Statement by

Communist Labour Party of Turkey/Leninist

Several “communist” parties who have come together under the name “European Communist Action” organised a conference “in order to evaluate the experiences and conclusions of the communists during the second year of the imperialist war in Ukraine.” 

They did well. They have once again given us the opportunity to see that they are doing their best to cover up the most important facts about the war, the real cause of the war, its class character and their political line in order to curry favour with their imperialist masters.

Anyone who wants to see an example of how a person, party or group of parties can claim to act in the name of the world proletariat and in reality serve their imperialist masters can look at the joint declaration of the “European Communist Action.” There is no need for anything else. In revolutionary communist literature, acting in the name of communism and serving the bourgeoisie is called social chauvinism. 

The “European Communist Action” (hereafter we will refer to this social chauvinist group only as “ECA”) is a social chauvinist group that acts in the name of communism but in reality serves its imperialist masters, especially the US, NATO and the EU. They are nothing more than a “group” because there is not the slightest that they represent a “movement.”

In order for the reader to better understand the political character of this group, some brief information about their past is in order. 

Except for one or two of them, the parties that make up the “ECA” operated under the name “European Communist Initiative” (ECI) from 2013 until September 2023. They formed part of the ongoing conference of the worldwide meeting of communist and workers’ parties (IMCWP). After the war in Ukraine, neither at the IMCWP conferences in Havana and Izmir, nor at the ECI meetings led by the KKE, could they issue a joint statement on the war. They could not issue it because they did not have a common view, a common ground on this most fundamental issue. There was not much the KKE could do in the IMCWP, but it could well “throw its weight” within the ECI. And so it did. The ECI shamefully ended its life in September 2023 with a teleconference via Zoom. After the KKE presentation, it was hastily declared that the ECI had completed its mission and they pulled the plug! 

Thus, in order to get rid of “the important ideological and political differences … which creates insurmountable obstacles for the continuation of the ECI,” a new, narrower organisation was formed in line with the views of the KKE: The European Communist Action (ECA)!

The global civil war waged by the USA and other imperialists against the world proletariat and working classes, the oppressed peoples of the world in general, and the war waged by the Russian army against imperialism and fascism in particular, have caused the path of collaboration with the bourgeoisie to mature and forced these social reformist parties to reveal their true social chauvinist faces. They could no longer hide their true bourgeois collaborationist faces. This was the inevitable result of the war. This social reformist, compromising, collaborationist boil matured as a result of the war and was revealed to us in the form of social chauvinism.

The joint statement issued by the parties that came together as the “ECA” on the 2nd anniversary of the war was a document that showed how these parties, in the name of “communism” sided with their imperialist and reactionary states and governments. Now let’s have a look at that statement.

Is The War In Ukraine An Imperialist War?

“Marxism, which does not degrade itself by stooping to the philistine’s level, requires an historical analysis of each war” (Lenin). That is to say, if a party is to express an opinion on an emerging war, it has to make a concrete evaluation of that war; it has to analyze, in a concrete manner that relies on evidence, the situation in the warring countries, but also class relations at the global level and the general conditions of the imperialist epoch. 

The “ECA” answers “yes” to the above question without hesitation. It claims that this war is an imperialist war and asserts that siding with one of the parties, for example the Russian army, means siding with its own government, its own bourgeoisie. And what is the concrete evidence that the “ECA” puts forward for this claim? There is no concrete evidence, only abstract claims, nothing more than the idea that “If I say so, it is so.” Now let us analyse these claims from their statement.

In article 1 of the statement of the “ECA” we find the following “concrete” assessment of the cause of the war:

“1. The imperialist war in Ukraine has led to thousands of deaths. Millions were forced to leave their homes and country. This imperialist war is an extension of the conditions that emerged after the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and which have tragic consequences for the working classes all over the world. It was the overthrow of socialism that prepared the ground for this war, in which the blood of two peoples who worked together for decades to build a new society on socialist foundations, who fought shoulder to shoulder against fascism and brought it to its knees, is being shed.”

The only worthwhile opinion (if one can call it that) among all this empty talk, which is otherwise presented without a single piece of concrete evidence, is this: The war results from the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, of socialism. “It was the overthrow of socialism that prepared the ground for this war.”

To say this is to say nothing. They put forward no idea about this war or about its causes. Because the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the destruction of socialism led not only to this war but to countless wars, to the unbridled aggression of the US-NATO-British imperialists in countless parts of the world. Under the conditions of the existence of the Soviet Union, these imperialists and their aggressive military organisation NATO could not dare to attack any country as they pleased. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the destruction of socialism encouraged them in their aggressive policies and they started to carry out attacks everywhere. The wars in Iraq I and II, Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and Israel’s aggression in the Middle East, etc., are all “an extension of the conditions that emerged after the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and which have tragic consequences for the working classes all over the world.”

So, to say that the war is “the result of the collapse of socialism and the conditions that emerged after this collapse” is to say nothing about this war. What we need, however, is, to use Lenin’s words, “a concrete evaluation of each war separately.”

It is obvious that the parties that make up the “ECA” are in a state of complete confusion. On the one hand, they are trying to curry favour with their imperialist masters, but on the other hand, they are trying to do it in a way that is compatible with the word “communist” in their name. According to the “ECA,” there is an imperialist war, but they cannot call Russia, one of the parties to the war, “imperialist.” That is to say, on the one side there are the familiar imperialist states; on the other side―at least for now―there is Russia, which is not yet imperialist.

We come to point 2 of the statement, where glaring confusion and demagoguery reign. Before that, however, we should make an intermediate note. There is obviously no unanimity of thought within the “ECA” on the definition of Russia. While one section defines Russia as “imperialist”―we know that the KKE is of this opinion―another section, for example, the TKP (the Communist Party of Turkey), opposes this definition. As an intermediate way, as a ground for compromise, they have come together in the freakish idea that “there is an imperialist war, but this is an imperialist war in which one of the parties is not an imperialist.” Now we can continue with Article 2 as it is.

“2. The most important factor fuelling the conflict on this ground is the fight among capitalists for the plundering of all underground and surface resources, the wealth produced by the workers. At the root of this conflict lies the competition and contradictions within the imperialist system as a whole, which in this case were expressed in the expansion of NATO and the EU to the east and the aspiration of the Russian bourgeoisie to establish new forms of organisations of capitalist states in the territories of the former USSR.”

What do we understand here that the phrase of “the aspiration of the Russian bourgeoisie to establish new forms of organisations of capitalist states in the territories of the former USSR.” Nothing! Suppose the Russian bourgeoisie were to wish to establish new forms of state organisation in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan or any other “territory of the former USSR.” What would the result be? Is that why they went to war with the USA-NATO and others? Or, on the contrary, did these imperialists decide to wage war against the “Russian bourgeoisie” because of this desire? As a concrete analysis of the war, they heap of platitudes about “the desires of the Russian bourgeoisie” before the working class and nothing else.

There is an “imperialist war”; this is true. But from the point of view of the US-NATO-UK-European imperialists, this is an imperialist war. From the point of view of the world proletariat, labouring peoples, socialist states, and global revolutionary forces, it is an anti-imperialist, anti-fascist war.

This war has arisen out of the general conditions in which the imperialist-capitalist system, that is, imperialism, especially the USA, has been living in the last twenty to twenty-five years. But what are the main lines of today’s general conditions of the imperialist epoch?

To put it in the most general terms, in the last quarter of a century, the imperialist-capitalist system has entered a process of decline, of collapse, of the loss of its world hegemony. The entire historical development of the capitalist mode of production and the fact that the productive forces have reached the point where they cannot fit into the shells of this mode of production and the struggles of the world proletariat and labouring peoples, the poor masses against capitalism and the world bourgeoisie, which have turned into revolts, uprisings, and revolutions, have formed the basic lines and general conditions of this process.

Our era is the era of the collapse of imperialism and social revolutions. NATO itself has determined that our century is the “century of uprisings” and has started to shape all its economic and military policies according to this prediction. To reverse this process, the imperialists, led by the USA and their military organisation NATO, have launched a war against the world working class, working peoples, socialist countries and revolutionary-democratic popular governments oriented towards socialism. This is a global civil war between the world bourgeoisie and the world proletariat, socialist countries, labouring, poor, oppressed peoples. Without understanding these features of our epoch and the global civil war arising from these features, it is impossible to understand either the wars in different countries or the unbridled policy of aggression of the imperialists against the territory of Russia.

The imperialists, i.e. the USA and other imperialist-reactionary states, which surround it like little jackals, are doing their utmost to erase all signs and every trace of socialism from the face of the earth. They are preparing to attack not only Russia but also Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and many other countries. 

Russia, whose relations with socialist and socialist-orientated revolutionary-democratic popular governments are close to the Soviet-era line of foreign relations, was an obstacle to these aims. Social chauvinists will not like it, but such were the relations between Cuba and Russia, such are the relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Such are the relations with China and with Venezuela, where US imperialism wants to bring its henchmen to power. Needless to say, the relations between Cuba, Venezuela, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Russia were the greatest obstacle to the destructive economic, financial, technical, and military policies of the imperialists on these countries. This is a concrete, verifiable fact.

Syria is a more typical example. It is a well-known and recognised fact that if it were not for the active support of Russia, Syria today would have become a farm for the production and export to the world of religious fascist murderous hordes. For the imperialists, but especially for the US and British imperialists to consolidate their domination in the Middle East, the capture of Syria through Turkey and the religious fascist gangs was extremely important. The whole world knows that the Syrian war is not over. Russia, with its active military intervention, has frustrated the ambitions of the imperialists and their subcontractors in the region.

Russia’s military and economic activity and policy on the African continent has also been one of the biggest obstacles to the imperialists’ plans for the African continent. The poor, labouring peoples of the African countries, who expelled French imperialism from their lands with the direct help of Russia, and indirect help of China, are the peoples who know and express this fact best.

Did USSR Become A Thing Of The Past? Why Is The USA Attacking Russia?

All these concrete facts and conditions constitute important reasons why the imperialists want to attack Russia, despite the powers in the Kremlin, which wants to get on “good terms” with them, compromise with them and even join NATO. But we have not yet touched upon the most important reason, the decisive reason for the imperialist aggression against Russia. That reason is this: despite the bloody counter-revolution of 1991-93 and the significant restoration of capitalism, imperialists, first and foremost the USA, do not believe that socialism in Russia has been completelyuprooted. We will give evidence of this. 

But first, we must emphasise the following: Whether the USA and its imperialist followers are mistaken in these beliefs and thoughts is not important for now. What is important is that they have this belief and that it motivates them to attack Russia in the first place.

They believe that socialism in Russia can be completely, uprooted from the life, culture, language, literature and art, habits, and aspirations of the people to disappear without a trace only through the dismemberment and destruction of Russia as a state.

The imperialists, unlike their henchmen, are neither fools nor slackers. They are accustomed to “taking the bull by the horns”; they leave nothing to chance. That is why, unlike the social-chauvinists, who believe more than anyone else and before anyone else that socialism in the former Soviet territories has been consigned to history, the imperialists cannot rest until they see Russia disintegrate and disappear as a state.

If the social-chauvinists who make up the “ECA” want proof, let them look at the article entitled “Preparing for the Final Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Dissolution of the Russian Federation.”

Korkut Boratav explains the importance of this article in “Sol Haber,” the organ of the TKP, which hosted the “ECA” meeting:

“In the CIA, in the Pentagon, such texts are kept away from casual observers as ‘top secret‘documents. This Policy Note, on the other hand, bears the signature of Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at Hudson, and is publicly available.

The Hudson Institute’s track record, however, suggests that the document should be taken seriously. It is a neo-con organisation founded in 1960 by Herman Kahn, a major contributor to the US nuclear war doctrine… It is closely aligned with the Republican Party.

The views in the aforementioned Policy Note are in line with the intentions of Biden, who called for ‘regime change’ in Russia after the war in Ukraine. It probably also sheds light on the current, functional scenarios of the US state institutions.”

The article begins with the following paragraph:

“The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev as president of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of the collapse of the USSR, but not the collapse itself. Although the legal personality of the USSR ceased to exist after 1991, the collapse of the USSR is still ongoing today. The two Chechen wars, the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, the on-off border conflicts between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and the Second Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020 are just a few examples. The Soviet Union is still collapsing today.”

That is to say, it is irrelevant whether this is actually the case or not―the US does not believe that the USSR has finally collapsed. It sees the problem as a process and thinks that the “process of collapse” is continuing. But this process is not over and Russia’s defeat in Ukraine (taking Russia’s defeat as a certainty) will only be the second stage of the process, but still not its end.

The article continues with the following prediction:

“Future historians, however, are likely to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 as the most important, if not the last, moment in the collapse of the Soviet Union. We do not know when the war in Ukraine will end, but it will probably mark the dissolution of the Russian Federation (the legal successor to the Soviet Union) as it is known today. It is undeniable that Russia’s economy has suffered a major blow, its military capacity has been destroyed and its influence in the regions where it once held sway has diminished.”

There is a lovely proverb in Turkish; “the hungry chicken dreams that it is in the feed shed.” The goals listed in the article as “predictions” do not go beyond the dreams of a hungry chicken. We know that the US and all other imperialist states pin all their hopes on a decisive defeat of Russia in the war. The authors of the policy note have the same hopes. It is not our business to make predictions about the future of the war. But we can say, at least for the time being, to the chagrin of the social chauvinist “ECA” community, the following: The war is not going at all according to the imperialists’ wishes. Fascist Ukraine is being defeated―and we say “for the time being” with caution.

It is true that the war between Russia and the NATO-US-UK-EU imperialists―not to mention the jackals around the big tigers―is a turning point in history. The Leninists made and explained this determination on the very second day of the war. However, this break will not be in the direction the imperialists hope for, that the USSR will be buried in history, but in the opposite direction! We see the signs of it everywhere.

To avoid misunderstandings, we must also say the following: Our words should not be taken to suggest that the USSR will be revived. The USSR, as a product of certain historical conditions, was an example of one form of socialism. It would not be correct to say in advance what the new form will be like. On the contrary, we have no doubt that socialism will flourish on the territory of the USSR again and in a much stronger form than before. We say this not as an expression of “faith,” but in the sense that all traces of socialism have not and cannot be erased from the territory of the USSR, whereas the process is now beginning to reverse itself. 

All the developments we are witnessing now are the practical realisation of the ideas put forward by Engels in “The Role of Force inHistory.” Force is being defeated by economic development in the forward evolution of history. That is all.

We can now come to the most summarised answer to our question in the subtitle. The USSR did not and could not become history. The attacks on Russia by the US and other imperialists aim to bring this process, which they consider unfinished, to an end.

The exploitation of Russia’s natural resources, raw materials, and other riches certainly whet the imperialists’ appetite. But this is not even worth mentioning when compared to the great goal of destroying socialism without a trace.

Imperialism and the Fascist Movement

These same general conditions of the imperialist-capitalist system explain why the imperialist states, which boast of being the “cradle of democracy,” organise neo-nazi fascists in Europe and religious fascists in Asia and elsewhere all over the world. There is a direct link between imperialism, monopoly capitalism, and fascism―not just an indirect one. This is known and we assume that the parties forming the “ECA,” which are “communist” in name and social chauvinist in reality, would also accept this characterization.

To put it in a way that the component parties of the “ECA” can understand, you can no longer explain the movements and policies of the US, UK, and EU imperialists without pointing to fascism and the fascist movement. The reverse is also true. You cannot explain the existence and actions of fascists, neo-nazis, and religious fascist gangs, in today’s common parlance, without pointing to the US and the imperialists around them and analysing their relationship.

In other words, if there is a struggle against US imperialism or any other imperialist state, if there is a war, it is inevitable that it is a war or struggle against fascism. This is a trend that results from the general conditions in which imperialism finds itself.

