14 May Online International Forum
There are two transcripts not yet available, from two Brazilian trends: comrade Laura Torquato of the Fracao Trotskista, and comrade Neimar, of Partido Comunista does Trabalhadores Brasileiros. When they are recieved, the transcript will be updated.
Transcripts of the Presentations
Socialist Unity Party: Greg Butterfield
Comrades, I’ve just come from a march of many thousands here in New York to defend the right to abortion. As you probably know, a draft ruling by the Supreme Court was leaked earlier this month, which would reverse the right to abortion granted in the Roe Vs. Wade case almost 50 years ago. If the decision goes through, the legal precedent will also endanger many other hard-won civil rights, including same-sex marriage, protection from so-called sodomy laws used to criminalize queer people, even interracial marriage. It truly is an attack on the whole working class.
The vicious ruling class attack on reproductive rights made me think about the essential role of women and other oppressed gender people in our movements and in the Soviet victory over fascism in World War II. We know the names of heroines like the Red Army sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, air fighter Lidya Litvyak and saboteur Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. But Soviet women also held down the home front, kept the factories running, and waged guerrilla warfare when their cities and villages were occupied by the Nazis.
In 2016 I had the great fortune to attend the Victory Day march in Lugansk, capital of the Lugansk People’s Republic. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life as a revolutionary. The people of the city poured into the streets to honour not only their ancestors who fought fascism decades before, but also those who fought and died to stop Ukraine’s attack on the city in 2014-2015. And women were at the centre of this mobilization. They were the organizers, as they are in so many of our organizations, movements, unions and communities.
In this spirit, we are seeking ways to connect the struggle against the U.S./NATO proxy war in the Ukraine with the emerging mass movement to fight for abortion rights and other struggles of the working class here at home. There is enormous and growing anger and distrust of the Democratic Party, which poses as the friend of workers and oppressed communities to get elected, while fundamentally serving the interests of the capitalist class just like the Republican Party.
In recent weeks, we have seen the spectacle of Democrats in Congress voting unanimously for an additional $40 billion for the proxy war in Ukraine, while at the same time failing in a rushed vote to codify abortion rights into law, despite having control of both the House and Senate. At the same time, every member of the Senate, Democrat and Republican, voted to add extra security for the Supreme Court justices who are poised to strip a basic human right from more than half the population.
The imperialist regime of the U.S. wants to mandate forced pregnancy and birth at a time when the cost of food and rent is skyrocketing, there is a frightening shortage of infant formula, and all of the public health measures of the pandemic have been repealed. And the money that could be used to mitigate some of these life-and-death crises is being spent on weapons and aid to prolong a war on the other side of the world.
The capitalists, in their insatiable drive for profits, can’t stop themselves from pushing too far. They are making the contradictions of their system so glaring that it gives us, their enemies, an opportunity to educate and organize the many, many workers – especially the most downtrodden, Black and Brown people, women, trans people, immigrants.
As we mark the 77th Victory Day, our great task is to help our class make the connections between the struggle against imperialist war abroad and the war on workers at home.
Bolshevik Group (South Korea)
“Two Key Programatic Issues for Rebuilding International Leadership”
We think Lenin’s following quote is a very useful hint in understanding today’s theme “Victory against Nazism and imperialism, today and yesterday”
“Of course, finance capital finds most ‘convenient’, and derives the greatest profit from, a form of subjection which involves the loss of the political independence of the subjected countries and peoples. In this respect, the semi-colonial countries provide a typical example of the ‘middle stage’. It is natural that the struggle for these semi-dependent countries should have become particularly bitter in the epoch of finance capital, when the rest of the world has already been divided up.”
Imperialism has used a variety of methods, such as “bribery, coup, military dictatorship, assassination, economic sanction, civil war, and direct invasion”, in order to achieve complete subjection, which even deprives political independence. Through these methods, imperialists establish an alliance with comprador partners, which helps setting the most advantageous imperialistic super-exploitation system which extracts the greatest profit.
The imperialist media have labelled certain manoeuvres, which took place mainly in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, as “Colour Revolutions”. The Euromaidan coup which ousted pro-Russian regime in 2014 is one of the typical examples.
The Kiev regime, established by a coup in 2014, is a fascist/Nazi regime. However, the expression of “fascism/Nazism” represents a portion of its essence but does not reveal the whole causal relationship of the phenomenon. There are two reasons, first it is not distinguished from Nazism in imperialist camp like in Germany, the fascist movement which was aimed to save the capitalist system from the socialist revolution, and second, its relationship with imperialism is not represented.
So, some, including a number of leftists, say, “Putin government is fascist regime that oppresses the working class to the extreme. Therefore, the working class should oppose both fascists.”
Since 2014, Ukrainian Kiev government has undergone several changes in personnel, but it is a pro-imperialist comprador far-right forces which are indigenous social group whose interests coincide with imperialist colonial rule. It has almost the same character as Bandera’s fascist force that cooperated with German imperialism during the anti-Soviet war.
* * *
Such policy of expanding imperialist colonies by using local far-right comprador forces is not limited to Eastern Europe. It’s a phenomenon that happens in every colony around the world. The cases, that have occurred or on the process in past 10 years and may take place in the near future, are roughly as follows.
Libya, Syria in 2011
Egypt in 2013
Turkey, Brazil in 2016
Venezuela, Bolivia, Hong Kong in 2019
Belarus in 2021
Kazakhstan in 2022
Iran
On the other hand, superprofit exploited from colonies aristocratise the working class in the imperialist regions. For them, the victory of their own imperialist government in overseas and the expansion of their colonial rule improves their living standard. So, they share some part of interests with their own imperialist government.
While the workers in the colonial region live a miserable life, the working class in the imperialist region can enjoy a better standard of living through superprofit. These factors function as pressure to push working class in imperialist regions fall into chauvinism, that is, to support its own imperialist government.
This pressure is most acute in Britain and in the United States, which have continuously gained victory since capitalism entered the stage of imperialism and competition between imperialists began. Since English is treated as the world’s common language, there is no need to spend time and effort learning foreign languages. They are also treated as the first-class citizen during their overseas trip. They are free from fear of racism, which Muslims, blacks, and Asians are facing in Europe and North America.
The political forces, which did not fiercely resist and sever ties with this pressure became a hostage to chauvinism. Thus, they ostensibly advocate “Marxism and Trotskyism”, but actually support their own imperialism directly or indirectly. This phenomenon, social patriotism did not only show up during World War I but also during World War II and since then it is still ongoing.
Just by looking at the Ukrainian war, we can see how many “Marxist, Trotskyist” organizations are surrendering to imperialist pressure. If the spectrum is listed from right to left, it would be as follows. RCIT at the far right, SWP (Cliffites) and IBT at the center, and BT at the left, which declared neutrality in the 2014 coup.
This Anglo-Saxon chauvinism is depicted in several documents by ICL’s “The Struggle Against the Chauvinist Hydra”, IBT’s “In Defense of Semour’s Marxism”, and several English documents of our group.
“Worst Enemy of the Working Class” : Capitulation to Imperialism, Neutrality and ‘BT’
Summary of Our Thought on “Islam Revolution” in 1979 in Iran
Iran, nationalism and imperialism
We are defending the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky not of Seymour
The Bankruptcy and Collapse of the IBT
As Trotsky said, the historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership. And the crisis of leadership is due to the betrayal of opportunists who have betrayed the historical cause of the working class.
We think that the most important platform issues in the construction of world working class leadership are two.
First, opportunism regarding the question of imperialism
Second, the attitude toward deformed workers states, especially China
These two issues are sharply penetrating today’s theme “Victory against Nazism and imperialism, today and yesterday.”
* * *
We are certain that, regarding the question of Ukraine, the organizations attending this meeting are the most courageous and revolutionary parts of the world proletarian movement. In that sense, we are Zimmerwald or Zimmerwald left. However, we are not sure about the attitude toward China, the second issue that was raised in the 2019 Hong Kong crisis and will continuously arise again as the most critical issue. We wonder what kind of position the comrades here took on the Hong Kong crisis, which heated up 2019 all year long.
The future of mankind depends on us. To solve the crisis, we must build a revolutionary leadership of the world working class. Today’s meeting will be an important opportunity for the rebuilding of the international revolutionary leadership, like the Zimmerwald Conference.
Communist Revolutionary Action (Greece)
Good morning, Good Afternoon, Good night comrades from the world. Thanks again for inviting us to talk to this lovely gathering. My short intervention will try to focus on some aspects of the significance of the 9th May and mainly the attempts to distort its current meaning.
So, if we start from a general understanding of the Second World War, I believe we could say that the victory against Nazism was mostly based on the struggles of the Soviet peoples and the Soviet Union and we have qualitative and quantative data to support this notion. We can see that the most losses were from the Soviet Union, we can see that the biggest part of the Nazi military machine was destroyed by the Soviets. But we also know that the United States and the other bourgeois allies started to fight quite late actually. This was because their goal was for the Nazis to first destroy the Soviets and then to open up a second fight in Europe for the spoils of war.
So based on our historical understanding of what happened in the Second World War, if it wasn’t for the Soviet struggle, we wouldn’t have the defeat of Nazism. Whilst this according to our perspective is a historical truth, on the other hand, as years and decades pass by, we see that Europeans think that the destruction of the Nazis was an American victory. So, for example there are some opinion polls on WW2 in France and Europe that support what I am saying. And it is quite astonishing to understand that they are managing to distort such a deep historical truth.
Of course there is a deep inter-connection between Hollywood, main broadcasting networks like BBC and CNN, who are consciously and continuously trying to propagandise and change historical reality. It’s important to understand the significance of information warfare in current politics.
So what we are seeing right now in Ukraine with all these false flag operations like in Bucha and Snake Island, the United States and its proxies are trying to construct a narrative that the Russians are barbarians etc. They are doing the same thing with history. So, history becomes a battle ground for staging false flag operations and falsifications. There are many consequences for this procedure. Let’s define this phenomenon, let’s call it the snatching of history. This has immense consequences because this is not just a random discussion about the past. It has immense significance for now. What an immense power to be able to rewrite history and construct discourses that suit you. And why is that? Because if you can control the past, its easier for you to organise and control the present. And we have actually seen that from the mouthpieces of imperialism.
