LIFT WESTERN SANCTIONS ON RUSSIA!

DOWN WITH NATO/AUSTRALIAN MEDDLING IN UKRAINE!

ABBOTT & SHORTEN USE UKRAINE PLANE TRAGEDY TO PROMOTE SUPPORT FOR AUSSIE IMPERIALISM

DEFEND THE JUST STRUGGLE OF THE PEOPLE OF THE DONBASS

FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY UNITY OF THE UKRAINIAN AND RUSSIAN WORKING CLASS!

September 22, 2014 – On July 16 2014, an Israeli military attack killed four boys between the ages of 9 and 11 as they played soccer on a Gaza beach. This was a horrific crime all too typical of the Israeli military. In its July and August assault on Gaza, they killed 2,133 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians and nearly 500 of whom were children. Yet Israel’s genocidal assault has been supported by the Australian government. Prime Minister Abbott and Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, have refused to even condemn the killing of Palestinian children. Indeed, the day after the murder of the Palestinian children playing on the beach, Bishop issued a press release blaming Hamas for the war and outrageously praising Israel for its supposed determination to accept a ceasefire. So when the powerful and sophisticated Israeli military carries out incessant attacks on Gaza that they know are mostly killing Palestinian civilians, the Australian regime and much of the mainstream media excuse this as self-defence.

Yet when on the very same day as that Bishop press release, Malaysian Airline flight MH17 was  tragically shot  down over eastern  Ukraine, the  Australian government, without any credible evidence whatsoever, unleashed aggressive language that blamed Russian-speaking rebels in eastern Ukraine and their Russian backers for deliberately downing the civilian aircraft. Abbott rushed to declare, “These were innocent people going about their lives and they have been wantonly killed by Russian-backed rebels using probably, quite possibly equipment supplied by [Russia].” Later he followed this up with further shrill denunciations. Abbott screamed that Russia was a “bully” and ranted that Ukraine has been “subject to active destabilisation and indeed outright invasion from Russia.” Now, the Liberal-National Party regime has implemented further sanctions on Russia and has announced that it is considering supplying the hard right Ukrainian regime with “non-lethal” military assistance.

The shooting down of MH17 was, indeed, a horrible human-made tragedy that took the lives of 298 innocent passengers and crew. Among the dead were 193 Dutch people, 43 Malaysians (including popular actress Shuba Jay) and 37 Australian residents (some of whom were citizens of overseas countries.) Six of those tragically killed in the crash were delegates on their way to the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne. Yet not only is it not clear who shot down the aircraft, current indications of who was responsible actually point away from the Donbass-based rebels. Now, it is of course possible that the rebel forces representing Russian-speaking people seeking self-rule for the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine could have shot down the aircraft by mistake, thinking it was a Ukrainian military plane. Let us assume for a moment that the wild and completely unsubstantiated accusations of the Western rulers turn out to be correct and a rebel missile did, indeed, bring down the Malaysian airliner. Then there is certainly negligence involved in not properly checking to ensure that the targeted aircraft was not a civilian airliner. However, far, far greater criminal negligence would then fall  on the part of the  aviation authorities and  the greedy capitalist airline bosses who, to save fuel costs, continued to authorise flights over a dangerous war zone where military aircraft have already been shot down by surface to air missiles. If the Donbass resistance were, in fact, the ones who brought down the plane, it is absolutely certain that the shooting of the plane would have been a case of mistaken identity as they could have gained no military advantage from downing a Malaysian civilian airliner and would have, indeed, suffered a massive propaganda blow from it. Although they would still be guilty of negligence, there is a massive, absolutely enormous difference between this and the deliberate terrorist shooting down of a civilian airliner which Obama, Abbott and other Western rulers have deceitfully implied was  the case. Later, we shall address the question of who, ultimately, has the most responsibility for the airline tragedy even if it was after all the Donbass rebels that fired the shots.

Yet, it is far, far from certain or even probable that the Donbass rebels did bring down the airliner. For one, there has been no tangible evidence that Russia or anyone else supplied the Donetsk rebels with the BUK-M1 surface to air missile that Western and Ukrainian rulers say brought down the Malaysian plane. Previously, the rebels had never even used such a missile. The Ukrainian military planes that they had earlier destroyed were all shot down at much lower altitude with another less advanced missile system. That system is incapable of shooting down an aircraft flying at 33,000 feet which is the altitude that the Malaysian airliner was flying at. Indeed, a group of retired U.S. intelligence officers from the CIA, FBI, U.S. Army and other agencies are so concerned that the unsubstantiated claims by the U.S. government are harming U.S. interests that they released an open memorandum to Obama stating that:

Twelve days after the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, your administration still has issued no coordinated intelligence assessment summarizing what evidence exists to determine who was responsible – much less to convincingly support repeated claims that the plane was downed by a Russian-supplied missile in the hands of Ukrainian separatists.
– http://consortiumnews.com/2014/07/29/obama-should-release-ukraine-evidence/

This open memorandum is all the more telling given that these retired U.S. intelligenceofficers are hardly opponents of U.S. imperialism – indeed, the memorandum takes as a positive example right wing former president Ronald Reagan’s release of  intelligence  information to “justify” the U.S. bombing of Libya in 1986!

So, if the Donestsk rebels did not bring down the Malaysian airliner who else could have shot it down? The Russian Defence Ministry maintained that its air traffic control had picked up at least one Ukrainian Air Force Sukhoi SU-25 fighter just 3 to 5 km from the Malaysian airliner before the incident. This information release was,  no  doubt,  aimed at suggesting that it was a Ukrainian fighter jet that brought down the passenger plane. Certainly given the current tensions between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian government has an interest in pointing the finger at Kiev. Yet, what has given this hypothesis a serious life is when none other than the flagship, mainstream newspaper of Malaysia, New Straits Times, published several articles suggesting that MH17 was brought down by a missile fired from a Ukrainian aircraft and then finished off with aircraft gunfire. Thus, a New Straits Times article carried on its website on August 7, headlined “US analysts conclude MH17 downed by aircraft,” commenced as follows:

INTELLIGENCE analysts in the United States had already concluded that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by an air-to-air missile, and that the Ukrainian government had had something to do with it.

This corroborates an emerging theory postulated by local investigators that the Boeing 777-200 was crippled by an air-to-air missile and finished off with cannon fire from a fighter that had been shadowing it as it plummeted to earth.

In  a  damning  report  dated  Aug  3,  headlined `Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts’, Associated  Press  reporter  Robert  Parry  said `some US intelligence sources had concluded that the rebels and Russia were likely not at fault and that it appears Ukrainian government forces were to blame’.
– http://www.nst.com.my/node/20925

The New Straits Times article continued:

Yesterday, the New Straits Times quoted experts who had said that photographs of the blast fragmentation patterns on the fuselage of  the  airliner  showed  two  distinct  shapes – the shredding pattern associated with a warhead packed with “flechettes”, and the more uniform, round-type penetration holes consistent with that of cannon rounds.

The above evidence is significant because cannon rounds could not have reached the aircraft from the ground – they had to  be fired from another aircraft. New Straits Times also quoted Michael Bociurkiw, a Ukrainian- Canadian monitor with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) who,  along  with  another  colleague,  was the first international monitor to reach the wreckage after flight MH17 was brought down. In a July 29 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview, Bociurkiw, had stated that:

There have been two or three pieces of fuselage that have been really pockmarked with what almost  looks  like  machinegun  fire;  very,  very strong machinegun fire.

To put the New Straits Times reports into perspective one has to understand what this newspaper represents. New Straits Times  is not only the  main  establishment  newspaper of Malaysia, it is also closely linked to the Malaysian government –  a  government which while not quite as fully subservient to Washington as its neighbours is nevertheless far closer to the U.S. rulers than it is to Russia. This newspaper has no political interest in contradicting  the  Western  narrative  about the plane tragedy. Soon after the New Straits Times reports, Malasyia’s defence minister, Hishammuddin Hussein came out and denied that MH17 was shot down by fighter  jets. Yet, since then New Straits Times has run at least one article supporting the alternative narrative (see, for example: http://www.nst. com.my/node/22405). However, all these New Straits Times accounts and the evidence they are based on have been completely ignored by the Western mainstream media. Furthermore, the U.S., British and Australian rulers  who had been so aggressively denouncing Russia and the Donetsk rebels over MH17 have now become fairly quiet about the whole incident adding to suspicions that they are aware that another party were the real perpetrators.

If it was the Ukrainian military that  did, indeed, shoot down MH17 what possible motive could they have? One suggestion is based on the fact that the livery of Malaysian Airlines sported by MH17 is rather close to the Russian tri-colour. They could have mistakenly thought it was a Russian transport aircraft. Another hypothesis is based on reports that at the  time of the shooting, Vladimir  Putin’s aircraft, whose Russian tri-colour based livery is  similar  to  that  of  the  Malaysian  airliner – was in the air not all that far from MH17. Could the shooting down of MH17 have been a botched attempt by the Ukrainian Air Force to assassinate Putin? Then there is a still more sinister possible motive: that the right wing Ukrainian regime  shot  down  the  plane in order to blame the rebels. Could this be possible? Certainly the Ukrainian regime has a motive for doing this. The blame that the rebel forces received for the shooting down of the civilian aircraft was a great propaganda coup for the Ukrainian government. If the Ukrainian military did shoot down MH17 in such a false flag attack then in that case the downing of the civilian airliner would have not been a terrible accident caused by negligence from various parties but deliberate mass murder. It would seem unthinkable for any humansto undertake such a heinous crime. Yet, other U.S.-backed forces involved in conflicts have committed precisely these kinds of attacks  –  especially the imperialist-backed Syrian “rebels.” For example, in May 2012, 108 civilians including 49 children were horrifically massacred  in the town of Taldou in Syria’s Houla  Plains. The Syrian “rebels” displayed the bodies  to UN inspectors and to their supporters in the Western media as evidence of the Syrian pro- government  forces  supposed  responsibility for the massacre. Yet a German mainstream newspaper soon uncovered that it was the Western-backed “rebels” who had in fact committed the massacre and had displayed the bodies in order to blame the Syrian government.

Even less morally averse to downing a civilian aircraft than the Ukrainian Army  are  the fascist militias that have, as volunteers, joined the Ukrainian military’s fight against the rebels. These murderous fascists hark back to the tradition of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of Stepan Bandera, which allied with the Nazis invaders against the Soviet Union during World War II. The Bandera forces murdered over 100,000 Poles,  Jews  and  Communists in a series of gruesome massacres. Today’s Ukrainian fascist irregulars not only have a fanatical hatred of Russian speakers but are extreme white supremacists who would have little qualm in targeting a civilian aircraft from an Asian airline.

Then there is, of course, the possibility that the U.S. directly shot down the aircraft. Certainly, the U.S. and allied imperialists have been the greatest beneficiaries from the political fallout from the shooting down of MH17. It has put Washington’s Russian capitalist rival on the diplomatic back foot. The U.S. imperialists have long treated the peoples of the “Third World” as expendable pawns. Thus, while claims that the U.S. government  was  behind the September 11, 2001 bombings must, surely, be far-fetched given that the target was a key symbol of U.S. capitalist, financial and commercial power, the targeting of an Asian airliner is well within the range of past CIA actions. These cold-hearted enforcers of U.S. capitalist interests would rationalise this as “unfortunate collateral damage” incurred for the sake of the greater good – that is, the good of U.S. imperialism!

The U.S. rulers certainly know all about shooting down civilian airliners. On 3rd July 1988, the U.S. Navy guided missile  cruiser USS Vincennes downed Iran Air flight 655 which was on  a  regular  flight  from  Tehran to Dubai. All 274 passengers and 16 crew aboard Iranian Airbus A300 were  killed  by the U.S. missile strike. The Iranian passenger airliner was on its normal flight path within Iranian airspace and above Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf when it was shot down. The U.S. never apologised or accepted any responsibility for the killing of the people aboard Iran Air flight 655 and  claimed  that the crew of the warship had  misidentified the plane as an F14-A Tomcat fighter aircraft. Except that the passenger  airliner was in regular  English  language  radio  contact  with air traffic controllers. Moreover, not only was the airliner well within a recognised civilian air corridor, it was a full 20km away from the U.S. warship when the latter fired the two missiles that killed all 290 people aboard the aircraft.

