Displaying items by tag: war

February 24, 2022

Putin's government carried out a military action called "special military operation" in Ukraine, claiming a defense in the pro-Russian region of Donbass. Russia bombed military and strategic targets in Ukraine and threatens with an invasion of its troops from different flanks into a besieged Ukraine.

Putin justifies the attack by saying that he seeks to guarantee the independence of the self-proclaimed "people's republics" of Donetsk and Lugansk, which for the last 8 years have been attacked by the Ukrainian army. In this way it is trying to destabilize the Ukrainian government, which is a NATO ally.

The response of US imperialism and the EU is greater economic sanctions so that Putin desists from his warlike advance. On the other hand, China is trying to balance this situation of chaos.

Faced with this scenario, revolutionaries must intervene by proposing a workers' solution to the crisis that has opened up, to intervene independently in a world situation marked by the economic crisis and accelerated by the pandemic. We must agitate among the workers as a whole that this is not our war, that it is totally contrary to the historical interests of the proletariat. The interests pursued by NATO and imperialism are those of assimilating the former workers' states as a semi-colony. On the side of Putin's government, they seek to sustain a restorationist bureaucracy at the service of a proto-bourgeoisie that is not willing, in its transition to capitalism, to be a plain semi-colony.

The "severe economic sanctions" posed by imperialism will be paid for at the cost of greater exploitation of our class, not only in its own countries, but of the plundering of the semicolonies. That is why we must unite the workers against the governments in office and prevent, with workers' methods, the military machine from being set in motion to defend imperialist interests. In the region in conflict, we must seek unity between the Ukrainian and Russian proletariat to stop the capitalist restoration in course, expropriate the proto-bourgeoisie and complete the revolutionary tasks that were left unfinished. This, starting from recovering the most advanced lessons of the revolutionary process of October, such as the formation of federations as the state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, lessons that -not by chance- both, imperialism and Putin and the Russian restorationists hate and want to erase from history.

This conflict is taking place in the midst of a decomposition of imperialism and a process of assimilation of the former workers' states. American imperialism is trying to recover world hegemony, showing its historical weakness, while the bureaucracies in command of the former workers' states of Russia and China are trying to maintain the place conquered within the capitalist system in crisis.

Those of us who claim to be revolutionary Marxists make an urgent call on the currents that still uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat to an International Conference to discuss a common internationalist program and actions. 

COR Chile - LOI Brasil - COR Argentina

The dispute over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, or Upper Karabakh, between Azerbaijan and the Armenian independentists who control the area has triggered a war that has blown two ceasefires since it began on 27 September.

The current territories of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the southern Caucasus were part of the tsarist empire and were incorporated into the USSR after the October revolution. The territory of Nagorno-Karabakh maintained a special status within the Soviet federation, as an autonomous territory with an Armenian majority integrated into the territory of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. The break-up of the USSR led to a confrontation between Armenia and Azerbaijan from 1988 onwards, and after its fall a bloody war began which, following the intervention of Russia and imperialism, ended in a precarious ceasefire in 1994. Azerbaijan is an oil and gas extraction power, linked to Turkey by language and history. Armenia is a small mountainous country of just over 3 million inhabitants, whose industrialization advanced with its integration into the USSR and then fell back abruptly with its fall, and receives large remittances from the so-called diaspora, some 10 million Armenians who live outside this republic, after being expelled from eastern Anatolia by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, through the genocide of over a million people.