Let me give you a practical example because until now I have been too theoretical. Let’s remember the hysteria regarding Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi. The main US news would say Saddam Hussein was a new Hitler right and now we are facing the same thing, Putin is not just a Stalin, he is a Hitler. How gruesome it is to try to compare these kinds of leaders to Hitler. The goal is very specific. It is to use the Nazi atrocities, the atrocities of imperialism to create a monster out of these countries. So imperialist crimes of the past are used to justify the current plans of imperialism. So, the old crimes are used to justify new imperialist crimes. So for example isn’t Abu Graib or Guantanamo a WW2 kind of a crime? But nobody knows what’s happening in there, how many people are jailed, how many people are murdered etc.
We have also seen other examples of this kind of snatching or hacking, for example in Israel in the way the Holocaust is used as a way to justify the genocide of Palestinians. But I know this is a theme that I wouldn’t like to say more.
So what I am saying is that by taking history they are more able to justify their crimes now. They are more able to politically control the population and guiding them to this or that choice. The issue is that we don’t just have an attempt to rewrite history but also a political change. For example, if you ask a liberal what fascism or Nazism is, he or she would probably say it’s just violence and dictatorship. And by saying that they are justifying their own characters, it is the other limit in relation to themselves. It is the other pole of democratically elected governments. So, it’s a kind of dualism where in one pole we have those who respect minorities, its pro-dialogue, pro-rule-based policies. Where on the other pole we have authoritarianism, monologue, chaos, and brutal dictatorship. On the one hand you have respect for human rights and non-violence and on the other hand we have no respect for human rights. So, by using this characterisation of Nazism and fascism they are politically rebranding themselves as the factor of progressiveness and enlightenment. Whereas the rest of the world, Asia, Africa, Latin America etc are the beacon of the past let’s say. And is quite funny that the United States Empire and its satellite countries have organised hundreds of military groups all around the world and have made it all but impossible to have a normal democratic process in these countries because they are continually in the process of surviving. At the same time they use these defensive behaviours of these states as a way to criminalise them as dictatorships as a way to slander them and make them illegitimate in term of Western knowledge, in order to project on them that they are militarists for example.
Of course they never really give a damn about these populations or what these leaders say. So, what is happening is that the CIA hits them and when they react we have a Democratic Party shouting “Look at those militarists”. So, we have a political system that hits together, as an organic whole if you say it in Marxist terms. Whoever objects to imperialist rule is often trapped in this kind of dual attack, both from the Democratic Party and the Republican.
It is very important not to just try to not just adopt the correct historical narrative of what happened on 9th May and who destroyed the Nazi monsters. It is also very important to make a political analysis in the sense that Marxists do not understand Nazism as just the expression of plain violence. Because if we explain Nazism as explicit violence this blurs the boundaries of what is a defensive action and an offensive action. Like for example what we are seeing now in Ukraine. In our opinion it is a defensive action on the part of Russia. Nazism also we cannot identify with the feeling that one is part of a nation. Of course, every national feeling has a lot of metaphysical feeling of great ancestry or lineage. For example, the chauvinists in Greece believe they are the descendants of Ancient Greece etc which in our opinion is laughable. Also, Nazism cannot be identified with territorial disputes between different nations or nationalisms. In our opinion our main hypothesis is that Nazism is probably borne when nationalism is mixed with imperialist dreams. Or is it when imperialism gives you the weapons to fight for them for example. It is not a coincidence for example that Swastikas appeared in NATO regiments in Afghanistan and now Azov. It’s also not by chance that ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Azov were given money and weapons in order to fight the Empire’s war. This is an expression of the essence of what Nazism is, of the imperialist aspects of Nazism.
So if we don’t have a definition of what imperialism is we will not be very successful in understanding what fascism is or what Nazism is. So, it is very important to define what Imperialism is and right now if I could condense in a few sentences what imperialism is it’s the ability to subordinate the globe, to carve it as Lenin said. It’s the ability to sustain and hold the global financial system. To express a global military force and political influence. It’s the ability to organise groups everywhere in the world. Also, at the same time imperialism is to have as a conscious idea the ability to under develop the rest of the world to sustain an environment of selling expensive industrial tools to deindustrialised countries. It is the strategy of not providing cultural knowledge and equipment that could break dependence.
So in order to return to 9th May and to conclude my presentation if we could guess what is the most probable success of Nazism because I don’t believe we have had a true revival of Nazism yet, the most probable candidate is the US Empire and its proxies. Nazism will be probably not be revived in the rest of the world. We would guess if it was to be revived it will be at the birthplace where it also has an imperialist function now. It would be in Europe or the United States as these other proxy armies or organisations. So, if we really want to adhere to the current meaning of 9th of May, Victory Day, it is the destruction of this mechanism, it is the holding NATO and the White House and the rest of the imperialist organisations to account. It is to destroy them as the only way to remember the true significance of Victory Day. Thank you very much, comrades.
ClassConscious.org : Davey Heller
According to the bourgeois press and echoed shamefully by many so-called Marxists, to point to the connections between the current war in Ukraine, the Great Patriotic War and the fight against fascism is to play into the hands of “Putin’s propaganda”. However, these connections are real.
That the Russians are fighting against the forces of fascism is undeniable in Ukraine. The Banderaite fascists in Ukraine are not even Neo-Nazis in any real sense the term but unreconstructed Nazis who trace their lineage directly to fascist Ukrainian forces: the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists in WW2, who committed massive atrocities against Ukrainians of Jewish and Polish descent as they fought alongside the Nazis against the Soviets. The OUN then went on to be funded by the CIA to continue its war against the Soviet Union even after the end of WW2 into the 1950s.
It was therefore hardly a break with form when US imperialism under Obama openly solidarised and used fascist shock troops on the group to prosecute the Maiden Coup in 2014. These Nazis employed the most vicious tactics to ensure a new Banderaite regime was installed. They shot anti-government protestors in a false flag operation in Kiev to finally bring down the Yanukovych Government and herded and burnt alive 48 leftists in Odessa. It is no coincide these crimes echo the crimes of the OAN during WW2 on a smaller scale. It is the type of crimes that would have been implemented on a massive scale if the Ukrainian forces, led by the Azov Battalion had successfully retaken the Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and wreaked their revenge on the populations there.
Whilst the fascist far right parties do not rule directly in the current Government of Ukraine under Zelenskyy, it is doing the bidding of both imperialism and the fascists in Ukraine. Before the Russian intervention the suppression of left-wing parties continued, the Minsk Agreement was rejected, preparations for retaking both Crimea and the Donbass continued militarily as plans for NATO membership were advanced. Stepan Bandera was elevated to a national hero and “decommunization” continued. Zelenskyy’s initial flirting with making peace in the East was quickly brought under control by the Ukrainian fascists and their imperialist pay masters.
That the Russians are fighting imperialism in Ukraine is also undeniable. Weapons are pouring in not just from the US but other leading imperialist nations such as Germany, Britain, and secondary imperialist powers such as Canada and Australia. It is clear the war in Ukraine is being used to accelerate and advance the latest imperialist effort to dominate the Eurasian landmass, as in the last century.
The first “grand imperial coalition” to try and do so was the 14 country Allied invasion who attacked Soviet Russia from 1917 to aid the White Army. Ten of those countries are now part of the new imperialist alliance sending weapons to Ukraine: the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Greece, Estonia, Romania, Italy, demonstrating the continuity of the project.
The second imperialist effort was of course the massive Nazi fascist Operation Barbarossa which was defeated at such enormous cost to the Soviet people. Officially 25 million Soviet citizens died, 18 million non-combatants. One out of every ten Russians. Hitler planned to kill 30 million to create the Lebensraum (living space) deemed necessary for Germany to become an imperialist country that could compete with the hegemonic US. The Genocide of European Jewry and Operation Barbarossa were part of one interconnected process of extirpating “Judeo-Bolshevism” and destroying the urban intelligentsia of Eastern Europe. The gas vans of the SS Einsatzgruppen first rolled in Ukraine.
(30,000 Jews were hurled into the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev; some of the OUN fascists assisted in the hurling before being tossed in themselves!).
Despite the victory of the Red Army over fascism that we celebrate on May 9th, of course the imperialist powers never gave up on their plans to both gain control of the Russian/Soviet landmass and to smash communism once and for all. It only took until 1949 for the US to start once again working with Britain, France and Germany to form NATO as an offensive military pact to bring down the Soviet Union. It even put leading Nazi military figures into senior positions due to their ideological and practical experience in fighting communism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO has again been massively expanded onto the borders of Russia itself and the moves to incorporate Ukraine largely precipitated Russia’s decision to militarily intervene in February
This brings me to some key differences between the Great Patriotic War and today’s situation. Firstly, it needs to be acknowledged that Russia faces a very different kind of military threat than was even posed by the massed power of the millions of Nazi soldiers and tanks and that bore down upon it in 1941. Of course, even the placing of conventional weapons is threatening to the Russian state but the fact is that a new “Operation Barbarossa” if launched will not be conventional but a pre-emptive nuclear strike. That is why Russia cannot afford to allow the imperialists to turn its borders into a long string of missile defence systems and offensive nuclear weapons systems that render its nuclear capacity unthreatening. If such a war was launched it is no exaggeration to suggest that Russia and its working class would be effectively wiped from the map. Of course, the resources under the ground would still be able to be mined and extracted at a later date!
The same denial of how modern warfare works is the insistence by some Marxist groups that US and Western imperialism is not directly involved in this war because they do not have “boots on the ground”. They turn what is a tactical move by the imperialists into an excuse for not taking a side. What I mean is that it obviously suits the US to have Ukrainian soldiers doing the dying rather than US soldiers whilst the US and its allies direct the war through providing nearly all the weapons and intelligence to keep the Ukrainian army functioning. This includes highly sophisticated weapons such as “suicide drones’ and new generation anti-tank weapons. It is beyond obvious that the Ukrainian army could not function without this direct support. The tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons make the question of “boots on the ground” redundant.
If some Marxists are confused, the imperialists are not. Biden has stated “Putin must go”. Secretary of State Blinken bellowed “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine” and British Foreign Secretary declared that a full defeat of Russia in Ukraine, including its expulsion from Crimea is a “strategic imperative”.
It is in this context that the position of “revolutionary” defeatism is an act of cowardice at best. It ignores the impact of a NATO victory not only on the balance of class forces within Ukraine but internationally as such a victory if it does not spark World War 3 in the process would only accelerate the drive to war against China as well by imperialism.
