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On 2/3/15 9:14 PM, James Creegan via Marxism wrote:
rty?
Do you think US military aid to Ukraine would be a good thing?
No, I do not.
The war in Ukraine has been a disaster both in human and political
terms. I thought that I made this clear by posting a link to this article:
https://peopleandnature.wordpress.com/2014/10/19/ukraine-war-as-a-means-of-social-control/
One consequence of the war in Ukraine is that some so-called “lefts”
have openly supported the separatist regimes established by gangs of
armed fascists and other thugs. To my mind, this is a turning-point in
the politics of these Stalinist (and some Trotskyist) groups. The logic
is that if people have guns and they are on the opposite side from the
USA, they deserve support. The fact that this is done in the name of
“anti fascism” – an argument that dovetails completely with Kremlin
propaganda that the Ukrainian government is fascist – makes it all the
more obscene.
What events in Ukraine have reminded us is that, once working class
people are armed with baseball bats and revolvers – let alone heavy
artillery – and are turned against each other, it’s already very very
late to start thinking of ways to promote social struggles. It is bad
enough that some so-called socialists participate in this. It is worse
that other so-called socialists sit in other countries, far away from
the violence and the hurt that it brings to working class people, and
not only applaud this activity but also use it to justify political
alignment with the Kremlin.
Recognising war and military conflict as a means of social control means
acknowledging its disastrous impact on social and labour movements. The
widespread availability of lethal weapons in society amounts to a new
type of hierarchy – of the armed against the unarmed – that reinforces
the hierarchies of state against civilian population, capitalist class
against working class and men against women.
News from eastern Ukraine – where protesters face shooting into
demonstrations by unidentified thugs, and grenade attacks on their homes
– confirms this. (See some reports that I have posted today here.) So
does the situation in western Ukraine, according to friends and comrades
there who say that many households now have guns and that there is
mounting pressure on young men, from both the state and extreme
nationalists, to join the military conflict in the east.
2. War inevitably deepens splits in the workers’ movement. A depressing
recent example was that of the independent miners’ union, one of the
first unions to emerge during the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship in
1989-90 and still one of the best organised. In June the branch of the
union in Donetsk – where most of the mines are closed, and many have
been flooded and ruined in the course of the military conflict – issued
a statement supported the Kyiv government’s “anti terrorist operation”
against the “Donetsk People’s Republic”. What made the statement
especially problematic in my view was that it denounced trade unionists
in Kyiv who had protested against the government’s plans to take
austerity measures including a public sector wage freeze, on the grounds
that the funds were needed for military action.
What a classic victory for our enemies: an organisation representing
workers under seige by the pro-Russian military dictators turning
against those representing workers in central and western Ukraine. Even
workers’ organisations built up over long periods of time can very
quickly be divided, and solidarity between them wrecked, in war conditions.
There are some examples of community and worker organisation
independently of the state and armed formations: the protesters who have
taken to the streets of several eastern Ukrainian towns this month, the
miners at Kriviy Rih who called for the formation of working-class
self-defence units, and others. Unfortunately these remain few and far
between. But this, and only this, can be the place to start to build
social movements.
3. For communists and socialists (however more exactly defined),
anti-militarism needs to be at the centre of our activity. In Russia and
Ukraine this is a very concrete issue: socialist organisations there are
thinking about how to support not only community mobilisations mentioned
above but also e.g. soldiers who refuse to serve, and the families of
those wounded or killed in conflict who are then denied support from the
state.
A heartening step forward was taken by a wide array of socialist and
anarchist groups in Moscow, who joined the huge anti-war march in Moscow
on 21 September in an “anti militarist coalition”. Their slogans
included “Capitalism causes all wars. This one too” and “Profit for the
oligarchs; medals for the generals; bodies for soldiers’ mothers”. The
coalition called for the release of Aleksandr Kolchenko, the
anti-fascist activist imprisoned by the Russian authorities in Crimea,
as well as anti-fascists jailed in Moscow following the protest movement
of 2011-12. (Report here, Russian only.)
Every step of the real movement is more important than a dozen
programmes, Karl Marx once said. In Ukraine, the real movement is now
trying to break the shackles of war and militarism with which its feet
have been chained to the floor.
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