The social basis of disorder

What characterizes the present historical period is, on the one hand, a tortuous process of assimilation of the former laboring states to the capitalist system and, on the other hand, the advance of imperialist decomposition that at the same time determines the difficulties to complete this assimilation. This is exacerbated by the disorientation of the US imperialism, which has not had any coherent policy in the region and is rather plunged into its own internal economic and social crisis and electoral dispute. On the other hand, the EU, which was the supra-state structure that was supposed to organize the assimilation of the former workers' states of Eastern Europe, is, on the contrary, immersed in the negotiation of the exit of one of its main partners with Brexit. And it has been paralyzed in its policy for its south-eastern border, because of divided positions on its relationship with Turkey, whose bourgeoisie defined to stop fighting for the entry into the European bloc (which led to a coup attempt in 2016). This division is exposed by the different positions in relation to the Turkish advance in the hydrocarbon prospections in the Eastern Mediterranean, its policy in Cyprus, its interventions in Libya and Syria and finally its position of open support to the Azeri government in the current war in High Karabakh. While the French President, Macron, is trying to lead a policy of more confrontation with the Turkish Erdogan government, with the support of the right-wing Greek government, Merkel and the German government prefer a policy of appeasement. However, it is necessary to say that the obstacles for the assimilation of the former Soviet states are not given by a flaw in the foreign policy, but by the tearing apart of the European imperialist project in its material capitalist bases, especially since the outbreak of the crisis in 2008. Today, we can speak of a new crisis that is a continuation of that, but not a linear one, exacerbated by the pandemic and by the disastrous consequences of the destruction of workers' conquests of the previous decades, which the European imperialist bourgeoisie used under the banner of austerity to try to find a bourgeois way out.

Before this imperialist decomposition and the erratic foreign policy of the metropolitan states, the Turkish bourgeoisie tries to design its own road map as a regional power, what could be called an "operetta empire" with totally semi-colonial bases, not less brutal and murderous. In its turn, the Bonapartism of the Russian proto-bourgeoisie led by Putin must face the contradictions that burst in the borders of its state rule, as it is the case of the crisis in Belarus, the semi-insurrection in Kyrgyzstan and the war we refer to in this note. Here, we find it interesting to take up Leon Trotsky's hypothesis in relation to capitalist restoration, which proposed that the counter-revolutionary leadership that would lead the restoration processes, in its contradiction of not being able to conform in class, would generate, in its relation to the tendential laws of the world economy, a capitalist chaos. In this case, it extends to the periphery of the former USSR, where sectors coming from the state bureaucracy and the petty bourgeoisie of these countries are pushing for territorial control under the guise of arguments of international law and nationalist ideologies in an attempt to establish new, undoubtedly semi-colonial states, seeking a balance between the different surrounding international forces (both Armenia and Azerbaijan belong to countless post-war international coalitions) in a period of capitalist decline and, therefore, of the decline of the state form of bourgeois domination, the nation state.

The truncated experience of the USSR

In the face of the current war, which already counts dozens of deaths, hundreds of refugees and the bombing of major cities in Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan, some groups and intellectuals are proposing a return to the "cosmopolitan and internationalist values" of the Soviet state as a solution for achieving peace between peoples. The Marxist basis of the revolutionary program, which led the Bolsheviks to seize power and develop the experience of the USSR as a state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, denies that a program is based on ideologies. Because it is the social being that determines the consciousness and not the other way around. The problem of the national minorities who were trapped in the then called "prison of the peoples", the Tsarist empire, was taken very seriously by Lenin. These oppressed nations were living under conditions of backward economic and social development. The appeal of the communists, materialized in the Congresses of the Third International, was to integrate into a Federation of Socialist Republics in a revolutionary alliance with the Russian proletariat in order to overcome this backwardness through socialist forms of economic and social organization, by compressing the historical stages. The transition from capitalism to socialism under the leadership of the proletariat through its dictatorship, these were the material bases that would allow the democratic reorganization of the peoples within the federation. A socialist future would pose new problems, but it would undoubtedly make it possible to liquidate the fratricidal struggles sown by backwardness and the subsequent needs for territorialization of profit typical of capitalism.