Such Marxists are making no attempt to even explain why most of the Global South, including even supposed allies of the US such as India, has not joined in with the sanctions regime against Russia. Therefore, they have accommodated not to international public opinion even but only to the propaganda offensive of the ruling class within the imperialist centres.
Russia is not itself an imperial power, whatever the subjective ambitions of Putin. It is a backward dependent capitalist state, despite the outsized military power it inherited from the Soviet workers’ state. The war in Ukraine that Russia is fighting is therefore a war against fascism and imperialism and revolutionary defeatism should be rejected. Marxists should support the military victory of Russia over NATO and its vassal government in Kiev.
However, May 9th is also an opportunity to draw out why support for the regime of Putin should only be of a critical nature. Putin when drawing upon the legacy of the historic victory of the Red Army over Nazism seeks to rob it of its class context. He seeks to turn into a victory of the Russian “Motherland”, as opposed to the victory of the Soviet proletariat defending the gains of the 1917 revolution. Putin himself of course rejects Bolshevism even going as far as blaming the current crisis on Lenin’s policies on the national question.
This tension has come out in the contradictory manner in which the Hammer and Sickle flag of the Soviet Union has manifested itself during the fighting. Russian soldiers have been seen taking down the Ukrainian flag from public buildings and replacing it not with the Russian flag but the Soviet Flag. They have flown it from their tanks. Most famously, Anna, the “Babushka” came out waving it at soldiers she thought were Russian there to liberate her town only to find Ukrainian soldiers who in the face of her protests stomped on the flag.
Of course, as Marxists we must take every opportunity to put the Great Patriotic War in its correct class context and reject the efforts of the new Russian bourgeoisie to claim it for their own.
We believe that the interests of the international working class are again at stake just as they were in World War 2 during the fight against Nazism. We support the forces of the Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and Russia in their struggle against imperialism and fascism. The launch of the military action by Russia on February 24th this year has acted as a dividing line to sort out which Marxist forces are truly lining up against the imperialist drive towards World War 3. This panel is part of the efforts to build links between those forces. Let us go forward together to build an international anti-imperialist movement based on Marxist principles!
Liga Comunista: Levi Pedro
My name is Levi Pedro. I am a construction worker. I participated in the Workers’ Party in the period of its foundation.
Today I am a member of the Communist League, the Brazilian section of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International.
For the first time since World War II, Nazism has conquered power in a country.
It was in 2014 in Ukraine, the second largest country on the European continent, which has a population of 45 million people.
Supported by the United States and the European Union, Nazi groups overthrew a democratically elected government through a coup d’état.
Since then, Ukrainian Nazis have killed 14,000 people to submit the country to the European Union and NATO.
They legalized Nazism, banned communism, opposition parties and murdered trade unionists.
Nazism is the cudgel of finance capital and NATO against workers to increase exploitation and break their resistance. Working harder and being prevented from protesting and striking.
We cannot let imperialist Nazism have its day of victory today. This is going to be terrible for exploited workers all over the world.
That is why we form a front with Russia against imperialism and its Ukrainian puppet. We are not satisfied with the independence of a part of Ukraine.
The Russian bourgeoisie, as well as the Ukrainian or Brazilian ones, do not deserve our slightest confidence, as they always capitulate in the fight against imperialism.
But the main enemy is imperialism that oppresses the planet and exploits us all.
The solution is the unity of workers and youth to build self-defense committees and a world party of socialist revolution to crush imperialism and Nazism.
That is why today we are in a united front with Putin, the devil is his grandmother, against Nazi-imperialism, as comrade Trotsky taught us against Hitler.
In 1932, comrade Trotsky explained to us the difference between a fascist government and a fascist state.
The fact that a government announces measures of radical expropriation of workers or expresses a desire to repress the population does not yet make it fascist.
Trotsky said that the state became fascist when it prohibited the elements of workers’ democracy that exist and are the achievements of workers within the capitalist regime.
The state became fascist when the state intervened in unions, banned left-wing parties, arrested and tortured political representatives of the working class, the state became fascist.
This has not yet happened systematically in the US, Brazil, Hungary, Russia or France.
But it happened in Ukraine from the 2014 Russophobic and anti-communist coup d’état supported by the US and the EU.
In the Second World War it was not clear to everyone that imperialism promoted Nazi-fascism. It was not clear why there were military conflicts between Nazi imperialism and Allied imperialism.
But now it must be clear to everyone that imperialism, that the US, that NATO finances and sends arms to Nazism, to the Azov battalion.
Now there are no more doubts.
Nazism is a Frankstein’s monster of imperialism against workers.
After the First World War, in 1919, Rosa Luxemburg was executed by the germs of Nazism supported by Social Democracy.
Before she died, Rosa Luxemburg formulated the alternative “socialism or barbarism”.
After the rise of Nazi fascism in Italy and Germany, things became clearer.
It is possible for capitalism to generate something worse than barbarism, worse than barbarism is fascist barbarism.
Trotsky said in 1939, “After the Italian experience we repeated it a thousand times: either COMMUNISM OR FASCISM.”
Now the question presents itself more clearly than ever.
Neo-Nazism is an agent of NATO, neo-Nazism is an agent of decadent imperialism.
Against neo-Nazism and NATO we stand together with Xi Jimping, Assad, Kin Jong Un and Maduro.
And we prefer a Ukraine occupied by an oppressed country like Russia than by the Nazi-imperialists from NATO, the US, Germany, England, and France.
But we need a new communist international workers’ organization to defeat Nazism and imperialism definitively.
The day will come that will be the day of definitive victory over Nazism, when humanity will definitively bury imperialism and capitalism.
That’s what the Communist League has to say to comrades today. Thanks for listening to us.
Partido Obrero Socialista (Costa Rica): Pablo Hdez
The defeat of German imperialism and the dialectic of the Revolution and counterrevolution
Good afternoon comrades. A few days ago, this detail appeared on the networks: A woman, in Samara, is harassed by a Russian pro-Nazi, who rebukes her because she carries a Z in her bag and questions her for supporting the War. The woman decently tells him “I am for the victory of our military, I am for peace.” Then before the aggressive tone of the Nazi, the woman gets nervous and puts him in his place. We have also seen this week the massive mobilizations of a sector of the Bulgarian population demanding that Bulgaria not send weapons to Ukraine and even asking for the fall of the Government that does not attend to the needs of the Bulgarian people and if the Ukraine needs for the war.
Without a doubt, when the woman in the video justifies the armed struggle to achieve peace, she does nothing other than update the history of the armed struggle for the defense of the USSR and the subsequent offensive to defeat the Nazi forces and reach the heart of Berlin on the symbolic May 9, 1945. That ended the war and opened for the Russians and the people of the USSR a period of relative peace, but peace at last. Let’s call it a peaceful period of coexistence with the staunch enemies of the Workers’ States, even if it was for a period that lasted for Russia until the current offensive by NATO and imperialism, let’s place it in 2014 with the war in Crimea and Donbass or let’s place it in the February 24, 2022 with the start of the so-called Special Operation.
The Second World War as a continuation of the counterrevolution against the Soviet Workers’ State
The Second World War was not only the continuation of the First to define the distribution of power of the different imperialisms: German imperialism made its second attempt to seize power in Europe and reduce the old and worn-out English imperialism, until then, the predominant imperialist power, not only in Europe but in the world.
Japanese imperialism did the same in Asia-Pacific. US imperialism took advantage of its comparative advantage of being on another continent and made its own calculations. It was waiting for the opportunity to intervene in the war in the best conditions to be the one who became world power. German imperialism had its priority in Europe and calculated that before taking over the whole world, with Europe in its hands, it would negotiate with the North American and the Japanese. But its objective for territorial economic reasons was to defeat the USSR and for political reasons it also intended to do so, since the USSR was the benchmark for the broad masses of Europe as the protagonist of the first triumphant socialist workers’ revolution and with enormous advances in its development as a workers’ state.
We just must remember that after the First World War the USSR faced a World War waged by the armies of the different imperialisms to crush the revolution, and it was the first Great War against imperialism. German imperialism had to defeat the USSR if it wanted to be the dominant power in Europe, either to continue against North American imperialism or for any temporary negotiation.
The triumph of the workers’ state defined as “triumph over the Nazis” is a subterfuge that Stalinism used to mask the class struggle because those who were really confronting each other were imperialist forces and the forces of a workers’ state. Likewise, Stalinism disguised itself as a national war: “Second Patriotic War” they called it to mask that it was also a counterrevolutionary war of the imperialists against the socialist workers’ state. “The Nazis” were the ideology and the program that the German imperialist bourgeoisie adhered to, imposed and raised and the German Army incorporated its symbology from Nazism, but the German state continued to be imperialist bourgeois, just like its army, only with a regime and a fascist or Nazi government. American, English, and French imperialism did the same, masking this inter-imperialist war combined with the war to defeat the Soviet workers’ state, as a war between democracy and a fascist-Nazi dictatorship and not as it was in essence: a continuation of the first world war of robbery.
Despite the containment of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the triumph over the Nazis promoted the permanent Revolution but also the permanent counter-revolution with the Cold War.
The triumph over the project of German imperialism to take over Europe and defeat the USSR as part of that objective, meant, despite the reactionary purposes of “socialism in one country” of the bureaucracy of the workers’ state with Stalinism as its leadeship, a process of Permanent Revolution: First, the People’s Democratic Republics of Eastern Europe had to advance and then deepen in them “socialist” tasks of expropriation of the bourgeoisie in those countries that had been liberated from the Nazi imperialist occupation. Then another giant would end up converting the Resistance to the Japanese occupation of its territory into a socialist peasant workers’ revolution and founding the workers’ state, the People’s Republic of China. And then North Korea and Cuba would follow.
At the same time a series of anti-colonial revolutions took place in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. which also ended up defining the distribution of inter-imperialist powers and the affirmation of the North American power as the dominant imperialism, by losing France and especially England, their great colonies, as well as allowing the Soviet bureaucracy to expand its influence in those decolonized regions.
All this prevented the victorious imperialisms of the Second World War from attacking the USSR; although they considered it, they did not count on the power relations in their favour to crush with a continuation of the Second War or a new World War against the USSR. Instead, an international order that we know of the “United Nations” of “peaceful” coexistence or negotiated order was imposed while the imperialists developed what was called the Cold War.
