great" Russia, which imperialism seeks to economically encircle more and more to grab and keep its sources of raw materials and its domestic market.

 If the Russian invasion succeeds, a devastated Ukraine will remain, divided and protected by a new pact between the imperialist powers and Moscow, this time perhaps under the umbrella of the UN or a "peace committee of imperialist nations".  The productive forces will be decimated and destroyed.  The working class broken and divided by distribution, occupation and imperialist pillage.  Possibly, according to the result, the borders of Ukraine will be redrawn.  But what will have remained is a strengthened "great" Russia, insofar as it can continue to be the gendarme of imperialist business in the former Soviet republics of Asia, while it will remain totally weakened in its relationship with Europe, where it will be increasingly surrounded by imperialism.

On the other hand, a victory for the Ukrainian nation and a defeat for the Russian invasion would leave the working class on their feet to get rid of their anti-working-class government in the course of that war, or during and after it, with the weapons in hand.  The fight for the victory of the Ukrainian nation is inseparable from the struggle to unify the ranks of the working class from Donbass to Kyiv, attacking the property of imperialism and the oligarchs associated with Moscow.  There is no doubt that a "great" Russian defeat in Ukraine would create the best conditions for the Russian working class to return to political combat and launch new counter-offensives for the sake of the workers of Kazakhstan, Belarus, the Caucasus, today disciplined by the whip of Moscow.  If these conditions of the revolted Eurasia working class were met, with a weakened regime in Russia, this would strategically mean a severe blow to NATO and imperialism.  Decisive battalions of the international proletariat would enter the fight, which would make the imperialist Europe of Maastricht tremble and would put in the order of the day the fight against the same enemy: the imperialist powers that plunder and oppress them.

The Ukrainian military defeat would mean a catastrophe with profoundly counter-revolutionary consequences, since it would leave a nation divided and "protected" in common by the imperialist powers, Putin's sabers and NATO missiles.  It would be the mirror in which all the oppressed nations of Eurasia, Europe and Russia itself would have to look at themselves.

 Let the "peace" theorists try to promote strikes and struggles of the Ukrainian proletariat if there is such a national defeat!  The Ukrainian labor movement will be a thousand times more enslaved, just as the Russian proletariat will be under Putin's boots.

 A Ukrainian national defeat at the hands of Moscow is not a threat to NATO.  Very possibly Russia will keep the Donbass along with Crimea.  The rest of the Ukraine will remain as a colony under the command of US imperialists.  That is to say, it will be imperialism that continue to dominate and control that oppressed nation (as Moscow will do in whatever slice it takes), as it does today with all the former Soviet republics that have become colonies or semi-colonies.  With Putin the winner, the interests of the millionaire imperialist investments in Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia will be guaranteed.  Ukraine will then end up tied with double or triple chains.

 The "peace" program covers up an abstentionist policy in the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and is a twin policy of the one raised by the sectors of the left that support Putin.  It is that the "peace" program, which goes directly against the victory of the oppressed nation, hides the worst of hypocrisies because ultimately it renounces the intervention of the European working class and all the international obligations that the world proletariat has towards the occupied Ukraine.  A pacifist policy that binds the working class at the feet of Stalinism and the church itself, commanded by the Pope of Rome.

Those who do not fight against the pacts NATO has with Moscow to massacre in the Middle East and the Caucasus on a front with Turkey do not confront it, as they have done until today with the Minsk Pact signed between Russia and the US to plunder and partition Ukraine.
NATO is being fought by unmasking before the European workers that the Gringos are stepping on Ukraine because they are disputing with the Franco-German axis the gas and oil routes that they extract from “great” Russia as a source of cheap energy.
Confronting NATO is calling on the working class of the entire imperialist Europe and Eastern Europe to rise to war and confront the anti-worker governments and regimes of NATO, to support the masses and the Ukrainian nation, with the method of struggle of the working class: the general strike throughout Europe, which would end with the revolt of the Russian workers against Putin's massacre in the Ukraine and the workers of the rest of Europe against NATO, to save the Ukrainian working class and the oppressed nation from being divided and doubly plundered.
 It is the working class of all of Europe, and that of Maastricht and Russia in particular, who must lead a decisive offensive against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and against NATO and its plundering imperialist governments, in defense of the Ukrainian proletariat.