We can see concrete expressions of this in the ongoing struggles and wars against these imperialists in Syria, Libya, Africa, Iraq, Ukraine, etc. Of course, we take into account that each country has its own specific conditions. In Ukraine, the force actually fighting on the field on behalf of the imperialists is the Ukrainian army as well as the neo-nazi fascists who are intertwined with this army. It is almost impossible to separate them. 

We are witnessing a different form of this in Syria and other forms in Iraq and Africa. Nevertheless, all these examples have one thing in common. This is that in almost all cases fascist gangs are being mobilised for war together with the imperialist armies, often in front of them. This intertwining also gives the war against imperialism an antifascist character and vice versa.

It is known that in Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, in countless countries of the African continent, the imperialists themselves organise, arm, and provide all kinds of material and technical support to religious fascist murderers such as al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, and ISIS. It has been proven beyond dispute that the fascists called neo-nazis in Europe, the Banderites, were organised, trained, and armed by the secret services of the European imperialist states and then sent to Ukraine.

The social-chauvinists who gathered under the name of “ECA” have not a word to say on this subject. Since they have nothing to say, the only thing they can do is to portray the presence of fascists in Ukraine as something small and insignificant and to divert the attention of the world proletariat and working people.

In article 6 of their statement, they do this as follows:

“Although the Russian leadership claims that its main objective in continuing the war is the denazification of the region and aims to break the siege by the Western bloc, it is clear that the main motivation behind is the protection of the interests of the Russian capitalist class in the wider region.”

They present their abstract claims as evidence like this, whereas they should be presenting concrete evidence.

It is true that “the Russian leadership claims that its main objective in continuing the war is the denazification of the region and aims to break the siege by the Western bloc,” and it says this at every opportunity. What concrete evidence do you have to refute this? Does the Russian leadership not send neo-nazis to their ancestors in the sky, but protect them? Instead of producing evidence, the “ECA” offers as evidence the empty phrase. “No, the Russian leadership is motivated by something else.” When a person has nothing to say on a serious issue, he tries to fill the pathetic void of ideas with such words.

Our century, as recognised by NATO, is the “century of uprisings”; it is a revolutionary age. Since the Seattle uprising in 1999, revolts and uprisings against imperialism, fascism, and capitalism have not stopped. In order to stop this decadent process, US imperialism launched a “Global Civil War” against the proletariat and working peoples of the world with the “Twin Towers” provocation on 11 September 2001. (Trump recently announced that the destruction of the Twin Towers was the work of the USA).

In this global civil war, fascist gangs are one of the most important military instruments of the imperialists. The imperialist states and their secret services could continue the global civil war by using these fascist gangs against the working class and popular masses. And so they did. We know that the murderous hordes called Al-Qaeda are US-made and were organised to fight against the Soviets. ISIS was also organised by the US, British and French imperialists. The Muslim Brotherhood gang, which is active in the Middle East, in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and many other Arab countries, was the work of the British imperialists against communism decades ago. Not to mention Al-Shabaab, which carries out bloody operations on behalf of imperialism on the African continent. The revolutionary democratic forces of Africa have realised that to get rid of this scourge, it is necessary to expel French imperialism from Africa and they are now doing just that.

It has just been revealed that the fascist party AfD in Germany has been holding meetings with the German intelligence services. In Ukraine, the Bandera fascists, which the social chauvinist “ECA” tries to downplay in order to deceive the people, have taken over the entire state, are organised and armed as a separate army, and exist as an officially recognised force intertwined with the Ukrainian army. Bandera has been declared a “national hero” by the fascist government in Ukraine.

We will not deal with how and what massacres were committed by the Bandera fascists under the banner of Hitler’s fascism. It is enough to know that the head of these fascists, Semyon Bandera, is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews. This rogue fascist, whom the “ECA” never uttered a word about, collaborated with Hitler’s army against the USSR and fought against the Red Army.

Another concrete fact, which the “ECA” people do not mention in a single word, is that the children, grandchildren, and followers of the Bandera fascist came to power in 2014 through the “Maydan coup” organised by the USA at a cost of 5 billion dollars. Neither “ECA” nor anyone else can explain the Ukraine-Russia war or the conditions that prepared it without mentioning the US-organised “Maidan coup.”

Instead of discussing these conditions that led to the war, the “Communist” parties, which have assembled under the name of “ECA” tell us the following tale:

“The war being waged on the territory of Ukraine, is not an anti-imperialist or anti-fascist war, as claimed by the leadership of capitalist Russia and its apologists, a fact that our parties have pointed out from the beginning and has been proven many times in the past two years.”

What has been “proved many times in two years”? That this war is not antifascist? Or, on the contrary, that this war is being waged on the Ukrainian side by fascists themselves, that the Ukrainian fascists in the war are day by day revealing their real fascist identity? Not only Ukrainian fascists, but also European fascists, even Latin American fascists―Colombian fascists, for example, have taken part in this war, as evidenced by the flags and symbols they carry and the tattoos they have carved on their bodies.

A quote from a news item by the organ of the TKP, which is a component of the “ECA” group, summarizes this point best. The news is accompanied by a photograph. The title of the article is “Neo-Nazis in Ukraine: ‘Our goal is fascist dictatorship’” A short part of the news report is as follows: “According to a report published in Global Research, neo-Nazis from countries such as Sweden, Bulgaria, and Hungary have arrived in Ukraine and are organising troops to fight against the eastern regions of Ukraine.

“The Swedes fighting in the Azov battalion, which has flags inspired by Nazi symbols, state that their goal is a ‘white Ukraine.’ The Swedish media organisation The Local reports the following about the battalion, which includes four Swedish militants:

“‘Azov is a special unit of about 300 soldiers, including volunteers from Europe. Although it was set up by the Ukrainian government, it is not part of the Ukrainian army and is led by ultra-nationalists. Anton Shekhotsov, a Ukrainian political scientist who researches ultra-nationalist movements, emphasises that these groups are not fighting for a democratic Ukraine, but for a fascist dictatorship.’ 

“This confirms the existence of neo-Nazi elements, which mainstream Western media outlets have ignored since the beginning of the crisis in Ukraine, and that these groups are working with the US-backed Kiev government and the military” (Sol Haber 02.08.2014)

This article was written ten years ago after the fascist Maidan coup. Imagine the situation now! Need we say more? So, according to these “communists,” the war against those who fight for a “white Ukraine” carrying fascist flags and symbols, who “fight not for a democratic Ukraine, but for a fascist dictatorship,” against gangs, not just a few individuals or groups, but gangs gathered from all over the world, who have become a full component of the Ukrainian army, who are supported and armed by the USA, who leads them to war against Russia and the Russian population in Ukraine, is not antifascist.

Well, if the war against a fascist state, its army, and its fascist government is not an anti-fascist war, please, “communists” of the “ECA” tell us how and against whom an anti-fascist war is fought. 

These communist parties advise us to remain neutral in the war between gangs fighting in the service of the USA and other imperialists, for their interests, under fascist flags and symbols, on the one hand, and soldiers carrying red flags on tanks and using the symbols of communism on their uniforms, on the other. Why? Because they have said from the beginning that this is not an anti-fascist war! No, such nonsense, such rubbish, cannot be out of ignorance; it can only be out of love for being a servant to the bourgeoisie. 

There is no doubt that this war is an anti-fascist, anti-imperialist war. In the two years that have passed, this fact has been proved day in and day out by hundreds and thousands of events and facts.

Donetsk And Lugansk People’s Republics

Just as a criminal turns his head away from the scene of a crime, the parties united under the name “ECA” turn their heads away and whistle about the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. There is not a word about these two People’s Republics in their statements. However, you cannot say a single intelligent word about the Russian-Ukrainian war without discussing the uprising of the people of Donbas against the fascist Maidan coup and the declaration of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics on 7 May 2014 as a result of this uprising.

They cannot do this, and that is precisely why, instead of establishing the relation between the general conditions of imperialism in our epoch and the uprising of the working and labouring classes of Donbas against the fascist Maidan Coup and the proclamation of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as a result of this uprising, they resort to this tautology:

“5. The protagonists of the war are not the people of the two countries but their capitalist classes. Presenting the war as a war between Ukraine and Russia obscures the real actors of the war and makes it difficult to understand its class character. The ongoing war is being waged between the Russian capitalist class and its allies on the one hand and the Ukrainian capitalist class, the USA, the EU and NATO on the other hand.”

Even the imperialists occasionally admit that the Russian-Ukrainian war did not start in February 2022, but in fact in 2014, yet the “ECA” does not say a word about it. Why is that? The reason is simple: Because if they mentioned these two People’s Republics, they would at least feel obliged, because of the word “communist” in their name, to take the side of these two People’s Republics which have a socialist orientation and are led by communists. Instead, they find it best to look the other way and ignore these two People’s Republics. These so-called “materialists” think that by ignoring them, the People’s Republics will also disappear.

However, one of the most important, albeit not the only reason for the Russian-Ukrainian war, was the declaration of these two People’s Republics in the Donbas region, led by the communists. For the imperialists, who had been wondering whether the USSR had been buried in history, the fact that these two People’s Republics had raised the flag of socialism in the territory of the former USSR was a nightmare that they could not bear.

Fascist Ukraine, with the unlimited support of the imperialists, put all its strength into action to destroy these two People’s Republics. The fascist Ukrainian government mobilised all the fascist forces at its disposal, released fascists in prisons, and put them at the head of the fascist Azov battalions. Here are some words of Andriy Biletsky, known as the “White Leader,” who was put in charge of Azov:

“The goal of the struggle of our generation is to create the ‘Third Reich’, Greater Ukraine. The historic task of our nation in this critical century is to lead the white peoples of the world to organise a final crusade for their existence and to lead this crusade against inhumanity led by the Sami…

The migrant problem is indeed a key issue. Our goal is to destroy everything that destroys our people. As you know, you can bring back everything―the economy, order in the streets, demography, a strong army and navy, nuclear weapons―but the one thing you cannot bring back is the purity of blood… .” 

Meanwhile, the imperialists were stalling, trying to buy time for the fascist Ukrainian army and government to prepare for war. The Kremlin did not want to burn bridges with them and dreamed of reconciliation and coexistence with the MINSK agreements. The imperialists admitted years later, after it was too late, through the signatories of the agreement, the German Merkel and the French François Hollande, that they had concluded the MINSK Agreement not for a real ceasefire between the two People’s Republics and the fascist Ukrainian government, but to eliminate the two People’s Republics and to buy time to prepare for a war against Russia.

For eight years the imperialists, especially the US, Britain, Germany, and France, have been preparing Ukraine for the destruction of these two People’s Republics and for a war against Russia. The Kremlin, hoping to reconcile with the imperialists and to maintain all kinds of relations with them, neither recognised the People’s Republics nor supported them openly during this period. As a result of the pressure of the Russian people, it was content to give limited, underhand support to the two People’s Republics. 

The Kremlin rejected the calls of the leaders of the People’s Republics (and the CPRF) to intervene against the violent aggression of the fascist Ukrainian state. It accommodated the stalling of Merkel and Hollande. On 24 February, in the first days of the war, the Leninist Party stated that if Russia was to be criticised, it should not be criticised for starting a war against Ukraine, but for waiting until now. Indeed, at the end of the second year of the war, Putin proved the rightness and correctness of the Leninist Party’s criticism when he said: “The only thing we can regret is that Russia did not start active action in Ukraine earlier, thinking that we were dealing with honourable people.”

In Donbas, it was not only the fascist Ukrainian state, its army, and neo-Nazis fighting with the working class, labouring peoples, revolutionary forces, and communists of Donbas. On the contrary, while all the neo-nazis and fascist forces of the world were carried to war by the secret services of the imperialist states to the ranks of the fascist Ukrainian army, the revolutionary forces of the world, revolutionary internationalists, and communists also rushed to war in the ranks of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics alongside the people of Donbas. While this is a tangible, proven fact, the “ECA” groups with the word “communist” in their names can say the following words with great shamelessness:

“7. One of the most important elements showing the class character of this war is anti-communism, which is being intentionally raised in the region.”

There is no need to dwell on the anti-communism of fascist Ukraine. Anti-communism is the basic line of the Ukrainian government, army, and forces; this is known.

But can it be said about the other side, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics; moreover, can it be said about the Russian Army, whose coat patch is still the Sickle-Hammer as it was in the USSR period, where in some places there are fighting soldiers carrying red flags on tanks using sickle and hammer crests? The military forces of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics are fighting on the front line and are playing a not-insignificant role in the war. Without a word about all this, the “ECA” equates the fascist Ukrainian forces with the Russian side. What better service can be rendered to the imperialists?

What is the basis for the allegations that the “leadership of Russia” (in the words of the “ECA”) is anti-communist? They do not state it explicitly, but we know that they are based on some of Putin’s words. It is true that Putin criticised Lenin on the Ukraine issue, the October Revolution, and the question of self-determination. But what does this mean? Putin is not a communist. Everyone knows this and he himself says so. But even if Putin is not a communist, the fact that he is trying to create a “hysteria” against communism can only be the ravings of social-chauvinists who want to curry favour with their imperialist masters. In Russia, communist parties are not banned, nor is there the slightest restriction on the symbols of communism. We know that the emblem of the Russian army remains the hammer and sickle. We also know that all statues, including Lenin’s mausoleum, and all symbols and values belonging to the USSR period have not been touched and cannot be touched.

Social chauvinists will not like it, but we know that Putin jealously claims the victory of the USSR over fascist Germany; that the teaching of books and literature of the USSR period has been re-introduced into the school curriculum; that it is forbidden by law to belittle the victory of the USSR, that is Stalin’s victory over Hitler’s fascism; that the “Bologna system” imposed by the imperialists in education has been abandoned; that the statue of Fidel Castro erected in Russia was inaugurated by Putin himself; that there are very strong relations between the current Cuban leadership and Putin, etc. Why don‘t the “ECA,” who claim they seek to determine the true class character of the war with an objective evaluation (!), never mention these facts?

In this case, let us ask once again, what can come out of Putin’s words about Lenin? Absolutely nothing. It would be better to end this chapter by quoting the words of Engels, the greatest dialectician known to history alongside Marx.

“Suppose these people imagine that they can seize power; what is the harm? If they have made the hole that will collapse the dam, the flood itself will soon tear them from their illusions. (…) Look at Bismarck, who became a revolutionary against his will, and at Gladstone, who finally came to blows with the Tsar whom he worshipped.” (Letter to Vera Zasulic, 23 April 1885).

Is The Russian Bourgeoisie In Favour Or Against The War?

According to the “ECA,” who show everything upside down to please their imperialist masters and who do not hesitate to falsify the facts, it is an indisputable fact that the Russian bourgeoisie is behind the war. Why? Because Russia is “imperialist”; therefore this war is an inter-imperialist war. Well, once you characterise Russia as imperialist, the rest comes like a thread; there is no need to even undertake a “concrete analysis” of THIS war. This is the whole “scientific” view of the “ECA” on the war.

In real life, we see the opposite. The Russian bourgeoisie or so-called “oligarchs” are not in favour of this war but against it. Some of them, as we shall see an example of in a moment, have made very harsh statements against Russia after taking refuge with the imperialists. Some of them kept silent out of fear and tried to protect the wealth that they stole. Here is the news that will serve as an example for those who fled to the imperialist countries and said all sorts of things against Russia:

“54-year-old billionaire Oleg Tinkov, founder of Tinkoff Bank with 20 million customers, announced that he renounced his Russian citizenship. Tinkov said, ‘I cannot be associated with a fascist country that kills innocent people. It is a shame for me to continue to hold this passport in my hands.’” 

We trust the reader’s patience and provide the rest of the article, which is also relevant. It continues as follows:

“I cannot be associated with a fascist country that starts a war with its peaceful neighbour and kills innocent people. It is a shame for me to continue to hold this passport. I hope that other Russian business people will follow my example, which will weaken the Putin regime and its economy. And eventually defeat him. I hate Putin’s Russia, but I love all Russians who openly oppose this crazy war!”