In this regard, it is important to point out that the concept and policy of Peaceful Coexistence is based on the principle of free self-determination of peoples and their sovereignty as states and nations formulated by the revolutionary bourgeoisie that comes from the French Revolution. It starts from that principle but introduces the decision and will of the parties to prevent the balance of forces from breaking between two existing systems at the time: socialism in one country with its post-war socialist bloc, and imperialism under the main domination of the USA along with its bloc of secondary imperialisms or those relegated to second order after the war, such as France and England.
The objective of the capitalist imperialisms to defeat the workers’ states was never abandoned. The Cold War was a war of attrition and contention so that the USSR was cooked in its own sauce of “socialism in its own country” economically and what would later be called “colour revolutions” or “springs” were woven in the countries of the so-called Soviet bloc: liberal democratic counterrevolutions for the restoration of capitalism and the power of the imperialist bourgeoisie using sectors of the petty bourgeoisie of each of those Eastern European states.
The world crisis of imperialist capitalism, especially the end of the post-war boom in the 1970s, dragged down the imperialist centres of free markets and competition such as the North American, but also not the mixed economy projects or welfare states, with strong participation of the state as a distorted expression of the triumph over Nazism or as an antidote for the masses not to follow in the footsteps of the Russian Revolution and also to the reactionary project of the Soviet bureaucracy of “socialism in one country”. For the Stalinists, the capitalist crises before and after the Second World War did not affect the USSR, shielded by the project of “socialism in one country” which, in the calculations of Stalinism, would develop to such a degree that it would establish a competition between two supposed models. Ending in the “socialist” by prevailing over what would be the disadvantage of the “western capitalist” world.
The calculation went wrong because the economies of the socialist bloc in a single country were integrated into the international capitalist division of labour. They could have margins to weather the consequences of capitalist crises, but they were not exempt from being affected by them. After the years of the post-war boom that allowed a fabulous development of the socialist bloc until the early 70s, who had reservations to face that great crisis of the capitalist economy of that time were the capitalist imperialist countries and especially North American imperialism, which also imposed , being the dominant power of the “capitalist West”, its own currency in 1971 completely detached from gold (FIAT Currency).
The only possibility to give air, even to a utopian project such as “socialism in one country”, was to develop the Permanent Revolution. It was to promote the revolutions and worker and popular uprisings for socialism in the world and to develop transformations internally that would stop the capitalist restorationist patterns that the Soviet bureaucracy encouraged as a form of adaptation to world capitalism and as a process of its intrinsic tendency to transform itself into a new bourgeoisie.
The leaks of the worldwide rise of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles, especially, were not enough to prevent imperialism, albeit more weakly, from resuming its counterrevolutionary offensive against the USSR and the new workers’ states. To the constant and permanent counterrevolution with the “Cold War” of the imperialisms, an objective condition of deterioration of the conquests and of the economy and social life was imposing itself in the socialist bloc and the curse of socialism in a single country further promoted the tendencies of bureaucracies and nationalist communist parties that sought to protect their source of local privileges instead of promoting the deepening of socialism internally and the extension of the workers, peasants and popular revolutions in the world.
The Dissolution of the USSR opened a tortuous process, but not yet closed, of capitalist restoration, creation of a new bourgeoisie and a new national bourgeois State.
The triumph of the so-called Cold War was imposed with the processes of dismantling the Soviet bureaucracy desperately seeking to adapt to capitalism and its different tendencies and fractions in order to seek to be the best off. Gorbachev first until he was defeated by the most proto-capitalist wing led by Yeltsin, supported by demoralized masses won over to the fiction of the supposed benefits of a liberal market and liberal society. Yeltsin crowns his project with the dissolution of the USSR and the cascade of violent or negotiated counterrevolutions between the different sectors of the population and the bureaucracies and agencies of imperialism in the other countries of the Soviet bloc, such as the Catholic Church, for example, in Poland with Solidarity. and in the former USSR itself (separation of Republics). There were changes of bourgeois democratic liberal regimes and governments, some with transitory leaderships of the “recycled” bureaucracies and either directly bourgeois or pro-imperialist European and North American ones. In other countries such as Romania, Albania and Yugoslavia, bloody civil wars were especially those that ended the so-called “deformed workers’ states”.
But at least in what in the theoretical tradition of our current we call the degenerated workers’ state, in the USSR, apart from an “attempted palace coup” against Yeltsin, there was no dissolution of the “Army”. To the administrative bureaucracies of the CPSU that ran like rats to save themselves from the sinking ship, a military bureaucracy appears within the Army that brings together others that also joined or offered their services. That military wing of the Red Army was led by Vladimir Putin.
The transformations of the USSR and within it especially of Russia to fully restore a bourgeois state, required a civil war or a coup that touched not only the government and the regime, but the STATE. In essence, we follow Engels’ definition of the STATE as a group of armed men who guard a certain mode of property and production. Well, the Group of armed men, the essence of the deformed Workers’ State, as there is no doubt, but workers, the Army of the former USSR, was not destroyed. Was there room for a peaceful transformation of a State linked to a specific property regime without civil war or a coup that would dissolve the Army and replace it with another group of armed men at the service of the new property regime? We are not convinced of this.
Was a change in the regime with a constitution that eliminated the definition of socialism and a series of economic measures of massive privatization enough to declare capitalism restored in the former USSR and establish a bourgeois regime and a bourgeois state? We are inclined to say no.
In most Eastern European states, it did not happen because the Armies of those workers’ states were an extension or branch of the Russian Army and their emergence had come from the liberation of the Red Army. On the other hand, in Albania, Romania, and especially in Yugoslavia, that “group of armed men” came from their own liberation forces that defeated the Nazis in their territories and their political and military bureaucracy had roots and national identity.
In the Russian Federation and in Russia as the main country there was a change of government with Gorbachev, and with Yeltsin especially, of government and regime. The capitalist restoration was being imposed with kicks and with traumatic and threatening costs of even turning Russia into a “failed state”. The definition of a workers’ state disappeared from the narrative and formality in the new constitution of 1993.
The constitution was changed in 1993 and reflects that transition to the capitalist restoration and the change of state, but the process was not closed. Regarding the character of the post-Soviet State, it points out:
“The Russian Federation is a social state, whose policy is aimed at creating conditions that guarantee a dignified life and the free development of the individual” In the previous Constitution of 1977 with the reforms of Leonid Brezhnev, it defined that: “The supreme objective of social production under socialism is the greatest possible satisfaction of the growing material, cultural and intellectual requirements of the people”. The concept “Social” had a Revolutionary character: linked to socialism, which was modified by the single term “social” only and “people” is deleted for “individual” in the 1997 Constitution after the dissolution of the USSR was declared.
Regarding property, the 1993 Constitution states that “In the Russian Federation, the unity of the economic space, the free transit of goods, services and financial resources, support for competition and free economic activity are guaranteed…In the Russian Federation Russian Federation, private, state, municipal and other forms of property are recognized and protected in the same way. (Same refers to land ownership)
The right to private property is protected by law.
All these are texts of the post-Soviet Constitution of 1993.
The former Soviet bureaucracy rewinds before the failure of the restorationist fast track
As the work of Ana Teresa Gutiérrez (1) points out:
“This capitalist restoration program had by no means served its purpose, a task that has proven more difficult than the Harvard economists who designed it imagined. The new course, led by Vladimir Putin, suggested a more assertive and nationalist foreign policy, one that was not subservient to Western politics and was more in tune with the Russian military elite.”
A wing of the ex-Soviet bureaucracy reacts, also fearing that a social explosion of chaotic dimensions could occur that would not give the ex-Soviet bureaucracy any space to recycle and manage the process of capitalist restoration, which threatened Russia to continue the course of states such as Czechoslovakia exponentially: Explosion in pieces of the components of the Russian Federation in a supra-balkanization and absolute domination of the capitals of European and North American imperialism, making the booty.
With the rise of Putin, mounted on masses disenchanted with the openly neoliberal capitalist turn, the workers’ state will not be restored, but the Army will intervene in political life and will restore, especially in strategic economic activities, re-nationalization and a new state and military bureaucracy.
It is clear that the definition of the Russian Federation or Russia is not socialism, nor is it to affirm the workers’ state. It is not a workers’ state but perhaps then, is it already a bourgeois state with a restored and consolidated capitalism? We don’t appreciate it yet. We come close to characterizing Russia as a degenerated workers’ state that began a political transformation in the 1980s with perestroika and whose milestone was the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and an accelerated course of the capitalist restorationist process. This restorationist process came from the defeat of the Bolshevik wing in 1924 with the death of Lenin, the wear and tear of the war to crush the counter-revolution and the imperialist armies, the defeat of the European revolutions, the German one in the first place, and the triumph of the bureaucratization of the party and the Revolution itself that made it possible to anchor and make the counterrevolutionary theses of “socialism in one country” triumph.
This fast course or “restorationist Fast Track” was started by a sector of the Soviet bureaucracy with Gorbachev, in alliance with imperialism and it only meant the sale of assets to pay foreign debt and insufficient and tiny loans from the IMF. The successor, Boris Yeltsín, was more radical since he led Russia at the end of the 90s to half the GDP of when he began the process of dismantling the state. The masses were disenchanted with the illusions in a market opening and liberal democratic reforms that only led to the destruction, not only of previous living conditions even in the worst crisis of the USSR, and to the social decomposition and of their nationality or national identity.
The wing of the former Soviet bureaucracy with strong participation in the Russian armed forces and its security apparatus found in Vladimir Putin the leader with the capacity to carry out the rewind in a Bonapartist manner to make an orderly capitalist restorationist displacement but not “neoliberal”. Putin had had the confidence of Yeltsin who appointed him deputy director of the Kremlin in 1997, director of the Federation Security Forces (FSB) in 1998, Secretary of the Security Council in 1999, Prime Minister in 1999, and President interim before Yeltsin’s resignation. He was the man of transition. He was the quintessential Bonapartist who could arbitrate between the different wings of the ex-Soviet bureaucracy.