The mainstream Western media don’t want to talk too much about this horrific incident today when attacking the Donetsk rebels and Russia over the MH17 tragedy. Yet there are also some important differences between the U.S. shooting down the Iranian  airliner  and the accusation that Donbass rebels brought down MH17. If the, increasing doubtful, claim that the Eastern Ukraine based rebels downed MH17 were true then the accidental strike would have been conducted by a desperate force fighting a war and shooting down an aircraft above its own territory.  In  contrast, the U.S. was not at war when the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air flight 655 and, further, that attack was unleashed thousands of miles  away  from the  U.S.A  in  the Persian Gulf. This makes U.S. claims that their warship misidentified the airliner highly dubious. Also, while NATO and the Australian  government are accusing a ragtag rebel army lacking advanced surveillance systems of shooting down MH17, Iranian Air flight 655 was downed by the most powerful military force in the world – a force with more than adequate sophistication to  clearly distinguish between an attacking military aircraft and a civilian airliner. The U.S. warship’s own Aegis Combat System picked up the Iranian airliner’s radio transmitter’s emission of the normal Mode III code clearly identifying it as a civilian airliner on its normal course. Furthermore, it turned out that the warship’s advanced surveillance system had also recorded that the aircraft was in a steady climb, not the descending profile of an attack run. Most Iranians, not to mention most rational observers in general, believe that the U.S. warship deliberately shot down the civilian airliner. This was either because the U.S. wanted to teach disobedient Iran a lesson or because a trigger happy crew wanted to try out their new advanced combat system.

Russians are, themselves, familiar with this kind of horrific tragedy. On 4 October 2001 Siberian Airlines Flight 1812 heading to the Russian city of Novosibirsk from Tel Aviv, Israel was shot down and crashed into the Black Sea, killing all 78 passengers onboard. At first denying any involvement, Ukraine ended up paying $15 million in compensation to victims’ families as  evidence  clearly pointed to the Ukrainian military accidentally shooting down the plane during a training exercise. The fact that Ukraine, thus, carries such recent form in this area has, predictably, garnered scant attention in the Western press in the wake of the MH17 disaster.

CANBERRA’S MEDDLING IN UKRAINE: GOOD FOR AUSTRALIA’S CAPITALIST EXPLOITERS,

BAD FOR THE WORKING CLASS & OPPRESSED

So what can we say in summary about who shot down MH17? Unlike the tycoon or capitalist government-owned Western media, we Marxists base ourselves on reality and have noreason to distort the truth. Nor do we have aneed to present scenarios that are only possibilities or even probabilities as dead certainties. Taking this approach, in summary, as we go to press, we can say that it is not certain who brought down Malaysian airline flight MH17. However, we can say that the analysis of actual hard evidence thus far points more towards the Ukrainian military as the perpetrators rather than the Eastern Ukraine rebels. And what we can say with absolute certainty is that in the (increasingly less likely) case that the Donbass rebels did bring down the airliner, this was an accidental shooting. Yet not only have the Liberal government, the ALP opposition and the mainstream media all rushed to pronounce both the Donbass rebels and their Russian backers as guilty, they have deviously equated the possible accidental shooting by these forces with a deliberate terrorist attack on a passenger-filled civilian airliner. In stark contrast, at the very same time that it was making these lurid allegations against the Donbass rebels, the Australian ruling class apologised for Israel’s deliberate devastation of Gaza which the Australian regime knew amounted to the deliberate mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians. So why these diametrically opposite responses from the Australian ruling class?

In the case of the war on Gaza, the U.S. and Australian rulers support Israel’s brutal assault because Israel has long been a key henchman for Western imperialism in the Middle East region. In contrast, the Donbass rebels and Russia are not the lapdogs of NATO and are, thus, targets for the Western imperialists’ propaganda attacks and economic sanctions. The capitalist  powers in the West want a loyal partner in power in Kiev because they want prized access to markets and investment opportunities in the Ukraine. However, that is not their only purpose. They meddle in Ukraine in order to ensure that there is a regime there that will act as a counterweight to – and a container of – Russia. With this aim, the U.S. and its allies have drawn not only Ukraine but Georgia into an “Intensified Dialogue” with NATO in what they hope will be a step towards integrating these countries into NATO membership itself. Three other former Soviet republics were brought into NATO membership in 2004: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. These moves are not only aimed in big part against Russia but also against the Western imperialists’ ultimate target – socialistic China.

The U.S.-led Western powers largely rule the world – brutally exploiting the masses of the so-called “Third World” and toppling disobedient governments seemingly at will. They tolerate no opposition to their tyranny. The U.S. rulers and their counterparts in the likes of Britain and Australia killed hundreds of thousands of people when they invaded and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. They have fuelled a bloody proxy war in Syria against the uncompliant Assad government. Today, these Western colonial predators are using the crimes of the ISIS monster that they had until recently fed and nurtured as a force against the Syrian government, as an excuse to again directly intervene to impose their will on Iraq and to more openly fight for regime change in Syria. Earlier in 2011, they devastated Libya with  air  strikes  in  order to remove the all too independent Gaddafi government in Libya. In short, the U.S., British and Australian imperialist ruling classes are used to getting their way and will do anything to ensure that they do. So the last thing that these imperial overlords will accept is a new, emerging capitalist rival with the potential to tread on their turf (which the Western imperialists now consider to be almost the entire  world!)  However,   capitalist   Russia is just  such  an  emerging  power.  Although it has been greatly weakened by capitalist restoration in 1991-92, Russia still retains some portion of the former USSR’s industrial and technological might and is today easily the  second  strongest  military  power  in the world. The Western imperialists, who have largely divided the world between themselves, approach Russia in the same way that criminal gangs unite to curb and bully an upstart new kid on the block rival who could impinge on their operations.

So what is the reason for the Australian rulers getting involved in all of this? After all, Russia and Ukraine are far away from Canberra’s sphere of influence and Russia has no designs on Australia’s neocolonies in the South Pacific. The reason is that Australian imperialism’s tyranny in this region depends on having the backing of the U.S. superpower. It is under the protection of U.S. might that Australian corporate giants like BHP and Woodside steal the oil of East Timor, that Australian mining tycoons plunder the natural resources of PNG, that the Australian military and cops often jackboot around the South Pacific

and that Australian judges and high-level bureaucrats get muscled into the upper echelons of the state institutions of PNG and the Solomon Islands. Thus, the Australian ruling class want to do everything possible to uphold  U.S./NATO  domination of the world – and right now that includes turning the screws on the U.S’s emerging Russian competitor.

Australia’s capitalist rulers are not just puppets of the U.S. but  are, rather, willing junior partners in the same way that medium-sized criminal bosses always want the particular mafia godfather that they are allied with to be the number one mobster. Yet, while it is rational for the likes of Andrew Forrest, Clive Palmer, Gina Rinehart, the Lowy family, James Packer and the greedy major owners of BHP, Rio Tinto and Woodside to back Canberra’s support for Washington’s great power machinations, it is completely against the interests of the Australian working class to do so. The more that the Western imperialist gang that the Australian ruling class is allied with is successful in its quest to strengthen its world domination, the more arrogant will the Australian capitalist rulers become at home. That means more aggressive attacks on our unions, more severe cutbacks to entitlements for the very poor, more anti-working class privatisations of infrastructure and public housing and further measures to exclude working class people from access to decent healthcare and education. It means more extreme all- sided racist oppression of Aboriginal people and still more brutal government attacks on refugees. That is why it is in the interests of the working class and all of the downtrodden to see the predatory international schemes of their ruling class oppressors suffer setbacks – setbacks in Ukraine/Russia and setbacks everywhere else. The Australian workers movement  and  left   must   demand: Down  with  NATO/Australian  meddling in Ukraine! No to the plan to station Australian Federal Police officers in Kiev – Down with the Abbott government’s threat to send military aid to the right wing Ukrainian regime! Lift all U.S., EU and Australian sanctions on Russia! U.S./ Australian imperialism: Hands off Iraq and Syria! Defend Syria against NATO and their “Free Syrian Army” and religious fundamentalist “rebel” proxies!

UKRAINE’S RIGHT WING COUP: PLOTTED BY WASHINGTON, SPEARHEADED BY FASCIST THUGS

Until earlier this year, Ukraine actually had a government that maintained fairly friendly relations with its Russian neighbour. That government was headed by then president  Viktor  Yanukovych who, following his election victory in the 2010 presidential polls, sought to balance relations with Russia and the West. However, when Yanukovych announced in November 2013 that he was putting off close integration with the EU in favour of stronger ties with Russia (highlighted by  his  acceptance  of a huge loan offer from Russia), pro-Western anti-government protests erupted. The  protests  were  able to ride on anger at the high unemployment and high poverty rates – especially in Western Ukraine – overseen by the corrupt, capitalist government. Yet from the start, the “solutions” offered by the groups leading the protests were right wing and dominated by aggressive Ukrainian nationalism.

Behind the  then  opposition  movement stood Washington which, seeing  a  chance to undermine Russian influence in Ukraine, backed the movement with both massive funding for opposition “NGOs” as well as with tactical direction. The U.S. government’s intervention was so blatant that U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, and Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, openly joined the then opposition protests – even handing out cakes to the right wing protesters. The extent of this U.S. intervention is also readily apparent in a recording of an intercept of a phone conversation between Nuland and Pyatt (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbOwfeoDX2o). The conversation begins with the ambassador saying, “I think we’re in play” (i.e. their efforts to affect regime change and determine the next government of Ukraine are in play!) Nuland and Pyatt express satisfaction that American diplomat and UN Under-Secretary- General for Political Affairs, Jeff Feltman, had succeeded in  getting  the  UN  to  agree to send Dutch UN  diplomat  Robert  Serry to Ukraine to promote  the  regime  change or, as Nuland puts it, “help glue this thing together.” Later, Pyatt speaks of the need to  get an international personality to come to Ukraine “to help midwife this thing.” Yet U.S. imperialism’s officials were not only speaking of how to affect the regime change but, in fact, who should be in the new government! Thus, they decided that “Yats” (i.e. conservative politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk) is “the guy” and Nuland insisted that “Klitsch” (i.e. rival conservative politician Vitali Klitschko) should not be in the government. And guess what happened in the end: “Yats” became the new prime minister and “Klitsch” decided not to be part of the new government!

This was not the first time that the Western powers had orchestrated events in post- Soviet Ukraine. In 2004, after Yanukovych won presidential elections, opposition groups massively financed and trained in “non-violent resistance” by U.S. government agencies – like the notorious National Endowment for Democracy – instigated mass protests against the election results. The movement, dubbed the Orange Revolution, resulted in Yanukovych’s victory being annulled by the courts and a re-run being conducted which resulted in strongly pro- Western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, winning office.

If the U.S. rulers  were the generals of the opposition forces, the shock troops were the local fascist squads. They came mainly from two groups: the Svoboda party and the Pravy Sector (Right Sector). The Svoboda party was formed as the Social National Party  of  Ukraine  in  order  to  identify  with the “National Socialist” ideology of Hitler’s Nazis. The party spews hatred against immigrants, Jewish people and Russians, espouses extreme hostility to  women’s right to abortion, calls for legal discrimination in economic and social matters against non-ethnic Ukrainians and glorifies the Nazi 4th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) that was made up of Ukrainians who volunteered to fight on Hitler’s side against the Soviet Red Army. Pravy Sektor, for its part, is composed of various street thug groups notorious for attacks on international students and immigrants. The prominence of Svoboda and Pravy Sektor in the opposition protests grew with time and became decisive as the movement  turned  violent  in  January.  The fascists then unleashed a series of brutal attacks on opponents of the movement – including government supporters, journalists, state security forces and the offices of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. The U.S. “democratic” imperialists were fully aware of and accepting of this fascist factor. Ambassador Wyatt said of the Svoboda neo-Nazis: “They have demonstrated their democratic bona fides.” Meanwhile, when prominent U.S. Senator John  McCain  came to Kiev’s Maidan square to salute the then opposition movement, he made a point about greeting and standing shoulder to shoulder with the leader of the fascist Svoboda party Oleh Tyahnybok. And in that intercepted call between Nuland and Wyatt, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State declared that, “I thinks Yats is the guy whose got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the guy… You know, what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside, he needs to be talking to them for four times a week.” pro-Western, conservative government that regularly consults with and takes advice from fascists was on Washington’s order of the day!

Up until a late stage of the anti-government protests, the U.S. was actually quite happy to see an arrangement where Yanukovych would retain the presidency while other key government positions would be  filled by their men so that the West’s agenda could gradually take over. The EU had also negotiated a compromise deal between Yanukovych and the then opposition. However, the fascists and other hardline sections of the movement refused to accept any compromise and stepped up their violence and their occupation of government buildings. Under the impact of this offensive led by fascist paramilitaries and under pressure from Washington, large chunks of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions abandoned support for him and many defected to the opposition. On February 21, the Ukrainian parliament ousted Yanukovych. Although large numbers of  people  had  participated in the opposition movement, in effect what had happened was that the elected president was overthrown by a right wing movement overseen by Washington and  spearheaded by fascists. Oleg Turchynov from the conservative Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party became Acting President and, yes, “the man” Yats was appointed Prime Minister.

