(From Il Partito Comunista no.364, March-April 2014)

The fight between Russia, the United States of America, Germany and other plunderers to divide up the Ukraine is aimed not only against the Ukrainian proletariat, with the prospect of years of misery, poverty and increased exploitation before it, but also against the working classes of the countries in the west and in Russia, all of whom risk ending up in an imperialist war in which they would be the first and major victims.

The ruthless power struggle between various groups of capitalists, bound to Washington or Moscow, Berlin, Warsaw or Kiev, is just the reflection in the Ukraine of the exacerbation of the conflict between the world’s major economic and military powers. The cause is the crisis of over-production, which is undermining the capitalist system from within, upsetting any equilibrium, and calling into question the threadbare ideology of the bourgeoisie, with its false secular myths of peace, coexistence and progress.

The current crisis, taking place exactly a hundred years after the outbreak of the first global imperialist war, shows that capitalism, in all countries, is now in a state of advanced putrefaction and decay, and that the time is historically ripe for society to take the road to communism. However, the forces of capitalism will seek to bar this road to the working class, by undermining its awareness of its destiny and the enormous strength it possesses, and thus preventing its international descent into revolution.

The street battles in Kiev and in other cities in the Ukraine led to the fall of the Yanukovitch government and its replacement with another one, which is equally bourgeois. But the new government, like the previous one, cannot ignore the fact that the Ukrainian capitalist state is enormously in debt to the imperialist loan sharks, a debt whose consequences weigh on the working classes, condemned to hunger and cold.

And that is why the government is fanning the embers of nationalism, to try and make the proletariat forget its real problems: wages, work, housing. And it is in pursuit of the same anti-proletarian and imperialist aim that the government in Moscow spreads its equally rotten propaganda among Russian proletarians, and those of Russian origin in the Crimea and in the regions of the east of the Ukraine!

Defense of the nation, one’s race, one’s religion are the incantations that the bourgeoisie, through its servants in the media, political parties and the trade unions, spread among proletarians in order that they mistakenly see their foreign brother as the enemy. These deceptive banners are there to divide them, and to prevent them from joining together in the trade union struggle now and in the communist revolution tomorrow. The revolts in the streets of Kiev and other cities in the Ukraine show that the “holy” flags and patriotic slogans are now just weapons used by the bourgeois states to make war propaganda.

This is why, maybe, the Ukrainian proletariat has instinctively avoided the gatherings in the city squares where patriotic songs are sung, be they “pro-Russian” or “pro-European”. The proletariat has nothing in common with its own bourgeoisie, with the bosses, with the “oligarchs”, whether draped in the flags of democracy and Europe, or seeking the protection of the Russian bear. It must reject solidarity with its own bourgeoisie and with the middle classes and concentrate on developing its own autonomous and independent class organization.

The proletariat should devote its valuable energy to rebuilding the essential instruments required for its emancipation, which are a real, combative class trade union, and the internationalist, revolutionary, Communist Party.

NO to defending countries – YES to defending the proletarian class!

NO to the war between states – YES to the international war between the classes!