Rewinding meant stopping the accelerated course of plunder and conversion of Russia to a power that “raffled off” the valuable assets of the former USSR to oligarchs and directly to US and European imperialism. Rewinding meant stopping the rush of the car down the slope towards the abyss of absolute dissolution and not only of the USSR but of those who had administered the source of privileges: the former Soviet bureaucracy. Rewinding meant recovering strategic activities for the state, strengthening the military assets of its armed forces and its military industry, guaranteeing a buffer social economic regime that would prevent the social explosions that would dissolve the former USSR in new Balkans, and guarantee the passage of the former Soviet bureaucracy to conversion into the bourgeoisie.
People’s China had made this step to capitalist restoration with the reforms initiated with Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening Up” in 1978 after the power vacuum created in 1976 with the death of Mao Zedong. A process of creation and promotion of a national bourgeoisie was opened that Xi Jinping put more recently his last. The CCP bureaucracy is preparing its way to become a bourgeoisie and is supported by a directly bourgeois sector that prepares the ground, but under its control. Putin has tried to emulate China in this regard with his own version. It developed a state bureaucracy, especially of renationalized and strategic companies, and strengthened a military bureaucracy by modernizing the army and the military industrial complex. It relied on the Russian oligarchs who adhered to the nationalist project and who, in agreement or under pressure, stopped looting funds to Switzerland and invested them in national and mixed capitalist bourgeois development, in unity with state companies. In the same sense, Putin made alliances especially with the German bourgeoisie to obtain loans from German banks and alliances such as Nord Stream 1 and 2.
From the 1993 Constitution, Putin emphasized nationalization, the development of a national bourgeoisie and “national” productive, financial, and commercial activity, as well as public-private alliances or mixed property and economy.
Russia is going through, like China, an accelerated process of capitalist restoration but from the Party bureaucracy, in the case of China, and from the bureaucracy of the former workers’ state in the first case. But both countries are not capitalist countries already established or with restorationist processes already closed or finished, much less consolidated. Neither, and in this we agree with this entire sector that has developed a united front for the defence of Russia and against the War of imperialism and NATO, do we consider these two countries as “imperialists”. There are developments and foundations, from the companions of this unit of action mentioned, regarding this that we share, and we are not going to repeat here.
For us, China is a deformed and degenerated workers’ state on the way to capitalist restoration and Russia is a former workers’ state in the process of rewinding or rethinking capitalist restoration. One is a workers’ state in the process of restoring capitalism and transforming into a bourgeois state and the other is a former workers’ state in the process of capitalist restoration, development of a national bourgeoisie but faced with the weakness of not having a configured national bourgeoisie (the oligarchs cannot be attributed to be a class because they are bourgeois but rich tycoons and not a structured and solid national class; and many of those Russian oligarchs fled as soon as the conflict with Ukraine began) must rely on nationalization to reach to fully establish the capitalist system, the development of a modern and state-of-the-art industrialization and a bourgeois State. As an expression of “socialism in its own country” that encouraged and configured China and Russia under the Stalinist project and theory, these were since then national powers, great national states that struggled to assert themselves in the face of a natural and desperate tendency of imperialism to expansion. and militarism. We do not consider Russia and China to be dependent countries. They have an advanced condition in their development or uneven and combined, but “national”.
Russia and China struggle to participate in the international division of capitalist labour but each defending its “national independence”. They develop a national bourgeoisie and a project for a national State in permanent conflict with North American imperialism and its dynamics of expansion and the need to destroy its competitors, whether they are other imperialisms or whether they are states in the process of capitalist restoration with a nationalist bourgeoisie that fights for its space of realization of surplus value. In this, China and Russia are similar to semi-colonial countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc. in Latin America with national bourgeoisies that fight for space and market share, entering into very strong contradictions with Yankee imperialism.
In our revolutionary Marxist tradition, we have rescued the struggle for the defence of the self-determination of peoples and nations as a bourgeois democratic task that the imperialist bourgeoisie will never allow, least of all in its senile, exhausted, or chronic crisis phase, but valid as a democratic slogan. But we have also always accompanied it with the need for federations or unions under the sole perspective of the socialist Revolution. Trotsky writes a work titled: “The Right of nations to self-determination” in May 1917 and points out:
“…By its very nature, imperialism is expansive and aggressive, and this is its characteristic quality and not diplomatic manoeuvres from here derives the permanent conflict between the principle of national self-determination that, in many cases, leads to economic and state decentralization (dismemberment, separation) and the powerful centralizing tendencies of imperialism that the state apparatus and power have at their disposal. military. ..This direct and immediate dependence on the national self-determination of the weak peoples of the collective European regime, excludes the possibility that the proletariat poses questions such as the independence of Poland or the unification of all Serbs outside the European revolution. But, on the other hand, this means that the right to self-determination, as an element of the proletarian peace program, does not have a “utopian” but a revolutionary character. This consideration is directed in two directions: against the German Davids and Lindbergs, who, from the height of their imperialist “realism”, denigrate the principle of national independence as reactionary romanticism; and against the simplifiers of our revolutionary camp when they affirm that it is only achievable in socialism and thereby avoid a principled answer to the questions raised by the war”
It is an early writing by Trotsky when the Bolsheviks have not yet taken power and much less social democracy has been discarded by building the Third International, but it is fully valid. The right of Venezuela, Argentina, China, Cuba, Russia to self-determination breaking the economic centralization, the unipolarity of US imperialism and its new order of recovery of weakened power, either by new imperialist powers or by new political and economic powers that hinder its natural characteristic of imperialism to expansion and aggression.
Due to its national right, self-determination and sovereignty, it is not reactionary but neither is it revolutionary per se, except on the condition that progress is made in the world socialist revolution and mediation with the regional socialist federations, such as those that should exist between Cuba and Venezuela, for example, to confront the offensive of imperialism and its military and sabotaging blockade and siege against these nations.
We have put Trotsky’s position then on the dimension of a globalized world now, where there are no weak nations but strong nations, but not imperialists and even at least with many doubts that they are already restored capitalist nations or full bourgeois states. But the essence of Trotsky’s approach at that time fits in with the current scenario.
The text, if you have the pleasure of reading it, remains in some expressions such as the need for a democratic United Europe or the United States of Europe: “The United States of Europe, without monarchy, without permanent armies and without secret diplomacy, constitutes the most important part of the proletarian peace program. But we can only place this in the context of what would later be the Transitional Program drafted by Trotsky. However, in the same writing Trotsky specifies that democratic slogan of the United States of Europe in transition to socialism:
“The republican democratic union of Europe, a union truly capable of guaranteeing free national development, is only possible through the revolutionary struggle against militarism, imperialism, dynastic centralism, through revolts in each country and the convergence of all these uprisings in a European revolution. The triumphant European revolution, independently of its course in the different countries and in the absence of other revolutionary classes, can only transmit power to the proletariat. And thus, the United States of Europe is the only conceivable form of the dictatorship of the European proletariat.
So, our policy of defence of Russia in the face of US imperialist aggression and expansion is not only explained by its need to directly resume capitalist restoration in Russia, not allowing the process of constituting a national bourgeoisie, of pulverizing the remnants of the workers’ state. In its expression of the army or armed forces that, although they changed their name, did not change their structural base: a military state bureaucracy that, deformed or degenerated, is still marked by its origin in the Red Army. Those Armed Forces must be liquidated in order to establish a bourgeois state and clean up the former workers’ state. It is a temporary situation because either due to the military defeat of the Russian Army or due to the development of a strong national bourgeoisie and the restoration of capitalism, the current Russian Army will have to disappear when one of these restorationist modalities prevails.
What prospects does this war have?
We frame this war in the offensive of North American and European imperialism with NATO as a coalition military force, as a reactionary war for the recovery of the weakened power of North American imperialism in the face of two main threats, defined by the United States itself: Russia and China.
It is the continuation of the Second World War in its court against the USSR and the conquests of the defeat of German and Japanese imperialism. Currently the USSR does not exist, but there is a degenerated and deformed workers’ state in the process of capitalist restoration and a former Russian workers’ state, which struggles to become a bourgeois state and restore capitalism by creating and consolidating a national bourgeoisie, with the dynamic logic that It would have that when it is consolidated, which is to become not only a capitalist but an imperialist country for the Eurasian zone but, we insist, both cases are in transition or in process, it is not yet achieved or closed.
Before capitalism is definitively restored and a strong national bourgeoisie is established in each of these states, US imperialism intends to convert the progress it made in the 1980s and 1990s (with the dissolution of the USSR and the relationship of forces of the end of the Second World War expressed in the bipolar world of peaceful coexistence, institutionalized in the United Nations), in an affirmation and consolidation of unipolar power.
After the dissolution of the USSR, US imperialism has not been able to sustain this result of taking unipolarity, because the former Soviet bureaucracy did not accept the rushed and liquidating restorationist course of its own existence and went on the counteroffensive building what is today Russia and which we have already addressed before. Also, due to the chronic crisis or exhaustion of imperialist capitalism, new powers have emerged, and others have recovered. The main one has been China, which, as a product of the Law of Combined and Uneven Development, taking advantage of planning and social property as a result of its sui generis socialist revolution, modified the concept of socialism in a single country, not developing a closed economy but rather outsourcing the capitalist world market with the turn of the modernization of 1978 and combining the very strong attraction of foreign investment, developing its own industrialization and penetrating, as German imperialism did in the past by not having colonies, with an aggressive placement and meteoric domination of merchandise around the world.
Such a transformation of China and others like India that also carried out similar “modernizations” and with a Russia that took advantage of its enormous energy potential and developments inherited from the former USSR, especially in the powerful nuclear asset and industrial scientific and technological development in many strategic branches, especially in the military and space, forces the US that thought, by omitting the component force of bipolarity and the “end of history”, to become the dominant power of “Globalization” and affirmation of its unipolarity or imperialist hegemonism.
It is important here to deal with the case of Europe and the main one, that of German imperialism. We will not deal with English imperialism, which plays as a secondary partner of the North American enlisted against German imperialism. Germany has been the imperialist power that has benefited from the European Union and as a secondary imperialist power tries to develop and not be drowned by US imperialism. Its policy has been to seek alliances with China and Russia in the face of a future confrontation to unseat US imperialism. The German bourgeoisie relied so much on this strategy of alliances that in energy it sought to ensure its supply from Russia and in industrial and commercial matters with China. Opportunistic alliances and not blocks yet. That would explain for us its ambiguity in this NATO war against Russia and explains the strong pressure from Russia and from European imperialisms related to the North American. But all this regarding Europe requires more research and work so that it does not remain as a speculative hypothesis.