The days leading up to and immediately following February 21 saw a series of frightening fascist attacks on civilians including violence against Jewish people, the desecration of Soviet war memorials, the tearing down of some 25 Lenin statues, the ransacking of the Communist Party of Ukraine’s (KPU) office in Kiev by masked fascists carrying batons and violent attacks on members of the KPU. As a result of the leading role played byfascists in the right wing coup, fascists were appointed to key posts in the new government.  Of  the  20  ministries in the cabinet, four were initially taken up by Svoboda members. Only the mainstream conservative Fatherland party had more ministries. The fascist Svoboda figures in the new government included the number three figure in the new regime, Vice Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych as well as Defence Minister, Ihor Tenyukh. Additionally, Svoboda fascist Oleh Makhnitsky was appointed Attorney General. Pravy Sektor leader Dmitry Yarosh was offered the deputy national security position but declined the offer.

This fascist representation in the Ukrainian government has declined somewhat over time. Svoboda’s Tenyukh  resigned as Defence Minister after less than a month in office a day after the coordinator for Western Ukraine for the neo-Nazi Pravy Sektor was killed in a shootout with Ukrainian police. In June, the Svoboda member acting as Attorney General resigned and this post is now filled by a member of the conservative Fatherland party. Yet the fascist paramilitaries  still make up a large portion of the newly formed Ukrainian National Guard and Svoboda has continued to exert a strong influence on the agenda of the government. On July 24, the Communist Party of Ukraine’s parliamentary faction was  dissolved  by  the  parliament and 308 criminal proceedings against the party were launched as part of attempts to ban any activity by the party. Furthermore, the authorities have carried out arrests and some in case beatings of KPU members. The international workers movement and left must demand an end to all persecution of the KPU and the restoration of its parliamentary faction!

RACIST OPPRESSION AND RESISTANCE IN UKRAINE

The fascist influence was also seen in the move to enshrine legal discrimination against non-ethnic Ukrainians. Thus just two days after Yanukovych was ousted, the post- coup parliament voted to repeal the law on regional languages which had stipulated that although Ukraine was the sole national language, a minority language with the status, “regional language,” could be used in courts, schools and other government institutions in areas of Ukraine where the percentage of representatives of national minorities exceeds 10% of the total population of a defined administrative district. In practice the law on regional languages meant that the large areas of the South and East of Ukraine, including the Crimea, with heavy populations of Russian speakers could also use Russian for education and public affairs as well as three small administrative areas where Hungarian, Moldovan and Romanian could be used. Although acting president Turchynov vetoed the repeal bill, the racist parliamentary vote, the violent fascist attacks on people of non-Ukrainian ethnicity and the

terrifying presence of neo- Nazis in the government all combined to convince many of the Russian-speaking people concentrated in the South and East of Ukraine to revolt against the new regime. Their struggle is a just struggle for liberation from a racist regime and quickly won support from the local populations.

 

In the Crimea peninsula in southern Ukraine whose port city of Sevastopol hosts Russia’s strategic Black Sea Fleet (Russia had been allowed to have control of this base under a 1997 agreement with Ukraine), tens of thousands demonstrated against the new government on the night of the  day  that the parliament voted to repeal the law on regional languages. Within days pro-Russian supporters took over key government buildings as a majority of Ukrainian soldiers in Crimeadefected to the pro-Russian side. On March 16, an overwhelming majority of the population of the Crimean peninsula voted for independence from Ukraine in an act of self-determination. The next day, Crimea’s parliament, which is dominated by hardline Russian nationalists, declared independence and asked to join Russia. This was accepted by Putin and secured by the Russian military. Although the Ukrainian regime and Western powers continue to demand the return of Crimea to Ukraine, this is empty rhetoric. No one seriously thinks they can wrest Crimea from Russia for the foreseeable future.

In the south-eastern part of Ukraine – centred on the districts of Donetsk and Luhansk that are together known as the Donbass region – a Russian speaking resistance movement also started taking over government buildings after the February right wing coup. They proclaimed a Peoples Republic of Donetsk and a Peoples Republic of Luhansk. However, they were opposed by a military onslaught by the Ukrainian military and Ukrainian volunteer battalions. The latter battalions are largely dominated by fascists,  such  as the Azov Battalion led by Andriy Biletsky, the leader of the Neo- Nazi, Social National Assembly. The Social National Assembly calls for “struggle for the liberation of the entire White Race” and seeks to “punish severely sexual perversions and any interracial contacts.” The Azov Battalion uses the Wolfsangel (Wolf’s Hook), a favoured symbol of modern Neo-Nazi groups (as the symbol was used by several military units of Hitler’s Nazis) and has attracted to its ranks white supremacists from Sweden, Spain and Italy.

The war has raged on for several months with one side gaining the upper hand and then the other. So far the death toll has exceeded 3,000 people. As we go to press a shaky ceasefire is largely holding with the resistance holding on to chunks of territory in Donestk and Luhansk. The Ukrainian parliament has also just voted to offer the rebel regions regional autonomy. It is too early to evaluate the extent of this  offer and the response from the Donbass people. The Russian government has welcomed the offer but as yet a comprehensive political settlement has not been implemented.

As the opposing sides were negotiating the ceasefire, the U.S. stepped up its rhetoric against Russia and then it and the EU announced new sanctions on Russia only days after the ceasefire. It seems that the Ukrainian government’s imperialist patrons were trying to scuttle Ukrainian president Poroshenko’s efforts to negotiate a ceasefire with the Donbass rebels. Washington is prepared to fight to the last drop of Ukrainian blood to curb the influence of its Moscow rival.

The Ukrainian pro-government forces’ assault on the Donbass rebellion was brutal and has caused the deaths of over 1,000 civilians. In order to capture towns, the Kiev regime’s forces have shelled civilian areas and bombarded them  with rocket attacks from both ground and air. Especially murderous have been Ukraine’s fascist irregulars. The extent of their barbarity was seen on May 2 in Odessa, a Black Sea port city with a mixed Russian and Ukrainian population. It was there that over a 1,000 fascists, many under the guise of being soccer fans for a local match, held a provocative march through the city denouncing the Southern and Eastern Ukraine-based rebel movements.  Among the marchers were large contingents from the Pravy Sektor and over a hundred thugs wearing masks and armed with sticks and shields. After a clash with anti-government activists elsewhere, the fascists marched upon a tent city of anti-government protesters at Kulikovo Field in the centre of Odessa city. They then completely torched the tent camp and forced the terrified protesters to flee into the adjacent Trade Unions House building. What followed was a horrifying massacre. The fascists threw petrol bombs into the second and third stories of the building setting the whole place on fire. As the anti-Kiev activists were being burnt to death, the fascists outside sung the Ukrainian national anthem! Other chanted “burn Colorado, burn” (The New York Times, 4 May 2014) – “Colorado” being a derogatory term for Russian-speaking rebels as it refers to the Colorado potato beetle, striped red and black like the pro-Russian ribbons. Some of those in the building tried to leap down to escape the inferno. Of these some died from the fall but others survived only to be chased down and brutally beaten. The police were complicit in the slaughter. They simply stood aside and watched the pro-Russian activists get murdered and the fascists block the firefighters from using their equipment. Later, 38 of the activists who survived the inferno were outrageously arrested by police as they left the building. In all at least 42 pro- Russian activists were killed at the Trade Unions House building and at least another three were shot dead in the earlier clash. The response of the Kiev regime was initially to blame the activists and later to try and cover up the massacre while cynically shedding crocodile tears “mourning” the dead.

Every atrocity committed by the Ukrainian military and the fascist volunteers against the Russian-speaking minority has only served to strengthen that minority’s separatist feelings. The struggle of the Russian speaking people in the South and East of Ukraine is a just struggle for self determination and thus can be compared in some ways to the Palestinian struggle, the Kurdish separatist struggle in Turkey and the Tamil struggle for a Tamil “Eelam” homeland in Sri Lanka. However, there are also some significant differences with the latter struggles. Firstly, unlike the Tamil and Palestinian struggles, the revolt of the Russian-speaking people in the South and East of Ukraine is not simply that of one ethnic community. Although ethnic Russians are by far the dominant force in the movement, the section of the Ukrainian population whose main language is Russian extends beyond ethnic Russians. According to the 2000 Ukraine census, over five and a half million ethnic Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language. Thus, in the Donetsk Oblast (District), although 57% of the population identify as ethnic Ukrainian, only 24%  of the population use Ukrainian as their native language. Russian is also the main language of the majority of the small Belarussian, Jewish, Greek and Tartar communities of Ukraine as well as large minorities of the Bulgarian and Armenian communities. Thus, in photographs of rallies by supporters of the Luhansk Peoples Republic one can see flags of Belarus alongside Russian flags and other Russian nationalist flags.

Secondly,  unlike  in  the  West  Bank   and the Gaza strip which is overwhelmingly Palestinian or the north of Sri Lanka which is overwhelmingly Tamil,  the  Southern and Eastern parts of Ukraine (other than Crimea which is now part of  Russia)  are not overwhelmingly ethnic Russian or even Russian speaking. Thus, in the Luhansk Oblast, 58% of the population are ethnic Ukrainians and 30% of  the  population  use  Ukrainian as their native language. In Odessa, 46% of the population use Ukrainian as their native language and in Kharkiv 53%. Therefore, the appropriate demand for the movement of the Russian-speaking people is for self-rule with the most deep going autonomy possible. This is what most of the rebels are demanding themselves and apparently what the majority of the population want, although the most hardcore Russian nationalists within the movement sometimes call for accession to Russia.

Thirdly, although the struggle against ethnic and language repression that became sharply posed after the February 21 right wing coup forms the central part of the emergence of the Donbass movement, there are additional factors involved. Some of these factors are directly tied up with the ethnic/ linguistic issue. Thus, the ethnic Russian and other Russian speakers based in the South and East for cultural and patriotic reasons prefer a government that maintains close ties with Russia than the anti-Russia regime that took power on February 21. The Donbass region was a stronghold for Yanukovych’s  more  Russia-friendly   Party of Regions and its removal from power in a coup was therefore most strongly opposed in this part of the country. More interestingly for socialists is the fact that the industrial and thus more proletarian South and East of Ukraine had a greater percentage of people who were favourable to the former Soviet Union and to communism than in other parts of the Ukraine. Despite the reformist nature of the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU), these sentiments among significant parts of the region’s masses were in part expressed in electoral support for the KPU. In the 2012 parliamentary elections, the KPU won nearly 30% of the vote in the Crimean Peninsula’s main city, Sevastopol, and over 25% of the vote in the Luhansk Oblast. This compares with under 2% of the vote in the western Oblast of Lviv. For those pro-Soviet, subjectively pro-communist individuals in the Southern and Eastern parts of Ukraine who are deeply passionate about the heroic Soviet Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany, hearing of Soviet war memorials being desecrated, communists being attacked and Lenin statues being torn down by neo-Nazis in Kiev and Western Ukraine encourages not only strong feelings of hostility to the new regime but also, in the absence of an internationalist approach to unite the Ukrainian and Russian speaking toilers in joint revolutionary struggle, the urge to separate from these parts of Ukraine. The exact weight of this factor is hard to gauge from a distance. Unfortunately, as the war has progressed and the atrocities  by the Ukrainian military and fascist irregulars mounted, the ethnic/linguistic tensions have hardened. As a result, the dominance of aggressive Russian nationalist elements in the rebel movement has alarmingly increased and less and less Soviet flags and emblems are seen in the rebel political rallies. This is certainly the case in current demonstrations in the Donetsk region, whereas a few Soviet flags were seen in the earlier protests in Odessa in particular.

Fourthly, in the Ukraine war, rival billionaire oligarchs  are   playing   a   major,   direct role independently of the state power representing their interests in a manner much more overt than in other similar conflicts. Some of these oligarchs are directly funding the pro-government militias and fascist irregulars while others are  backing the pro-Russian rebels, while at the same time trying to control their agenda.