We do not have a complete list, but as far as we have been able to determine, the names of the “oligarchs” on the Forbes billionaire list who have fled Russia due to the war are as follows: Timur Turlov, Duben Vardanyan, Yuriy Milner, Nikolay Storonskiy, Oleg Tinkov, Igor Makarov, Vasiliy Anisimov. These are thieves who have stolen enough to enter the Forbes billionaires list. To these must be added oligarchs like Abromovich, and figures like the Chubays, who were primarily responsible for the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the organisation of the theft and plunder.

These are the thieves who directly and openly oppose Russia’s declaration of war against the imperialists, and who, as soon as they have so determined their allegiance, take their leave in the imperialist countries. Then there are the thieving “oligarchs” who, although they do not support the war, do not openly make statements against it. These have remained in Russia and are now waiting patiently for the day when the storm will blow over and they will return to their old days of plunder. They oppose the war underhandedly and endeavour to prevent the government from taking economic and political measures against the haute bourgeoisie.

Now, the “ECA” might respond with a joke like this: Three trees do not make a forest! Or, if a few strands are missing from someone’s head, he will not be bald! No doubt, it is so. With one difference: if the trees continue to be planted and the hairs continue to fall, let the “ECA” members have no doubt, even the most bushy-haired will become bald; what started with the planting of three trees will become a forest after a while. It is a matter of process. Therefore, our suggestion to the “ECA” who regard the victory of capitalism in Russia as a fait accompli is that they should pay attention to the process of “recovery of stolen properties” in Russia, which started some time ago but is gaining momentum. It would be appropriate to give three examples to clear their minds.

The first example is a “nationalisation” that took place in early January this year. It reads as follows:

“A number of companies belonging to Alexei Hotin’s RusOil holding have been placed under trusteeship and placed under the control of Romimushchestvo (the Russian Property Administration). The Khotin affair is important; moreover, to some extent it is reminiscent of the intimidation of other oligarchs in the course of the liquidation of Khodorkovsky. Add to this the fact that at the end of the year the property of another oligarch, Alexander Klyachin, was seized in connection with Khotin. The reason given was tax debt.”

The second example is as follows:

“Roshim was appointed to the management of Metafraks Kemikals, the largest producer of formalin and methanol in Russia, whose 94.2% stake was nationalised last September on the grounds of corruption during the privatisation (i.e. theft and plunder) of the 90s. Last April, the Bashkir Soda Company (BKS) was de facto nationalised and Roshim was appointed to manage the 47% of the company’s shares that had been transferred to the Russian Real Estate Administration (Rosimushchestvo). The management of all major chemical enterprises in Southern Russia also seems to have been transferred to Roshim. Roshim was previously called “Russkiy Vodorod,” but was renamed Roshim by government decree last year. Moreover, last October Roshim took over the management of Nortek and YSZ Avia in Altai Krai. The former produces tyres for vehicles (including heavy vehicles); the latter is the only producer of aircraft tyres in Russia.”

And the third example:

“The Russian General Prosecutor’s Office’s application for the transfer (nationalisation) of the assets of the Chelyabin Electrometallurgical Combine (CEMC) (renamed Kompaniya Etalon last July) from ‘illegal ownership’ to state ownership has been accepted; the parent company CEMC and its subsidiaries Serov Ammunition Plant and Kuznets Ferroalloys have become state property. The prosecutor’s application had been justified on the grounds that the 1992 privatisation was illegal. In a meeting with the governor of Chelyabin oblast in the middle of this month, Putin said that harmful production would be moved out of the city and the plants would be transferred to the local government. In the Forbes 2021 list, ÇEMK was ranked among the 200 largest companies in Russia with an annual revenue of 49 billion rubles. The enterprises seized by ÇEMK were symbols of Stalin-era industrialisation, the foundations of which were laid in 1929. Yuri Antipov, the boss of the TECK, and his family were 170th in the list of the 200 richest people in Russia in 2021, with $700 million. As far as I understand, the CEMK owns not only Chelyabin, but also numerous other companies from Vladivostok to Yamal. Interfax has listed some of the nationalisation cases that have had a positive outcome in recent years: Rolf, Voljskiy orgsintez, Uralbiofabrm, Metafraks Kemikals, TGK-2, Rus-Oil, Kaliningrad Port, Konti-Rus, Vyatich, etc.”

There are many examples, but there is no need to repeat them. Suffice it to say that this process, led by the Federal Prosecutor General’s Office, continues to accelerate. The source of this information on “nationalisation” is Hazal Yalın, who lives in Russia and we understand that she follows the developments and processes in Russia carefully and day by day. There is not the slightest reason to doubt their accuracy.

Nevertheless, all these examples and explanations of thieving oligarchs may not have been enough to convince the “ECA” social chauvinists. In order to be sure, we must also look at the question from the point of view of the relations between imperialist finance capital and the Russian bourgeoisie. 

When we look at the problem from this point of view, we seethe following: The Russian bourgeoisie has no other way to develop and accelerate its capital accumulation than to join the world market and the financial system of imperialist capital. Not only the Russian bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie of any country in the world cannot flourish and develop without being integrated into the system of imperialist finance capital. The war has destroyed the bridges between the Russian bourgeoisie and imperialist finance capital. The yachts, bank accounts, and fortunes of some of them were confiscated; their activities in other countries of the world were eliminated, their trade was either banned or made impossible, etc. Imperialist monopolies, banks, and financial capital subjugate the capital groups, the capital class, not only in their own countries, but anywhere in the world, and eliminate all conditions of development except coming under their domination.

That is why the Russian bourgeoisie opposed any war with Ukraine from the very beginning and why they opposed the uprising of the working and labouring classes of Donbas, which would pave the way for such a war, and the subsequent recognition and support of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. The interests of the Russian bourgeoisie lie not in war with the imperialist states but in close and intensive cooperation with them.

There is no need to dwell on the other articles of the “ECA” declaration that contain nothing more than generalised statements. The possibility of the “global civil war” launched by the imperialist states against the working class, labouring peoples, and revolutionary forces of the world turning into an all-out inter-state war is increasing day by day. The imperialist states, which could not find what they hoped from the global civil war, could not win the war; on the contrary, witnessing the rise of revolts, uprisings, and social revolutions, they are now provoking a war that will drag humanity into a total catastrophe.

This is the meaning of French President Macron’s call to send troops to Ukraine to fight against Russia; the recently-deciphered plans of the high-ranking officers of the German army to blow up the Crimean Bridge, and the continuous shipments of weapons and equipment to the fascist Ukrainian government.

Will a total world war break out? It is impossible to give a definite “yes” or “no” answer to this question. But we can say the following: Today’s conditions are quite different from those of 1914 and 1945. We live in a revolutionary era. The imperialist-capitalist system is in the process of collapse. We face revolutionary mass actions, revolts, uprisings, and revolutionary attempts supported by millions of people every day. 

The conditions of imperialism and the war have matured the social reformist boil, transforming it into social chauvinism. The emergence of the boil of social chauvinism at a time when the world proletariat and labouring peoples need revolutionary communist parties more than ever will, of course, lead to negative consequences for the revolutionary communist movement. However, we cannot undo what has been done. The Belgian communists have shown what must be done by expelling their social chauvinist leaders from the party.

Let us not forget that “the development of the proletariat everywhere passes through civil war”(Engels, Letter to August Bebel, 28.10.1882).

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Fascism today is even more deeply linked to the ideology and practices of extreme neo-liberalism, to the cannibalistic individualism of social Darwinism and to the poisonous whims of “desire” of “post-modern” irrationalism. Hence the combination of nationalism/racism and imperialist cosmopolitanism that characterises it.

 

Today, the US-NATO-EU imperialist axis is instrumentalising and “exporting” fascism and Nazism to install its subordinate regimes in countries that until the 1980s were part of the USSR, Yugoslavia or other countries that passed through phases of early socialism in Europe, South Korea, etc.

 

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Greek Communist exposes the KKE leadership as “Slimy, repulisive and insolent cynical agents of subversion and disruption.”

Original Article by Dimitrios Patelis| Revolutionary Unification (Greece)

Therefore, we cannot allow the renegades, those who have been playing for years the rigged game of conspiracies, brazen interventions in the internal affairs of fraternal parties and organisations, with their ruthless manipulative practices typical of the degeneration, undermining and disintegration of the movement, to win in this confrontation: blackmail and coercion from above, negotiations behind the back, recruitment, coups, take-overs, splits, misuse of the parties’ online and financial resources, ultimatums, etc.. Exclusivity in the use of such toxic negativity, such dirty and deplorable means, has been claimed and deservedly captured by the renegades of the KKE, who, with the arrogance of the self-appointed and self-righteous leader/despot that they display, have now lost every trace of comrade morality, respect and credibility among fellow militants and comrades on a global scale, as slimy, repulsive and insolent cynical agents of subversion and disruption, as an example to be avoided.

 

Just as truth cannot be attained through a flawed cognitive process, so the high objectives of the movement cannot be attained through means, ways, paths and subjects that do not measure up to them. Every attempt to pursue a high and true objective by vile, distorted, alien means, and so on, ultimately leads to the abandonment of that objective, to its neglect, to the service of alien objectives and interests. This is what the Marxist approach on the dialectical relationship between ends and means clearly teaches.

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Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action)

Index

Part 1: Critical approach to the positions of the CPG

• Reasons for a response to the Communist Party of Greece (CPG)

• Greece must leave NATO! Or should not it?

• The CPG’s subterfuge to avoid debate

• No support for capitalists?

• Reactionary Venezuela?

• The member organizations of the Platform “ignore or deny” that the current mode of production in the world is capitalist…

Part 2: Criticism of the ideological foundations of the CPG

• A handful of countries?

• “Imperialist pyramid” or Lenin’s theory of imperialism?

• Idealism hidden in “Imperialist pyramid”

• Methodological error

• No participation of communists in governments led by the bourgeoisie?

• Are there no stages between capitalism and socialism?

• Erroneous positions are not harmless

• Incorrect and damaging derivations

Part 3: Imperialism vs. imperialism?

• A long work

• Brief and concise summary of the “imperialist pyramid” and the CPG study method

• A big mess

• China and Russia belong to the G20

• State presence in Russian companies

• Foreign penetration of the Russian economy

• “Gigantic amounts” of capital export from Russia

• The “big” Russian banking

• Warmongering Russia?

(The previous sections have been published in past issues.)

Warmongering Russia?

Imbalance

The task of defeating imperialism is not and will not be easy. As we see in Ukraine and recently in the Middle East, the struggle will demand sacrifices because the imperialist states, especially the U.S., wield immense military power which they do not hesitate to use when it suits them and because they control the world banking and financial system.

Only 42 of the nearly 800 military bases that the US[1] maintains worldwide are located in NATO member states. The rest are scattered across the globe. This means that the US has undisputed military control over all continents.

Russia, for its part, has some 15 military bases in 8 countries[2]… Most of them, with the exception of Syria and Moldova, are located in post-Soviet countries and therefore close to its borders. China has a single base in Djibouti[3].

The imbalance between the United States, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other, in terms of the number of military bases around the world is remarkable. If Russia had withdrawn its military bases from all post-Soviet countries, as it did in the German Democratic Republic[4], it would be in a very precarious position today in the face of NATO’s advance. These bases guarantee Russia degrees of territorial security, albeit decreasingly over time, as NATO has managed to gradually (politically) separate the post-Soviet world from it, encircling Russia from the Baltic countries to Kazakhstan[5], despite the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)[6] and all Russia’s attempts to enter an era of post-Soviet capitalist cooperation with “the West”.

If we add to all this the fact that the US has the largest war budget in the history of mankind and the incredible 255 military actions recorded from 1991 to 2024 by the US Congressional Research Service[7], we find an unprecedented war culture. But that is not all: the history of U.S. interference around the world is inconceivable: China in 1945, Italy in 1947, Greece in 1947, the Philippines in the late 1940s, Korea in 1945, Syria and Albania in 1949, Germany in the 1950s, Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1953, Costa Rica in the mid-1950s, Syria in 1956 and again from 2011, Indonesia in 1957, British Guiana in 1953, Italy in the 1950s, Vietnam from the 1950s, Cambodia from 1955, Laos from 1957, Haiti from 1959, then from the mid-1980s and again in 2017, Cuba from 1959. Then from the 1960s Guatemala, Algeria, Ecuador, Congo, Brazil, Peru, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Ghana, Uruguay, Chile, Greece, Bolivia, Guatemala. Then Panama 1969, Costa Rica from the 1970s, Iraq 1972 and 1990, Australia 1973, Angola 1975, Jamaica 1976, Nicaragua 1978, Seychelles 1979, Grenada 1979, Afghanistan from 1979, Morocco 1983, Libya 1981 and 2011, Suriname 1982, Bulgaria 1990, Albania 1991, El Salvador from the 1980s, Yugoslavia 1990, Ukraine from 2014 and Yemen in 2024.

Table 1: Air power of the countries of China, Russia and the US according to Global Firepower[8] for the year 2024.

According to Global Firepower[9], China has 1207 fighter aircraft, 371 specialized attack aircraft, 289 transport aircraft, 402 trainer aircraft, 112 special mission aircraft, 10 air tankers, 913 helicopters (see Table 1).

The same source notes that Russia has 809 fighter aircraft, 730 specialized attack aircraft, 453 transport aircraft, 552 training aircraft, 145 special mission aircraft, 19 air tankers, 1547 helicopters (see Table 1).

Comparatively, the US possesses 1854 fighter aircraft, 896 specialized attack aircraft, 957 transport aircraft, 2648 training aircraft, 695 special mission aircraft, 606 air tankers, 5737 helicopters (see Table 1).

The undisputed air supremacy is in the hands of the USA. China and Russia together cannot come close to US air power.

Table 2: Land power of the countries China, Russia and the USA according to Global Firepower data for the year 2024.

Table 2 shows that the three countries are more or less on a par in terms of land power. However, it should be borne in mind that the land power of the United States is based not only on its equipment, but above all on its military bases distributed over the five continents, especially those located at strategic points both from a military point of view and from the point of view of control of international trade routes. The U.S. has stationed several of its nuclear weapons (some are even active) at certain strategically located military bases. Its military bases are also used to monitor areas with drones or to deploy them in military conflicts. For example, the US used the Ramstein military base in Germany to recalibrate the flight of its drones by adjusting them to the curvature of the earth in order to deploy them in Syria.

Therefore, objectively speaking, one cannot speak of an equal relationship between the land power of Russia and China, on the one hand, and that of the United States, on the other.

Table 3: Naval power of the countries China, Russia and the USA according to Global Firepower data for the year 2024.

According to Global Firepower, the US is the undisputed maritime power (see Table 3), although it may seem otherwise.

As for naval power, we would like to reproduce part of an article from Le Monde Diplomatique, which aptly describes US naval power and, in particular, its comparison with China:

“What makes a maritime power is its presence in the straits, the bottlenecks of the main maritime routes: the Strait of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, which connect the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean; the Strait of Malacca, between the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and the Pacific; and the Strait of Hormuz, at the exit of the Persian Gulf, through which a quarter of the world’s oil exports are transported. The US Navy is in a position to control all three bottlenecks: the US 5th Fleet is based in Bahrain, the 6th is headquartered in Naples and the 7th in Yokosuka, just outside Tokyo Bay.

[…] U.S. ‘carrier strike groups’ play a particularly important role in securing defense. A CSG (Carrier Strike Group) consists of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier with dozens of fighters, fighter planes and helicopters, accompanied by two guided missile cruisers, two or three destroyers and two combat submarines. The giant aircraft carriers, which are almost as long as the largest container giants, give the US a degree of control over the world’s sea lanes that no previous maritime power has ever achieved. 

