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(Chapel is a British Mandelista.)
Facebook Status Update
By Duncan Chapel
Four points on Ukraine, flowing from one key point: What's happening is
that the dominant ideas in Ukraine are those of nationalism, and that
the struggle there is channeled and transformed by it.
First, the description of Maidan and the governing as pro-EU, and pro-EU
as bring pro-NATO, is simplistic. The main parties, the Ukrainian
oligarchs and also the new president, are trying to struggle the divide
between the EU and Russia: they want access to _both_ markets. They are
not simply EU (and, of course, Right Sector is anti-EU) It's because of
Putin that the comparador strategy isn't tenable. Putin wants the other
CIS countries to be semi-colonies. The masses support the accession
agreement for different reasons: they have experienced, in the 19th and
20th centuries, that Russian underdeveloped Ukraine. They see that they
are already most of the way along the painful route to entry into a free
trade zone with Europe which could be powerfully progressive, not only
economically but in enforcing civil liberties. The idea of "Europe" is a
glimpse over the borders to their West, and it looks good. So, the
masses and the ruling elites are in the same movement for different
reasons, which is why the strategy of permanent revolution is so
powerful in Ukraine.
Fascists are not the battering ram that is introducing neo-liberalism
into Ukraine. The nationalist movements east and west are under the
leadership of bourgeois oligarchs. Putin and the Russian oligarchs
implemented IMF shock therapy, and separation from Ukraine will not
protect them from neo-liberalism. The leadership, as we can see in
Donestk, is eclectic but procapitalist.
The description of what has happened as a coup by a rump is problematic.
We have an elected president; an elected parliament, and a cabinet
elected by parliament. If this was a coup d'etat, how is it that the
political parties and parliament not only remain in place, but also
retain power through the state? A coup d'etat involves a _minority_
action, while this was a majority action by the Ukrainian parliament
which, of course, has the right to impeach the president. A majority is
not a rump. Of course the impeachment procedure in Ukrainian law
requires, after the removal of the president, a trial. He is not
submitting himself to a trial, but that in itself does not make a coup.
The movement in the East is disoriented. The Kharkov rally leaflet, with
its swastika Star of David symbol (the new president is of Jewish
decent), shows the wide range of motivations. There are Russian fascist
groups in that movement, and the fear of fascism is clearly fictitious,
as is the fear of the suppression of language rights. What is real is
the fear of neo-liberalism. Sadly Borot'ba, and even more so their
tailists like Workers' Power, struggle to admit that the danger of
neoliberalism comes from the class that leads both movements, and that
there are organised fascists inside both movements. Nationalism is
channelling the real fear of neoliberalism into a movement which, by
dividing the working class along linguistic rather than national lines,
is turning the masses into tools of the oligarchs.
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