In fact, the experience of the USSR enabled the Caucasian nations to live together and achieve relative industrial development. However, the experience was truncated by the bureaucratic counter-revolution led by Stalin, who established the rule of this caste over the proletariat and national minorities in the USSR, strengthening the state apparatus instead of laying the social foundations for its extinction. The passage of the bureaucracy into the ranks of the open capitalist restoration in the early 1990s liberated all the centrifugal tendencies of capital, leading to wars like the one in the Balkans, and this process will continue to develop for a certain period of time, the duration of which we cannot define a priori, as we cannot find a stable capitalist way out given imperialist decomposition. And neither a progressive way out, given the crisis of revolutionary leadership. This conditionality will be determined, in turn, not by "values and ideals" to the taste of the nostalgic, but by class struggle, by the clash between the proletarian forces of the world revolution and the bourgeois counter-revolution. "To define the Soviet regime as transitional, or intermediate, means to abandon such finished social categories as capitalism (and therewith "state capitalism") and also socialism. But besides being completely inadequate in itself, such a definition is capable of producing the mistaken idea that from the present Soviet regime only a transition to socialism is possible. In reality a backslide to capitalism is wholly possible. [...] Doctrinaires will doubtless not be satisfied with this hypothetical definition. They would like categorical formulae; yes-yes, and no-no. In our analysis, we have above all avoided doing violence to dynamic social formations which have no precedent and have no analogies. The scientific task, as well as the political, is not to give a finished definition to an unfinished process, but to follow all its stages, separate its progressive from its reactionary tendencies, expose their mutual relations, foresee possible variants of development, and find in this foresight a basis for action.". (L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed)

We revolutionaries are opposed to the fratricidal war between Armenians and Azeris, which is led by the sectors that want to create small vassal states of imperialism in the region. It is part of the general militarism to which the Bonapartist tendencies around the world in the face of bourgeois decay are leading. We are fighting for a workers' solution, based on a program of expropriation of the expropriators, the defeat of the proto-bourgeoisies that run the republics of the former Soviet Union and for a Socialist Federation of the Caucasus. The Russian working class is called upon to support the Azeri, Armenian and Georgian workers in this task, starting with the paralysis of the arms and military equipment factories and their transport, intended to arm both sides for the benefit of Putin and his acolytes. We also call on the workers of Turkey, the European countries and the USA to labor actions against the intervention of their bourgeois states in the region, which as it was shown in Kosovo, only serves to increase the massacres and hardships of the workers and poor people. Once again, and in an increasingly urgent manner, we call on all the revolutionary currents that defend the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat and fight for the reconstruction of the Fourth International to promote an International Conference.

For the defeat of Imperialism in the Middle East

Stop USA’s war machinery

 COR Argentina - January 2020

Thursday 2nd January at dawn. Assassin drones sent by Trump under the advise of the Yankee military high command shoot on the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, who dies along with several collaborators. Soleimani was in Baghdad and was executed with no previous trial, like many others under imperialist fire. But in this case, we are talking about an officer of a foreign State and within the territory of another State –in the papers independent, although it is clear that the occupation of Irak on behalf of the Yankees has never ceased.

Trump hesitates. His policy was to withdraw the American troop out of the Middle East, including Afghanistan and Iraq. He wants to take advantage of the fact that the USA don’t depend so much on the oil of the region, thanks to the “fracking revolution” within their own territory and an eventual “recovery" of Venezuela. But the high commands of the Pentagon convince him of responding to the attack on the American Embassy in Iraq, that took place the last day of 2019. This attack had peculiarities: it was a popular demonstration against the American presence in Iraq. Trump accepts that its necessary to respond and orders the assassination of the Iranian General. It is an act of war against another State, outside any umbrella of imperialist international legality. It is a brutal demonstration of force on behalf of the imperialist Power that leads the world.