Imperialism makes calculations and is determined to take over Russia first, either by defeating her or leading her to capitulation. With this war, they use Ukraine as a military force and participate in the financing and provision of weapons and logistics without having to resort to an open war involving NATO for now. Take care not to move to a conflict of a nuclear nature that would end the framework of control and administration of the capitalist chronic crisis and would open an uncertain period of dystopia, apocalyptic and triumphant post-nuclear barbarism (although this perspective cannot be ruled out). Precisely because of the agony of the imperialist bourgeoisie and its system but it does not yet appear as the decision to be taken by the whole of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
With the economic blockade, the political isolation, the neutralization of China and other powers, the support of its Ukrainian armed wing and the contradictions within the half-measures of the former Soviet bureaucracy that continues to bet on achieving the “dissuasion” agreed with a negotiation that ensures the brake on the expansion of NATO, the neutrality of Ukraine, as well as putting the territories of Donbass and even Crimea up for negotiation (some formula of agreement or extension of the dispute diplomatically), US imperialism and its partners escalate and they prolong the conflict by increasing their pressures either to achieve a draw or a Russian defeat in Ukraine, with the withdrawal of Russian troops and the end of the declared “Special Operation”.
Hence, Russia’s objectives of gaining control up to the borders of Donbass are its axis by failing to divide the Ukrainian regime and government with the initial actions of the Operation to guarantee the aforementioned objectives. The demilitarization and denazification are relative. While it is true that Russia and the military forces of the Donbass have dealt heavy defeats to the Nazi battalions, Nazism as a national ideology not only remains but also expands as Russophobia and anti-Soviet history of liberation from the Nazis, in the nations of the former USSR and former Eastern Europe and even in other parts of the world. It is impossible to crush denazification if its matrix, which is the imperialist bourgeois power and system, is not eliminated. Demilitarization on its part is not a fact either, since Ukraine is being rearmed and it will be even more so even if an agreement is imposed and even if it is favourable or partially favourable on paper with the guarantees that Russia demands.
However, if Russia manages not only to liberate the territory of Donbass and to hold it without submitting it to negotiation, it would be a tremendous blow to imperialism and would delay a major and even nuclear confrontation for a while. The illusion in a polycentric or multipolar world encouraged by the former Soviet bureaucracies and the Chinese bureaucracy, as well as other powers and nations of a bourgeois nationalist nature, has no chance and is a total chimera. US imperialism and imperialism in general continue today more than ever in a delirious concentration of capital and a necessary sweep and redefinition of Competitors. The Third World War or its prolegomena have already begun, and it will be in the military field that the “new world order” will be resolved.
In this sense, the Covid pandemic of two years ago and the policies and positioning of the imperialist powers and forces in the face of this phenomenon should be located. Given that a jump was triggered in the concentration of capital and the destruction of productive force similar to what happens in a war and a blow of enormous dimensions was dealt to the masses, not only economically, but also politically in terms of their democratic rights in the imposition of Bonapartist and fascist forms of pandemic management and economic and social measures. Terror was implanted as a demobilization mechanism, disproportionate because a nuclear war that is not so far away is more real and threatening than the deadly consequences of the Covid pandemic. But this is still a topic that is not separated from an analysis of the World Situation but that would have to be discussed and developed.
No to the neo-Nazi war of NATO and the imperialist coalition, led by the US and articulated by the Ukrainian Army, against the self-determination of Russia and Donbass.
For the defence of Russia, against sanctions and blockades, neo-Nazi Russophobia and for the military triumph of the liberation forces of Donbass.
Only socialism and the defeat of imperialism at the world level is the way out of the nuclear barbarism to which imperialism leads humanity.
We are on the side of Russia and for the defeat of the NATO forces and their army of neo-fascist Ukrainian cannon fodder. Russia’s defence of the self-determination of nations against imperialist organic expansion and aggression extends to the territories of Donbass and Crimea. The Donbass in the last 8 years (with Georgia and Chechnya imperialism had made its tests) suffered the offensive escalation against Russia, imperialism had made Ukraine and turned it into a spearhead to advance more threateningly towards the most important centres of Russia, deploying a war of extermination of the Russian population and making use of this devastating and criminal task of neo-Nazism, so as not to directly show or demonstrate its responsibility in the offensive.
For this reason, our defence and military support to the Russian forces and the militias of Donetsk and Lugansk and for the victory over the Ukrainian and pro-Nazi or Nazi armed forces.
But we warn that no national independence and no improvement in the economic, social, cultural, and political situation of the workers and peoples can be achieved if workers’ and people’s power is not refounded and reconquered in the former USSR and in the former workers’ states of the East of Europe.
We also address the workers and peoples of the European countries that are within NATO or that participate within the European Union in this war against Russia so that they develop a defeatist program for their own governments and military forces. So that, following the example of popular sectors like the Bulgarians and in other countries like Greece and others, they demand that their governments not send weapons to Ukraine and withdraw support for that neo-fascist government and for the offensive and initiative of Yankee imperialism that has dragged to war the European nations against Russia. Peace, as the woman in the reference with which we began this writing said, is the military triumph over the war that the US and its squire Ukraine are carrying out against Russia. Even if it is a temporary and relative peace.
The European and North American rulers and those who in other latitudes support this war against Russia, are responsible for deepening the economic crisis, the increase in prices and shortages of goods, as well as the impoverishment of broad masses due to the sanctions carried out against Russia. Unconditional lifting of sanctions and peace with Russia. Neither weapons to Ukraine nor sanctions to Russia, that is Peace. The war against Russia pushes the world towards a nuclear war if we don’t stop it and if the US advances and/or wins.
Footnotes:
(1) The reason for this situation, Putin posits, at least in part, is “the futile attempt in the past decade to transplant Western liberal ideas to Russian soil” (Financial Time, 2000).
Hence, although Yeltsin’s stage consisted of the dismantling of the institutions inherited from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the looting against society and the economy, through the privatization process, which benefited a circle of former Soviet officials, today called oligarchs; the economic and social decline resulting from these processes, together with the advances of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the geopolitical sphere, now threatened the Russian Federation itself. Once again, powerful state institutions were necessary to defend the national interest. It is no coincidence that Putin also proposed the Chinese model in this document, as a kind of pattern to follow, since the Chinese bureaucracy has been restoring capitalism, with much more determination than the Kremlin, but unlike it, China has kept its old state apparatus, the Army and the secret police and independence in its foreign policy course:
“… the Russian President had to take this path at first. However, as in the Chinese case, to balance Western influence, Putin has the objective that the Russian State play a determining role in the Russian economy, since he is clear that Russians living in poverty could not survive the demands of the free market, so for Putin, the recovery of the Russian economy has as its main strategy the control of Russian-Western joint ventures over resources and the economy and at the same time, he hopes that the number of Russian businessmen of a nationalist cut grows. In addition, at that time, President Putin very clearly laid out a project for the economic revival of Russia, which Yeltsin’s two presidential terms brought to the brink of disaster, in economic and social terms, and to the danger of the disintegration of the national territory. ”
Notebooks on International Relations, Regionalism and Development / Vol. 5. No. 10. July-December 2010 The rise of Vladimir Putin and the pursuit of Russia’s national interest Ana Teresa Gutiérrez del Cid
Consistent Democrats/LCFI (Great Britain): Ian Donovan
The conflict between Nazi Germany and the USSR in World War 2 was a class war. It was a continuation of the war of intervention of 1918-21, which was waged by a 14-nation imperialist-led coalition including Britain, France, the US, Japan, Canada, Italy, Australia, Estonia, Romania, Greece, Poland, China, Czechoslovakia, and Serbia. Its aim was simply to crush and defeat the Russian Revolution.
This has always been the strategic aim of imperialist capitalism in its interventions around the world, to stamp on the very possibility of the overthrow of capitalism, and to defeat or even destroy any nation or people whose working class succeeds in expropriating the capitalists.
Note that Germany played no role in that coalition, though it had earlier intervened against the revolution in its own right in the immediate aftermath of October, and forced the Bolsheviks to temporarily cede territory, mainly in Ukraine, in the peace of Brest-Litovsk.
This only lasted until Germany surrendered to the forces of the triple entente in WWI, after which the Bolsheviks hastened to recover the territory ceded. However, they then had to fight the other imperialists who defeated Germany.
Inter-imperialist conflict consumed European capitalism throughout the whole of the first part of the twentieth century. This is because Britain had been the world capitalist hegemon in the 19th Century, and had through that effectively become imperialist world hegemon when capitalism became characterized by monopolies and the division of the whole world between capitalist great powers.
But it was a weak world hegemon, as it was already in relative decline when it gained that position.
Yet it is clear that, even though German imperialism was the rival imperialism that was in prolonged dispute with the then-world hegemon, British imperialism, their enmity to the British empire and its allies was not as fundamental as it was to the working class and the Russian revolution.
Hitler’s main purpose for the ruling class was to destroy the labour movement at home, as part of crushing the working class internationally. This meant destroying Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. This is very clear from his writings and speeches.
It is also clear that this aspect of Hitler’s politics had the fervent sympathy of arch British imperialists such as Churchill, who only feared Hitler would also lay his hands on the British Empire. This was true generally of Hitler’s rivals.
The Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 between Germany and imperial Japan, later joined by fascist Italy, was the clear forerunner of NATO. It had the same purpose – the destruction of the Russian Revolution and all that flowed from it.
But the issue of world hegemony had not at that point been resolved. It took World War II for the US to finally replace Britain’s weak hegemon with a massively stronger one. That was the issue that had to be resolved to fully unify imperialism against the USSR.
The barbaric nature of the attack on the USSR by Hitler, with the destruction of tens of millions of its people through scorched earth, exterminationist massacres, was only different in scale from the massacres (so far) of US imperialism. It was not different in kind.
In Vietnam and Korea, the US fought to drive back social revolutions that challenged capitalism, and their techniques of doing so were very similar to those of Hitler. They would like to have been able to do similar things in China but were too late to make a serious attempt to stop it.
But the nuclear threats against China during the Korean war were of a similar type. The strategies of the most radical Stalinist guerrilla factions were not centred on the working class, but rather a ‘prolonged people’s war’ based on a peasant insurgency. However, the imperialists learned the hard way that this could also sometimes lead to the abolition of capitalism.