[…] The real challenge is the rise of China as a maritime superpower. The Pentagon is particularly concerned about the expansion of the deepwater port of Gwadar in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, which lies at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, and U.S. intelligence services consider the Chinese presence on this strategically important coast a serious problem. However, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), as the Navy’s secret service is known, conclude in their analyses that China is incapable of challenging the US as a naval power.

It is true that China has expanded its military capabilities in parallel with its economic growth and has also developed anti-ship missiles, for example. However, Beijing has only two aircraft carriers, far inferior to those of the US. A DIA analysis states that China wants to ‘circumvent the US-led regional security system’ (in its own region!). The scenarios depicted by the Pentagon envisage a possible confrontation between the two countries in the waters of China’s areas of interest.

The idea that China wants to seize control of sea lanes essential to its economy is pure speculation.”[10]

The undisputed military power is that of NATO, especially that of the US. This fact is key to understanding which countries are aggressors and which are not. As Le Monde Diplomatique rightly points out in the previous quote, it is the US that has control of the sea lanes and it is the US that wants to confront China in “China’s areas of interest”.

What a brazen statement then from Jens Stoltenberg at the last World Economic Forum: “NATO is not moving towards Asia. It is China that is moving closer to us.”

And what dehumanization is evidenced by the words of NATO Admiral Rob Bauer, who told the press after a meeting of NATO defense chiefs in Brussels. He noted that NATO forces are preparing for the outbreak of a war against Russia in the next 20 years, that citizens should do the same (i.e., prepare for that war) and that they should understand that their lives will change radically. So that’s 20 years that NATO is giving humanity so that it―humanity―can prepare for its―NATO’s―war of annihilation against Russia…

Let us now see how far from reality the CPG assesses the current international situation.

All the same… or not?

A statement entitled “On the one year since the imperialist war in Ukraine”, published on the CPG website on March 27, 2023, reads:

“The peoples of the two countries, Ukraine and Russia, who lived in peace and prospered together as Soviet Republics under the USSR, have been shedding their blood for nine years now, culminating in last year’s massacre. This is due to the plans of the USA, NATO and the EU, in the context of the fierce competition of those powers with capitalist Russia for the control of markets, raw materials, transport networks and geopolitical pillars in the Eurasian region.

The Communist and Workers’ Parties express our solidarity with the peoples of Ukraine and Russia, who are paying for the imperialist conflict with their blood. We have shown and continue to show the peoples that the developments in Ukraine are taking place in the framework of monopoly capitalism, rejecting the false pretexts utilized by both sides of the conflict.”[11]

We agree with the idea that “the peoples of the two countries, Ukraine and Russia, lived in peace and prospered together as Soviet Republics within the USSR”, and also with that which points out that these peoples began to wage war against each other since its dissolution. However, the statement of the CPG and the other signatory organizations on the causes of these military conflicts seems to us to be erroneous. In its well-known reductionist analysis, the CPG overlooks important circumstances and consequently equates “the USA, NATO and the EU” with “capitalist Russia”.

According to this party, Russia would wage an “annexationist, predatory and rapacious war” in Ukraine, using Lenin’s terminology. Well, we have already seen that, according to the CPG, any capitalist country recognized by the United Nations would be imperialist, so it is not surprising that the CPG considers “capitalist Russia” as such. Similarly, Burkina Faso or Niger could wage a war on their own borders, for example over a conflict with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and in the opinion of the CPG they would be imperialists and the resulting war would be a war of an imperialist nature.

In this sense, according to the CPG there could be no support from the international proletariat and in general from all the exploited, oppressed and neglected strata in the world to almost any country involved in a war anywhere in the world, with the exception of the war waged by the Palestinian people against the Zionist fascism of Israel, although in this case with the usual lukewarm positions:

“The KKE has opposing ideological, political and philosophical views with this political-military organization. However, it will never allow the mass bombing of Gaza and the killing of thousands of small children, allegedly carried out for the elimination of Hamas, to enter into the consciousness of the people in order to justify the long-standing Israeli occupation. At the same time, all the evidence shows that Israel’s aim is to cancel the two-state solution, to exploit the hydrocarbons and the geographical location of the Gaza Strip, to commit genocide against the Palestinian people and to force the displacement of those who do not die in the Israeli massacre to the desert.”[12]

We were surprised by the CPG’s not-so-unfavorable assessment of Hamas. However, the CPG makes its usual masterful leaps from correct to incorrect, or, in this case, lukewarm positions when it expresses support for the two-state solution. In our view, this solution lost its validity many years ago, and if we make a cold historical analysis, it lost its validity at the very moment when the Zionist state of Israel began to expand into Palestinian territory. A truly humane position in this context can only envisage one solution: a single secular Palestinian state in which Muslims, Jews (non-Zionists), Christians, all other religions and non-believers coexist on an equal footing; regardless of the fact that in a region where the Muslim religion predominates, it will naturally occupy the leading position.

To continue to insist on the two-state solution at this time seems to us, to say the least, naive, because it means accepting in the midst of the Arab, Turkish and Persian world a state that is in practice―as the CPG itself says―“a US base”. Moreover, the ideology underlying such a Zionist state is fascist. How could the Zionist state, aggressive by nature, not pose a threat to peace in the region? Genuine support for Hamas requires support for the struggle for a Palestinian state from river to sea and an end to the Zionist state of Israel.

We also agree with the CPG that the conflict in Palestine is part of the international conflict, with the countries organized in NATO on the one hand and “Russia, China, Iran, etc.” on the other. However, on the basis of this correct statement, the CPG equates the second group with the first[13]:

“Given that the war in Palestine is objectively intertwined with the competition between imperialist powers (USA, NATO, EU on the one hand and Russia, China, Iran, etc. on the other) in the region and internationally, two different but equally incorrect perceptions arise from the above: 1) one that says that an “anti-imperialist axis” (Iran―Russia―China) is being formed that should be supported against the US imperialists and their allies; 2) a second one, which is less widespread at the moment but equally erroneous, that says that both war conflicts are imperialist, that they are different expressions of an imperialist third world war, therefore we cannot support the struggle of the Palestinian people for liberation because it is part of the imperialist conflict. […]

Russia, China and Iran do not express their support for the Palestinians because they stand with the peoples’ just cause but because they want to hinder the US plans in the region, to impede it, to afflict it. Therefore, these powers do not constitute an “anti-imperialist axis”. Their monopolies work for their own interests and that is why they cannot be consistent in supporting the Palestinian struggle. It is another matter that the Palestinians, like any national liberation or even revolutionary movement, are righteously seeking to take advantage of these contradictions in their struggle against the Israeli occupation.”[14]

The CPG rejects the fact that Russia, China and Iran support Palestine, which amounts in practice to postulating that the Palestinian people should fight alone against a Goliath, a country that has more than 80 nuclear weapons, a formal army, an intelligence service considered the best in the world and is supported by the US and the EU, i.e. NATO. Not to rejoice that Russia, China and Iran are on the side of Palestine and to characterize this fact as “working for their own interests, for their own monopolies and therefore cannot be consistent in supporting the Palestinian struggle” is not to side with the Palestinian people, but to see them destined for a lonely struggle that therefore has no choice but martyrdom. “They have fought bravely for a just cause,” the CPG would like to proclaim, even though there is no longer a Palestine to fight for or living Palestinians to fight for.

Russia is currently fighting in Ukraine to defend its borders from NATO and in defense of the anti-fascist peoples of the Donbass. Unlike NATO, it does not make other peoples fight for it. Russia fights with its soldiers, Russian soldiers, and because it has fought a real human war, a war directed at military objectives, it has had to sacrifice excessive numbers of its own soldiers, which would not have happened if Russia had been the US or Israel. In that case, no stone would have been left unturned in Ukraine, as we see today in Gaza, or as we saw in Mosul (Iraq) and Rakka (Syria) when the US fought there one of its many battles for “democracy and against international terrorism”.

The CPG is unable to distinguish these essential differences between imperialist and fascist belligerent actions, on the one hand, and Russian actions, on the other, demonstrating a not inconsiderable myopia in matters of international politics.

On the other hand, the CPG expects Russia, which is not only trying to push back NATO in Ukraine, which is fighting against a miserable fascist regime[15] lackey of this organization, which has supported Syria against NATO’s (almost) direct interference in this country, to pursue a “consistent” policy in Palestine as well. Our question is: What does the CPG mean by a “consistent” policy in Palestine: Russia sending soldiers, weapons, planes and tanks to Palestine? We have not been able to find an answer to this question.

But we know that the CPG is in favor of a two-state solution on Palestinian territory. You may not know it, but in this case it shares its position with Russia, which has officially declared itself in favor of a return to the 1967 borders. Would this be a “consistent” Russian position according to the CPG?

In the following parts we will continue the “warmongering Russia” theme and discuss the current conflict in Ukraine and the way the CPG evaluates them.

Notes

[1] The United Kingdom, the main US ally, has another remarkable 140 military bases around the world. 

[2] The countries in which Russia has military bases are: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Syria and Tajikistan. Some unserious lists also include the following countries: Georgia, Libya, Ukraine and Sudan. We have not included these countries for the following reasons:

 – Sudan: because the project of a Russian military base in this country unfortunately never came to fruition. The civil war in Sudan broke out precisely because the Sudanese government had agreed with Russia to establish a Russian naval base on Sudanese territory. Imperialism (US and EU) prevented such “daring” by encouraging radicalized groups against the government, seemingly overnight. Today we see the sad result.

 – Ukraine: Since the Donbass republics have decided by referendum to join the Russian Federation, it is no longer Ukrainian but Russian territory and therefore cannot be considered a “foreign military base”.

 – Libya: because it is a military presence of the private Russian company Wagner, which is not a permanent deployment.

 – Georgia: because Ossetia and Abkhazia have become independent from Georgia and are under Russian protection, which is not identical but similar to the situation of the Donbass republics.

Moldova deserves an additional comment: Transnistria became independent from Moldova and is supported by Russia.

[3] Two other military bases attributed to China (one in Cuba and the other in Tajikistan) do not exist.

[4] It is likely that this decision will not be viewed favorably by the CPG, although we cannot find any opinion about it on its website. 

It seems to us that Russia’s decision to withdraw its armed forces from democratic Germany was a naive act, at least from today’s perspective, considering that the USA did not do the same and, on the contrary, subjected the whole of Germany to an iron military, political and economic domination.

[5] A NATO peacekeeping center began operating in Kazakhstan in October 2023. U.S. Ambassador Daniel Roseblum attended the opening ceremony. Kazakhstan is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and shares borders with China and Russia. Kazakh military personnel are scheduled to be trained to NATO standards at the center.

Soon, in January 2024, Kazakhstan began to follow the path of the Baltic countries and Ukraine in rehabilitating Nazi accomplices. The Socialist Movement of Kazakhstan condemns the final decision of the State Commission for the Final Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression to acquit 311,000 people, many of them criminals or with weapons in their hands, who fought against the Red Army and Soviet power as terrorists, Basmachi, members of the Turkestan Legion and Eastern Muslim SS units.

All of them are presented today as “victims of Stalin’s regime in the 1920s and 1950s”, although among the prisoners there were numerous people convicted of banditry, political sabotage, looting of public property, attacks on trains and motor vehicles.

A scenario similar to that of the Baltic countries or Ukraine is foreseeable in Kazakhstan in the future. If Russia were to intervene there in defense of the Russian-speaking minorities and to prevent further NATO advance on its borders, the CPG would have no qualms in accusing Russia of imperialism, because for this party defense is synonymous with aggression.

The case of Bulgaria is equally tragic. On January 17 and 18, 2024, the inhabitants of the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv defended the monument to the Soviet liberator soldier “Alyosha”, which was to be moved from the Liberators’ Hill to another place at the proposal of the Bulgarian deputies because “it does not belong to the culture and history of the city”.

It should be recalled that the Bulgarian Defense Minister recently gave vent to his Russophobia by calling for the facts concerning friendly Russian aid to Bulgaria to be removed from the history books.

The post-Soviet countries, under the influence of imperialism, continue the process of breaking with their Soviet past and their friendly relations with Russia and its peoples.

[6] The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is a Russian-dominated group of six post-Soviet states that requires its members to assist each other in the event of an attack.

[7] Congressional Research Service, “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2023”, Updated June 7, 2023, in: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R42738

[8] In the case of the US, the data does not add up. There is an inexplicable difference of 184 air units.

[9] The information is available at the following link: https://www.globalfirepower.com/

[10] Le Monde Diplomatiqu, “Atlas der Globalisierung―Ungleiche Welt” (in english: “Atlas of globalization―Unequal world”), article: “Geopolitik des maritimen Welthandels―von Tankerflotten und strategische Alianzen” (in english: “Geopolitics of Global Maritime Trade: Tanker Fleets and Strategic Alliances”), author of the article: Tom Stevenson, p.107

[11] Communist Party of Greece (CPG), “On the one year since the imperialist war in Ukraine,” in.: https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/ON-THE-ONE-YEAR-SINCE-THE-IMPERIALIST-WAR-IN-UKRAINE/

[12] Communist Party of Greece (CPG), “Short answers to current ideological-political questions concerning the Israeli attack and massacre against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip”, in: https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/Short-answers-to-current-ideological-political-questions-concerning-the-Israeli-attack-and-massacre-against-the-Palestinian-people-in-the-Gaza-Strip/

[13] At this point, we would like to point out another subterfuge used by the CPG: Let us note the “etc.” that comes after the enumeration of “Russia, China, Iran”. 

The “etc.” certainly includes, and this is also recognized by the CPG, the people of Palestine, but also the people of Syria or the people of Yemen or the people of Donbass, the people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or the peoples of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. It seems to us no coincidence that the CPG has not included in the list at least some of the countries belonging to the bloc of Russia, China and Iran. The list replacing this “etc.” could in fact undermine their argument, because it would include countries like Cuba or Palestine, for example, which are clearly “anti-imperialist” according to the common sense of the broad progressive masses. Such sentiments would clash with the not-so-sensible positions of the CPG and cause perplexity among those who read its statements. The CPG is well versed, as we have already seen, in the art of obfuscation.

[14] Communist Party of Greece (CPG), “Short answers to current ideological-political questions concerning the Israeli attack and massacre against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip”, in: https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/Short-answers-to-current-ideological-political-questions-concerning-the-Israeli-attack-and-massacre-against-the-Palestinian-people-in-the-Gaza-Strip/

[15] This miserable regime has on its conscience so many victims, among them the Chilean-American journalist Gonzálo Lira, was the product of a coup d’état in 2014, sends its people to death in the service of NATO as if they were cannon fodder, has systematically erased all traces of the memory of the victory of socialism over fascism during World War II… and a long etcetera of terrible deeds.

The post The political stance of the Communist Party of Greece… a communist stance?Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action) appeared first on They Shall Not Pass.

This article is our reply to the flawed analysis of the KKE in reducing everything to inter-imperialist rivalry.

Capitalist countries can be on the correct side of history as has been evidenced most notably during the World War II era when the US and UK joined the USSR in the fight against fascism. These countries’ motives were aligned with their own national interests and to their own capitalist class, but joining the Anti-Fascist Forces during World War II was progressive.

Similarly, it is obvious that Russia, like all capitalist countries, is controlled by oligarchs operating to benefit the few rather than the majority. As materialists, we also see that, under Putin, Russia has taken significant steps to stand up to the US, EU, NATO, and the G7.

The 2014 Euromaidan coup and a path to join NATO set the stage for a civil war in the Ukraine and fulfillment of the dangers laid out by CIA Director William Burns in a 2008 cable titled “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines”ⁱ which was released by Wikileaks and showed that NATO was aware that Russia saw eastern expansion of NATO as military aggression which would split the Ukraine leading to a civil war which would create an “opening for Russian intervention.” This cable also showed the risk of “new member countries ‘rewrit[ing] history and glorify[ing] fascists’” without repercussions because they were protected by NATO.