The reformist left hides the Minsk Pact, which strangled the 2014 mass revolutionary uprising and split the Ukrainian nation

 Before the invasion of Ukraine, it was governed and protected by puppet after puppet governments of NATO and Russia, in what were the Minsk Agreements that were imposed in 2014 to divide Ukraine, divide its working class and prevent any revolutionary process such as the one that opened with the fall of Yanukovych, the great agent of Putin and the largest paymaster and servant of the IMF among all the former Soviet republics of Eastern Europe.
With this pact Ukraine was then divided, its working class was also divided and a fratricidal war was opened within it that left more than 14,000 dead... Many of them were assassinated in Donbass by the paramilitary gangs of Kyiv and by the same Stalinism associated to Putin inside Donetsk and Lugansk.  They were who imposed, with the pistol of the Kyiv army at the temple of the masses, the worst plans of the IMF in Donbass these years.  They closed dozens and dozens of mines and left thousands of workers on the streets, just as happened in Kyiv and in western Ukraine years past.  The 6 biggest oligarchs in Ukraine who control the bulk of the productive forces alongside imperialism, won on both sides, while the working class was torn apart in a bloodbath.
Uniting the working class of eastern and western Ukraine is the decisive task to win the war against the Russian occupation.  To this end, the struggle for self-determination of the Donbass peoples is inseparable from the struggle for the military defeat of the Moscow invasion.  The unity of the Ukrainian working class is the only guarantee of the victory of the nation oppressed by imperialism and the boots of Putin.

 As we will develop later, those who call themselves "Leninists" today turn their backs on the only revolutionary program and policy that was raised for the Ukrainian nation, that of Lenin in 1922, of which the butcher Putin and the counterrevolutionary forces of NATO are the greatest enemies and why not say it, also the reformist left hanging on their coattails.
Lenin's policy was to fight for an independent organization of the working class that would take national tasks into its hands, starting by defeating the invasion ravaging a people who do not want to be dominated by foreign troops, regardless of their nation, much less by Russia, which has oppressed Ukraine for centuries.  The more the tsars, Stalinism and today Putin oppress Ukraine, the more the Ukrainian masses want to go to Western Europe to escape from the horror of oppression, death and famine.  Supported in these conditions the Ukrainian bourgeoisie can manipulate the masses, promising them that they "will receive paradise" from the hand of imperialist Maastricht.
And what a paradox: the most pro-Russian governments that Ukraine had, like that of the millionaire and oligarch Yanukovych, were the most subservient to imperialism and the IMF.  How could they not be?  If they came from the kidney of the Stalinist scourge that the USSR handed over to Reagan, Thatcher, the Citibank and the imperialist bankers of London.
 Instead, under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, Soviet Ukraine was a great bastion of the revolutionary struggle against European imperialism.

The Marxist policy in the face of war, then, starts from promoting in it what it generates: the exacerbation of the class struggle and the civil war in the heat of it.  All the rest is talk to hide capitulation.

The anti-defensist policy of “turning the gun around” covers up the fact that the Ukrainian working class is left unarmed in the face of Putin's massacre and an oppressed and occupied nation.

This is also the case of the currents that raise an anti-defense policy in the war of national oppression that is taking place in Ukraine, which opens the doors to the “great” Russian invasion.  This position is twin to the “peace” policy in general, since it also liquidates the Ukrainian national question.  The current war is taking place with a specific invasion of a specific country, which is Ukraine, because the objective of this war is to bring the Ukrainian nation to its knees and massacre its people, unless the current theorists of "imperialist Russia" are seeing a Pearl Harbor, a bombing of London, the taking of Paris, or Russian troops marching into Germany.
In its policy of keeping its business in Europe, the "great" Russia does not accept that the US controls its borders.  He does agree to share them in the hydrocarbon business with the Franco-German axis, with whom they built a gas pipeline, with a former German Prime Minister, which reaches the gates of Berlin and that the Gringos have frozen today.  Germany has accepted this and, together with the Europe of Maastricht, has reluctantly yielded to the Gringo leadership in its offensive for Moscow's businesses, while preparing to "nationalize" Gazprom in Germany so that it is clear to Putin who is in charge and who oppresses whom in the business of Europe.  The Franco-German axis is a long way from giving up the supremacy it won in its commercial control of Russian gas.  And it does this by accompanying the US offensive.  Actually, in the midst of the morass of the world economic crisis, all the imperialist powers need the internal market and the sources of raw materials of Russia and China to survive, an issue that pushes more and more to the war to semi-colonize them.

Those who die in this war are the Ukrainian workers and the Russian workers who go as common soldiers to kill their class brothers in the Ukraine, under the orders of Moscow.  You have to define yourself and stop being "neutral": either you are with the oppressed Ukraine, whatever government it has, against the oppressive country that invades it today, as a starting point to confront US and European imperialism, or you are a lackey of imperialism in the oppressor nation.