The imperialist response to ‘people’s war’ in such conflicts was to exterminate the people. That echoed the bloody counterrevolution of the Nazis.
In a sense, the US hegemony subsumed both British imperialism’s world hegemony and the Third Reich, and many of the clients of both. They made use of personnel from the Third Reich to rebuild West Germany as a bastion of NATO – personified in General Gehlen, who led West German intelligence after doing the same for Hitler.
They also made considerable use of Nazi allies and clients throughout East Europe after WWII – the ‘captive nations’ crowd – including some of the deadliest killers and criminals, like Bandera in Ukraine, who was employed by the CIA to work politically against ‘communism’ in the East, until he was eliminated in 1958.
Even with the destruction of the USSR, the crusade against Communism continued. This crusade against Russia is a continuation of it. The resurrection of bourgeois support for Hitlerism in a crusade against Russia and all things Russian is a manifestation of the same thing. The expansion of NATO is part of the same purpose. Otherwise, what is NATO for?
How can this be? The Soviet workers state was destroyed in 1991. True, and a form of capitalist state was re-created.
However, one word of wisdom, derived from Marxism, was from the former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, was when in the early 1970s he was asked “what was the historical significance of the 1789 French Revolution?” He replied that “It’s much too early to say”.
A remarkable quip. However, you can certainly say the same thing about the August Coup and the 1991 counterrevolution in the USSR. And the other counterrevolutions, particular in China etc. Its much too early to say how sustainable capitalist restoration is. Imperialism suspects it is not sustainable.
They have good reason to suspect this from the history of bourgeois revolutions. Recall that the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, and the Restoration of the Bourbons in France, did NOT succeed in restoring the feudal order.
The imperialists fear the same will prove to be true in Russia and China, that capitalist restoration will prove unsustainable, and that Communism will revive. They even see Putin as in some way an expression of that, with his retreats from neo-liberalism.
That is why Nazism is being revived and rehabilitated today.
We must acknowledge the continuity between today’s war drive against Russia, with Operation Barbarossa and the intervention against the Bolshevik revolution.
We must renew our solidarity with Russia against Nazism and these war threats just as we did in previous generations.
Fernando Ximenes, Member of Komite Esperansa (East Timor)
False Unity and Eroticism of Contemporary Super-Imperialism: The Tasks of the Anti-Imperialist Left
The dreams of Western imperialism after World War II and the ‘end of history’ enigmatic-thesis after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 promised a more general happiness. A tolerant multicultural cosmopolitanism has oppositely led into a transcontinental alliance of imperial ethno-nationalism. Is this not reflecting in the peak of xenophobic, racist, white-supremacist Euro-Atlantic modernity and recent intensification of NATO and AUKUS-directing process of identity and otherness toward Russia East and China’s south as archaic, ignorant, savage, backward that need to be implanted Western with democratic civility and free market neoliberal capitalism? This all serves the goals of accumulation at world scale and empire-building.
Hence the process of otherness, belonging, loyalty, duty or all the fascistic and authoritarian elements of culture has embedded within the essence of imperialism and manifested as a dominant form of its expansion across the world. Therefore, fascism and authoritarianism is not an extension of capitalism, outside of it, it is rather, an inherent essence of capitalist imperialism.
This all to say that, growing imperialist eroticism has fuelled their inflammatory passion to construct otherness and their inevitable needs to dominate. Behind all these madness lies the ‘erotic energies’ of capital required to settle and rule everywhere – narcissistic requirements of the ruling oligopolies of the centre. The more expansionist, aggressive and global repression toward sovereignty state of the South is rooted in the over-expanding conflict and contradiction within the inter-imperial order itself. The long economic depression followed with hysterical frustration of the imperialist states that fomented permanent aggression and of course, growing risk of third global war. Thus, the ongoing US-lead global imperialist war on Russia and China was founded by long sustained relations of domination and subordination between the imperialist states. I referred to this case as false unity of imperialism.
Since the middle of twenty century, the US has not only waged war, pillaging, plundering, intervening, and dominating the third world of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, but also an economic war against Europe – for the current crisis in Ukraine, US has turned the allies to engage in war that will be paid for with the preservation of their submission to US command, and paid with the prices for US strategy of empire-building.
The recent US-led NATO war against Russia aimed at China as well. The strategy of isolating China is not just simply by destabilizing and removing Russia from China in making a counter-hegemonic alliance, but it is also serving to block the EU from making a stable mutual trade with China and Russia. This will open the chances to prevent the greater Eurasian prosperity and multipolarity without US leadership, that’s including the prevention of further China-promoting Belt and Road Initiative.
In another, to destabilize Russia, to topple the existing regime in the Kremlin, is to continue to recycle it back into a client peripheral capitalist state serving the US-imperialist triad strategic goals, ways that will further isolate, weaken and again, turn China into a backward periphery status, complement US and western monopoly needs for capital accumulation and empire-building. In short, the anti-hegemonic coalition of China, Russia and the third world socialist democratic regime aims at creating an alternative non-neoliberal world without NATO and US central command.
It is important to note, Russia is not an imperialist state that engages in inter-imperialist war, or partitioned world territorial division. To label countries as imperialist simply with ‘exporting capital’ is flawed, very non-dialectic, since most of the countries, even poorer third world countries are also exporting capital. So, in all, it is an inter-imperialist alliance of US-West Europe-Japan war against the anti-imperialist front of China-Russia and other global south countries.
In this, I would like to call for all the peace-loving anti-hegemonic countries, to all socialist states, and all the peoples of the Global South and working-class struggle in the North to struggle in order to recover the popular and democratic sovereignty by delinking from imperialist neoliberal economic order and more importantly, to de-dollarize the economy. That’s because the international monetary system based on the dollar as a world reserve, its will to provide credit and taxing across the world, to impose austerity, sanction, or a more general economic line of Washington Consensus, is the foundation of US economic imperialism coupled with military form of imperialism.
To de-dollarize is critical to the international class of struggle among capital and labour, people of the South with the North monopolies. Since the US cannot run out of money, it can print all the money, and it can recycle all the dollars that it has pumped into the world economy. Once they can recycle back into the US treasury bonds as monetary and savings (foreign countries buying US treasury securities with US dollar) will ended up financing US spending abroad, its balance of payments deficit, in short, subsidizing the US global militarization by investing billions of dollars to military expenditure and military bases in all the continents. This historical fact is central to US imperialism since 1972, and it started to end since the US decided to seize the Russian assets, and we expect many more third world countries will decide to stop depositing or disinvesting in the US anymore, from now on.
That’s all because, US has moved from world ‘creditor-state’ to ‘debtor-state’ that makes all nations pay for its government policies abroad – that’s because we live in dollarized neoliberal imperialism. So, by maintaining the dollar-based international monetary order, we are doomed to participate in US global war, intervention, occupation, proxies and domination toward the third world countries, to topple down the socialist state and sovereignty anti-hegemonic state such as Russia. We are participating in financing US continuing militarization of the world, its worldwide invention of fascistic and right-wing counter-revolutionary regime across the world. We are financing the military base and operations that keep us in check, subjugation.
For now, the US’s oil, agriculture, financial and arms-industrial monopolies have benefited more from the sanctions. The recent drop of production, supply or energies export by Russia will affect the ‘accumulation of world scale’, but it will underdevelop many third world countries, a condition that will enable imperialist economic diplomacy to impose neoliberal austerity, structural adjustment, debts and so on. But now, it also led to blowback consequences, boomerang to the West. More countries are protesting and resisting western sanctions. In fact, the US has lost all wars it has initiated in the beginning of the twenty first century. Michael Hudson have claimed “the era of military occupation is over. The mode of control is financial”. That is why, the alternative to build a world without the US dollar presented by China and Russia is intolerable.
Comrades, we cannot have peace and socialism under financial imperialism, and to achieve both under the tyranny of imperialism is totally absurd. In addition, you also cannot have development and democracy without socialism – the democracy of the West aims to eternalize the regime of private property and endless accumulation for the 1%. It is a democracy that is empowering the minority financial tyranny in which few predatory oligarchies select the candidates for the masses to exercise their five minutes democratic power to elect the representative of industrial, oil and finance oligarchies for executive power. That is totally a false option, and that’s the essence of democracy in triad imperialist countries such as the US, Japan, and Western Europe.
The US, the “guarding of world peace and democracy” has almost a century, been inventing and arming the right-wing, fascist, and Islamic jihadist to fight against the secular, people and proletarian state of East and South. From backing Suharto’s fascist war to crush the PKI in Indonesia since 1965, and FRETILIN in East Timor in 1975, from financing extremist Jihadists against the Soviet Union during the 1980s that gave birth to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, to the recent ISIS war against the Syrian regime, and so on. This has been continued in Ukraine against Russia, by utilizing the right-wing neoliberal regime and militia Nazism in Ukraine to play the US-NATO grand-strategy and oppressing the people.
Since the World War II, US military and intelligence operations have been directed to restore former Nazi elements and sustained a permanent Nazification of a reactionary mass since the first decade of the twentieth century for its fight of destabilization against Russia. The Nazi and right-wing forces armed by US-NATO are also oppressing the forces of socialism in Ukraine. They not only oppress the political left but also brutally sustained ethnically-based violence against Russian speaking people and people who resist Western neoliberalism in Ukraine. This reflects the total mechanism of the US war machine aimed at crushing the progressive mass popular movement and regimes in the world by using the most reactionary, conservative, and fascistic element in the society. So, the war in Ukraine forced us to choose between the anti-imperialist/anti-fascist camp, or to side with imperialist-fascist alliance co-opted with liberal lofty humanism and pseudo-critics of the most puritan western Leftist. I would like to quote my comrade Humberto Rodrigues in our email chat that, “Soon, everything will become more explicit and each one will adopt a side”
During the years, the dominant line and approach of US imperialism in Latin America and Asia is through economic aggression and domination, while the predominant form in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia is by militarism, either by military invasion, occupation, intervention, proxies, war, coup, covert intelligence operations, and nuclear deterrence etc. But to engage in both Russia and China, US approaches characterized as the mobilization of its total instruments and integral aspects of economic-military imperialism in its art of war. It is the ‘proxies war’ that serving the strategic economic interest of empire-building: that is by continuing destabilization and encroachment of anti-empire state of the East and South such as Russia and China; of reinforcing the accumulation of capital at world scale while sustaining austerity, privatisation of common resources and underdevelopment across the Global South and internal colonisation in the centre; of protecting international capitalist property and business interest; preserving the US monetary imperialist order and reconstitution of its global hegemonic power: in short, preserving US’s unipolar world and illegitimate rule-based order marked with a generalized exploitation and permanent oppression of the peoples of the world, and not to count, despoliation of planetary ecology. It is also vice versa with the economic sanctions, of continuing war of economy against Russia and its Rouble, to China’s Yuan, and to subjugated Euro in order to preserve the geopolitical advantages, militarisation of the world and global apartheid under US military supremacy, so that the Pentagon will draw the world map “after its own image”, as Karl Marx has pointed out in the Communist Manifesto.