Russia’s Special Military Operation can be judged in many ways. However, we cannot overlook the fact that Russia took the initiative and risk to stand up to NATO’s bullying. Russia saw the broken promises and understood the implications of an eastern expansion of NATO. They did not want to become the next Yugoslavia, Iraq, or Libya and took a different path.

In an attempt to weaken the economy of Russia after the beginning of the Special Military Operation, the West has enacted sanctions, and a price cap of $60 a barrel was placed on Russian crude oil. Russia has sidestepped these limitations while the West shot themselves in the foot, struggling with inflation and a high cost of oil products, especially in Europe. According to the IMF, GDP growth in Russia outpaced the US, Germany, France, and the UK for 2023. This growth has opened the door for an end to US sanctions on Venezuelan oil, and Russia is working with People’s China to move past the petrodollar. BRICS is expanding, and is providing an alternative to NATO and the West.

We must recognize that the US and NATO have held a world-wide monopoly and dictated the affairs of all other nations. They work to ensure that, across the globe, countries manage their economies according to the interest of US imperialism, and they hinder all competition to their global hegemony. They Shall Not Pass supports Russia in its quest for a multipolar world because it provides working people around the world, and the leadership of their countries, an escape from the gripped fist of NATO.

i https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html

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Commentary on the article of the International Department of the CC of the KKE “On the position of the RCWP in relation to the imperialist war in Ukraine”

Understand the assessment of modern warfare and modern politics

FROM THE EDITORS: We have already written a lot about the range of opinions among the communists on the issue of assessing the ongoing hostilities of the Russian Armed Forces and the Donbass militia in the Donbass and Ukraine. Various, sometimes contradictory, opinions, the fervent fervor of some and even the hysterical outbursts of some comrades are certainly worthy of attention and consideration. But still, we are primarily interested in a scientific approach to assessing events. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself in the preface to the post-revolutionary edition of the work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism wrote: “I should like to hope that my pamphlet will help to understand the fundamental economic question, without the study of which nothing can be understood in the appraisal of modern war and modern politics, namely, the question of the economic essence of imperialism.”Of our allied parties, the deepest and most heated discussion took place between the RCWP and the Communist Party of Greece. The comrades of the KKE did not agree with our assessment of the current situation on a number of issues, and the RCWP did not sign the joint statement of a number of parties initiated by them. The International Department of the CC of the KKE published a critical article in the newspaper Rizospastis regarding our position. The International Commission of the Central Committee of our Party responded to the criticism of the comrades and put forward arguments in favour of our analysis.

The Central Committee of the RCWP expresses confidence that the ongoing discussion will help not only the disputing parties, but also the entire communist movement in the formation of a revolutionary communist pole.

On April 29, 2022, the newspaper “Rizospastis”, the central organ of the Communist Party of Greece, published an article by the International Department of the CC of the KKE “On the position of the RCWP in relation to the imperialist war in Ukraine“.

The article evaluates the actions of the RCWP in connection with the special operation carried out by Russia in Ukraine, expresses extreme resentment for our disagreement with the position of the KKE and argues that the approach of the RCWP is eclectic and that it descends into serious theoretical and political errors, even to the “borrowing“ of bourgeois concepts.

We openly say that we categorically disagree with such assessments, considering them unscientific, but we even more disagree with the method of conducting discussions on the part of the party, with which we have long-standing friendly relations. At the request of the International Department of the CC of the KKE of 28.04.2022, we discussed the situation especially at the meeting of the Political Council and answered the questions asked. However, it turned out that no one was particularly waiting for our arguments, and on 29.04.2022, the above-mentioned article was published in the newspaper “Rizospastis”.

Since we have already verified the main arguments and submitted them to the comrades in the CC of the KKE, we are submitting them for publication on the Solidet website, trying to adhere to the structure of the article in Rizospastis for the better orientation of the Greek readers.

A Few Words on the Relationship between the RCWP and the KKE

The Political Council of the Central Committee of our Party carefully examined and discussed the letter of the International Department of the CC of the KKE of 28. 04. 2022 on serious differences in our positions on a number of issues, primarily on the assessment of the situation in connection with the hostilities in Ukraine and Donbas.

We also believe that the time has come to clarify our relations, which have a long history and have mostly been fruitful and comradely in nature.

We remember well and appreciate the fact that the KKE was one of the first foreign communist parties to establish bilateral relations with the RCWP. Our parties have always treated Marxism as a science in the same way, and our positions on the analysis of the causes of the defeat of socialism in the USSR have practically coincided. At the International Meeting in Leningrad in 1997 in honor of the 80th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, we, together with 30 parties, signed the October-80 declaration. We can say that we worked together in theory. For example, at the request of our Greek comrades, we selected relevant literature on economic discussions in the USSR, and our specialists shared their knowledge. A group of scientists, political economists and philosophers (Assoc. Prof. Yabrova, Prof. Popov, Prof. Elmeev, Prof. Volovich) traveled to Greece to give lectures and participate in scientific discussions. We also recall with gratitude the organization of a group of our trade union activists to study in Greece. In 1998 our party immediately supported the initiative of the KKE to hold regular International Meetings of Communist and Workers’ Parties and participated in all meetings as a member of the Working Group of Solid Workers. Together, our parties laid the foundations for the publication of the journal International Communist Review (CIE) and the creation of the European Communist Initiative Movement (ECI).

The RCWP viewed these forms of interaction as concrete steps to create a communist pole in the international communist movement, which, in our opinion, has had a strong opportunist bias since Gorbachev’s time. As you know, our party contributed to overcoming this deviation, organized international conferences of orthodox parties: “100 Years of October” in Leningrad, “100 Years of the Comintern” and “140 Years of J. V. Stalin” in Moscow, “70 Years of Victory” in Donbass, in which the KPD participated.

Unfortunately, despite these long-standing comradely relations between our parties, we have indeed encountered serious differences in positions in recent years.

How did it come about? We, too, sincerely experience this fact and analyze the previous history. We think it should be said frankly that certain discrepancies appeared much earlier than the military operations of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine began. Previously, there were differences on the issue of the scientific understanding of fascism and the assessment of manifestations of fascism in the foreign policy of the United States (i.e. the initiation and support of terrorist forms of domination of capital in the “victim” country) and its NATO allies, today it is “fascism for export.” Significant differences were also evident in the assessment of the activities of the Comintern.

But even more significant, from our point of view, is the fact that gradually divergences have been accumulating in our parties’ vision of the method of forming a communist pole. We certainly recognize the merits of the KKE in initiating and creating the CIE and then the ECI, but we have to point out that these organizational forms have never been developed as effective forms of collective struggle against opportunism and revisionism. They limited themselves to exchanging the views of the parties among themselves, but they did not find a continuation in practical joint work – they did not ensure even the most elementary joint coordinated actions of the parties of the pole to the outside, for example, at such forums as general meetings of the solids. In order to ensure the appearance of unity and prevent a split in the system, the The KKE has always held back attempts to organize a common front against the opportunism of the Euro-Left and other right-wing parties, although it has expressed itself on questions of theory and current politics in the main correctly, from a revolutionary Marxist standpoint.

To this we must add that, from our point of view, the comrades leaders of the KKE from the time of their first meetings became somewhat arrogant, as they say in Russia, became bronzed, began to present their opinion as the ultimate truth or even in the form of lectures, and the CIE and the EKI began to be transformed into organs for the support of the KKE line. We think that this is the reason for the recent decision of the Presidium of the Hungarian Workers’ Party to terminate the party’s participation in the Secretariat of the European Communist Initiative, since the comrades can no longer assume responsibility for the various political documents adopted in the name of the Secretariat.

It is with a heavy heart that we have to have this conversation. As V.I. Lenin said: “… There are moments that oblige us to put the question point-blank and call things by their true name, under the threat of causing irreparable harm to both the Party and the revolution.”

Report of the CC of the RCWP and the Objections of the Comrades of the International Department of the CC of the KKE

The comrades of the KKE have indeed studied the report of the Central Committee of the RCWP and rightly point out that we assert that “capitalism brought the war to the land of the Soviet Union”. We assess the nature of the war as imperialist – that “the true source of the conflict in Ukraine is the inter-imperialist contradictions of the US, the EU and Russia, in which Ukraine is involved.” The RCWP also believes that Ukraine is a fascist state and that fascism in this country “is Ukrainian only in the place of manifestation, in language, in historical continuity and in personnel, and in terms of its origins it is quite American.”

After that, the comrades state that they do not agree with the RCWP’s understanding of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, they do not agree with the theory of “fascism in foreign policy”, they do not share the conclusion of the RCWP, which believes that what is happening in Ukraine has a positive side – helping the people of Donbass in the fight against American fascism in foreign policy, and therefore it supports it. The theoreticians of the KKE claim that it is the eclecticism of the position of the RCWP, which in the end leads it to support the imperialist war. They say that this is why the RCWP supported Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine and did not sign the Joint Statement supported by 42 Communist and Workers’ Parties and 30 Communist Youth Organizations from all over the world, issued on the initiative of the KKE, the Communist Party of the Workers of Spain, The Communist Party of Mexico and the Communist Party of Turkey, in contrast to their youth organization, the Revolutionary Communist Youth League (Bolsheviks), which maintains bilateral relations with the KMG.

The comrades of the KKE regret that the RCWP is not among the 42 Communist and Workers’ Parties that have signed the Joint Statement against the imperialist war in Ukraine. We, too, regret and worry. At the same time, however, we are compelled to note that there was also a certain arrogance and disregard for the opinions of the comrades. The statement was initiated by the Communist Party of Greece, the Communist Party of the Workers of Spain, the Communist Party of Mexico and the Communist Party of Turkey. We respect these parties, but we consider it simply indecent that the authors did not consult with the communists of Donbass, Russia and Ukraine before submitting the draft for general review. In 2015, we held an international conference in Donbass on the fight against fascism in honour of the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. How could one act so tactlessly, knowing that the war against Donbass has been going on for 8 years and has already claimed 15,000 lives, mostly civilians? The comrades of the KKE and the other signatories rightly pointed out that the Russian bourgeoisie is not engaged in denazification for ideological reasons, that it does not intend to uproot the capitalist roots that give rise to fascism. But, we ask them, what should have been done – to wait and endure further? You know that we (the RCWP, the KRO LPR and the RFD) have always not only admitted, but also persistently demanded greater assistance to bourgeois Russia, but in the statement under consideration you did not even mention that the war on the part of the working people and communists of the Donbass has a just anti-fascist character. Or do you disagree with that?

Instead, you speak very ironically about the character of the so-called “People’s Republics” of Donbass, which has nothing to do with the character of the People’s Republics that emerged after World War II in Europe.

Yes, that’s right. We, and the Communists of the Donbass, know this, and in our agitation we speak in sufficient detail and directly about the loss of elements of nationality in the administration of the republics. But let me tell you that the nationality of these republics was born of and conditioned by the unwillingness of the people to submit to the dictates of the fascists, the unwillingness to repeat the fate of the burned House of Trade Unions in Odessa. At the referendums in May 2014, the people of Donbass said their “OHI” to the fascist punishers in Kiev. This is the basis for what you think is the wrong nationality of these republics.

The fact that it is impossible for the Donbass republics to survive in this struggle without the help of bourgeois Russia has been absolutely clear since 2014, especially since they are confronting the united forces of world imperialist capital. But this does not mean at all that the republics should refuse this assistance from the Russian Federation. The RCWP, we repeat, has always not only allowed, but always demanded more assistance from the authorities, including military assistance. For some reason, you didn’t mind before. Do you think today that the fight against American fascism should not have been helped in foreign policy? We believe that the fascists should be beaten with any weapon, always, with the use of all allies and fellow travelers.

A Mistaken Approach to the Consideration of the Modern World and Russia by the RCWP or the KKE?

The comrades of the KKE in Rizospastis write: “It is evident that, unlike the CPRF, the RCWP is trying to approach the events from a class standpoint, but it is slipping into serious theoretical and political errors, even into ‘borrowing’ bourgeois concepts from those forces which it calls opportunist. Such blunders lead to the justification of an unacceptable Russian military invasion, which, as it itself admits, is being carried out for imperialist purposes under the pretext of saving the people of Donbass.”

The claims are really serious. The discrepancy in assessments of the character of the imperialist war must be dealt with seriously, because it is a question of science and theory.

We have already expressed our opinion to you earlier, in the course of working on the articles for the CIE, that the Ideological Department and the leadership of the KKE, from our point of view, somewhat misinterpret Lenin’s theory of imperialism in relation to today’s reality. You present the matter in such a way that today the whole world is imperialist, all countries are dominated by monopolies, and only a kind of pyramid of imperialists of the highest category, of the second and third levels, etc., should be considered.

At the same time, you seem to forget Lenin’s conclusion that capitalism has now singled out a handful (less than one-tenth of the world’s population, less than one-fifth in the most “generous” and exaggerated calculations) of particularly rich and powerful states, which are plundering the whole world by simply “cutting coupons.” This objective situation has even found its reflection, albeit in a distorted form, in the bourgeois conception of the “golden billion”. named after the total number of those “prosperous people” who live in the “robber states”.

You are somehow modestly hushing up this point and considering this Leninist thesis to be obsolete. You write that on the basis of this distorted understanding of the modern world, the RCWP interprets Lenin’s statement about “a handful of countries“ at its own discretion, written when three-quarters of the planet were still colonies.

You justify this by the fact that it is possible to reduce the question of the struggle against imperialism to exclusively anti-Americanism, which is characteristic of many national bourgeois states and the corresponding political forces. This, of course, should not be done, we agree with you. But the core of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, along with its economic basis, the monopolisation of production, is the proposition that a handful of leading imperialist powers, which have carried out the division of the world and are fighting for its redivision, are plundering all the other bourgeois countries under imperialism. Today, the essence of imperialism has not changed. The importance of the “handful” and its influence in today’s world has definitely increased in comparison with Lenin’s time.

Now this handful is headed by the United States of America. The rest play the role of squatters. Do you disagree? Is Greece an imperialist country? Or even the much more powerful EU countries? By and large, none of these countries today can disobey the United States, cannot show independence, which is remarkably confirmed by the entire practice of imposing sanctions against the Russian Federation. And even clearly to their own detriment! Don’t you see it? From our point of view, it is a very big mistake not to see that today a handful of the most powerful predators, led by the United States and NATO, are forming “a solid basis for the imperialist oppression and exploitation of the majority of nations and countries of the world, the capitalist parasitism of a handful of the richest countries!” The political practice of the behavior of the EU countries and other leading imperialist powers in connection with the conflict in Ukraine has shown that there is almost no independent policy of the EU countries, there is the fact that these countries are dancing to the tune of the United States, even to the detriment of their economies for the sake of the hope of continuing to rob the rest of the world in the future. The U.S. is carrying out the most advantageous operation: it is crediting, ideologically and politically formalizing fascism that is hanging over the peoples of the world, hostile to them and destroying even bourgeois democracy. At the same time, it significantly weakens the EU countries, at least in the short term, and strengthens their presence in this market.

An analysis of events suggests that if Russia did not possess nuclear weapons, it is quite possible that it could have suffered the same fate as Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya. But given the power of the defense potential of the Russian Federation, inherited from the USSR, the imperialists of the United States and the EU have chosen the tactics of reviving fascism in Ukraine and setting it against Donbass and the Russian Federation. Their pumping of weapons and the political aggravation of the situation on the line with Donbass, as many countries and parties admit, if not forced, then pushed the Russian authorities to start preventive military operations.

A flawed theory of “fascism for export”?

