CERQUI’s Declaration: One month of war

CERQUI’s Declaration – Ukraine

Liaison Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International*

One month of war

March 26^th , 2022

The United States and European allies are the most responsible for the barbarism!

It is necessary for the working class and the exploited people to rise up for the end of NATO and US military bases!

It is part of this anti-imperialist struggle, the defense of Ukraine’s self-determination!

Since the first signs of the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine militarily, the Liaison Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (CERQUI) and its sections denounced that the United States was promoting war. By ordering Zelensky not to accept a neutrality agreement, US imperialism decided to turn the Ukrainian people into cannon fodder. This starting point of the war has been hidden by the press controlled from the White House.

One month after the Russian military incursion, Ukraine is in ruins, thousands have died and millions have taken refuge. The Zelensky government and imperialism propagate that Russia can be defeated by the heroic resistance of the population. Which would justify sending weapons and hired mercenaries in several countries.

The last piece of the US campaign is that Russian troops could use chemical and nuclear weapons. It is perfectly well know that in a war anything can happen, depending on the forces in combat and the moment in which the confrontation development is. But nothing indicates that Putin’s government has reached the point of desperation to resort to chemical and nuclear weapons. It is worth remembering that the United States invented the reason for chemical weapons to invade Iraq in 2003, bypassing the UN Security Council, razing the country, removing the government, setting up a war crime trial, and decreeing the death penalty for Saddam Hussein.

US imperialism has long since become a danger to humanity. The most obvious and definitive signal was given when the Harry Truman administration used Japan, at the end of the Second World War, to test the atomic bomb. The United States not only armed itself with the ability to eliminate entire countries, it became the most voracious seller of arms. The North American arms industry is largely intertwined with the domestic and foreign economy, as well as with the State.

The wars – there were many after the second world conflagration – are in the umbilical interests of the arms industry monopolies and related monopolies, such as energy, etc. NATO became one of its main military arms in Europe, alongside countries from other continents, which serve as a military base. The United States promoted a gigantic militarization of the world after the Second World War. That was and is the condition for the greatest power to guarantee the partition of the world, established in Yalta, under its aegis. Which meant turning all the forces of the world bourgeoisie against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The fact that the USSR, in the division of the world, counts on East Germany and East Europe has become a major obstacle to imperialist domination.

The growing need for the market constituted a driving force for imperialist militarism, especially with the end of the post-war reconstruction period. Peaceful coexistence between the United States and its allies with the USSR, which came to include the people’s republics of Eastern Europe, was not possible. The same was true of Yugoslavia in the Balkans and revolutionary China in the East.

National borders, which protected social property and the process of transition from capitalism to socialism, would have to be overthrown, and capitalist relations of production restored. What would be done, either by war, by the action of the governing bureaucracy itself, or by internal popular uprisings, which could lead to civil war. Paths that could be combined.

Eastern Europe fell like a house of cards after the Kremlin’s military interventions in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia failed. Yugoslavia was torn apart by civil war and NATO bombing of Serbia. The USSR collapsed, plunged into a deep economic and political crisis, giving way to the longest and bloodiest civil war in the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

The United States and the European powers were thus able to cross the borders of Eastern Europe, demarcated in World War II, re-establish the regime of private ownership of the means of production, impose servile governments and install NATO. Yugoslavia met a more tragic end, as it broke apart into several bourgeois republics, lost economic unity, and raised national hatred to heights. Capitalist Germany has reconstituted itself, re-emerged itself as the main European power, and is ready to rearm itself.

The dissolution of the USSR gave way to new national borders, with the diaspora of the former Soviet republics. The fragmentation of the USSR resulted in a major economic regression. Russia and the republics that made up the new federation left weakened, unable to live in economic harmony, and pressured by internal crises. The problem of national oppression, typical of imperialist capitalism, emerged. The relations of oppression, which were more or less hidden under the bureaucratized and restorationist USSR, were completely exposed.

It is in this scenario that two major conflicts erupt: that of Georgia and that of Ukraine. Both former Soviet republics have placed themselves on the same trajectory as the former Baltic republics of subjecting themselves to the European Union and NATO. If they reached that point, imperialism’s economic and military siege of Russia would practically come to an end.

The bourgeois oligarchy and the Putin government were unable to convince the bourgeois oligarchies and the governments of Ukraine and Georgia to renounce this objective. Under the impact of the collapse of the USSR, the separatist movements of South Ossetia and Abkhazia broke out between 1991 and 1993, thus, the war broke out in 2008 between Georgia and Russia. In five days, Georgia was defeated, and France brokered the peace agreement.

The outbreak of the crisis in Ukraine in 2014, as can be seen, was not an isolated case. The overthrow of the pro-Russian government and the installation of a puppet of the European Union and the United States projected border conflicts throughout the region, indicating the influence of imperialism. The economic forces of the great powers moved from the recovery of national borders in Eastern Europe to the incorporation of the former Soviet republics. It was, therefore, the expansion of international capital over the borders of the former USSR.