 "The Russian worker must turn the gun around," they say.  Okay.  "Committees of common soldiers must be set up."  Okay.  And what about the Ukrainian worker?  Does the rifle turn and against whom does it shoot?
What do you propose to the Ukrainian working class?  March on Poland and declare open war on NATO that is there?
These people are lost among three pines.  Only a victorious Ukrainian working class, which takes into its hands the military direction of the national war, arming and generalizing the armament of all the poor people, allied with the Russian working class and with a weakened Putin, will create the best conditions to confront the imperialist looting.

Both the policy that denies the defense of Ukraine as an oppressed nation, as well as the one that proclaims "peace" together with the Pope and the one that gives direct support to Putin, are the three policies that clear the way for the murderers of Moscow to crush the Ukrainian nation and then share it with US and European imperialism, as Putin is already negotiating with his great friend Erdogan, the NATO man in Eurasia.

 Meanwhile, we insist, those who shed the blood are the workers of the Ukraine and the common soldiers of Russia who are forced to go to fight against their class brothers of the Ukrainian nation.

Another fraction of the international reformist left follows in the footsteps of Stalinism and its policy of deals and agreements with "democratic" imperialism to "crush fascism"

This is the policy proposed by old Morenoite currents such as the LIT-CI and the UIT-CI. They demand that "democratic" imperialism send weapons to Ukraine.
Asking imperialism to arm an oppressed nation to the teeth in the midst of a war, with the danger that these weapons remain in the hands of the proletariat, is not only a deception, but also nonsense. It is passing off  USA, England, France and Germany as forces of national liberation. We really do not know nor have ever seen the imperialisms that they call “democratic”, support any national liberation struggle. Moreover, all the wars of national liberation in the imperialist era have been against them. As revolutionary Marxism stated in the 20th century, “democratic” imperialisms are the most fascist in the colonies and semi-colonies they oppress.

Today NATO settles who is to be the jailer of the Ukrainian people. Moscow claims that they have to play a key role in the colonization of Ukraine. Today the constitution of a "neutral" government in Kyiv is being negotiated in Turkey, with the Biden family, Dreyfus, Cargill and the imperialist companies controlling the gas and all the wealth of Ukraine while Moscow is breaking up and seceding Donbass and Crimea and drawing clear borders. This is what Russia has already done to Georgia, taking South Ossetia out of that country and placing it within the Russian Federation along with North Ossetia, but not before crushing the Georgian people who rose up against hunger in 2008 in  iron and fire. Thus Russia proved before imperialism that its weapons are there to massacre the rebellious peoples and very far from attacking the imperialists' businesses.

This is what Putin is fighting for: to continue being the gendarme and the guardian of imperialism's businesses in Asia, but also in Europe, as he has been until now. But for the U.S. this has come to an end. The US no longer wants to allow Putin to be the jailer who steps on the former Soviet republics, since the US want NATO and their direct agents there, precisely to break the vital European space of the Franco-German axis and be the ones who take control of the key deals between Europe and Moscow. That is why the trade war that Trump started yesterday, is today taken by Biden forward to the nth degree, even openly handing over Ukraine to be the object of the Russian massacre. The cheap energy and the gas from the “great” Russia that goes to Europe through the Ukraine is paying commission to the Biden company and comes also through the Caspian, through the Turkish gas pipelines.
The USA in bankruptcy, with 3 world crashes greater than the crisis of the 30s, in the lapse of 20 years alone, already need the vital European space to survive. And it goes all out for it, Moscow included, as we have said.

For this reason, asking German “democratic” imperialism to send weapons to Ukraine, when it has appointed time ago one of its greatest executives and former chancellor, Gehrard Schröder, as president of Russian Gazprom and its Nord Stream II gas pipeline, is a fallacy. Germany is not going to commit suicide. It has sufficient problems to address, as NATO under U.S. command steps on Europe and breaks German vital space and the labor division that Maastricht had with Russia and Eastern Europe; while the U.S. and England are to be the ones leading the plan to recolonize even a Russia now relatively independent of imperialism. Which will be, as Biden himself said, a long-term job.

While the second most powerful army on the planet invades Ukraine with 150,000 men, the shipment by several NATO countries of some missiles shows that the US and NATO have handed over Ukraine as a pawn to prepare for their own march to Moscow and control the spheres of influence of imperialist Maastricht in Europe.