It must be said that some of our and foreign comrades are embarrassed by the very term “fascism for export.” It reminds some of the concept of “exporting revolutions,” which the Communists do not support. Someone primitively interprets it as a real export, i.e. the export of fascism. Moreover, after being translated from the great figurative Russian language, the essence may be difficult to grasp for foreign comrades. We do not hold on to the term, for us it was born as a journalistic image. More important is the very essence of the phenomenon – fascism in foreign policy. Special attention should be paid to the assertions of the Greek comrades that the RCWP in its analysis repeats the harmful theory of “fascism for export.” They even went so far as to say that “Fascism for Export” is a bourgeois theory that was first put forward by Russian bourgeois political forces during the 2006 Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

We are embarrassed to make this remark, but, first of all, it is blatantly untrue. The analysis of manifestations of fascism in foreign policy, which we often call “fascism for export” in journalism, was first carried out, including with our participation, by the Honored Worker of Culture of the RSFSR Boris Lavrentievich Fetisov and published in 2009 by the Russian socio-political newspaper Narodnaya Pravda. After that, it was discussed, agreed and adopted as a position at the plenum of the Central Committee of the RCWP. In 2012, the Greek comrades mention that there was a serious discussion in the pages of the ICE magazine. At the same time, they consider that the warning made by the KKE in 2014 that this theory will lead to a wrong course of collaboration with bourgeois political forces has been fully confirmed in practice.

We assert that practice has fully confirmed our analysis and foresight. And the divergence of our assessments is caused by the departure of the Greek comrades from the standpoint of the scientific approach and, as a result, the rejection of the Comintern definition of fascism. The comrades do not speak openly and directly about this, but write in a very intricate way: “However, it should not be forgotten that this definition, made by the Comintern, was formulated during a period of serious polemics on the part of a number of Comintern leaders, and it was precisely in practice that its inability to show the connection between fascism and capitalism and to take this into account in the strategy of the international communist movement was manifested.”

It’s strange and even painful to hear. Did Dimitrov’s definition fail? Let us remind you: “Fascism in power is an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, the most chauvinistic, the most imperialist elements of finance capital, a special form of class rule of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not a supra-class power, nor is it the power of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpenproletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist reprisals against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. Fascism in foreign policy is chauvinism in its crudest form, cultivating zoological hatred against other peoples.”

In our analysis, we are talking about fascism in foreign policy! Fascism consists in the rejection of democratic forms of bourgeois rule and the transition to open bourgeois imperialist terror. In the modern world, most of the most developed bourgeois states use various forms in their domestic politics with the appearance of bourgeois democracy, refraining from exercising dictatorship in an openly terrorist form. The international arena is a different matter. We assert that after the defeat of (we are sure) temporary socialism in the USSR and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, there has been a negative change in the balance of forces determining the situation throughout the world. First, in the absence of examples of socialist countries, capital launched an all-out offensive against workers’ rights in domestic policy. Secondly, the imperialists are trying to solve their internal problems by means of external expansion. In foreign policy, world imperialism, and above all its shock troops represented by the imperialists of the United States and the NATO countries, began to act much more unbridled, aggressively, without looking back at the bourgeois-democratic norms of international law and so-called public opinion. This is exemplified by the massacres of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria, threats against the DPRK and Iran, and the initiation and support of today’s bloody conflict in Ukraine. In the words of V. I. Lenin, “we have before us a completely naked imperialism, which does not even find it necessary to clothe itself in anything, believing that it is already magnificent.”

We regard the ongoing escalation of tensions in the Middle East and Ukraine as the spread of neo-fascism – “fascism for export.” “Fascism for export” is an undisguised terrorist imperialist policy of violence and bloody solution of the interests of world imperialism, the core of which is finance capital, which ignores all laws and norms of international law. This is a modern form of fascism. At the same time, chauvinism in its crudest form today manifests itself in the statements of US presidents about evil empires, about rogue states, about the special responsibility of the United States for the fate of the entire world, with the conclusion that they have been given the right to decide everything!

The denial of this fact, the reactionary domination of the United States, is detrimental to determining the position and tactics of the struggle of the Communist Parties. Hence your skeptical attitude to the manifestations of fascism in foreign policy – “fascism for export” – and even your rejection of the Comintern’s definition of fascism. And in the end, this led to a mechanical transfer of assessments from 1914-1917, the time of the First Imperialist War, to the current situation.

You write that the criticism of the RCWP is unfounded and unfounded, but we reflected all these points in the Report of the Central Committee to the March Plenum (26.03.2022) “On the attitude of the RCWP to the military actions of the government of the Russian Federation and the armed forces of Donbass in Ukraine”. You can read the report, and we are fully prepared to answer questions and criticisms. Only people who are not confident in themselves are afraid of criticism. The RCWP is confident in its position and ready to clarify relations.

You, dear comrades, write that “on the one hand, the RCWP pays lip service to the imperialist war, which is the result of inter-imperialist clashes, and on the other hand, by declaring the ‘protection of the people of Donbass’ and the alleged ‘denazification’ of Ukraine, it actually supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the imperialist war and the Russian bourgeoisie, which it regards as the guarantor of the struggle against fascism.”

But this only shows that you have not understood, in Lenin’s words, “the fundamental economic question, without the study of which nothing can be understood in the appraisal of modern war and modern politics (here and hereafter the editor’s emphasis), namely, the question of the economic essence of imperialism.”

Of course, the war for the Russian bourgeois class, which is much weaker and in the process of establishing imperialism, is also becoming imperialist, since bourgeois Russia is defending its interests, its desire to exploit the gas and oil pipelines itself, including the country’s human resources. But this does not mean that the working class of the Russian Federation is indifferent to the prolonged, persistent and aggressive attack on Russia by the forces of the United States, NATO and the EU, that we do not notice the use of open fascism as a weapon in Ukraine, that the prospect of repeating the fate of Yugoslavia, Iraq or Libya is more preferable for the working class of Russia than the oppression of the domestic bourgeoisie. Today, the military actions of the Russian Federation are no longer aimed at seizing resources and markets through the subjugation of Ukraine, but at protecting the interests of bourgeois Russia, Russian capital and even the integrity of the country. We do not support the authorities and do not call for all forces to rally around them, as the CPRF does, on the contrary, we call for using the situation to explain the true causes of the tragedies we are experiencing and to organize the struggle against capitalism, for socialism and the restoration of the USSR. But we are not simply calling for an end to the war, because that essentially means calling for an end to the war against fascism. With real fascism, which is fed and directed by the biggest imperialist predators, which calls itself the successor of the fascists of 1941-45, which today openly uses civilians as human shields. There is no way we can do that. We believe that it is possible and necessary to beat the fascists with any weapon with the involvement of all possible forces. At the same time, a conscious factor must be introduced into it, i.e., agitation for the development of the anti-fascist struggle into a struggle for socialism.

And the calls for the defeat of one’s own government in this war do not correspond to the essence of the moment, do not contribute to the approach of the revolution, since there is no corresponding situation, and today, in the words of Lenin, it is not yet possible for the revolutionary movements in all the belligerent countries to coordinate and cooperate with each other. The victory of the United States and NATO today will be the victory of the advancing fascism. The intensification of fascism of regimes is observed in all EU countries, especially in the Baltic states.

This point is very difficult to understand, because there is a great temptation to simply transfer the assessments of the First Imperialist War to the present day.

Criticism of the KKE

You write that the RCWP unfoundedly accuses the KKE of “mistakes” as well as of a lack of solidarity with the people of Donbass. This, of course, is not the case at all. Of course, we admit that you sympathize with the people of Donbass and condemn the fascist manifestations of the Kiev regime. Together with the communists of Donbass and Ukraine, we are grateful to the KKE for the consistent protests that have been carried out since 2014, including from the rostrum of the European Parliament.

But this is solidarity and support for the victims, the protection of the suffering and oppressed population, and we, as a party, first of all support the struggle of this people themselves against the fascists, and we ourselves participate in it to the best of our ability, helping the formation of communist forces in the republics.

We take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the deputies of the KKE who, for their political activities against the war, were included in the official “black list” of the reactionary regime in Kiev. But let me tell you that our comrades-in-arms in Donbass are directly involved in hostilities, suffering losses both in the wounded and in the lives of comrades. Our mutual friend, the head of the Workers’ Front of Donbass, Mykola Belostenny, who fought in 2014-15, went to enlist in the militia at the military registration and enlistment office, but his 69-year-old has not yet been hired. Today he works as an ambulance driver, sometimes transporting the wounded, including soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, from Mariupol to the hospitals of the DPR under fire. And the guys who are younger are fighting. And the fact that the Russian bourgeoisie, not at all for ideological reasons, is compelled to help their struggle, does not negate its just character and absolute necessity.

Inner-Party Processes in the RCWP

The Greek comrades note: “Recent events threaten to be a crushing ideological and political blow to the RCWP, as evidenced by the so-called ‘Conference in Support of the Struggle Against Fascism in Ukraine’, held on March 20, 2022 at the headquarters of the Central Committee of the RCWP.”

As you know, certain tensions have arisen in our Party in connection with this question. There are even defections of unstable comrades from the Central Committee and from the ranks of the Party. And we have to note with regret that, voluntarily or unwittingly, the comrades of the KKE contribute to these processes, including by accepting the signature of a group of young people, allegedly from the organization of the Russian Youth Union (Bolsheviks), under the Statement of the 42 parties, although we told you that they are in fact provocateurs trying to seize the brand and website of the Komsomol. You did not react to this and even repeated this disinformation in the newspaper “Rizospastis” for the general reader, in fact misleading about the position of the RCSM(b). We think that such actions also do not contribute to the strengthening of comradely relations between our parties.

In addition, we note your attempts to interfere in our domestic political work with the voice of opponents of our party. So, you write to us: “… It is with great sadness that we observe your joint activities with Russian far-right, nationalist organizations, such as the Other Russia party (the National Bolsheviks).”

We have already given explanations on these issues on the party’s website and in the TR newspaper, which you may have read. The Other Russia is by no means a socialist organization, but it is by no means a far-right party. It is not really a party, because it does not have clearly defined class positions, but it does not support private capitalism, and one of the populist slogans is “Capitalism is shit!” These are mainly young people, they are not so much nationalists as patriots of the Soviet past and the greatness of the USSR, in which all peoples occupied a worthy place. In their luggage the hoisting of the red flag over Riga (November 17, 2000), for which the comrades received real prison sentences. Their representatives are fighting in Donbass not for the Russian world, but against the fascists. We are trying to introduce elements of class consciousness into this youth subculture, including through the example of Lenin’s understanding of the national pride of the Great Russians. We don’t always succeed, but quite often we succeed. We have been cooperating for many years and will continue to do so.

Поэтому мы бы пожелали вам прежде, чем делать выводы, посоветоваться с нами. В любом случае мы не собираемся молча терпеть извращения нашей позиции и даже самих исторических фактов.

The fact that the Donbass militia often includes not the most advanced, but various Orthodox, Cossack, national-patriotic, and even anti-communist elements, does not at all change the nature of the anti-fascist struggle. It is impossible to win with the avant-garde alone, as Lenin taught. It is necessary to attract and use any forces, it is necessary to beat the fascists with any weapon. And it is no coincidence that the core of the resistance to the Nazis was made up of miners and tractor drivers, as even President Putin was forced to admit. And you shout the guard when “in the name of the struggle against fascism the road is opened to co-operation with the opportunist forces, with the Social-Democrats, with sections of the bourgeoisie.” Damn it! We will learn from the USSR and Stalin.

The RCWP allegedly embarked on a dangerous political path

In conclusion, we are compelled to categorically contradict you with regard to the statement of the International Department: “With this letter we call on you to reconsider your position, which not only does not conform to the founding declarations of the ICO and the ECI, but also cuts you off from the line of the successive forces of the international communist movement.” Allow me to know who gave you the right to single-handedly determine the boundaries of the successive or inconsistent forces of the communist movement? Both the CIE and the ECI, as we know, have a procedure for collective consideration of issues and decision-making. In our opinion, here again you have the same element of communist arrogance to which we have already referred, and which has ruined many parties with a glorious revolutionary past.

In conclusion, we openly say that, of course, we agree with your statement: the RCWP has embarked on a dangerous political path. Only we did this in the depths of the CPSU, fighting its degeneration and Gorbachevism, we did it in 1991, when, in response to Yeltsin’s ban on the activities of the CPSU, we replied that in 1941 there were even tougher banners and established the RCWP. In 1993, when they participated in the defense of the House of Soviets, shot by Yeltsin from tanks. We have quite consciously embarked on the path of struggle, and we are well aware of the danger of deviating from the principles of Marxism-Leninism. We learn from the Bolsheviks and Lenin: “It is possible to defeat a more powerful enemy only with the greatest exertion of forces and with the obligatory, most thorough, careful, cautious and skilful use of every ‘crack’ between enemies, even the slightest, of any antagonism of interests between the bourgeoisie of different countries, between different groups or types of bourgeoisie within individual countries, as well as of any possibility of gaining a mass ally, even the slightest. Even if it is temporary, shaky, unstable, unreliable, conditional. Whoever has not understood this has not understood a grain of Marxism and of scientific, modern socialism in general.”

Only people who are not confident in themselves can be afraid of temporary alliances, even with unreliable people. We are self-confident, therefore, respecting you, we reserve the right to defend our Marxist-Leninist approach to political practice.

Let us not falter on the chosen path!

With friendly greetings and wishes to think about the issues raised.

19.05.2022Leningrad

The article was sent and published on the Solid website

The post Russian Communist Workers Party: On the Class Understanding of the Struggle Against Fascism and the Mistakes of the “Leftism” of the Greek Comrades appeared first on They Shall Not Pass.

Introduction

The ongoing World War III (WWIII) presents the global revolutionary movement with vital tasks. It makes it necessary and imperative to organically interconnect the tactics of the anti-imperialist struggle with the struggle for the strategy of socialist revolution and the perspective of communism.

The urgently needed anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, national-liberation, national-independence, anti-fascist, etc. tasks can be achieved effectively and consistently by a frontal revolutionary movement, in which the communists play a pioneering and leading role. This is in turn possible to the extent that the communists also spearhead the theoretical and ideological struggle by linking these objectives to the revolutionary perspective of socialism in an organic, substantiated, scientific and convincing way, to revolutionary social transformations that pave the way for the socialist revolution.

In order to best serve these tasks, the World Anti-imperialist Platform (WAP) was established and is being developed. The main interrelated aims of the WAP are: 1. The coordination and organisation of the anti-imperialist struggle; 2. The ideological struggle against opportunism and revisionism that act to undermine the movement; 3. The consolidation of the consistent revolutionary and internationalist communist forces, without the leading role of which the victorious anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples is unattainable.

In the WAP we consider necessary the broadest possible rallying and mobilisation in the frontal anti-imperialist struggle, of forces and tendencies with different ideological and political starting points and tendencies. However, we are convinced that the optimal way of organising and escalating the anti-imperialist struggle cannot be consciously planned without its organic interconnection with the struggle for socialist revolution.

Anti-imperialism and socialism/communism, in their social/class and ideological/political content, are two distinct but organically interrelated components of a single revolutionary process, a single movement.
The basic precondition for the strengthening of the anti-imperialist struggle today is the reconstitution and strengthening of the communist movement on a national, regional, and global scale, on the basis of the creative development and application of contemporary revolutionary theory and methodology.

WWIII has brought to the surface a plethora of ideas, scenarios and approaches to the rapid shifts taking place in the balance of power. Currently, the anti-imperialist movement is being approached by forces inspired or influenced to some extent by ideologies and ideological constructs in which concepts and doctrines of “geopolitics” are predominant.

If we seek a truly scientific approach to the issue, we must make a clear distinction between two levels of approach:

1. On the one hand, there is the actual objective historical process in the development of which historical subjects are involved based on the objectively available resources and means of pursuing their actions. The crystallisation of this process leads to the respective changes in the balance of power, the poles of attraction and/or repulsion of power and the corresponding (old and new) decision-making centres.

2. On the other hand, there is a plethora of different levels of reliability or unreliability of ideas, approaches, perceptions, speculations, working hypotheses and so on, through which people attempt to understand, describe, explain, and predict the above phenomena.