But the killing actually shows the weakness of the US. Of course, not from the military point of view, where its supremacy is uncontestable, at least in the mid-term. It is a weakness of its position in the State system, configured as superstructure of global capitalism. It is a structural weakness, due to the deepening of imperialist decomposition, and it’s as well determined by the dangerous cracking of the postwar balance. The attack against Soleimani was not included in any action plan. The events that happened later show it. The Iraqi Parliament voted a request for the Prime Minister “in charge” (a definition itself) Adel Abdul Mahdi –that had given up the job under the pressure of the popular demonstrations in November- to start the process of American troops out of the country. The high command of American forces in Iraq answered in a letter that they would get out, but they requested that they did it in order. Then the Pentagon discredited they command “in the field”, denying any initiative of troops withdrawal. Of course, that withdrawal would ultimately configure a resounding victory for Iran and a huge defeat for the USA.

Mass processes

The American weakness doesn’t contradict the weakness of the Iranian government itself. Obviously, it is a semi-colony that cannot confront imperialism in an open war. But this weakness also finds its roots in the situation of national sub-bourgeoisies within the capitalist crisis, who receive the pressure of imperialist aggressions, on the one hand, and, on the other, of mass mobilizations –that in Iran took were very strong in November, in the frame of a regional process that also crosses Lebanon, Iraq and, at the same time, there are class struggle processes going on in Latin America and the Caribbean, Hong Kong, Africa, Europe, etc.

The element of mass processes is qualitative to analyze the ongoing conflict. If we go back to the previous processes (2010-2011) that took place in the region after the economic outburst of 2008, with the downfall of many dictators that governed their countries with iron fist (Ben Ali in Tunisia, Gaddafi in Libya, Mubarak in Egypt) we may see how those processes leaded to several failed way outs –from the coup in Egypt to the Tunisian semi-democratic semi-Bonapartism. But what predominated was the decomposition of the States in their most brutal way: civil war in Syria and the upsurge of ISIS, an actual anti-State. This decomposition blocked out the paths for mass processes through cooptation by counterrevolutionary bourgeois or petty bourgeois leaderships. Once again, the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletariat has appeared as the crisis of humanity. The confusion of aims of the new generation of fighters in this crisis situation determines the tortuous element of the process.

Now, the upraise of ISIS and the civil war in Syria forced imperialism to agree with old enemies in order to try to stop the threat of this monstrosity, against the very idea of nation-State, that is the form of class domination of the bourgeoisie. So, the anti-ISIS fronts and the compromises with Russia (and Iran) are born to limit this. In the middle, there are other very important events like the failed coup in Turkey and the development of autonomic experiences in Kurdistan, which we will not deal with in this article. It is important to underline that the current stationing of American troops in Iraq happened under the pretext of this war against ISIS. In 2019 imperialist forces announce the end of ISIS. But with its defeat, any of the contradictions in the region have been closed and this is proved by this current military escalation with Iran.

Vietnamization

A lot has been said about this term to describe Iran’s policy in the region in the last years. Superficially, it is described as an asymmetric war policy between a military weak State and the main world Power, only considering the field of tactics. Vietnamization so understood would be the use of guerrilla war or “proxy” confrontation (through others). Without denying this tactic element, Soleimani was the General in charge of a more complex challenge: to unify the different ethnic and religious factions in Iraq and, in a more general way, of the whole region with the only aim of freeing it from the “great Satan" that is America. In fact, that is the official line that Iran has made public with the declarations of Ayatollah Jamenei. So we are talking about a policy that aims to give a national liberation goal to the religious movements by building up the so called “resistance front", that includes Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and other bourgeois or petty bourgeois groupings. This policy on behalf of Soleimani, and its relative success, could be one of the most important motives for his assassination, above all, taking into account the immediate cause that lead to it was the demonstration against the American Embassy in Baghdad, that made the American administration evacuate its diplomatic staff. Now, the Iranian’s government policy does not aim national liberation of the peoples of the Middle East, but rather the strengthening of a semi State able to bargain with imperialism, using as cannon fodder the heroic resistances of Palestine and Iraq, and supporting without hesitations one of the main war criminals in the region, Al Assad, only after Trump, Obama and the Israeli  governments. The negotiations for the nuclear plan are a good example of the class character and the counterrevolutionary nature of this policy.