This fraction of the reformist Left, like the fighters for "peace", have liquidated in advance the fight for the independent intervention of the Ukrainian proletarians' taking the leadership of the war into their hands and calling for the uprising of the Russian and the whole Europe working class to stop Putin's war machine. In this way they have also renounced to prepare the working class for a decisive class war against imperialist Maastricht.

The policy of "peace" and being in a front with the "democratic" executioners of the oppressed peoples, together with that of Stalinism, which came out to support Putin together with some of its ex-Trotskyist henchmen, are what has handcuffed the European, Russian, American and worldwide proletariat to prevent it from intervening decisively in this war for their Ukrainian class siblings to take political and military control of it.

Openly combating this "democratic front" policy, Trotskyism intervened in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.
The Trotskyists were very far from relying in France and England, the “democratic” imperialists, as the LIT CI says, for receiving weapons for the Spanish proletariat.
Trotsky argued that in the Spanish Civil War we Trotskyists were not neutral, but rather fought on the Republican front. But the fundamental weapon that the proletariat had to defeat Franco by 90% was the program of the socialist revolution and not the submission to the "democratic" executioners of the European and world working class, while the technical-military issue was only 10% of the solution.
The key to victory was to develop the civil war according to an independent policy of the proletariat, and join the international working class. It was necessary to expel the (Catholic) Church from the land and give it to the peasants, fight to grant independence to Morocco and take over the factories and banks. These were tasks that only the proletariat could guarantee, by disputing the leadership of the war against Franco to the “democratic” bourgeoisie. With that program and that policy, the proletariat and the "republic" could open the way to victory, leaving the forces of fascism without a social base.

The LIT CI openly falsifies the position of Trotskyism in the '30s, the same as it did in Syria, where it supported and continues supporting the "democratic" generals of the FSA that, linked to Qatar, Turkey and the US imperialists, ended up handing over the heroic mass revolution, the workers', peasants' and soldiers' committees and all the rebellious cities… to the fascist al-Assad and Putin. Meanwhile, US "democratic" imperialism grabbed all the oil in northern Syria without firing a single shot, except for the one it fired, after giving prior notice, at a deserted military base, which had long been abandoned by al-Assad.

Against the capitulators who advocated these "democratic fronts" with the "republican" bourgeoisie in order to win the war, the Fourth International affirmed that the "democratic" imperialist bandits of France, like the fascist bandits of Germany, only disputed businesses and spheres of influence on the planet. That is why they associated in the Vichy Republic and went together to massacre the peoples of Northern Africa when Hitler was already occupying France.
The socialist workers who follow these currents cannot let such a social democratic program and policy impregnate the labor movement. We Trotskyists do not refuse to receive help from anyone in the midst of a war, as Trotsky affirmed, but we only place our trust in the international proletariat, whom today we call on to ship all the weapons that are directed to the oppressed nation, Ukraine in this case. We also call them not to ship the weapons that go to the oppressor nation, i.e. Russia.
Warning against the capitulators of the "democratic" bourgeoisie, the Fourth International affirmed that the most powerful weapon that England and France sent to the Spanish Civil War was the Stalinist fifth column to assassinate from behind the best combatants who led the fight against Franco, as they put at risk the property of the land of the landowners and the companies and banks of the capitalists.
In Spain a war of bourgeois camps was taking place, where the “democratic” Republic contained and diverted the revolution and Franco's fascism prepared to crush the workers and peasants.
Precisely, the Marxist program in the face of a war between two bourgeois camps that were ultimately fighting over which policy to best defeat the masses that were in a state of revolution, was clear: it orders to win the war against fascism, the capitalists had to be expropriated.  That is, it was necessary to fight against fascism with the method of socialist revolution and civil war.

 In Spain, the war was led by the republican bourgeoisie that put in the rear generals as counterrevolutionary as those of Franco, because they had to disarm the masses, and allowed the Moroccan masses and the peasant movement to fight on Franco's side.  The great Trotskyist journalist Felix Morrow, recounting the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, transcribed the cry of the (Spanish) peasants and the Moroccan workers: "What has the Republic given us so that we are going to die for it?"

Both these social democratic currents and the PTS that fight for "peace" have a great point in common, which is that (according to them) during the war the class struggle is suspended: in this case they are calling for the construction of a military front with NATO to save the ukrainian nation. 
This, as we have already seen, is the same as what they did in Syria.  There the PTS also declared themselves “neutral”: neither with the “barbarians” (as they accused of being the millions of workers in revolt in the Middle East against dictatorial and fascist regimes and governments), nor with Al Assad and Putin.  In other words, they demanded "peace", which meant leaving the executioner alone, with his victim tied up so that he could slaughter her and that Syria be for the Americans.