Geopolitics as ideology and propaganda of the capitalist class

Geopolitics is a direction of bourgeois ideology, a handmaid to every strategic and tactical pursuit of the “collective capitalist” at national and international level (and therefore of the ruling class’s leading political personnel). Geopolitics is often given a scientific veneer, with corresponding courses, degrees, university positions, “research centres”, etc.

As a widespread direction or trend in bourgeois political thought and propaganda, geopolitics is rooted in the extreme over-exaggeration or even absolutisation of the role of geographical factors in the life of society and in history. According to its ideologies and approaches, the whole flow of the history of human society is directly related to geographical terms and geographic location, in combination with Malthusian and neo-Malthusian ideas of demography, and even with racist concepts of social Darwinism. According to these concepts, not all races and nations are equal. On the contrary, there is a hierarchy between superior races/nations and inferior ones. Moreover, there is always insufficient “vital space” for the “superior and rising nations”, hence the legitimacy of claiming “vital space”, which leads to constant revisions of various physical borders, etc. Therefore, geopolitics as a rule functions as a necessary foundation for the ideology and propaganda of the aggressive foreign policy of imperialism.

While it emerged in its basic ideological directions from bourgeois public written discourse at the end of the 19th century in colonial Britain, France, Sweden, etc. however, as a sphere of ideological framing of the war and political aspirations of the warring imperialist camps, it flourished during the First World War. It was then that the Swedish pan-germanist political scientist Johan Rudolf Kjellén formulated the term “geopolitics”, describing the state as a geographical and biological organism. Since then, geopolitics has also been organically linked to the practical, ‘institutional’ applications of racism (eugenics, the imposition of sterilisation by court order, concentration and extermination camps for undesirables, control and repression of immigrants, ethnic cleansing, persecution of revolutionaries as forces ‘undermining national purity’, lobotomies, etc.).

During the interwar period it flourished in Italy, Germany, militaristic Japan and elsewhere, where it served as the “foundation” of the official doctrines of fascism, nazism and monarcho-fascism. It provided the ideological basis for the misanthropic and genocidal practices of the regimes of the anti-Comintern fascist axis.

The agents of fascist geopolitics officially organised and disseminated on a wide scale the propaganda of the ideas of revanchism and retaliation for the “unjust character” of the Treaty of Versailles against Germany. What they actually sought was to satisfy the imperialist aspirations for the redistribution of colonies and spheres of influence for the benefit of the German financial oligarchy, which they presented as a supposedly “natural aggression to claim necessary vital space” on behalf of the entire “supreme German nation” and the “Aryan race” …

After World War II, geopolitics blossomed in the United States and in some other imperialist countries as an ideological tool of anti-sovietism/anti-communism during the cold war, as a means of achieving the neo-colonialist aims of the financial oligarchy of imperialism. A distinctive feature of geopolitics is expressing the claims of the major imperialist states and their trans-state organs, coalitions, etc. for world domination, “world order” and, if possible, “world governance”. In any case, geopolitics has over time been associated with various versions of racism, chauvinism, nationalism but also with versions of cosmopolitanism.

Racism is a mishmash of unscientific and irrational beliefs about the supposed biologically determined physical and spiritual inequality of the human races and about the decisive influence of racial differences on the history and culture of society. Common to all racism is misanthropism, prejudices about superior and inferior races, the ones who are supposedly destined to be the sole creators of civilisation and domination and those who are incapable of cultural creation and hence are doomed to be exclusively dominated, subjugated, and exploited.
Nationalism, as bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology, psychology and politics perceives the nation as a supreme — non-historical and transcendental of class — unity, as a harmonious whole with identical basic interests. The interests of the ruling class are here projected as “nationwide”, while in relation to other nations, the nationalists put forward the idea of their own national supremacy and exclusivity. An extreme form of nationalism is chauvinism, the characteristic feature of which is an insistence on “national exclusivity”, the prevalence of the interests of one nation over the interests of other nations, national arrogance, hostility, and hatred towards other nations.

Cosmopolitanism is the reactionary bourgeois ideology/utopia with geopolitical implications, which is directed against the autonomy of the state and national sovereignty, against national traditions, national culture, and patriotism. This ideology is particularly widespread in the era of imperialism, since it aims towards the unhindered freedom of capital of the multinational monopoly groups on a planetary scale, free rein, and impunity for the financial oligarchy. The agents of this ideology consider anti-imperialism, any national liberation movement, any struggle for national and popular sovereignty “obsolete” (in this respect, the supporters of the revisionist doctrine of the “imperialist pyramid” agree with the reactionary bourgeois utopia of cosmopolitanism, with the only difference being the attempt to present this alignment with the strategy of imperialism as “the only revolutionary one”!).

Proletarian internationalism is opposed to all forms of racism, nationalism, and chauvinism, as well as to bourgeois cosmopolitanism, which advocates the integration of nations through the violent assimilation and enslavement of their peoples by imperialism in terms of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Marxists see the prospect of the rapprochement and conglomeration of nations through objective social development, through the law governed path towards unification of humanity under communism, in a process that crosses through the liberation, emancipation and self-determination of nations, through the flourishing cultural prosperity of each of these nations as organic elements of the unified humanity’s culture, on a completely voluntary basis.

Based on all the above, geopolitics certainly is not and cannot be considered a science. It is based by definition on a predominantly superficial, subjective and irrationally charged, or even highly obsessive perception of reality, especially when unresolved contradictions emerge due to the accumulation of changes in the balance of power on a regional and global scale.

In conditions of impending and/or ongoing military conflicts, geopolitics becomes particularly popular in the circles of the public opinion and common sense of everyday consciousness.

Despite its popularity in conditions of conflict, however, geopolitics is unable to rise above its immanent methodological inadequacies and its bourgeois reactionary ideological limitations. Geopolitical narratives are rife with unstable references, teetering towards a variety of different ideologies, pseudo-philosophical ravings, and irrational elements.

In its narratives, apart from the exaggeration of the geographic factor, many different factors are invoked at will, which makes it a version of the so-called “factor theory”. This type of “theory” attempts to describe and explain structure and movement, balances, imbalances, and conflicts by invoking certain “coequal” factors: economy, demography, geography, military power, religion, morality, technology, culture, “race”, etc. The inability to organically interconnect and prioritise the factors leads to a chaotic vicious circle through which it is rather impossible to distinguish cause-and-effect relationships, laws, and law-governed processes. Ultimately, anything can affect everything, and out of this maze of undefined, chaotic interactions, anything can emerge… In this way, it is impossible to produce substantiated and systematic scientific knowledge capable of objectively describing, explaining, predicting and being an effective instrument of human action.

As a rule, its proponents are not concerned about the existence within its narratives of contradictions, disparate elements, even irrational mystifications, typical of the ideological constructions/dogmas of nationalism, chauvinism, etc. I would like to point out that if some advocates of geopolitics show elements of acumen in their remarks, this is in no way due to the scientific validity of this field of ideological activity. On the contrary, any insightful remarks they may make are achieved in deviation from the irrational tradition that historically characterises this field, so it is rather due to their own individual erudition and insight, their own self-education and understanding of social theory, philosophy, political economy, etc.

As a rule, professionals of this kind (university professors, journalists and “analysts”, rambling politicians and other representatives of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class) cannot rise above the scientifically veneered propagandistic schematisation and systematisation of a narrative framework, according to the current ideological agendas for the justification of predetermined decisions taken by the political staff of the oligarchy of capital, the national or supranational bodies and institutions they serve (governments, transnational bodies such as NATO, EU, etc.).

At the level of the bourgeois geopolitical scriptwriting, peoples cannot be acting subjects, but expendable “resources” used to carry out the “national & supranational goals of the elites”. Therefore, they de facto fail to notice the class content in the interests of the real acting subjects behind every war, while the only subjects they acknowledge and promote are state formations/nations and coalitions of states. In practice, for geopolitics, the acting subjects can be, above all, the ruling classes, and their instruments at the national and supranational/transnational level (coalitions of states, etc.). Thus, the class essence, the contradictory and law-governed character of the system, comes to the surface in an inverted form, which not only conceals its essence, but presents the respective accomplishments and predeterminations of the strategy of imperialism as a one-way street…

An account of the historical context for the emergence of narratives on “multipolarity”

A systematic engagement with the history and main trends of geopolitics is not within the scope of this paper. For the sake of ideological debate here, I will make specific reference to that version/sub-variant of geopolitics which is nowadays projected as “multipolarity”. The debate concerns certain trends within and around the anti-imperialist movement of our time, which for various reasons resort to the aforementioned version of geopolitics.

Initially, the term “polarity” was introduced into the discourse of geopolitics, political science and international relations in the 1970s, within the context of needing to describe and explain the terms of the then dominant bipolar system of the Cold War.

Multipolarity emerged as a term and a trend in geopolitics after the end of the Cold War. It implies the existence (or the pursuit of the emergence and simultaneous predominance) of multiple poles/centres of power in the world, composed of the strongest powers/states, which are not bound to any specific alignment after the collapse of the bipolar world. According to some “multipolar” narratives, none of these “poles of power” (military, cultural, political, economic, etc.) should outnumber the others, nor seek to extend its influence over the others. As of 1989, with the end of the Cold War, the bipolar world (US and USSR) ceased to exist. Since then, many “well-meaning” journalists have been indulging in opinion pieces on the “future just world”, which somehow “ought” to be “multipolar, fair and equitable”, “subscribing to international law, morality and equality”, fostering mutually beneficial cooperation and “fair competition in the world market”, leaving room for each independent country to have its own domestic and foreign policy, etc., and so on.

At that time the confrontation was characterised by the antagonism between two rival socio-political and economic systems, two camps: capitalism and the countries of early socialism. Particularly after the crushing defeat of fascism-nazism — with the decisive role of the USSR and the anti-fascist popular liberation movements led by the communists — other types of relations of power were created on a global scale which favoured the development of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and national liberation movements on all continents where until then, the main imperialist countries had maintained their conquests and colonies.

At that time, even to the most ignorant on matters of social science, it was clear that there was an irreconcilable conflict between two poles (camps, coalitions), between “two worlds” led by two superpowers: the first led by the USA and the second led by the USSR.

Among them there was also an ambivalent and contested space, a multitude of countries that were then and often still are called “third world countries”. One after another, these countries were gaining their independence in various ways and at various levels. The breadth and depth of the socio-economic and political independence they achieved emerged as a function of the class character of the socio-political and ideological fronts that led these anti-colonial anti-imperialist movements, of the balance of power at the national, regional, and international levels, and of the effectiveness of internationalist assistance from the camp of the early socialist countries. This explains the range of diverse socio-economic changes and reforms historically observed in them in the decades after WWII.

These changes cannot be understood scientifically without the theoretical and methodological investigation into the position and role reserved by the existence of the camp of the early socialist revolutions and the countries that emerged from them. They must be examined as a historically necessary escalation of the basic contradiction of the global capitalist system, as a fundamental condition and manifestation of the general crisis of this system, i.e., the fact that the superior system/socio-economic formation of private property (capitalism) is beginning to lose the justification of its historical existence due to the progressive development of humanity in the direction of socialism, communist unified humanity. It is precisely the manifestation of revolutionary situations that blossom into victorious early socialist revolutions within the countries that constitute the weak links of the world capitalist system that creates conditions for an upsurge of historical optimism and new types of liberation movements in the countries that have been subjected to overexploitation by the parasitic imperialist countries.

The contradiction between the poles of the imperialist core and the periphery of the colonies and conquests of that core is also a manifestation of the basic, fundamental contradiction of the global capitalist system: the contradiction between capital and labour.

With the research established by Lenin in his work “Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism”, it becomes clear that in the monopoly stage, the escalation of capital accumulation on a global scale creates multiply mediated1) mechanisms for extracting surplus wealth on a planetary scale in the form of monopoly super-profits.

It was precisely as a result of the creation and strengthening of the camp of early socialism that — at the level of the balance of power, but also at the level of the realisation of this fact — another level of capacity for struggles for the liberation/emancipation of the colonies emerges, as a result of which the range of options for the predatory parasitism in terms of genocide, of the imperialist countries against the colonies and their possessions, semi-colonies, dependent, semi-independent and formally independent countries is shrinking.

In this way, during the monopoly stage of capitalism (imperialism), after World War II, rapid changes in the global balance of power emerge, which are directly related to the qualitatively different manifestations of the essential fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system:

1. The dipole of the contradiction between capital and wage labour, between dead labour of the past (embedded in the material means of production) and living labour of the present (which productively activates these material means).
   This fundamental contradiction continues to manifest itself, but no longer in a clear form, in the context of each individual country. It is precisely the new type, the escalation to a higher level of the law of capital accumulation discovered by Marx, that leads — as Lenin demonstrated in the field of the science of political economy — to the monopoly stage, in which two additional organically interrelated contradictory dipoles are revealed, manifested on a radically different scale, as qualitatively and essentially differentiated:
   • capitalism — early socialism and
2. imperialist center — colonial/neo-colonial periphery.
   It is precisely the triumph of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the subsequent great early socialist revolutions in Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, etc. that has a catalytic effect on the emergence of this third dipole, as expressed by the extremely popular but inaccurate term “third world”.
   Each of these organically interconnected opposing dipoles, and all of them combined, constitute fields of distinctive struggles between the forces of progress and regression: wage labour and capital, early socialism, and decaying imperialism (monopoly capitalism), anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist movements and imperialism/neo-colonialism.
   In this way, in the 20th century, a new level of internationalisation of the economic, social, and ideological-political life of the world’s population on a global scale was launched. The world system, the global division of labour and the respective positions and roles of countries and regions of the world are articulated in their further development through the escalation of these contradictory bipolarities, which are not static, but are subject to the historical necessity of the law of the global unified revolutionary process of the transition of humanity to socialism, which is the becoming, the process of the formation of communism, of unified humanity.
   The process of this revolutionary transition cannot be understood in a non-historical, linearly mechanistic way. It is a process characterised by an extraordinary and increasing complexity and diversity that is not only due to the multiply mediated relations between the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system and its necessary derivative manifestations under imperialism. They are also linked to the extraordinary diversity of residual pre-capitalist forms and structures. These remnants — insofar as they are not completely transformed by capitalism — function as historically necessary and extremely convenient for the monopoly overexploitation of imperialism, forms of manifestation and historically specific reproduction of inequality. In this capacity they are organically intertwined with the law of the “weak link” and thus with the extremely contradictory process of the rise and fall of revolutionary movements in the historical confrontation between the forces of revolutionary progress and counter-revolutionary reaction/regression.
   Contrary to the reactionary and irrational self-delusions of the ideologues of the financial oligarchy (who were quick to celebrate ghoulishly, joining the cries of the bourgeoisie along with the lamentations of some shipwrecks of the “left” of defeat and renunciation of even the idea of revolution) the temporary defeat of some early socialist revolutions (in the USSR and in the European socialist countries) did not in any way signify the death knell of the “end of history”, the definitive and irrevocable domination of capitalist barbarism, the cancellation of the inevitable historical course of humanity towards communism.
   Indeed, the world labour and revolutionary movement has suffered an unprecedented strategic defeat. The tragic consequences of this counter-revolution were even expressed in demographic losses amounting to genocide. The people of the movement tragically experienced the counter-revolution, its consequences, and its impact, often in the form of existential anguish.
   This defeat was of strategic importance and was tragically experienced by the people of the revolutionary movement. However, in terms of the logic of history, on a world/historical scale, it was only a tactical defeat. There is no strategic total victory in history without individual tactical defeats of the ultimate victors. Defeats through which the camp of the forthcoming victorious revolutions regroups at all levels (theoretical, practical, organisational, etc.) to finally defeat the forces of counter-revolution definitively and irrevocably.
   The tragedy of this defeat in no way negates the historical necessity of the global revolutionary process, the historical legitimacy of the revolutionary transition to a unified humanity. In the period since these counterrevolutions, the historical law governed process has continued to escalate through the contradictions mentioned above and other more complex and mediated ones. Underground fundamental processes (not visible on the surface by the common mind, untrained in dialectical science, and its variant that remains locked into metaphysical schemas stereotyped by dogmatism and revisionism) continued the work of the destructive and creative forces of historical becoming.
   The Soviet Union and the European countries of early socialism were once again transformed into a field ripe for predatory exploitation, being violently dragged back into the capitalist system. Imperialism, by means of unbridled revanchism, tried and to a considerable extent succeeded in subordinating them to its own system of global division of labour, positions, and roles. For this purpose, all legitimate and illegitimate means, all deceitful and inhuman ways of imposition, manipulation and subjugation have been employed.
   This process was characterised by the recolonisation of these countries and peoples by the imperialist camp led by the USA and its supranational organs. This process of recolonisation found fertile ground in a historically unprecedented process of primary accumulation of capital. The hitherto historically known process of Primitive Accumulation of Capital took place in its classic form as a process of historical transition from feudalism to capitalism, as a process of the abolition of feudalism and the feudal guild relations of society by the emerging capitalist relations of production. This process was spearheaded by the then revolutionary rising bourgeoisie together with its allies, the nascent working class and the poor peasantry of smallholders and landless peasants who suffered the evils of the declining serfdom. Successive early bourgeois revolutions were swept away by feudal counterrevolutions and restorative processes, until finally the capitalist system (long since dominant in the field of economy) was established at the level of the bourgeois superstructure. This took place with the late bourgeois and bourgeois-democratic revolutions, in a process which in the major European countries lasted for more than five centuries.
   On the contrary, the unprecedented historical form of Primitive Accumulation of Capital beginning anew was led by the newly emergent parasitic bourgeoisie of Russia and the other countries of the post-Soviet space. This partially incomplete accumulation took place under conditions of global domination of late imperialism.
   Crucial for understanding the historical context of the emerging narratives of multipolarity are the tectonic shifts in power marked by the development process of the early socialist countries that are continuing socialist construction, with the prominent role of the historically unprecedented rapid development of the People’s Republic of China.

