TŘÍDNÍ VÁLKA # CLASS WAR # GUERRE DE CLASSE

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When we wrote some months ago in our text, “War preparations between Ukraine and Russia – Show or Reality?”ⁱ that the conditions for a new war ripen in Ukraine, many comrades expressed doubts or even disagreements with such a categorical statement. Now we can say that the conflict in Ukraine has clearly switched from the “cold” phase to the “hot” one and that what we are currently witnessing in the east of the country is the war by all definitions. From Lugansk on the border with Russia to Mariupol on the Black Sea coast two military forces compete in daily clashes when trying to enlarge the area under their control, they fight on the ground as well as in the air, in countryside as well as in industrial centers, artilleries shell villages, air forces bomb cities (under the pretext that their enemy uses the inhabitants as living shields), men, women, children die under the bombs and missiles… In four months of armed conflict more than 2,000 civilians and militaries have been killed and 6,000 others injured; 117,000 proletarians have been internally displaced and 730,000 others found refuge in Russia. Just as we were on the point of finishing this article dead bodies are strewn over the streets of Donetsk, caught in a government’s offensive stranglehold.

In the same text we also wrote that the only reply of the proletariat to the war is to organize and develop revolutionary defeatism, i.e. practically refuse to join one or the other camp, on the contrary to build connections between proletarians from both sides of the conflict through the struggle against both bourgeoisies. As even in this field things developed, our text deserves (three month after publishing) a post-scriptum.

This text is based on information drawn from different sources (that we quote in footnotes) from militant blogs to official media. This short description of events in the Ukraine required hours and hours of careful work, searching information, reading texts, watching videos, comparing different data etc. We would like to emphasize two things: Firstly, the fact that the events that we describe here were not covered by BBC or Euronews does not mean that they did not happen, that we invented them (various leftist sources and also Ukrainian and Russian media describe them). Secondly, it is clear that the news that we get from the Ukraine are chaotic, incomplete and sometimes contradictory. This however doesn’t mean that we should give up our attempt to grasp what is going on there. We believe that we should face a selective reporting of the state with a critical and radical position of anti-capitalist movement; we should develop and share information and analysis that see the world through a prism of revolutionary perspective. Continue reading →

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Mass protests in Ukraine, which were sparked by not signing the association agreement and a free trade agreement with EU by President Yanukovych, have lasted for more than three months now and have escalated to nationalist hysteria, threatening with weapons, both from Russian side and by the protests strengthened mostly West-oriented Ukraine opposition. For example, neo-fascist Svoboda (Freedom) Party, which emerged from the protests boosted thanks to their organization not only on the barricades of Maidan and which has obtained five ministerial posts in the new government, including Deputy Prime Minister and general attorney, would like to insure the position of Ukraine with accession to the NATO structures and with renewal of nuclear arsenal. This launched a game that teeters on the edge of open military conflict, could be the beginning of a global war of destruction of forming imperialist blocks, which would be built over the existing economic and political alliances.

For Russia may support of Russian nationalism in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea be part of the larger geopolitical game tarnishing its recently injured position as the imperialist super-power, specifically after the loss of its influence in Libya (where because of the Gaddafi’s fall, in which Western super-powers were engaged, Russia lost a possible naval base) and potential loss of the last Russian naval base in the Mediterranean in Syrian Tartus, if Russia and Iran supported Bashar Assad would be defeated. The development regarding the Crimea may follow the same scenario as in the case of occupation of territories of South Ossetia or Abkhazia. It may also be a tactic to get to the head of the Ukrainian state elements such as the now mostly discredited Tymoshenko, which already have in the past emerged as being able to communicate with Putin. Ukrainian bourgeoisie is lobbying in the EU and in the USA for a strong response to Russia, but the EU mainly due to Germany and its economic interests and energy needs, will in effect remain with toothless verbal threats. To set off an imaginary powder keg it will take steps and conspiracies of the USA and Russia itself, probably through the exploitation of nationalist militias, of which exist on both sides too many.

Either way, one thing is clear. The nationalist hysteria and direction of the whole development show that the proletariat – a collective wage worker – in this storyline plays the role of extras unable to express its own interests and its resistance to be mobilized for the interests of the national bourgeoisie as potential cannon fodder. Continue reading →

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The historical collapse of a model of management of the capitalist social relation, the one that had developed among others in Eastern Europe during several decades of counterrevolution, led to the dissolution and the disappearance of the USSR as an imperialist bloc. Since then, the proletariat in this region, as everywhere else in the world, had to undergo numerous new attacks against its survival conditions, but at the same time it also burned a certain number of illusions fuelled by the Western propaganda praising to the skies ad nauseam another model of management of capitalism considered to be more “human”, more “free”. This so much vaunted “world of peace and harmony”, this new Eden promised to the “useful idiots” at the time of the fall of the iron curtain that sealed the end of a “bipolarized world”, all these illusions get more and more smashed.

Rumours of war resound noisily in Europe again, cannons are loaded, fighter-bombers are packed with murderous bullets and bombs, missiles point their nuclear warheads at their future objectives: after wars that caused unrest locally and according to circumstances in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ossetia etc. during this last quarter of century, preconditions for a new war have been intensively maturing in the Ukraine now, a war much more extensive and with unimaginable international effects.

Since four months the Ukraine has been shaken by an important unrest emerging from the fertile soil of underlying contradictions that determine any class society and their concrete expressions: starvation wages, restructuring, layoffs, privatizations, cuts in social security that was a hangover from “the socialist era” etc. Of course these social movements (like all the struggles that develop nowadays) yet carry the seal of the lack of rupture with the managers of the social relation, as well as with their substitutes to come. Their political expression and consciousness seem to be so weak and false… But revolutionaries cannot just brush off the content of the events in a disdainful and patronizing manner. Continue reading →