 It is already clear that the PTS in the war is always on the Putin barricade, throwing smoke bombs like ninja fighters so that the masses do not see who their enemy is.

 Meanwhile, the European and worldwide trade union bureaucracies linked to Stalinism, with the excuse of a "multipolar world", have come out to support and place the proletariat at the feet of that counterrevolutionary agent, guardian of the businesses of the capitalists and imperialism throughout Eurasia, namely Putin.

 This current is not neutral towards the Ukrainian working class, but calls together with Putin to crush it.  With the excuse of the "anti-fascist front" they support the invasion of  Ukraine by the Bonapartist government of Russia and its massacre of the Ukrainian working class.
They are not neutral.  They define Ukraine by this or that reactionary or counterrevolutionary government it may have at its head (and the Moscow government has nothing to envy the in Ukraine government for in this regard), and not by the type of state that Ukraine is, i.e., a colony already "protected" under the Minsk Accords by imperialism and crushed in the East by Russia.
Stalinism has been always consistent in its politics.  Starting in 2014, they sent their “international brigades” to “combat Donbass”, where far from being on the front line against imperialism, they acted as a true fifth column massacring the best of the vanguard that had risen up against the Yanukovych government and was defending the unity of the Ukrainian nation and their own jobs in the mines that the IMF plan threatened to close.
As thousands of corpses of workers and exploited killed by the invading troops in Ukraine are found, it is clear what the meaning is of Putin's infamy at trying to justify his invasion with the argument of "defeating the Nazis of Kyiv".  Putin is a miserable murderer of the poor people in Ukraine, just as he is of the "great" Russia's one.

The national question and the socialist revolution

Both at the time of the Tsars and at the time of the counterrevolutionary policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, Russia was nothing more than a “jail of nations”.
It ceased to be so only when the revolutionary proletariat, behind the internationalist banners of the Third International in 1917, defeated and expelled 14 imperialist armies that had invaded Russia, and they could do that thanks to the support of the European proletariat and the heroic combats of the Soviet working class. Fighting for socialist revolution in Europe and worldwide, the Bolshevik Party was able to lead victorious revolutions in republics that later federated with the USSR, freely and democratically. Ukraine was one of them. They did it with the workers and peasants in power.
Hence Putin's hatred against Lenin, denouncing that the independent Ukraine was a mad idea of his and a historical disaster, as is also considered by most of the reformist groups that today do not recognize that in Ukraine there is a national problem as or more serious than in the 20th century.

At the beginning of the imperialist era in the 20th century, of the decline of the capitalist system, of oppression and looting of nations by gangs of parasites from the central countries, the era of the emergence of new independent nations ended. Those that had not already done so were protected as colonies, semi-colonies or directly annexed by the imperialist powers.
The Tsars in Russia kept dozens of oppressed nations, on account of their alliance for plunder with English and French imperialism. This was the case of the former Muslim Soviet republics in Eurasia such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, of the Caucasus nations such as Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, or those that directly border Europe such as Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and the same Ukraine.
All these were oppressed nations that were exploited and their wealth sucked away with direct taxes and looting from the Tsars of Great Russia, which was the weakest link in the chain of imperialist domination.

In the First World War, Russia and her front with France and England, fought to maintain control of these nations, warring with Germany. If they were to win the war, they had already agreed with England to keep all of Persia, that is, what is Iraq and Iran today.

The Marxist thesis that only the socialist revolution can carry the democratic-revolutionary tasks all the way, such as the liberation from imperialism and the nationalization of the land, was reaffirmed with the victory of the October Revolution. Only by taking power, the proletariat was able to solve the national democratic tasks, combining them with socialist tasks. Thus emerged the Soviet Ukraine, federated with the USSR.

The bureaucratization of the USSR that liquidated all vestiges of workers' and Soviet democracy, brought brutal repression to the Soviet republics as soul to body, where Stalinism prevailed manu military.
To defeat and crush Soviet democracy, Stalinism liquidated any existing independent character of those nations federated with the USSR and therefore, the national tasks that the October Revolution had resolved there.  Under Stalin's boots, the "jail of nations" returned again.

 Summarizing then, the Red Army and the revolutionary Bolshevik Party called to found the Third International and united with the workers of Europe, liberated all those nations oppressed by tsarism.  It was a great historical event, it changed the civilization of the 20th century and showed all those oppressed peoples how they could liberate themselves, with the victory of the socialist revolution.