The quagmire in Iraq resounds like the situation in Vietnam, that is real. As we said before, even with a Trump administration looking forward to leave the occupation behind, it can´t be done now, nor any way put can be found to withdraw without that being understood as a huge defeat for imperialism. Therefore, now it is possible that the ongoing conflict continues to escalate. Specially now, after the first Iranian response, that consisted in a bombing of two military bases in Iraq on Janury 8th, that although quite limited were still a humiliation for the US. Trumps response has limited to minimize the damage caused by these bombardments and to announce new economic sanctions; while he asks the rest of the imperialist Powers to commit to isolate Iran and abandon the nuclear agreement by imposing sanctions, and request the NATO a more active intervention in the region.

Uncertain scenario

A lot has been said about the American domestic front as a reason for the attack. We mean the consideration regarding the impeachment process against Trump and the presidential elections. Although this might have an influence, the strategic elements (or of weakness of this strategy) we believe are more important so as to develop a characterization of the possible new war of American imperialism. And here there exists a determining factor of the so-called domestic front, which is the inability of the imperialist State to win over a solid social base –in which the labor aristocracy must play a role- to launch a large-scale military offensive. We think that the conquest of such a social base, which was one of Trump’s aims, has not been achieved, as we can see in the development of a variety of labor conflicts in industry, services and public workers, and as it is also shown by demonstrations against an intervention in Iran that took place the first weekend of January, immediately after Soleimani’s killing, in many cities of the US. For the time being the demonstrations have not been massive, but they open the possibility of the development of a mobilization against a greater imperialist intervention.

Another important factor are the economic consequences of the war, that could accelerate the entrance in a recession of the global economy, which has been forecasted and, up to now, is being retarded. Geopolitical instability has shaken financial and commodity markets. This instability becomes uncertainty and it is pointed put by the withdrawal of some NATO allies of their troops in Iraq, the European lack of definition in face of the events and even Israeli hesitations towards the assassination of Soleimani. If for some time we have been assessing the contradictions of Trump’s policy at implementing a turn of imperialist policy, today come up some doubts about the possibility of a failure that leads the cracking of the postwar balance to a much more chaotic world situation.

Out imperialism of the Middle East

Iraq has been military occupied for the last 17 years. Palestine, since 1948, by the Israeli creature that responds to the imperialist needs of control over the Middle East. Imperialist plundering of the region has been going on for a long time, but the ongoing imperialist decomposition, worsened by the global crisis, accelerates the situation of unbalance of the system of States and the decomposition of the nation-State. In face of this, mass responses have not missed. They have come out in a spontaneous way and with confusion of aims, which allowed counterrevolutionary leaderships to lead the different national processes to dead ends. But imperialism has not been able to close the crisis and, therefore, the processes open up again placing before revolutionaries the main challenge to intervene decisively in them, so as to draw lessons from the previous defeats and make them useful to develop a transitional program between the current capitalist decomposition and the socialist future of humanity. The centrality of the working class in these processes is marked by the need to dispute bourgeois and petty bourgeois leaderships the leading role against imperialism. For that, internationalist policy and leadership are needed, working for the unity of the proletariat of the region, centered in the oil workers, along with the working class of the imperialist countries, especially the USA. Therefore, it is necessary that revolutionaries fight for the American and European unions to declare the stoppage of the imperialist war machinery, by occupying factories and blocking the supply of troops established in the region and Israel. In the Latin American countries, besides developing street demonstrations and denounce the complicity of Fernández, Bolsonaro, Piñera and other sepoys, we must propose the stoppage of imperialist industries against the intervention in the Middle East. This struggle is linked to the fight against the IMF’s reforms that those governments intend to apply in our region. We must develop the organization and the struggle to force all the imperialist troops to withdraw from the Middle East and the other semicolonial countries. For the military defeat of the US in Iraq and Iran. For the destruction of Israel. For a Federation of Socialist Republics in the Middle East. For the reconstruction of the IV International.