The accusation by Biden and his European minions that Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine expresses expansionist purposes is completely false. The truth is that Russia, economically weakened, needs to keep the former Soviet republics under its tutelage, without which it will lose the independence won by the October 1917 revolution and will fall to its knees before the United States. But to maintain such power, it must exert national oppression. Ukraine is strategic to Russia, both to contain the advance of adversaries in the economic war, and to maintain the ability to influence the international order, ruled by US imperialism.

The events show that there is an interdependence between Russia’s self-defense in the face of the siege of the great powers and the national oppression exerted over the former Soviet republics. The war in Ukraine synthesizes  this contradiction. And there is no way to explain it in all its dimensions, without resorting to the economic and social consequences and the historical meaning of the restorationist process, driven by counterrevolutionary forces, since Stalin and his cronies took over the leadership of the Bolshevik party, the command of the Workers’ State and the leadership of the Third International. An unprecedented crisis of world revolutionary leadership took place, whose brutal reflexes are manifested in the war in Ukraine.

The predominance of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalism among the oppressed masses in the ex-Soviet republics and ex-people’s republics of Eastern Europe explains why they remain in the dark and do not react against the imperialist alliance, led by the United States. And they are not able to reconstitute their revolutionary internationalist unity against the national oppression exercised by restorationist Russia, the oligarchy that seized nationalized property and Putin’s anti-worker government.

The war completed a month with no prospect of a peace agreement. The most important cities in Ukraine continue to be bombed and ruins are strewn. It is not known precisely how much the Ukrainian resistance hit Russian troops, but it is known that the supply of weapons by NATO to Zelensky, the support of the population for the government and the regimentation of battalions of mercenaries have hindered the surrender of Ukraine.

The United States finds itself in a relatively comfortable position. It is watching the Ukrainian people serve as cannon fodder, the migratory wave favoring the hypocrisy of humanitarianism, Russia struggling with economic sanctions and the campaign growing among the middle class in favor of condemning Putin. Imperialism is interested in Russia weakening Ukraine and then handing it over to finance capital to rebuild it. This is a possible variant, taken from a strategic point of view. It is on its own interest to promote national hatred of Russians, already discriminated against by the Ukrainian oligarchy and by Zelensky’s chauvinist policy.

Completing a month into the war, Biden met with the European Council, the Group of 7 (G7) and NATO. There is an apprehension on the part of European powers about greater economic damage if the war is prolonged and the sanctions, demanded by the United States, increase. The rise to more than 3.5 million the number of refugees begins to weigh on Poland’s bills and social conditions. And Zelensky’s desperate request that Biden order NATO to impose a no-fly zone and send warplanes to the Ukrainian Armed Forces needed an answer, even if it was just a maneuver.

The European powers took the position of avoiding a direct confrontation with Russia, which could lead to a war of greater proportions. Biden announced $1 billion in aid to the Polish government. Most important, however, was a commitment to increase “military assistance” to Zelensky, strengthen NATO and send more troops to Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. Everything indicates that economic sanctions have reached the limit that Western Europe can bear; and direct NATO interference in the war continues to divide the forces of imperialism.

Under these conditions, it is not known how much longer Ukraine will hold out. For the Ukrainian and Russian working class and the exploited people, the longer the bombings last, the more unnecessary suffering, since this is not a war of liberation. The Ukrainian people are being sacrificed for a cause that belongs only to the bourgeois oligarchy and imperialism. The Russian working class watches the destruction of entire cities in Ukraine, but pays dearly for war expenditures and economic sanctions. The exploited people of Europe and other continents bear the cost of rising prices, the heavy cost of living, the economic downturn, the closing of factories and rising unemployment.

The bourgeoisie was unable to defend the masses from the pandemic, which left a trail of 6.5 million dead, and millions who were pushed into poverty, misery and hunger. Now, with the war in Ukraine, the United States and its servile allies impose economic-financial measures on the world that fall everywhere, but mainly on the semi-colonial countries. There are plenty of reasons for the world proletariat to rise up against the insane war of domination. The crisis of revolutionary leadership is the only reason why the exploited people of Russia and Ukraine, Ukraine and Europe, and Europe and the whole world do not unite. But its vanguard, even if embryonic, has in its hands the internationalist orientation of Marxism-Leninism-Trotskyism.

The banners raised by the Liaison Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International remain in force: Dismantling of NATO and US military bases; End of economic sanctions; Withdrawal of Russian Troops, Territorial Integrity and Self-Determination of Ukraine. Taken together, these revolutionary banners and tasks correspond to the program of the Socialist United States of Europe and the World. This is the way to unite the proletariat and prepare the conditions for the inevitable wars of emancipation to come.

Capitalism has long only offered wars and privations to the oppressed majority. The destruction of the USSR interrupted the process of transition from capitalism to socialism, but did not eliminate its objective bases and the need to be reconstituted by the proletarian revolutions.

*English translation for “Comitê de Enlace pela Reconstrução da IV Internacional” – CERQUI