 The revolutionary workers of Russia with their democratic-revolutionary and Soviet policy, demonstrated to their brothers oppressed for centuries by the Czars, that they were their allies and enemies of all oppression.

This development is what defined the independent Ukraine, for which today Putin blames Lenin.

The national question in Ukraine and in the other republics of the former USSR became red hot after the surrender of the workers' states in 1989 by Stalinism

 In that year the former Stalinist bureaucracy, already a direct agent of imperialism, became a new possessing class in the USSR, China, the Glacis countries, Vietnam... It was the collapse of the pseudo-theory of "socialism in one country" of Stalinism, which argued that the USSR in its narrow national borders could overcome the imperialism that controls the world economy with enormous labor productivity.

 During the 1980s, the former workers' states had accumulated enormous indebtedness to the IMF and imperialism, while a bureaucracy keen to restoring capitalism emerged in the USSR, led by Gorbachev with his "perestroika" and his "glasnot", as Deng Xiao Ping had emerged before in China. It was the Maoist bureaucracy that in 1975 handed over all of southeastern China to imperialism, giving the latter the slave labor of millions of workers to be super-exploited in factories under the control of transnationals in joint directorates with the sons of the Chinese bureaucracy that, associated with them, later became a new possessing class, but not before massacring the workers' rebellion in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

 As a product of these restorative regimes of capitalism, in '89 the productive forces of the former workers' states were already in total bankruptcy.  The working class had no conquests to defend.  The Stalinist bureaucracy had handed them all over to imperialism.

In 1989, the former worker states collapsed and with their fall the false theory was unmasked that there was a "socialist bloc" and confronting it, another "capitalist bloc" at the world level at the time of Yalta.  This was proclaimed by Stalinism and broad sectors of the renegades of Trotskyism, when, actually the bureaucracy, after betraying the proletarian revolution in imperialist Europe, maintained a deal with imperialism in which Stalinism was in charge of controlling the revolutionary processes in Eastern Europe, preventing the spread of the Chinese revolution throughout the Pacific and aborting every revolutionary struggle worldwide, as it did.
It was after the diversion and defeat of the revolutionary upsurge of the masses of '68-'74 almost worldwide, which called into question the imperialist domination of the planet (and of the bureaucracy itself in the workers' states, as had been demonstrated in Czechoslovakia, before in Hungary and also in Poland) that the Stalinist scourge rapidly accelerated its open passing over to capitalism, before another mass rise had the opportunity of overthrowing it with the political revolution.

 The process of capitalist restoration in the USSR that began with Gorbachev, culminated in '89 with Yeltsin and the leaders of the Communist Party becoming a new bourgeoisie that appropriated all of the productive forces that were nationalized.  As we have seen, the same thing happened in China.

 In the former USSR, avid layers of the former bureaucracy imposed "stock companies" on all companies.  While each worker was given a share, the former bureaucrats, frankly millionaires, kept the majority of the shares in all the factories and companies.  It was a capitalist restoration and accumulation based on these "stock companies".
The catastrophe that this meant was expressed in a total setback of the productive forces and in a disorganization and reconstruction of a capitalist market that was carried out in a savage and violent way.  This included the separation of most of the nations that had been oppressed by Stalinism, with exceptions that remained within the new Russian Federation that was emerging, which in some cases was imposed in a bloody manner, as happened with the genocide in Chechnya, promoted first by Yeltsin and then carried out by Putin's bourgeois gang.  And the massacre of the Balkans, as happened when the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, whose nations were quickly subsumed by imperialism, after the great Serbia did the "dirty work" of massacring and disciplining the masses, as they did with the genocide in Bosnia.

The different Stalinist gangs of the former Soviet republics federated with Russia disputed the loot by breaking with Moscow.
All former Muslim Soviet republics gained independence from Russia, as did former Soviet republics in the Caucasus, such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia, and in Eastern Europe, such as Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, etc.  Not to mention the countries of the Glacis that since 1945 had been oppressed and even looted and crushed in every rebellion there was, by the counterrevolutionary forces of Stalinism.

 In the former Soviet republics, the Communist Parties of those nations followed the same path of their twin brothers from Moscow: they took control of the states to grab all the state property.
While Yeltsin's gang had kept Russia's gas, minerals and even Russia's industrial-military apparatus, in the oppressed nations, the old Apparatchiks of the Communist Parties became today's oligarchs, establishing harsh Bonapartist governments. They crushed the masses with iron and fire, to steal state property.