Fifthly, unlike the Palestinian and Tamil struggles, the Donbass struggle is being conducted in a region which borders a capitalist power whose main language/ ethnicity is the same as that of the rebel movement and which is providing some support to that movement. This fact does colour  things   somewhat,   even   though the rebel movement has not been simply subordinated to Russian interests and thus does remain a progressive movement overall. So, while national rights movements often use the rhetoric of anti-oppression and defensive nationalism, large parts of the Donbass movement leadership use aggressive Russian nationalist and national-supremacist rhetoric reflecting their proximity to a power based on the same ethnic/language group. Until recently, the commander of the Donetsk Peoples Republic was one Igor Girkin (known as “Strelkov”) a reactionary nationalist and  monarchist  whose  hero  is a Russian White general (the Whites were the right wing countetrevolutionaries who fought in the 1918-1921 Civil War against the Red communist forces in a failed attempt to overturn the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution). As a result of the character of the Donbass rebel leadership, the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity and clerical-fascist Slavic Union have sent volunteers to support the Donbass rebels as have the Serbian Chetniks (the Chetniks are right wing monarchists who were defeated by Tito’s communist partisans). The Donbass rebellion has also won the enthusiastic support of the Hungarian neo- Nazi Jobbik Party and the fascist British National Party.  Most disturbingly,  elements of the Donbass pro-Russian  forces  have been accused of committing horrific racist violence against the region’s Romani (Gypsy) minority as well as attacks on church goers who don’t attend Russian Orthodox-affiliated churches. All this is not only terrifying for the non-Russian communities in the Donbass but is harmful to what is overall a just struggle against racist/linguistic discrimination and repression of the  Russian-speaking  people of the region. For one, it repels the many pro-Soviet, anti-fascist working class people in the Donetsk and Luhansk districts from supporting the rebel  movement.  Secondly, it  drives  the   Ukrainian-speaking   masses in the West of Ukraine into the arms of the reactionary Kiev regime, as the excesses of the rebels recalls  to  them  the  subjugation of Ukrainian people in pre-Soviet, Tsarist Russia. Therefore, it is urgent for there to be a political struggle to replace the reactionary nationalist leadership of the Donbass masses with an internationalist, pro-working class leadership. Such a leadership would  pose the struggle solely as a struggle against racist and capitalist oppression, would completely reject great power Russian nationalism, would stand resolutely in defence of the well-being and rights of the region’s Romani, Jewish, Ukrainian-speaking and other minorities, would drive out fascists from the movement, would appeal to the class interests of the Ukrainian-speaking workers in the rest of the country in opposing the regime’s onslaught against the region and would fight for the revolutionary unity of Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking workers in the struggle against the capitalist exploiters of all ethnicities.

The objectively progressive nature of the anti-regime struggle in the South and East of Ukraine has meant that, although it’s still only a relatively small component  of the movement as a whole, there has been leftist participation in it. Active in Odesssa and Kharkiv is the Borotba group which is pro-Soviet and openly describes itself as Marxist-Leninist and revolutionary. Borotba correctly denounces the November 2013 to February 2014 then opposition movement for bringing to power a very right wing, “neo-liberal and nationalistic government”, while correctly also opposing the previous capitalist  Yanukovych  government   and the capitalist Putin government in Russia. Borotba members have courageously withstood fascist attacks and state repression and have today been driven underground. Borotba comrade Andrey Brazhevsky was murdered in the fascist attack on the Trade Unions House building in Odessa when, after jumping off the burning building, fascists beat him to death with sticks. From this distance we cannot give a broader appraisal of the politics of this group. Unfortunately, although the group has expressed strong opposition to both Ukrainian and Russian fascists, a Borotba leader founded a joint committee for the “Liberation of Odessa” with the Russian bourgeois Rodina party and the Russian fascist party Slavic Union.

Despite the dominance of right wing Russian nationalists in the Donbass rebel leadership, the struggle of the Russian-speaking people in the Donetsk and Luhansk districts is still, objectively, a just struggle against racist/ linguistic discrimination and  repression and, what is more, includes to some degree a progressive, pro-Soviet hostility to the desecration of Soviet war memorials, the presence of neo-Nazis in the Kiev regime and the tearing down of Lenin statues in western Ukraine. That is why the international working class movement must defend the just anti-regime struggle of the people of the Donbass and demand the right to the broadest self-rule for the people of this region.

The Ukrainian working class outside the Donbass, including the Ukrainian-speaking masses, must especially take up this cause. Only by positively opposing the anti-Russian chauvinism promoted by the regime can they unite on a class basis and focus on the struggle   against the capitalist exploiters – those true enemies of the workers of all ethnicities who are consigning the masses to high unemployment and poverty and whose regime is preparing to unleash EU and IMF-dictated austerity that would hit working class people with social service cutbacks, price rises and still deeper job losses. Such a perspective is possible even given the right wing, nationalistic climate in Ukraine and the polarising effect of the bitter and bloody war. It is striking that wives, mothers and other relatives of those drafted into Kiev’s war on the Donbass have staged a series of militant protests against conscription and in many cases against the war itself. The protests began in July in response to a government decision to announce a new wave of conscription orders. The protests took hold initially in the Chernivtsi region, a heavily ethnic Romanian region, near the Romanian border. There protesters blocked roads in protests at conscription orders given to 280 young men in the Ostryzja village. “We want peace, we really do not need war. Ukraine must have peace,” was the typical sentiment of the protesters. Soon the protests spread including importantly to ethnic Ukrainian regions as well. From the Obukhivs’kyi district near Kiev to the village of Hamaliivka near Lviv to the villages of Rakoshyno and Znyatsevo, near the border of Slovakia and Hungary, anti-war and  anti-conscription protesters have blocked roads. Among the slogans and retorts of the demonstrators have been, “‘Send call-up notices to the children of the higher-ups!’, ‘Return our children to us,’ ‘Stop the bloodshed’ and ‘Go fight your own wars.’” On July 22, farmers protesting the conscription of their children in the town of Bohorodchany in Ivano- Frankivsk Oblast, in south-west Ukraine, attacked the military registration office and the government premises and burned conscription documents. On July 25, in the shipbuilding port of Mykolaiv, east of Odessa, mothers and wives of soldiers braved state repression to block the Varvarovsky Bridge over the Bug River for three days until police violently broke up the action and arrested several protesters.

Such courageous protests present an opportunity for leftists to intervene to both show solidarity and to explain the need to not only oppose Kiev’s war but to defend the just struggle of the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass. Furthermore, in ethnically mixed and heavily industrial cities like Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk there is also an opportunity for leftists to intervene to bridge the ethnic divide and to  mobilise  actions  in  defence of the embattled Donbass people as an integral part of the fight against the capitalist oligarchs. Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk are Ukraine’s second and third  largest cities, both of which have not been directly subsumed in the polarising war and both of which have Ukrainian and Russian workers toiling together in large workplaces. In Dnipropetrovsk, the connection between the necessity to defend the Donbass struggle and the struggle against capitalist exploitation is especially apparent, given that the governor of the district, the stridently anti-rebel Ihor Kolomoyskyi is also a capitalist billionaire who happens to be Ukraine’s second richest man.

DON’T LET ABBOTT DIVERT US FROM TARGETING OUR MAIN ENEMY: THE AUSTRALIAN REGIME AND THE CAPITALISTS THAT THEY SERVE

What we have at this point in time is not an inter-imperialist war between the NATO powers and Russia or even a war between Kiev and Moscow. The Russian-speaking rebels in the Donbass region are not, at the moment, simply acting as Moscow’s proxies. The Moscow government has a different agenda to the rebels. The Russian-speaking people of the Donbass want to protect themselves from discrimination and a very right-wing government whereas Moscow wants to promote its great power capitalist ambitions. Indeed, many of the rebels are angry that Russia has not supported them adequately. Notably, when Donetsk and Luhansk organised referendums demanding self-rule, Putin tried to pressure the local leaderships to delay the referenda.

What we have today is a just, defensive struggle of the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass in the context of great power capitalist tensions between  the U.S. and Australia on the one hand and  Russia  on the other. The tasks for the international workers’ movement and left that flow from this is to, on the one hand, defend the just struggle of the Donbass rebels and, on the other, to oppose as the main enemy one’s “own” capitalist rulers in the capitalist political standoff. That means that socialists in Australia must oppose first and foremost the sanctions on Russia and the anti-Russia propaganda of Canberra and Washington and Co. We must point out the irrationality of the Western claim that Russia invaded Crimea when a massive 96% of voters in Crimea opted to join Russia in the March 16 referendum that had a high voter turnout of 83.1%. We should also challenge the claim that large numbers of Russian troops have entered Eastern Ukraine to fight alongside Donbass rebels when, in fact, there is no actual hard evidence of it whatsoever. Indeed, if there was such a huge direct Russian military role in the Donbass as Washington, Canberra and Co. claim then the Ukrainian forces, as formidable as they are, would not have been able to achieve the major victories that they did in their late July offensive into an area where much of the local population is hostile to them. The Kiev regime’s war later ran into difficulties not because of Russia but because many of its own troops either do not want to fight this war or, if they do, are not enthusiastic enough about the war to fight with the necessary conviction. With many regular Ukrainian troops half-hearted about fighting, the Kiev regime had to rely on the fascist irregulars – drunk as they are with rabid  nationalism  and  hatred  of  Russians – to be in the frontlines of many difficult battles. Thousands of regular Ukrainian soldiers have, in fact, deserted. Some of these  have  taken  asylum  in  Russia.  Some have even defected to the rebels. The fact is that despite the intense nationalism of the post-Soviet period, many Ukrainian soldiers, a large percentage of whom are conscripts, are shaped by the stories that their grandparents have told them about the Soviet Red Army’s heroic struggle against Nazi Germany. Although they are still indoctrinated in the pro-capitalist and nationalist traditions of a capitalist army, it is difficult for such soldiers to fight with much enthusiasm a war in which they are taking orders from a government that includes neo-Nazis and in which they have to fight alongside neo-Nazi irregulars. Indeed, Ukrainian president Poroshenko ended up agreeing to a  ceasefire with the resistance and offering autonomy for the Donbass not because of fear of Russia but because of fear of the breakdown of morale in his own army and fear at the militancy of anti-conscription protests on the home front.

We must also expose the sickening hypocrisy of the U.S., British and Australian rulers when they attack Russia’s supposed “incursion” into Ukraine. It is these same Western imperialist rulers that caused the deaths of over a million people in their brutal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the NATO powers that killed tens of thousands of Libyans in their 2011 air and special forces campaign to spearhead the overthrow of the Gaddafi government. Today, the U.S., backed by its allies like Australia, grossly violate Syria’s sovereignty by bombing (supposed) ISIS targets inside Syria without the Syrian government’s permission – all as part of a broader plan for regime change in Syria. And they have the hide to attack Russia over its alleged, but completely unproved, actions in eastern Ukraine!

Now, of course, understanding that the main enemy of the Australian working class are the Australian capitalist rulers and their senior partners does not mean that they are the only enemy. As Marxists-Leninists we understand that the ruling class of every capitalist power is our enemy. Therefore, capitalist rulers of the West’s rival, Russia, are also an enemy.  Putin heads  a right wing capitalist government that oversees exploitation of workers, repression of leftists, brutal  police  attacks  against  migrants  and Russians of non-European ethnicities and persecution of gay and transexual people. Indeed, Putin has much in common with Tony Abbott! However, it is primarily the job of the Russian working class to oppose the predatory ambitions of their “own” rulers just as it is primarily the duty of the Ukrainian toiling masses to fight against the murderous, fascist-infested, capitalist regime that oversees their exploitation. The class struggle in these countries does, indeed, matter and should not be ignored for the sake of the “big picture” – as it is, in fact, a significant part of the “big picture.” Ukraine and Russia together have a population of over 190 million and as both countries are industrialised, they have some big centres of industrial working class concentration. The strategic importance of these countries to the struggle for world socialism is highlighted by the fact that Russia is the second strongest military power in the world, the world’s largest country by area, arguably the pre-eminent world space power and closely rivals the U.S. in nuclear warfare capability. Just as importantly, given that the counterrevolutionary  destruction of socialistic rule in the ex-USSR was such a massive propaganda windfall for the capitalist rulers of the world – used by them to claim that “communism is dead” and capitalism is inevitable – the revolutionary socialist restoration of workers state power in any of these countries would be a terrific propaganda and moral victory for the fight for international working class liberation.

However, for Australian leftists to today focus their attack on the crimes of the Russian ruling class in the context of the current great power capitalist tensions only serves to support the agenda of the Australian capitalists and to enhance their legitimacy. It would push our audience into thinking that Abbott and Shorten are right on major world issues like Ukraine and so maybe we should start listening to them on  domestic  issues as well. Yet, focusing on the crimes of the Russian ruling class and retailing Western imperialism’s propaganda against Russia is what the various reformist socialist groups in Australia do. Their orientation can be summarised as: the main enemy is the rival of my “own” bourgeoisie! In carrying out such  a  perspective,  these  socialist  groups are serving to bolster the credentials of the Australian capitalist ruling class and thus act to undermine the class struggle against them.