To end, I would like to quote Michael Hudson here. As he said, “without such understanding (of 1932-1933 and 1972-1973 where the later, US using IMF, World Bank and its international economic, military and MNCs diplomacy to create a dollar standard, and turned allies to paid for US war, become a foundation of US imperialism modus operandi), no post-dollar can be created”. Since 1932, 1972, and now in 2022, shows a continued march of US empire-building based on dollar hegemony, and Western imperialists have globalized its war of oppression, plunder and pillaging the third world more penetrative. We are living in the very dangerous time, and we have entered the most reactionary time, a new cold war politics of war against all is reflected in the imperialist triad war of economy-ideology-military against China and Russia, a war between the forces of barbarity against socialism, between the most predatory, ‘vampire-like’ of neoliberal “financial capitalism” versus “industrial market socialism” led by China.
The Ukraine crisis is not about Russia’s war against Ukraine. It’s a war of two systems, a war (economic war) that will not come to end in the next year or years to come. It is a war that will shape a new global economic system. World economic systems are facing ‘tectonic shifts’ and the transition has just started. Hence, in 1975, Nicolau Lobato, a leader of nationalist revolutionary movement of FRETILIN in Timor-Leste said “a great leap forward to our liberation is irreversible”. Hence, there is a fundamental shift in the world economic system, the horizon of world socialism is much closer to us now, decades ahead than ever.
My dear comrades, see you either in hell or communism!
Tendencia Militante Bolchevique/LCFI (Argentina): German Ezequiel
We are from the Bolshevik Militant Tendency of Argentina, the Argentine section of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International.
We have been in the Workers’ Party and the Bolshevik Party for the Fourth International of Argentina.
We are formed in the principle of the defencism of the workers’ states, such as Cuba and North Korea and of all the countries oppressed by imperialism, especially those considered cursed by imperialism such as Venezuela, Iran and Yemen.
The Bolshevik Militant Tendency as such was formed in 2011 on the basis of opposition to the interventions of imperialism as in Libya and Syria and imperialist coups as in Honduras, Paraguay, Guatemala, Ukraine, Brazil and Bolivia.
Today, the offensive of the imperialist blocs constituted by the Anglo-Saxon, European and Japanese blocs, against the bloc of oppressed countries, nucleated around China and Russia, forces the latter to promote, objectively, an anti-imperialist united front, beyond the bourgeois character of the governments of these countries. Only internationalist communists can turn this defensive resistance into revolutionary defencism. Today we need to defend the Eurasian bloc against NATO and AUKUS and defend the proletarian and socialist revolution within that bloc. On the right wing of the world Anti-Imperialist United Front (AIUF) that is being formed are the governments of Russia and China themselves. On the left wing of this AIUF are the people’s republics of Donbass.
Today in the war against Nazism and imperialism we are facing the historic opportunity for a new regroupment of the international vanguard.
The transition stage from concurrent to monopolistic capital in the period that includes the Austro-Prussian War, and the Franco-Prussian War gave the context in which the First International was formed and the Paris Commune became the first workers’ government in history.
The First World War created in the context from Zimmerwald, to the first victorious socialist revolution and gave way to the formation of the Third International, the Communist International.
The trends leading to the Second World War gave rise to the Fourth International.
The victory over Nazism, which we commemorate today, and the victory over imperialism in the post-war decolonization processes in which the anti-imperialist united fronts did not degenerate into popular fronts in several countries gave rise to a belt of workers’ states such as China, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam, East Europe including Albania, which together gathered 1/3 of the world population. In that context that Stalinism even formally liquidated the Third International, and the Fourth International was also liquidated between opportunism and sectarianism.
Well, today, the tendencies that push the third world war generate conditions and contradictions that favour an international regroupment by the currents that do not give in to imperialism, just as in Zimmerwald they did not give in to social-chauvinism.
Today, faced with the proxy war of imperialism through the Nazi government in Kiev against Russia, conditions are being created for an international regroupment.
In this sense, not giving in today to the imperialist offensive is comparable to not giving in to the social democratic degeneration that became social-chauvinist before the First World War.
In the struggle against imperialism we are for the unconditional defence of all countries attacked by the economic, military, political or diplomatic war of the system of big international finance capital.
We believe that these are the guiding principles at the international level on which the future international regroupment will be constituted, of which this meeting will be a historical antecedent.
Today we commemorate the day of victory against Nazism just as today we speak out against the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev in its proxy war of imperialism against Russia, the industrial working class, and the Russian-speaking part as well as the national minorities in Ukraine itself. We are aware that the resistance of the bourgeois leaderships of the Eurasian bloc to imperialism and Nazi-fascism, is not enough. It is not enough because of the very bourgeois class content they have.
It is in this context that we advance in an international regroupment that unites the defencism of the workers’ states, with the struggle against Nazi-fascism and the struggle against imperialism, having as its guide the permanent revolution against capitalism.
Mike Gimbel (USA)
The entire world’s future is being determined in the Ukraine!
I thank the organizers of this forum for inviting me to speak at this critical moment in history.
All communists, around the world must rally behind the struggle against US/NATO sponsored fascism! A little history is needed to understand the war in the Ukraine
There is a bourgeois myth, promoted by much of the communist movement, that US and UK imperialism were not only allies of the Soviet Union in World War II, but in fact were the good imperialists vs. the bad imperialists of Germany, Japan, and Italy.
That these ‘good imperialists’ only became bad imperialist after WWII.
Did US imperialism only become bad imperialists when they dropped the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and initiated the Cold War? Of course not!
In creating the structure of Nazi Germany, Hitler used the model of US imperialism’s massacre of the tens of millions of its native peoples and used the US segregation laws as a model for the fascist Nuremburg laws.
Yet millions of would-be communists continue to be fed the nonsense of the good imperialists in WWII, and this nonsense is being promoted by our fellow communist organizations!
This is the greatest ideological service possible of aid to the corporate propaganda of the imperialists and shamefully done by our own communists!
It is necessary for our communist movement to understand why WWII happened and how US imperialism was the world’s greatest imperialist power before WWII and how it used its economic power to strangle the UK and France and all of Europe and Japan, which, in turn, crashed the capitalist world market and drove the world into that bloody world war!
The hundred million dead in WWII must be laid at the doorstep of US Imperialism!
The oppressed cannot understand today without understanding how we got to here.
The Cold War, after WWII, was a worldwide class war which did not end with the tragic overthrow of the Soviet Union. Every worker and every oppressed nation suffered a huge defeat when the Soviet Union was overthrown.
The capitalist rulers, led by US imperialism, saw the overthrow of the Soviet Union as a way to take back all the concessions won by the workers and the oppressed, while the USSR existed.
The worldwide class war, which was called the Cold War intensified dramatically, after the USSR was overthrown, as US led imperialism went on a bloody rampage, destroying small nations, one after another, but came up to a brick wall, when trying to overthrow China, Russia, and Iran.
US-led imperialism had utilized economic sanctions as its preferred weapon against all the oppressed nations, but the sanctions has not worked in regard to breaking the resistance of China, Russia and Iran.
The opposite has happened:
China, Russia, and Iran have been driven closer together, for their own self-protection and this alliance of resistance is inspiring the oppressed all around the world.
The unity of China, Russia and Iran is causing panic in capitalist ruling circles!
US-led imperialist control of the world capitalist market, ever since the end of WWII, has depended on worldwide acceptance of the US dollar as equivalent to gold.
China’s industrial base, however, is already far larger than the US industrial base and China’s Belt and Road initiative is beginning to dislodge the grip of US imperialist power all over the world.
China, together with Russia and Iran, has become the primary threat to the dominance of US-led imperialism.
If US imperialism cannot break the China, Russia, Iran alliance, it will face a run on the dollar, which is only backed by faith and threats and the US military, not gold.
US-led imperialism sees the writing on the wall. Its very existence is threatened.
The war in the Ukraine has suddenly turned the Cold War into a Hot War as Russia said: “Enough is enough” “You backed us into a corner and we’ll fight you and defeat you!”
There can be no misunderstanding:
The fates of the oppressed nations, under the thumb of US imperialism, is closely tied to the result of the war in the Ukraine.
A victory for US imperialism would be a disaster for the oppressed all over the world, while a victory for the Donbass and Russia will open wide the possibility for every oppressed nation to free itself and for workers around the world to rise up against capitalist attempts to impose austerity.
Unfortunately, as in the past, many comrades and communist organizations have helped US-led imperialism to confuse the masses with decades of nonsense attacking China and Russia as imperialists.
We see the result TODAY, of the fake communist ideological attacks on China and Russia, which only helps the corporate media spreads lies about the war in the Ukraine, and gullible leftists, having been propagandized against Russia and China, by our own comrades, quickly accept the corporate media lies.
This shameful ideological support for US-led imperialism must be fought!
The result of the Ukraine war is that a line has been drawn between real communists, who support the Russian anti-NATO and anti-fascist intervention in the Ukraine, between those, on the left, who are continuing to serve the propaganda needs of US-led imperialism by opposing the Russian intervention.
Our movement, TODAY, faces the same internal contradiction, as occurred during the outbreak of WWI, with the collapse of the 2nd international.
Our movement has clearly diverted onto separate roads: a Marxist road and a bourgeois road.
My question to all the viewers:
The overthrow of the Soviet Union was the greatest defeat of our class in human history.
Can we create the basis for a new Zimmerwald type conference, that can become the basis of a revival of the world communist movement?
Is that not our duty as communists to try to create a new communist international?
I think it is possible to begin the process of doing this. Don’t you?
Where there is a will, there is a way!
Onwards to a new communist international!