 This process of capitalist restoration was carried out by the bureaucracy intimately intertwined with world imperialism.  As we have already said, the workers' states were totally indebted to the IMF, as was the case with any semi-colonial country.  The reason was the old bureaucracy needed credits in dollars to import what the USSR did not produce.  This is how most of the new oligarchs associated with the IMF, Citibank and the world imperialist banking system. That scourge and excrescence of the workers' state, the Stalinist bureaucracy, became a new owning class fully associated with imperialism.  This time, capitalism penetrated the USSR not with Hitler's tanks, but with the "Ford tractor" and the finances of Citibank, as was one of the forecasts put forward by the Fourth International on how capitalist restoration would take place if the bureaucracy endured at the head of the workers' states.
When seeing Stalinism today at the international level supporting and sustaining the "big" bourgeoisie of Russia and the former Soviet republics, passing them off as "anti-imperialist fighters" and "anti-fascists", it cannot but arouse the indignation of every conscientious worker in the face of such a fallacy and deception.

We will not cease of insisting that today the great cereal and oilseed production of Russia and also of Ukraine is in the hands of Cargill, Dreyfus, Monsanto and Bunge, in these countries that concentrate a third of the world's agricultural production.  British Petroleum and Germany's BASF and E.oN control Russian gas, while France and Germany provide Putin's army with high technology.  This shows that this relatively independent capitalist country that is Russia is in a real transition, not to being imperialist, but also to being colonized by the world capitalist-imperialist system in crisis and bankruptcy. This despite the fact that today a powerful Russian bourgeoisie defends its qualitative part in these businesses, which have been assembled in the last period in a common division of labor with the Europe of Maastricht.  But the bankruptcy of the world crashes of 2008 and 2019-2020 pushes the imperialist powers more and more to seize all internal consumer markets and all sources of raw materials.
In her intervention, comrade Eliza Funes explained in depth that the control of the productive forces by imperialism begins to grow more and more in Russia itself.

 Meanwhile, all the former republics of the former USSR, both Muslim and those of the Caucasus and Europe, have become colonies or semi-colonies, totally controlled by imperialism and its companies.  Imperialist financial capital and its transnational corporations have a key weight in all the central productive forces, both in services, such as its banking system, and its agricultural and industrial production, as happens in every semi-colonial country.

 The consolidation of this new owning class in the former workers' states from the beginning of the 21st century was then expressed in a recolonization of the former Soviet republics by imperialism, while in the case of Russia, it was Putin and the old KGB who took the control of the state to order the capitalist economy openly strangled and disorganized by the eager layers of the new bourgeoisie that had emerged with Yeltsin in '89.
This Bonapartist bourgeois faction of Putin took back control of the state companies in Russia, associating with the transnationals, as is the case with Gazprom, and also in the production of cereals and even in the financial system.  This capitalist gang came to control all state businesses, such as public works and services.  Hence, this bourgeoisie depends on managing the Russian state and its government, from where it has accumulated enormous fortunes.  The example of this is Putin who has been controlling the Russian state and government for 22 years.
This fraction of the Russian bourgeoisie was thus creating financial, political and military ties in a common space with the imperialist Maastricht and in world trade with all the transnationals, particularly with the Americans in what refers to agricultural production.

Also, this bourgeois fraction agreed with imperialism about its own role as gendarme in the former Soviet republics of the former USSR.  It was central that Putin played this role in these new capitalist countries already colonized, where weak states could be swept away by revolutionary actions of the working class and the exploited.

 Putin's counterrevolutionary forces invading Kazakhstan last January to crush a huge revolutionary action led by steel and oil workers clearly demonstrate what we are saying here: weak governments pulled  on the one hand by Russian military control and the latter's grabbing of national revenues, and on the other, by the imperialist control of its key production branches.
We can see the same thing in Belarus, where Moscow's intervention and occupation with its military forces were to crush a huge process of worker strikes in automotive and metallurgical companies and save the Lukashenko government.

 Ukraine is nothing more than a link that has escaped both from Moscow's military control, as well as from a stable and solid relationship with the imperialist Europe of Maastricht.
Ukraine concentrates all the contradictions of the world situation and the European one in particular.  It is one of the great gas routes to Europe, controlled on the one hand by the Biden family and the Gringos, while on the other hand, the Donbass mines are articulated to production for the Russian industrial-military apparatus.
But beyond that, what is decisive is that Ukraine is a nation that, from the surrender of the former workers' states in '89, was completely looted by the IMF, as is the situation of any Latin American country or any semi-colonial nation in Africa.  Ukraine's external debt is 127 billion dollars, with the imperialist banks plundering most of its mining and agricultural income.
Such a suction of wealth led, in 2014, not to a "coup d'état" as the Stalinists claim, but to a huge mass revolutionary uprising to defeat the pro-Russian government of Yanukovych, who had just imposed a huge plan of austerity, attack on the labor movement and national surrender, dictated by the IMF.  The response of the exploited against such an attack, is called by the lackeys and servants of the IMF, as a "coup d'état".  They are miserable.