Some Western leftists, as an excuse for taking the more socially acceptable position of favouring the ally of their own bourgeoisie, argue that Ukraine should be defended as a weaker country than powerful Russia. However, such a stance is very wrong. Firstly, Ukrainian capitalist rulers are at least to some extent acting as a proxy of Western imperialism. Secondly Ukraine is itself not a weak semi-colony. Although Ukraine later gave up its nuclear weapons, as the second largest republic of the former USSR, Ukraine inherited from the ex-Soviet Union a large, well-trained and well-equipped military. Although capitalist restoration devastated its military and industrial strength, Ukraine retains an advanced independent arms industry. It manufactures, among other goods, ballistic missiles, submarines and tanks and is a major arms exporter. Ukraine has also retained some of the highly skilled technical personnel as well as the highly educated workforce of Soviet times and has the fourth highest number of IT professionals in the world. It has also retained a portion of the powerful and high-tech industrial plants built in Soviet times. This is indicated by its level of steel production, which is commonly used worldwide as a gauge of industrial capacity, since steel is the base material for much heavy and medium manufacturing as well as most infrastructure construction. Ukraine, although only being the 31st most populous country in the world is the globe’s 10th largest steel producer. Ukraine also has a sizeable automotive industry as well as a space vehicle industry and is one of the few countries in  the  world  able  to  design  and produce a complete aircraft. All this means that Ukraine does not have to accept capital from overseas capitalist powers simply in order to get access to the technology that it needs. And it has sufficient military deterrent to make it costly and risky (although, of course, not anywhere near impossible) for a foreign power to use military threat to force it into repaying debts, for example. In summary, 75 years of industrial, educational and military development as part of the Soviet workers state transformed the Ukraine from a weak nation subjugated by Russian imperialism  in  Tsarist  times  into a country that even after being decimated by capitalist  counterrevolution would be difficult for Russia, or anyone else for that matter, to turn into a semi-colony. Over 22 years of capitalist chaos since the destruction of the USSR has meant that Ukraine today is debt ridden and is being dictated to and bullied by the IMF and Western banks but then so are even imperialist countries like Spain and Italy. Yet, today Ukraine’s prized enterprises like the Antonov aerospace company and the giant PA Yuzhmash, a producer of rockets, satellites, buses and trams, remain in domestic Ukrainian hands. Furthermore, although there is considerable Russian investment – often via Cypriot banks – in Ukraine’s financial and service sector, other than for Russian-owned resource giant TNK-BP and the  part-Russian  ownership in Ukraine’s major mobile phone operator Kyivstar, most of the biggest firms operating in Ukraine are domestically owned (most often by fabulously wealthy oligarchs).

The Western imperialist huffing and puffing against Russia is not only about Russia itself. The Western rulers are using the myth of the Russian  bogeyman  that  they  have  created as  an  excuse  to  bolster their militaries and to exercise their imperialist political and diplomatic muscles for future use against other targets as well. This month’s NATO summit used the supposed “Russian aggression” in Ukraine as justification for creating a “Spearhead” rapid reaction force of several thousand troops ready to deploy anywhere in the world in less than 48 hours. The summit also  enshrined a commitment by member states to significantly increase defence budgets. For its part, the Australian rulers used the horror of the MH17 plane disaster as an excuse to send Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers tramping around the crash site in war torn Eastern Ukraine. If they were really interested in recovery of the dead bodies and determining the cause  of the disaster  they would  have sent pathologists and air crash investigators after diplomatically and politely negotiating with the Donetsk rebels who were holding the territory. Instead, they sent in cops after they and their Western counterparts made aggressive demands upon the  Donetsk rebels. For the Australian government, demanding the “right” to  send  in  cops  to an area controlled by a force – the Donetsk separatists – that they oppose was a chance for some good old fashioned imperialist bullying (how would the Australian regime like it if the Chinese  government was this aggressive and demanded that Chinese police take over sites in Australian cities whenever a redneck racist bashes or murders a Chinese student in Australia). This was a chance for the Australian state forces to show that they have the right to maraud anywhere they choose. For the Australian ruling class this exercising of imperialist muscles was mainly in order to prepare for future expeditions in the Asia-Pacific region. In recent years the AFP has been deployed to lord it over the peoples of the Solomon Islands, East Timor, Papua New Guinea and Bougainville.  However, they are quite prepared to also unleash their state forces in operations around the globe to support their U.S. godfather. The Liberal/ National Coalition government, with Labor’s full support, sure couldn’t wait to send troops to the Middle East to support the U.S.A’s latest military adventure there.

The most important reason for all this Western imperialist diplomatic and military exercising – including NATO’s planned military build-up – is to target not so much Russia  but  China,  socialistic   China   that is. When Clive Palmer recently ranted against China and the Communist Chinese government he was, in fact, expressing the real opinion of the entire Australian capitalist class. The trouble is that this capitalist class is simultaneously relying on China’s booming state-owned enterprises to keep on buying enough of Australia’s exports to hold up the Australian economy. So other Australian politicians publicly told Palmer to shut it while no doubt wanting to whisper in his ear, “we’re with you brother.” After all, with the enthusiastic support of both the ALP and the Liberals, the U.S. has 1,300 troops stationed in Darwin which are squarely aimed against China and her socialistic North Korean ally. The continued presence of a socialistic state in China, however corrupted and weakened by a degree of capitalist penetration, is an obstacle to the imperialist designs  to turn China into a huge sweatshop for imperialist exploitation. Meanwhile, the presence of a socialistic world power is an obstacle to imperialism running amok in the world. These are the reasons why the capitalist powers are building their forces to put pressure on China. Equally, it is the reason why the international working class must urgently rally to the defence of the Chinese workers state, however deformed from the ideal that it may be.

The Abbott government has also  been using the MH17 disaster and the events in Ukraine for domestic purposes. Abbott and Labor Opposition leader  Shorten  claimed to feel intense grief for the pain borne by families and friends of the Australians killed aboard MH17. In truth these pro-capitalist politicians  only  ever  feel  true   solidarity for some Australians – those in the big end of town! They both certainly don’t feel any sympathy for the close to 500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have been killed in state custody over the last 35 years. Both their parties running state and federal governments have overseen brutal police and prison guard terror against Aboriginal people. They definitely do not feel any sympathy for low-income, single mothers either. At the start of last year, Shorten’s ALP, when in government under Gillard, drove 80,000 low-income single parents and their children into dire poverty and in some cases even homelessness when they cruelly slashed their payments – a move maintained by the current Abbott  government.  And Abbott could not care less for unemployed youth – as he plans to drive unemployed people younger than thirty into starvation by cutting off their dole payments for six months per year. Yet  Abbott cynically manipulated people’s genuine sympathy for the victims of MH17 to gain a boost in opinion polls by portraying himself as a person who cares for and stands up for the interests of Australians.

The Coalition government’s tough talk over MH17 and denunciations of Russia and the Donbass-based rebels are, however, not purely about gaining electoral  advantage. As with Abbott’s ranting backing Australia’s war moves in the Middle East, the focussing on an external adversary is meant to unite the population on a nationalist basis – into a “Team Australia” as Abbott calls it. Except that in this so-called team, a small number of team members – that is, the capitalist tycoons likes Andrew Forrest, Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer, James Packer and Frank Lowy – are exploiting the majority of  the  team: the working class. The idea that we are all together as Australians against the external adversary – whether that be Russia or ISIS – is meant to make the exploited masses accept their oppression for the sake of the “team.” Abbott and Co. want us to hold the hands of the corporate bigwigs while the latter kick us in the guts. He wants public housing tenants to consider the housing authorities that are booting them out of their homes and the greedy developers that are buying them up as part of their “team.” This government is also foisting upon working class people loyalty to “Team Australia” in order to make them accept, for the sake of the “team,” a federal budget that will slash payments for the unemployed, make the masses pay for doctors’ visits and further reduce funding for Aboriginal services all the while cutting taxes for mining billionaires.

Yet, even though Shorten’s ALP and Adam Bandt’s Greens claim opposition to some aspects of the budget and would seemingly have an interest in stopping Abbott’s attempts to divert mass hostility to the budget, they too have joined in creating the myth of the Russian bogeyman. Why is this? Although the ALP rests on the working class it is opposed to militant class struggle and instead sees improvements coming through collaboration with the capitalists. Thus, it too wants to tame class struggle by tying the masses to their exploiters through the notion of a common “national interest” uniting all Australians. The Greens, who are based on the liberal/ progressive middle class and  students, also reject class struggle. Both the ALP and Greens, whose strategy for progressive social change is based on getting elected to parliament, are desperate to win the blessing of the wealthy capitalists whose funding, economic clout and media dominance greatly shapes who can win elections. Thus, both the ALP and Greens are always keen to prove to the capitalist elite that they are “responsible” parties committed to doing what is best for Australian capitalism – like standing alongside Australian imperialism’s U.S. senior partner in the Ukraine conflict. However, those who understand that the only way to advance the interests of working class people is through class struggle against the ruling class must oppose every scheme to tie the masses to their exploiters on the basis of a fictitious “national interest.” Down with the ruling class’ attempt to create the spectre of a Russian bogeyman! Don’t let them use the threat of the, indeed thoroughly reactionary, ISIS movement to divert the working class from the central task of opposing the attacks of the Australian capitalists – from their imperialist expedition to  the  Middle  East to their drive  to further  degrade workers’ standard of living and access to social services.

SUFFERING, RACISM AND CHAOS IN UKRAINE: A DIRECT RESULT OF CAPITALIST COUNTER-REVOLUTION

To many older Ukrainians and Russians who remember life in the days of the former Soviet Union, the current war, economic chaos and fascist rampages are especially hard to stomach. Although things were not perfect, in the heyday of the USSR from the 1950s to the early 1980s not only was there no nationalist bloodletting but fascists barely existed let alone dared to show their colours in public – certainly they were not able to rampage on the streets and gain ministries in government as they do now in Ukraine! Despite a moderate degree of Russian-centredness of leading elements of the ruling Soviet bureaucracy and at various times this bureaucracy making concessions to Russian nationalism, the socialistic USSR in its prime really was a land of the friendship of peoples. Many international students from Asia, Africa and the Middle East studied in the USSR on scholarships or for nominal fees. They were treated with generous hospitality and genuine warmth. However, after the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the USSR, the life of international students in both Russia and Ukraine has been one of fear and terror. Dark-skinned international students and migrants are regularly harassed and abused and countless numbers have been murdered or brutally bashed by fascist gangs. In Russia, fascist gangs are notorious for going out on nightly “street cleansing” operations where they premeditatedly bash or murder dark-skinned immigrants, stall holders from the Caucasus, Romani people (Gypsies), people from Central Asia, gays, people with long hair and anarchists. These fascists have committed over 1,000 premeditated murders in Russia in the last 10 years -including those of 200 international students!

The creation of the Soviet workers state itself involved a conscious struggle against racism and national oppression. Tsarist Russia was an empire centred on the ethnic Russians (then known as “Great Russians”) that brutally oppressed the non-Russian nations including Ukraine. As an essential part of uniting the working class of all ethnicities Lenin’s Bolsheviks insisted on the need for the ethnic Russian working class to strongly defend the rights of the downtrodden non-Russian peoples and to oppose the Russian fascist Black Hundreds group:

Amidst the alarms and turmoil of the struggle for existence, for a bare livelihood, the Russian workers cannot and must not forget the yoke of national oppression under which the tens and tens of millions of “subject peoples” inhabiting Russia are groaning. The ruling nation–the  Great  Russians–constitute  about 45 per cent of the total population of the Empire. Out of every 100 inhabitants, over 50 belong to “subject peoples”.

And the conditions of life of this vast population are even harsher than those of the Russians. The policy  of  oppressing  nationalities  is one of  dividing  nations.  At  the  same  time it is a policy of systematic corruption of the people’s minds. The Black Hundreds’ plans are designed to foment antagonism among the different nations, to poison the minds of the ignorant and downtrodden masses. Pick up any Black-Hundred newspaper and you will find that the persecution of non-Russians, the sowing of mutual distrust between the Russian peasant, the Russian petty bourgeois and the Russian artisan on the one  hand, and the Jewish, Finnish, Polish, Georgian and Ukrainian peasants, petty bourgeois and artisans on the other, is meat and drink to the whole of this Black-Hundred gang.

But the working class needs unity, not division. It has no more bitter enemy than the savage prejudices and superstitions which its enemies sow among the ignorant masses. The oppression of “subject peoples” is a double-edged weapon. It cuts both ways– against the “subject peoples” and against the Russian people.

That is why the working class must protest most strongly against national oppression in any shape and form.
– National Equality, V.I. Lenin (1914), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/apr/16.htm

As part of this struggle, Lenin trained the ethnic Russian working class to physically smash the fascist Black Hundreds and to defend the right to self-determination of the oppressed peoples in imperialist Russia, like the Ukrainians:

Accursed tsarism made the Great Russians executioners of the Ukrainian people, and fomented in them [the Ukrainian people] a hatred for those who even forbade Ukrainian children to speak and study in their native tongue.

Russia’s revolutionary democrats, if they want to be truly revolutionary and truly democratic, must break with that past, must regain for themselves, for the workers and peasants of Russia, the brotherly  trust  of the Ukrainian workers and peasants. This cannot be done without full recognition of the Ukraine’s rights, including the right to free secession.