2014: the anti-imperialist struggle against the Yanukovych government is aborted... Ukraine at war

Neither the European unions nor the workers' organizations of the world proletariat, led by the scoundrels of the Stalinist scourge that remains leading them, showed solidarity with the enormous mass struggle that, in 2014, was developed against imperialism and the IMF that subjugated Ukraine and continues to do so as it is an oppressed nation.
At that time, on the condition that the hated Yanukovych continued in government, Putin offered to pay the 15 billion dollars of foreign debt of a Ukraine that was in DEFAULT.
The incredible crisis and contradiction that was presented to the Ukrainian working class was the betrayal of the leaderships of the working class at the international and European level in particular, which left that oppressed nation subject to imperialism, that is, at the same time to the forces of Kyiv and on the other hand, strangled and broken by the "great" Russian oppression, which had been acting, and still continues to act, as a guarantor of the imperialists' and IMF business in Ukraine.
As we have seen, the Yanukovych government was a direct agent of Moscow and also of the IMF, oppressing the masses together with 6 oligarchs, as the Kyiv bourgeois gang had tried to do previously with the “orange revolution” in 2004.

The revolutionary process of 2014 was aborted, as is extensively developed in the note on the genesis of the current war in Ukraine, written by Nadia Briante and Eliza Funes, which has been already published in our international press a few days ago.

In 2014, a pro-European and pro-U.S. bourgeois faction from Kyiv, closely linked to imperialism, mounted up the uprising in Maidan Square, with the aim that in order to get out of the misery imposed by the pro-Russian Government of Yanukovych, Ukraine had to go with the European Union. For the working class that earns a salary of 200 euros, entering the Europe of Maastricht in their conscience meant the solution of their just aspiration to increase their standard of living.
Meanwhile, the Donbass miners, who had supported the overthrow of Yanukovych's pro-Russian government, which, applying the IMF plan, wanted to close their mines, began a process of independent organization. The mining proletariat of eastern Ukraine, with the promise that the mines and their source of work would be kept open, were brought to the feet of the pro-Russian oligarchs of Donbass.

Thus, the Ukrainian revolution and the mass anti-imperialist struggle was strangled. But the key to this was not the "backwardness" of the working class, but the betrayal of the counterrevolutionary leaderships of the world proletariat, which supported the pro-Russian governments of Donbass, which were the ones that ended up closing the mines and laying off 50 % of the miners. At the same time, a counterrevolutionary force arose in Kyiv to defeat the Ukrainian working class and, far from taking it to the "paradise" of salaries in imperialist Europe, subjected it to the worst scorn and exploitation and to a fratricidal war organized by the imperialism and the "great" Russian bourgeoisie in the Minsk Pacts. As we have already said, the Ukraine left for the Biden family to keep the gas, for imperialism to control the greatest wealth of the nation and for Putin to annex Crimea and applying to the end the IMF plan in Donbass for closures, layoffs and mining restructuring. They did this with the workers of the Ukrainian east holding the gun to the temple of the mercenary gangs of Kyiv, since the working class of the whole of Ukraine refused to enlist and send their sons to fight against their class brothers from the Donbass. Those are the facts. That's the truth.

During this entire period, the Ukrainian working class sought at every step to win its unity. Ukraine is one of the most important proletarian countries in Eastern Europe, with a very powerful mining movement, not only in Donbass, but in the nation as a whole. This has an enormous source of minerals, such as coal and zinc, while one of the largest lithium reserves on the planet has already been discovered, which the imperialist powers will divide among bites and stabs, and the Moscow commissioners will fight to obtain a smaller portion of it. Apart from mining, the steel, food and construction industries are the key sectors of the Ukrainian working class.
The tragedy is that this powerful proletariat was divided by the betrayal of the Stalinist and social-imperialist leaderships of the European working class, who are either servants of Putin or of the imperialist Europe of Maastricht.

The failure of the Ukrainian revolution expressed all the contradictions and crises that this nation concentrates, which is a true hinge between the Europe of Maastricht, the former Glacis and European worker states and the Russian Federation.