We do not favour the existence of small states. We stand for the closest union of the workers of the world against ‘their own’ capitalists and those of all other countries. But for this union to be voluntary, the Russian worker, who does not for a moment trust The Russian or the Ukrainian bourgeoisie in anything, now stands for the right of the Ukrainians to secede, without imposing his friendship upon them, but striving to  win  their  friendship by treating them as an equal, as an ally and brother in the struggle for socialism.
– The Ukraine, V.I. Lenin (1914), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jun/28.htm

Through such a policy  the  Bolsheviks were able to unite the toilers of different nationalities in a socialist revolution that shook the world. Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks taught the Soviet masses to understand that their interests were completely synonymous with those of the toilers of the whole world and to see the October 1917 Russian revolution as the first step in the world revolution. However, the communist parties in other parts of the world were too weak and too recently formed to take advantage of the revolutionary wave that swept Europe after the October Revolution. As a result the young Soviet workers state was isolated and then devastated following the bitter, but ultimately victorious 1918-1921 Civil War against the defeated capitalists who waged a violent bid to recapture power with the assistance of  invading  armies from fourteen capitalist countries. Under these conditions  of  isolation  and  scarcity a more rightist,  less  revolutionary  faction of the Soviet Communist party grabbed political power in the mid-1920s promising they would give the masses a respite from the tumult of revolutionary struggles by establishing “peaceful coexistence” with world imperialism. The new leaders rested on  the  more  conservative  workers  and the rural peasants and especially on the governmental/administrative bureaucracy. Gradually they began securing some material privileges for the emerging  bureaucratic elite which they became  an  organic  part of. They murderously persecuted the Trotskyist Left  Opposition and countless other communists who spoke out (or even were as seen as potentially speaking out in the future) against the course away from Leninist egalitarianism and internationalism. However, the bureaucracy had to base itself on the progressive, socialist economic relations  centred  on   public   ownership that   sprung   from   the   1917   revolution.

Furthermore, although the  bureaucracy often (with some important exceptions) pushed Lenin’s perspective of supporting the international socialist revolution down to the second row in the vain hope of achieving peaceful coexistence with imperialism, the Soviet masses remained imbued with Soviet patriotism – that is, a strong pride in the socialistic character of the USSR and in its principle of friendship among the different peoples of the multi-ethnic republic. It was through this Soviet patriotism that the Soviet masses, with incredible heroism and at great cost, defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. Meanwhile, the USSR’s friendship of peoples was secured by its economic system based on common ownership and co-operation between people to achieve central plans. This brought people together, in contrast to the system of individual ownership of capitalism which tears people apart.

Nevertheless, over time the imperialists subjected the Soviet workers state to immense military, economic and political pressure. This pressure was at least 50 times what capitalist Russia  is  being  subjected to today by its Western rivals. The ruling bureaucrats in the USSR would respond to these threats when they directly manifested themselves within the USSR. However, these Soviet leaders who retained great authority over the international workers movement through being  the  heads  of  the  world’s first and most powerful workers state, held back the most powerful counterpunch to the  capitalist  states  threatening  the  USSR – the revolutionary workers within these capitalist countries  themselves.  Instead, they extended this arm of the international workers  movement  to   shake   the   hands of the imperialists in friendship and offer them “peaceful coexistence.” The capitalists powers  responded  by  first  grabbing  this arm, then twisting it and finally snapping it in half. Panicked, the Soviet bureaucracy also offered the other arm to the imperialists. The imperialists did the same to that arm as well. With the USSR and the international workers movement thus weakened, the Soviet leadership from the time of Gorbachev’s ascendancy in the mid-1980s began backpedalling in the face of the imperialist threat. Gorbachev allowed greater freedom for capitalist counterrevolutionary political forces to operate and introduced right wing perestroika market reforms. All this created a new layer of petty capitalists – and associated with them a sizeable layer of pro-capitalist intellectuals – demanding more “rights” for capitalism. They pushed the bureaucracy to the right and with each new concession this counterrevolutionary layer became more powerful and more demanding. Eventually, when these counterrevolutionaries with tremendous backing from Washington, London, Canberra and co. made their bids for power in the ex-USSR and Eastern Europe, the ruling bureaucracies committed their ultimate betrayal of socialism when they (although not all that happy about what was happening) simply stood aside and allowed the pro-capitalist forces to storm in and take power. Even those bureaucrats that did try to mount some form of resistance – like the top Soviet leaders who staged the so-called coup  against  Gorbachev  in   August   1991 in opposition to his counterrevolutionary course – capitulated at the first sign of any significant opposition.

Some in the bureaucracy went further and broke away from the mainstream  of  the Soviet  apparatus  to   become   direct   agents of the capitalist counterrevolution – like Russian counterrevolution leader  Boris Yeltsin and like Putin,  who  was  an  adviser to counterrevolutionary Leningrad mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, during the counterrevolution. Others like the first president of post-Soviet capitalist Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, remained with  the  mainstream  of  the  bureaucracy and then promptly jumped  over  from  being an administrator of a workers state to an administrator of a capitalist state. There were, to be sure, a great many in the bureaucratic establishment, including officers in the Red Army, who were  incensed  and  bewildered at the counterrevolution. These elements were either purged from their positions or retired. However, even though the period from November 1991 to March 1992 saw mass pro- Soviet rallies, proudly, pro-Soviet individuals within the bureaucracy were unable to mount a decisive challenge to the counterrevolution because they lacked any perspective of relying for their strength on the working class masses. It was the Soviet working class that could have stopped the capitalist counterrevolution. However, lacking a genuine communist leadership and having its independent initiative degraded by having been excluded from a vanguard role in active politics for decades by the bureaucracy, the working class did not take the initiative to mobilise decisive action to stop the counterrevolution. This was despite the fact that major portions of the Soviet working class were very worried about the ascendancy of the pro-capitalist forces.

Although the decisive events in the counterrevolution that destroyed the USSR were centred on Russia there were significant counterrevolutionary movements in other republics as well. In Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Moldova, Azerbaijan and elsewhere, “Popular Fronts” were formed to push for independence from the USSR. These were nothing like the national liberation movements that fought against the Great Russian chauvinism and subjugation of Tsarist times. In Soviet times, although there was a degree of Russian  centredness  on  the  part of the bureaucracy, the non-Russian  masses did not face significant national oppression. The nationalist “Popular Fronts” in Ukraine and elsewhere were really simply capitalist restorationist movements that used the cover of national independence to promote a call to break from the socialistic USSR and establish capitalist rule. These movements  were  fed by Gorbachev’s perestroika market reforms which by turning away from the even, planned distribution of resources between different republics and regions led to greater competition and income differentials between different republics and thereby exacerbated national divisions. The “Popular  Fronts”  harked  back to anti-Soviet or non-Soviet  national  figures of their respective republics and insisted on the exclusive use of their national languages as opposed to  the  bilingualism  encouraged in the USSR. The aggressive nationalism, anti-communism and hostility to the use  of the Russian language of the current Ukrainian ruling parties is really an extension of the politics of the Ukrainian Popular Front (known as Rukh) that fought to undermine socialistic rule in the last years of the USSR.

If  reactionary  nationalism  was  used  as  a tool to promote counterrevolution in the various Soviet republics, the effect of the counterrevolution itself was to increase this nationalism  many  fold.  Counterrevolution saw these republics go from being areas of zero unemployment in the mid-1980s to being regions of massive unemployment. In Ukraine capitalist restoration caused its GDP and its industrial production to collapse by a stunning 60%! Under conditions of such scarcity, nationalism flourished. Furthermore, the corrupt new rulers had to whip up reactionary nationalism as a matter of their own survival. Capitalist restoration had been such an all- round disaster – causing immiseration of the masses, an alarming drop in health levels and a massive increase in crime and street violence. Only by offering the masses the “solace” that they were part of building a strong, new nation and, what is more, standing up to national adversaries could the  new  ruling class ward off the

prospect of being toppled from power. In countries like Ukraine, these new capitalist rulers have stirred up such reactionary nationalism in part by pointing to the ambitions of capitalist Russia and by thus appealing to real fears among “their people” that they would be again subjugated  under the thumb of Russia as in the old Tsarist times. However, the lasting  effect  of  some  aspects of Soviet development in these countries and the equalisation of development among the different republics of the USSR through central planning mean that it is now not easy (although not impossible in the least developed of the former Soviet republics) for capitalist Russia to replicate the Great Russian tyranny last seen in Tsarist times.

WHO IS TO BLAME FOR THE MH17 DISASTER AND THE CRISIS IN UKRAINE?

If we now step back and consider who is, ultimately, to blame for the horrific crash of MH17 – regardless of who actually fired the projectiles that downed the aircraft – first and foremost responsibility must fall upon the imperialist ruling classes from the United States to Australia to Japan, Germany and Britain. They mobilised massive financial, military and diplomatic power in order to squeeze the socialistic USSR hard enough to trigger her internal collapse and, consequently, create the misery, racism and chaos out of which the current war in the Donbass – and, thus, the downing of MH17 – grew. The Western imperialists also orchestrated this February’s right wing coup that brought in the new hardline nationalistic regime that provoked the Donbass conflict. Also, major responsibility for the current tragedies lies with the likes of Boris Yeltsin and the Ukrainian Popular Front who, on the ground, spearheaded the capitalist counterrevolutions in Russia, Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics. Then there is the direct responsibility of the political heirs of the Ukrainian Popular Front – from conservatives like Yatsenyuk and the Fatherland Party to outright fascists like Tyahnybok and Yarosh – who conducted the February right wing coup and then unleashed brutal repression against the peoples of the Donbass.

Putin has some responsibility too but less than the Western imperialists and their right wing Ukrainian allies. Furthermore, Putin’s main fault lies in having acted as a partner of Washington, Canberra and Co. in being part of the imperialist-orchestrated, Yeltsin-Sobchak counterrevolution that destroyed socialistic rule in the former USSR and thus paved the path for the emergence of the reactionary Ukrainian nationalism of  the  February  coup  regime and outright fascists like Svoboda and Pravy Sektor. Then, later, as the chief administrator of capitalist Russia, Putin oversaw the continued immiseration of the Russian masses while spewing reactionary nationalism to help maintain capitalist rule: both of which have helped to raise large fascist movements within Russia. In turn, the abundance of vile Russian fascists  and  the   great   power   nationalism of the mainstream Russian ruling class has indirectly bolstered the strength of Ukrainian nationalists  and  fascists   by   allowing   them to exploit – and hysterically incite – fears of Russian  domination.

The criminal role of the Western-based social democrats in the  tragedy  that  has  unfolded in Ukraine cannot be underestimated either. These social democrats not only  supported the right wing February coup in Ukraine but throughout   the   Cold   War   fully   supported their own ruling class’ efforts to destroy the Soviet and East European workers states. Here in Australia, pro-ALP union leaders treacherously lined up our workers’ unions behind the anti-communist – and, thus, anti-working class – Solidarnosc “union” which with the ardent backing of the Vatican and right wing Western leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher unleashed the counterrevolutionary wave that toppled the workers states in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Meanwhile, the Hawke-Keating ALP government that came to office in 1983 aggressively supported the U.S.-led Cold War against the USSR both through hosting joint U.S-Australia military bases in Pine Gape and elsewhere and through politically backing the various anti-Soviet movements from the women-hating Afghan mujahedin (out of which the Taliban emerged) to the Ukrainian and Baltic “Popular Fronts” to the Yeltsin- Sobchak counterrevolutionaries in Russia. Right behind the ALP’s Cold War drive were the reformist, far-left groups. Most enthusiastic in their opposition to the Soviet workers state was the Cliffite, International Socialist Organisation (ISO) – the parent organisation of both the Socialist Alternative and Solidarity groups. The ISO wielded the bogus theory that the Soviet and East European states were in fact “state capitalist” in order to justify giving enthusiastic support to all the counterrevolutionary movements. When the openly counterrevolutionary Yeltsin forces grabbed governmental power in Russia after opposing a timid, pro-Soviet coup against the sellout Gorbachev and anti-communist mobs then went around Moscow tearing down statues  of  Russian  Revolutionary  leaders, and while Western mainstream newspapers cheered that “Communism is Dead,” this parent group of Socialist Alternative and Solidarity chimed  in  with:  “‘Communism is dead’ …. It’s a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (Socialist, September 1991). The Democratic Socialist Party (the DSP has now become the Socialist Alliance) was little better, even though, unlike the Cliffites, the DSP recognised in theory that the USSR was a workers state. Although the DSP took a progressive position of opposing the CIA-backed mujahedin fundamentalists in Afghanistan (a good position which the Socialist Alliance appears to be embarrassed about today), the DSP supported almost every other counterrevolutionary movement that sought to overthrow the Soviet and East  European workers states.   Among the movements that the DSP were most enthusiastic about were the nationalist and anti-Soviet Ukrainian Popular Front and the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian Popular Fronts. This was despite the fact that the DSP were simultaneously cheering for capitulatory Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev who for a time as the leader of the workers state was opposed to these “Popular Fronts.” When the Yeltsin-led open counterrevolutionaries made their bid for power in August 1991, the DSP then committed the ultimate betrayal of socialism by not only “critically” supporting the ascendancy of the Yelstin forces but actually having a leading DSPer physically join Yeltsin’s barricades during the decisive events. This DSP representative, Renfrey Clarke, actually boasted about  how  he tried to help deliver a letter of solidarity to Yeltsin from then British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock (see the article, “Eye witness report; Moscow  during  the  coup,”  Green Left Weekly, 4 September 1991, https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/690).   Even the Communist League (who sell the paper The Militant), who  are  often  less  inclined to capitulate to imperialism than Socialist Alternative,  Solidarity  or  Socialist  Alliance, joined the counterrevolutionary united front. Thus, their  newspaper’s  description of the victory of Yeltsin’s alliance of hardline anti-communist students, small-time capitalists, Orthodox priests and outright fascists was headlined: “Soviet workers defeat coup”!

ADVANCE THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIALIST REVOLUTION IN UKRAINE & RUSSIA!

Given that it  is  so

 obvious that it was the destruction of socialistic  rule  in  the  former USSR that has led to the suffering and bloodletting in

Ukraine and other former Soviet republics it is clear that what is needed is to fight for new socialist revolutions to restore working class state power to Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Georgia and all the former Soviet republics. Whether the resulting new workers states choose to join into a union – or several unions – and in what combination is a separate and in many ways secondary question. It will depend on the manner in which the poisonous nationalism unleashed by counterrevolution is overcome in the course of the revolutionary struggles. Some may ask: how can we guarantee that new workers states will not again degenerate and be defeated. That would be like a worker asking for an iron-clad guarantee that a strike against bosses will succeed before engaging in it. There are no guarantees in the class struggle. A strike’s outcome depends on how decisively the workers act, how far- sighted and resolute their leadership are and how much support the action wins from other workers. Similarly, the integrity and survival of a workers state depends on how secure the workers hold on power is and how much the revolutionary struggle in other countries can come to their assistance. The Soviet workers state first degenerated and many decades later collapsed because the revolutionary working class movement was not powerful enough to overcome the political, economic and military onslaught of world capitalism on the workers state. Ensuring that future workers states are protected against degeneration and collapse requires fighting to ensure that the international revolutionary workers movement is as strong as possible. For ultimately the defence of workers states and the fight to win them are achieved by one and the same method – the method of the revolutionary class struggle.

Key to the struggle for socialism in the former Soviet republics is the  fight against the nationalist influence that divides workers of different ethnicities and lines them up behind their “own” exploiters. In the Ukraine, it is urgent for workers to oppose reactionary Ukrainian nationalism with its strong anti-Russian and anti-Semitic bent. However, as each of the competing  nationalisms  feed off each other it is not possible to defeat simply one of the opposing nationalist ideologies by themselves. Ukrainian and Russian nationalists hate  each  other  but both rely on the existence of the other to justify their own existence. Not only has extreme  Ukrainian   nationalism   come   to the fore but Russian nationalism has also surged since the February coup in Ukraine and then further increased with Crimea’s return to Russia and the eruption of the Donbass conflict. Putin has been whipping up this nationalism, which has served to divert the Russian masses’ frustrations at their hardships caused by capitalist inequality and a stagnant economy away from the capitalist exploiters whom Putin serves. Aggressive Russian nationalism is also  being  promoted by more hardline forces than Putin including the fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s misnamed Liberal Democratic  Party  of  Russia.  The last few months has seen mass, extreme nationalist rallies in Russia full of reactionary symbols from the Tsarist era such as the black, gold and white monarchist flag used by the Russian empire from 1858 to 1883. Such Russian nationalist mobilisations can  only play into the hands of the Ukrainian extreme nationalists who raise the spectre of a return to the subjugation under Russia of the Tsarist times. On the other hand if there were mass workers mobilisations in  Russia  opposing this reactionary  nationalism  it  would  give a great boost to those Ukrainian leftists standing  against  Ukrainian  nationalism and fascism just as a struggle against the anti-Russian ravings of Ukrainian nationalists and their bloody war on the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass would cut the ground from under the Russian nationalists. For the revolutionary unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers!

Key to dispersing the poisonous fumes of nationalism and to organising the working class for the struggle for power is to mobilise working class actions to defend ethnic minorities, dark-skinned immigrants, leftists and gays from the fascists. To be successful such actions must be mass mobilisations. Small scale anti-fascist actions cannot defeat the fascists because in both Ukraine  and Russia the fascists are well and truly out of the egg. In Russia not only is there a terrifying level of murders by fascists but Zhirinovsky’s fascist party  received  nearly  12%  of  the vote in Russian parliamentary elections. In Ukraine, the fascists are a component of the actual government. However, they are now threatening to overthrow the government and establish a fascist dictatorship. The slogan of the fascist Ukrainian irregulars fighting in the Donbass conflict is that: once we finish with the Russians we’re coming for the government in Kiev. Although they are part of the government, the fascists think that the conservative majority in the government are not extreme enough in opposing ethnic Russians and Jews. They point to the fact that both the prime  minister  Yatsenyuk  and  one of the two vice prime ministers, Volodymyr Groysman, happen to be of Jewish origin to create a fanciful notion of Zionist domination – ironically the very same claim made by Russian fascists within the Donbass rebel forces! The recent offer of regional autonomy for Donbass made by president Poroshenko and the parliamentary majority has further incensed the fascists.

Although the Ukrainian fascist paramilitary forces are a serious threat it is important to note that they do not currently have anywhere near majority support from the Ukrainian people.  In  the  May  presidential   elections, the two fascist candidates, Tyahnybok of Svoboda and Yarosh of Pravy Sektor, received just a meagre 1.2% and 0.7% of the votes respectively. In the case of Svoboda, this was a notable setback as in the last parliamentary elections in 2012, they received over 10% of the vote. To put the recent electoral showing by the fascists in perspective, in the German elections prior to Hitler taking power in November  1932,  Hitler’s  Nazis   received over 33% of the vote. And in the subsequent elections four months later, before the Nazi forces actually established their fascist dictatorship, the Nazis secured nearly 44% of the vote.

However, the danger of fascists seizing outright power in Ukraine should not be underestimated. In the absence of a class struggle fight on the behalf of the masses’ interests and the building of unity between Ukrainian, Russian,  Jewish and   other workers, it is certain that fascist demagogues will be able to exploit the economic crisis in Ukraine. Furthermore, even with the limited popular support that they have, the fascist paramilitary forces in Ukraine are right now terrorising leftists, Jews, Russian speakers and dark-skinned migrants and students. What is urgently called for is working class–centred mass  actions  to  defend   groups   targeted by the fascists. Such a mass working class, anti-fascist movement could first emerge in ethnically integrated, industrial cities like Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk and then spread on to Kiev and other cities. What would give such a movement real authority too is if workers in the Donbass simultaneously mobilised to defend Romani and Ukrainian speaking people from attacks by Russian fascist factions within the rebel forces.

Especially given the penetration of fascists into the Ukrainian state forces,  it  is  crucial for anti-fascist actions to be  independent  of the state and all wings of the capitalist class. In this way, working class-centred defensive actions against the fascists can become a springboard for a working class offensive against the capitalists and their impending austerity  drive.  However,   to   realise  such a perspective requires the building of an authentic communist party in Ukraine. The Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) won much support in the past because it was identified  with  the  former  USSR.  Sympathy for the KPU reflected the people’s longing for the days of the Soviet Union. However, the KPU squandered this sympathy by seeking alliances with – and thus being tarnished in the eyes of the masses – one or other wing of the capitalist class. In 2010, the KPU became one of the parties in a parliamentary coalition supporting the government led by Mykola Azarov of Yanukovych’s,  capitalist    Party of Regions. Following the 2012 elections, although trying to distance itself somewhat from  this  government,  the  KPU  again voted in parliament for the second Azarov government. In earlier years, the KPU had not only supported other corrupt Party of Regions governments but had even once joined a bloc with the conservative, pro-Western parties. Constantly allying with  one  or  other  wing of the capitalists, many KPU leaders are careerists who seek the privileges associated with being part of the political elite. At the same time  many  grassroots  and  mid-level KPU cadre have shown considerable courage in the face of the right wing repression and fascist  attacks  of  recent  months.  Yet  the KPU itself bows to reactionary nationalism and some KPU cadre have publicly opposed emulating European countries on the grounds that this means accepting African migrants and   permitting   homosexuality!    Against such vile backwardness, a truly communist, internationalist party like Lenin’s must be built. Ukraine needs a party that will train cadre to follow in the revolutionary footsteps of devoted Ukrainian communists of the past like Leon Trotsky  and Christian  Rakovsky: a party that can unite the toilers of all ethnicities to smash the filthy fascist forces for good by overthrowing  capitalist  rule.

ONLY SOCIALIST REVOLUTION CAN SAVE HUMANITY FROM THE THREAT OF WORLD WAR THREE!

Since the collapse of the USSR, the U.S.-led Western imperialists have gotten used to bullying the world with little hindrance and little competition. They don’t want an emerging Russian capitalist rival spoiling the party and, thus, want to isolate and contain Russia. They know full well that Russia’s military strength presents a problem. Late last month, sick of the Western powers’ aggressive posture against Russia over Ukraine, Putin boldly declared: “I want to remind you [the West] that Russia is one of the most powerful nuclear nations. This is a reality, not just words.” Everyone, indeed, took note because that is indeed the “reality, not just words”!

In the early period after  the  destruction  of the USSR, the new Russian capitalist rulers, while trying to assert their independence – for example in respect to the conflicts in Yugoslavia – were very much junior partners to the U.S. A. It was the U.S. that had orchestrated the capitalist counterrevolution that brought the new rulers to power and they still needed  Western help to consolidate their rule. For  example,  take the 1996 Russian presidential elections for which the Communist Party of the Russian Federation’s  candidate  Gennady  Zyuganov was set for victory. Although the Communist Party’s program was not revolutionary and Zyuganov’s victory would not have spelled the end of the new capitalist state it, nevertheless, would certainly have impeded Russia’s free market economic reforms and would have been a stunning propaganda blow against world capitalism. To stop this, the capitalists’ chosen candidate, then president Yeltsin relied on massive cash injections from the West to fund his campaign as well as the U.S. pressuring the IMF to grant a $10.2 billion loan to Russia so that Yeltsin could pay Russia’s long overdue wages and pensions on the eve of the elections. Additionally, Yelstin had to rely on a  CIA- assisted dirty tricks campaign against Zyuganov as well as Western and Russian agencies organising massive electoral fraud to “win” the election. More generally, with  the  destruction of socialistic rule sending the Russian economy into free fall, the new Russian capitalist rulers relied on their Western senior  partners  for the capital and investments needed to try and stabilise the capitalist economy.

Although at a level far below the relative position of the former USSR, eventually the capitalist Russian  economy  did  stabilise. Putin brought more discipline to the mafia capitalists that ruled  Russia  –  forcing  them to give up some of their individual interests and  bloody  competition  between  each  other for the sake of the overall interests of their class. Meanwhile, with Russia a huge oil/gas supplier, the strength of Russian capitalists grew as the price of oil and gas surged. Today, world oil prices are well over four times what they were when Putin first became president in 2000!  This has  been a  decisive factor in shaping the Russian capitalist class’ outlook. Thus, while Putin does have a slightly different outlook to what  Yeltsin  did,  the main difference in their governments is  not due to differing personal political proclivities but due to the different positions of Russian capitalism during their rule. Putin, after  all, had been Yelstin’s deputy and heir apparent.

The growing strength of Russian capitalism was highlighted when ten years after a 2003 joint venture between Russian oil tycoons and British petroleum giant BP that produced a company called TNK-BP, this same TNK-BP was taken over by a Russian firm. Today, Russian tycoons with interests in oil/gas, steel and banking are splashing their cash around in investments in the Mediterranean, Middle East, Britain and even Asia. Despite having just 2% of the world’s population, nearly 10% of the world’s richest 250 people are Russian citizens.  Due  to   the   concentrated   nature of Russian industry, these oligarchs are so wealthy that they have personally ammassed capital of the size held by banks and can often acquire decisive stakes in corporations by themselves or through partnerships among themselves.  Russian  capitalists  are  known for buying up big in companies listed on the London Stock Exchange and for buying huge holdings  in  London  property  and   banks. All this has been of little benefit to working class Russians. However, what its growing economic strength has meant is that  Russia has been able to re-modernise its military which had been ageing  and  deteriorating since the collapse of the USSR.

Some people, noting how the Soviet superpower stayed the hand of the Western powers and prevented these  imperialists from riding roughshod over the world to the extent that they wanted to, hope that Russia with its immense military strength and its growing economic clout and self-confidence can now do the same. Indeed, Russian military aid is today,  to  some  extent,  assisting  Syria to ward off a takeover by the NATO proxy “rebel” forces. Throughout history there have been such examples of capitalist powers providing assistance to a people fighting a just anti-colonial war against one of their rivals in a situation where they were not in a position to become the new masters of those people. They did this purely to weaken  their  rivals. The British imperialists often did this to their rivals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century while during the Second World War, Hitler’s Nazis offered some modest assistance to the Indian independence activist Subhas Chandra Bose in his struggle against British colonialism. However, Russia’s backing of Syria is largely an exception. Since the emergence of the Putin era, the U.S-led Western imperialists have continued to trample all over the world’s peoples. In 2001 the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and then two years later they  invaded  Iraq and occupied it for a decade. Russia has also not directly impeded the imperialist drive to destroy the Chinese workers state. Moscow’s position with respect to China is, to be sure, nuanced. It is the only world  power that does  not  threaten  China   either   militarily or politically and has built lucrative trade arrangements with China. At the same time it notably refused to stand by socialistic China in its disputes with imperialist Japan over the South China Sea, has supported Washington’s push against China’s socialistic DPRK ally and did not stand against the anti-communist campaign against China in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics (in turn it has been striking how up  to  now  China  has  refused to take any stand in defence of its Russian economic partner against the Western attacks on it over the Ukraine crisis). Meanwhile, when NATO moved to bomb Libya and impose regime change on it in 2011, Russia stepped aside and allowed this to happen. And, in general, Russia has not opposed the numerous imperialist military adventures in Africa over the last few years, such as those conducted by the French imperialists in the Ivory Coast and Mali.

In part, this is because Russia’s military strength with respect to the NATO powers is slightly below what  the  USSR’s  was  and  so is its relative economic position. However, this is not the only reason. The main reason that Russian power has not been able  to play the same curbing role on imperialism that the former  USSR  did  is  because  Russia is a capitalist power whereas the former Soviet Union was a socialistic power. And when examining this question, this difference means almost everything! This is not to say that we should not welcome Russian support for Syria. Even while maintaining  their struggle to overthrow their “own” capitalist rulers, communists in Russia should make sure they do not obstruct  whatever arms Russia sends to Syria (while not calling for this themselves) or for that matter the Donetsk and Luhansk separatists. However, in general, in global terms we can have no expectation of Russia being a strategic deterrent to Western imperialism. Russia being a capitalist power means that it will seek out – and has achieved – deals with the Western imperialists to allow the latter’s subjugation of “Third World” peoples in exchange for modest stakes for Russia in the resulting loot there or in other theatres of exploitation.

Most  importantly,  consider the difference in the domestic response when the USSR obstructed imperialism to those cases when Russia defies Western powers. When the USSR crossed imperialism, the response amongst class-conscious workers in imperialist centres like Australia was inspiration and increased sympathy for communism while amongst reactionary elements it brought increased hatred for communism. In short, when the USSR did impede imperialism the battle was reflected domestically as part of the class struggle. A struggle between the working class whose interests lie in fighting for  socialism and capitalism whose interests are in crushing communist influence. However, when today Russia (or some other capitalist power) gets in the way of a rival, the effect is to encourage reactionary great power nationalism on all sides. Such reactionary nationalism is poison to class struggle – and as Marxist-Leninists we understand that  ultimately  only  the class struggle leading to the revolutionary overthrow of imperialist states from within   can   decisively   stop   imperialism.

We, of course, do support the struggle of the masses of the neo-colonial and semi-colonial countries against imperialism. Thus, we defend the Syrian Army’s struggle  against the Washington-proxy “rebels.” However,  we do so largely from the point of view that the defeat of the pro-imperialist “rebels” would firstly weaken the imperialist rulers at home and thus encourage the class struggle within the  imperialist  centres.  Secondly,  because the defeat of the “rebels” would energise the anti-imperialist, liberation sentiments of the Syrian masses, this could open the  door  to the Syrian working class taking power from their “own” economically-tied-to-imperialism capitalist rulers.

However, there is an emerging  left-liberal trend that looks instead to capitalist opponents of the West to be part of a force that can stop the tyranny of Washington-led imperialism. This trend, which is often composed of some very articulate and  well-read  intellectuals and academics, is not organised or even coordinated and the individuals concerned do not necessarily even consider each other as part of a common trend. However, it consists of people  who are  co-thinkers  on several issues and share certain common features. Firstly, while they also side with socialistic states like China and the DPRK when they are in standoffs with imperialism, they make no distinction between such states and capitalist countries – like Russia and Iran – that clash with Western imperialism, ascribing to  each an equal progressive status. Thus, they often have rather unrealistic hopes that the BRICS countries which group together socialistic China with capitalist power Russia, semi- colonial India and capitalist countries in between can actually become a bulwark against imperialism. Secondly,  their  hopes that certain capitalist  countries  could become serious impediments to the Western imperialist juggernaut  are  based  on  their lack of belief in the revolutionary capacity of the working class in the Western imperialist centres. This springs from the lofty middle class, academic circles that they inhabit from which (looking at the working class  from the outside) it is easy to be dismissive of the possibility of revolutionary class struggle. For some within this left-liberal, anti-Western- imperialist trend, their dismissal of the class struggle  in  the  West  is  all  too  convenient.

Their relatively privileged position makes them quietly half-satisfied with the domestic reality in the West while finding the Western rulers’ entire foreign policy – as  well  as certain particular excesses at home – cruel and illogical. Thus, some elements within this trend are prone to labelling far-left groups that capitulate to imperialism – like the Cliffites – as “ultra-lefts” rather than as the right-opportunists that they are. This false retort of “ultra-left” allows these middle class, anti-imperialists to, on the one hand, correctly attack left groups for lining up behind Western imperialist regime-change  schemes by simply backing every anti-government movement abroad while, on the other hand, maintaining a rotten, liberal critique of these far left groups  for  being  too  irreconcilable to the capitalist rulers at home. Yet, in fact, groups like Socialist Alliance and the Cliffite groups (Socialist Alternative and Solidarity) are far from irreconcilable enough against the rulers at home – tailing after the ALP and the Greens and promoting strategies for change that rely on organs of the capitalist state. It is, in fact, these groups’ rightist adaptation to the imperial rulers at home from which their conciliation to imperialism’s agenda abroad arises.

Of    course,    the    individuals     who     can be considered part of this left-liberal, anti-imperialist trend do make some very well-informed and effective critiques of Western imperialism. Thus, when  necessary we should join in united front actions with them, for example against  the  imperialist drive for regime change in Syria. At the same time we must maintain our clear political independence from them and should criticise their  political  shortcomings.  We   need   to be clear in the current conflict in  Ukraine that while we defend the just struggle of the Donbass separatists and oppose the Western sanctions, bullying and propaganda against Russia, we do so not because we invest in capitalist Russia any progressive mission or because we hope that  Russia  can,  even  for its own reasons, become a bulwark against imperialism. We take our positions because this is what is necessary to weaken our “own” imperialism and the nationalism it uses to poison class struggle  and  because  this  is what is necessary to advance  the  struggle for  socialism  in  Ukraine  and  Russia  as  well.

We repeat that as Marxist-Leninists we understand that only the working class united and drawing behind it all the oppressed in class struggle – alongside socialistic states where the working class masses already hold state power – can ultimately stop imperialism.

As Leninists, we also understand that capitalist powers clashing with rival powers will eventually lead to world war. Capitalist rivalries brought us two world wars last century. If the capitalist system is not overthrown it will lead to a new world war– this time one fought where all sides have nuclear weapons at the start of the war. During the Occupy protests in 2011, some  liberals and conspiracy types promoted theories, still prevalent today, that capitalism is simply a system of financial schemes where people in three piece suits dream up devious monetary plots to rip off  the  population.  However, there is much, much more to it. Capitalism is a system of exploitation of labour ultimately enforced not only by propaganda but by the use of, or threatened use of, force against those who dare to resist. It also involves the capitalists of the more powerful countries exploiting the masses of the poorer countries again through the actual, or threatened, use of military force. Furthermore, this imperialist tyranny abroad is protected from rivals and would be rivals also by the use, or threatened use, of military force. In summary, violence is at the heart of capitalism especially in its final and highest stage – the stage of imperialism.

To  put  things  in  perspective,  the  tensions between the U.S-led Western imperial powers and  their  Russian  would-be  capitalist  rival are,   currently,   nothing   like   the   level   they were  between  the  rival  capitalist  powers  at the start of World Wars I and II. Indeed, the current   tensions   between   the   Western powers and capitalist Russia are not yet, at the time of writing, a quarter of what they were at the height of the Cold War between the  imperialist  powers  and  the  socialistic USSR. It was then that huge, heavily armed, military    forces    faced    off    against    each other on the borders between the U.S.-led imperialist  countries  and  the  Moscow-led, Warsaw Pact socialistic countries. However, the heightened capitalist tensions do point very   much   to   the   future   slide   towards world    war.    The    expected    line-up    and combinations in such a possible conflict can quickly change. The capitalist powers have no real loyalty to each other. Although, currently, the NATO countries are all arrayed against Russia, we can see how France and especially Germany eye up Russia’s military strength and wonder how nice it would be to combine their economic clout with Russia’s military power to stop the Americans from dominating everything. Indeed, it was notable that Germany, which has close economic ties with Russia, was not happy with the recent NATO meeting that approved a tougher line against Russia. France, for its part, had to be pressured by the U.S. to postpone – for the time being – the delivery of two, highly advanced Mistral navy  assault  ships  to  Russia.   Meanwhile, the extent of friction  between  the  U.S.  and its German “ally” is evident in the recent revelations of extensive U.S. spying on German government leaders and in the angry response it provoked from  the  German  government. In July, the stakes were raised  further when Germany expelled the CIA representative  at the U.S. embassy in Berlin.   As for what the U.S. really thinks of its EU “partners”  this was colourfully expressed in U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland’s now famous, “F_ck the EU!” statement to the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine  that  was  recorded in the phone intercept, referred to earlier. There are indeed some elements within the Washington establishment that wonder why it is not Russia that the U.S. is allying with. They think having Russia aboard could put their West European potential competitors on the back foot and, what is more, secure Russia’s co-operation for the anti-communist drive against China.

It is the question of China that moderates and conditions inter- imperialist tensions.  What  unites the various imperialist powers is their common need to ultimately destroy    the    socialistic    state    in China. Thus, the drive against China somewhat retards the inter-capitalist  rivalries.  The extent to which rivalries flare up is, therefore, also conditioned by the extent to which the imperialists are confident that the current degree of capitalist economic penetration within China can open the way for capitalist counterrevolution there. The renewed pro- market reforms being flagged in China by rightist premier Li Keqiang – most significantly ones that involve  sales  of  minority  stakes in some state-owned enterprises to private investors – and the replacement of the former Hu Jintao government by a more right-leaning one headed by Xi Jinping has, no doubt, given the imperialists renewed hope. Yet they would also recall that every time in the past that they feel that they are making  progress  towards the goal of precipitating the collapse of socialistic rule in China, the goal posts seem to move further away as the intervention of the Chinese working class and determined leftists force  a  retreat   in   pro-capitalist   measures. Xi Jinping’s recent  unequivocal  statements that China must  stick  to  socialism  would have again recalled these disappointments amongst the imperialists. In December last year, a U.S. warship almost rammed into a Chinese naval vessel in the South China Sea, highlighting that Washington understands that the collapse of socialistic rule in China can only be possible if the imperialists maintain military and political pressure on the PRC.

Even given the moderating of inter-capitalist tensions due to the existence of a socialistic power, the capitalist system, if not overthrown first, will ultimately, soon or latter, lead to world war. For the only way that the capitalist powers can make up for the decay of their system at home – which has seen major parts of the capitalist world lurching from one economic crisis to another over the last 6 years – is through increasing their plunder and exploitation of the peoples of the “Third World.” However, there is only a finite amount of bounty to loot and each of the capitalist powers want as great a share of it as possible. It  is  this   intense   competition   for   spheres of exploitation that will inevitably lead to a new world war unless the system that causes it is not first swept away through socialist revolution.

Right now, one set of tasks for Western leftists that are necessary to advance the struggle for socialist revolution is to demand the lifting of Western sanctions against their Russian rival, to oppose their military aid to their Ukrainian junior partners and to oppose the Western imperialist propaganda and diplomatic campaign against Russia. Let’s not allow Tony Abbott – and the pro-capitalist ALP – to get away with diverting working class  anger  at the ruling class’ vicious attacks on low rent public housing and its planned assault on medicare and unemployment payments by whipping up national-chauvinism against Russia. As communists, who passionately support what the former  Soviet  workers state represented, we of course have a special hatred for the Ukrainian and Russian capitalists whose rule was founded on the destruction of our USSR. But we understand that behind  this  counterrevolution  stood the Western imperialists – who remain the most powerful, brutal and dangerous forces on the planet today. One of the partners in this  Western  imperialist   alliance   happens to be the Australian capitalist class – the main enemy of this country’s working class, Aboriginal people, non-white working class youth, the unemployed and all the poor. Let’s make sure workers are not lined up behind the predatory schemes abroad of Australian imperialism. Let’s instead do everything to weaken this main enemy at home  so  that the working class and the downtrodden can eventually sweep away from power this nasty, racist and ambitious exploiting class for good.