Geopolitical doctrines on “multipolarity”
New impetus has been given to various forms of geopolitical/geostrategic public discourses among the ideological constituents of the ruling class of various countries after the victory of the bourgeois counter-revolution, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the imposition of reactionary processes of dismantling the coherent framework of the planned socialist economy during the capitalist restoration in the countries that emerged from the dissolution of the USSR and overall in the countries of early socialism in Europe.
Particular reference should be made to the adoption and application of geopolitical views of “multipolarity” in Russia after the bourgeois counter-revolution in the USSR. The historical specificity of the ideologies put forward by the newly emerging bourgeoisie in Russia is organically linked to the historical specificity of its emergence and formation: from the structures of the “shadowy” underground economy that parasitized on the weaknesses of the central planning of the USSR in the sphere of circulation, to the appropriation of ever deeper positions and roles in the economy and society, in proportion to the escalation of the bourgeois counter-revolution and capitalist restoration. They literally enriched themselves by treading on corpses, by the predatory privatisation of the wealth and infrastructure created and defended by generations of Soviet citizens with their sweat and blood.
That explains their ambivalent character. For decades they have been grovelling, begging the imperialist powers for a share and a role in the world economy. They have been getting kicked around and having doors slammed in their face on all sides. World imperialism did not relish the defeat and dissolution of early socialism in the USSR and Europe to have in its place even petty capitalists with aspirations and ambitions. It was and is aiming to pre-emptively eliminate all competition, through further fragmentation, the total colonisation of the post-Soviet formations, by turning them into vulnerable and subservient sources of raw materials, energy and cheap labour power. For this goal, a slimy submissive comprador bourgeoisie (of the Latin American banana republic-type like that of the late Yeltsin) is more than enough. Whatever independence and autonomy this bourgeoisie has had stems from the constant battering and humiliation at the international level, from the fact that Russia has not yet been dissolved, and — above all — from the mighty arsenal inherited from the USSR.
The present Russia is by no means the USSR and should not be equated to it. However, even the present counter-revolutionary Russia with the anti-Soviet/anti-communist excesses of its leadership, has to cloak its actions with references to the glorious anti-fascist victory of the USSR, “anti-Nazism”, etc., because it owes any power it may hold, to the achievements and legacies of the October Revolution and building of socialism.
The Soviet and later Russian spy, political scientist, diplomat, and politician Yevgeny Primakov2) (1929-2015) was the mastermind behind the Russian Federation’s pursuit of foreign policy and diplomacy based on the doctrine of a Russian variant of “multipolarity”, the operational/military version of which is known today as the “Gerasimov doctrine” (after the Russian Chief of the General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov).

• Pursuit of a “multipolar world” governed by a group of independent powerful states, capable of counterbalancing the unipolar power of the USA.
• Seeking to regain control of the post-Soviet space, playing in it the role of a pole of re-coalescence and integration of countries it influences and inspires.
• Highlighting and strengthening in geopolitical terms Russia’s “Eurasian role” in Central Asia and beyond.
• In this context, it is necessary to establish close alliance relations with Asian countries (especially China, India, Iran, etc.), capable of bringing forth the weakening of Euro-Atlantic economic and monetary dominance in the global economy and the international division of labour, as well as strengthening tendencies of coalescence within the EU.
• It is of vital importance to prevent further expansion and strengthening of NATO in its periphery, by activating military-technical or even military operational measures of power projection and deterrence.

There are two versions or aspects of narratives about “multipolarity”:

1. The first is confirmatory, pointing out the situation in which there is no singular dominant pole, or two of them with undisputed power, but a situation of uncertainty in which a few existing or even potentially rising poles — centres of power — emerge as coexisting, competing, or cooperating.
2. Of an ethical and/or practical political nature: “multipolarity”, as a desirable idealised state of affairs or even as “strategy”.
   The 1st version (confirmatory in character) contains, in my opinion, the rational core of this argumentation: it ascertains, captures some moments of an ongoing process, even if it does so in a static, fragmented, and disjointed way, without scientifically examining where, why, and how this process came about and without being able to make a scientific prediction of where this situation is going to lead.
   First of all, we must point out that no complex developmental process exists in the form of a steady state, as any kind of static “multipolarity”. This is particularly true of society as the most complex system which constitutes an organic whole.
   Any organic whole — no matter how multifactorial the context of the preceding or even contemporary reality within and from which it emerges — may well include various trends and dynamic directions of further development, however, in the course of the developmental process itself, these diverse tendencies converge until they are polarised as components of a fundamental antithetical dipole which gives rise to its development, a moving and driving contradiction, which constitutes the law-governed basis of its self-development. This is the fundamental contradiction of the system from which all further derivative contradictions arise.
   Therefore, in the process of the scientific research and the dialectical reconstitution in the cognition of the structure and history of society as a developing (organic) whole, any partial existence of a forming diversity of poles and contradictions can only constitute a historical moment of the early stages of a new whole being formed, with its own essential contradiction.
   Therefore, both versions of the “multipolarity” narratives mentioned above are highly unscientific, limited, static and restrictive. Both the approach which regards “multipolarity” in a confirmatory way as a given and unchangeable state of affairs, and the one which perceives it as an ideal and insurmountable future prospect, as an imperative to which the development process must be directed towards, as a … “strategic goal of the anti-imperialist movement”.
   Therefore, if there is a rational core to the multitude of views on multipolarity, it is at best reduced to the static confirmation, pointing out the existence of various poles, at some stage of their development process.
   And in the case where multipolarity is perceived as a moral/political and ethical principle, as some kind of ideal, or — even worse — as some kind of strategy the pursuit of which is asserted as a basic strategic purpose of an anti-imperialist movement, it is certain that if such an extremely short-sighted, vague and disorienting goal of this kind is adopted, it will ultimately have disastrous consequences for the movement. In any case, the multipolarity narratives, however “realistic” they may seem to some, are highly unhistorical, undialectical, and therefore, unscientific, and ungrounded.
   Of course, in terms of the discourse articulated by institutions of foreign policy and diplomacy, certain versions of a desirable “multipolarity” may have a certain resonance and functionality. In the case of those who evangelise a world in which there will no longer be unipolarity, supremacy and domination on a planetary scale of, say, a coalition of coercion headed by the United States as the “sole superpower having claims”, the functionality of this narrative has some meaning, some significance in tactical terms. This significance could be expressed in slogans along the lines of: “Down with the imperialist aggression of the US-led axis!”
   In any case, however, the insistence on “multipolarity” as a strategic horizon indicates a tendency and attitude in which the weaker pole or poles, the “cheated” ones in the present balance of power, claim a better position for themselves in the future order of society or even beg for this position, in cooperation with other weaker and “cheated” peers. So, if the discourse of multipolarity is articulated in this context, it is a rather short-sighted and shallow move to ideologically frame tactical objectives, which in no way could constitute a strategic perspective of an anti-imperialist movement with a revolutionary impetus and objective.
   This clearly pertains to the multipolarity beliefs and rhetoric of the official political and propaganda discourse of the newly formed, current ruling class in Russia.
   Here I am not even referring to those shades of “multipolarity” ideologies that are organically and overtly linked not only to versions of mysticism, obscurantism, regression, and reaction, but also to versions of fascist practices and ideologies. Indicatives are the cases of the pursuit of the constitution of geopolitically significant centres/poles based on reactionary tendencies that are more akin with conspiracy theories, such as “anti-globalism”, “conservative values”, ecclesiastical and theological structures of orthodoxy, pan-Slavism3), pan-Turkism, every nationalist “great idea”, etc. The pursuit of e.g., the establishment of a pole of this “multipolarity” based on “national Russian exclusivity”, the “Russian idea”, a metaphysical “special mission of the Russian people”, the “Russian idea”, the “Russian world” — and that in a highly multinational state like the present Russian Federation — denotes a nationalist and chauvinist position. Russian nationalism, in a spirit of conservatism and reaction that feeds national division, cannot be posited as the counterpoint to the russophobic hysteria of imperialism.
   Versions of the “multipolarity” discourse can also be observed in declarations of a constitutional character, in official texts of international organisations, such as BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and other alternative coalitions in the present historical context.
   A similar rhetoric is often expressed with regard to the foreign policy of the PR of China, in full conformity with the foreign economic policy model adopted by this early-socialist country at the international level. In all these cases we must take into account the specificity of the international policy and diplomatic language of various countries, which should not be directly confused with the concise scientific and ideological equipment of the anti-imperialist revolutionary movement.

Ethical and moral aspects of “multipolarity”
Does “multipolarity” have anything to do with justice?
Justice is a concept that touches on aspects of ethics, politics, and law. The concepts of good and evil are placed at a higher level of generalisation and abstraction, allowing the formulation of moral judgments about certain moral phenomena as a whole. In contrast to the concepts of good and evil, which morally characterise certain phenomena (attitudes, behaviours, acts, actions, steps, initiatives, omissions, inaction, and so on), justice characterises more specifically the interrelation of certain phenomena, or even the overall assessment of the state of society at any given time, in terms of the interrelation and distribution of good and evil in the relations between people. In this light, through the concepts of justice and injustice, people assess the totality of the social conditions of their existence and form their perception of the need and desirability of maintaining or changing these conditions.
Under the prism of justice, the ways of distribution among people of goods in scarcity (e.g. of optimal access in terms of quantity and quality to material goods and services for the satisfaction first of all of biological needs, of optimal access to creative activities that lead to the development of the individual and to the acquis of culture) are examined. It concerns therefore the way people relate to each other, mediated by access or not to desirable and contested goods. It also concerns the global dimension of the economy and inter-state relations, the relations of exploitation, domination, and subordination on a planetary scale.
From this point of view, if this access is unequal, i.e., as long as the existence of exploitation of man by man is historical necessity, injustice prevails and the prospect of the elimination of this exploitation projects itself as the prospect of justice. However, the objective conditions of this prospect, which arise, are formed and mature historically, are realised in corresponding conceptions of justice. The latter are divided, they differ and clash, to the extent that the material interests of individuals, groups (classes), countries, groups of countries and society, of humanity as a whole, are divided, differ and clash, while the respective dominant conception of justice, is consolidated and internalised at the level of everyday practice within the dominant relations, but in general, it is also imposed by the institutions of the dominant material interests as a pseudo-generic justice, which supposedly expresses the whole of society (through law, institutions, etc., but also by invoking “national interests”, international and/or “universal”, “democratic”, “anti-authoritarian” principles, values, institutions, etc.).
These perceptions change historically and regionally. For example, in antiquity, slavery was seen as the natural state of slaves (according to Aristotle, “speaking tools”), while feudalism and serfdom were considered in their decline by the rising bourgeoisie to be an unjust and undignified anachronism that deserved to be overthrown.
Until recently, the neo-colonialist super-exploitation of peoples by imperialism was considered an “insurmountable normality”. However, with the escalation of WWIII, the anti-imperialist/anti-neo-colonialist sentiments of hundreds of millions of people on the planet are beginning to snowball as a claim for justice and dignity in international economic relations.
From a certain point of view, justice can be projected and function as the moral dimension of the respective conditions and limits of the consent of the underprivileged, of those subjected to exploitation, oppression, or (when these tolerable limits are exceeded, which is perceived as social injustice, corruption, and so on) of the claim to change their conditions of existence. In the latter case, we have clear symptoms of the manifestation, on a mass scale and at the level of everyday consciousness, of the moral decay and bankruptcy of historically obsolete economic and social relations and institutions, but also of the balance of power that is radically changing.
However, provided that revolutionary Marxist-Leninists do not wish to indulge in abstract moralism and arbitrary deontological constructions from a safe distance, they do not confine themselves to philosophical reformulations of the experiences that cause the above symptoms in the subjects of everyday consciousness, nor to schemes outside of the historical place and time, as if they were timelessly unchanging “principles and values”. Abstract ideas, understood as an unhistorical self-righteousness, and feelings of justice cannot replace the theoretical (philosophical and interdisciplinary) investigation of the actual possibilities and the law-governed necessity of a way out of the social deadlocks experienced by people as conditions of injustice at the local, national, and global level. They cannot be a substitute for the struggle to achieve the tactical and strategic goals of the real revolutionary movement.
The bourgeois conception of justice is linked to formal equality (egalitarianism) and natural law theories. In the bourgeois “neoliberal” ideologies of “unadulterated meritocracy” and in the practices of post-modernist identity and rights politics, the complete degeneration of the demands of the rising bourgeoisie for equality, justice and freedom is manifested today. The neoliberal revision of bourgeois values that is predominant today is manifested with such extreme social minimalism that it not only renounces the prospect of social revolution, anti-imperialism and any radical demands of the working class and the people, but also renounces any positive definition of the fight against injustice, inequality and oppression, from every positive platform, means and ways of making demands, from every concrete interconnection of revolutionary tactics and strategy. It is limited to negatively critiquing the conditions that led to the consolidation of the now undisputed inequality and oppression, or to the conditions of their reformation in order to ensure consensus with the strategic choices of the financial oligarchy. Modern opportunism and revisionism operate in a similar way.

Some practical conclusions on ideological intervention and propaganda in the anti-imperialist movement
In the case where “multipolarity” is put forward as an ideal, an expectation of a more just world or, in any case, of a framework for more just international relations, then it is linked to deontological thought and to a certain moral ideal, to some notions of justice based on a certain sense of right.
In this respect, people and groups of people who begin to understand injustice on a primitive level, even in terms borrowed from “multipolar” narratives, are welcome into the movement.
However, there is no reason to maintain and reproduce this static, limited, and restrictive level of awareness as it is, nor is there any reason for it to be promoted as the central concern and purpose of the movement.
Any perception of the people that even partially, even in a static way, reflects the sense of injustice from the dominant regime of imperialism, which is now endangering humanity, can be a certain basis, a starting point for their rallying in our frontal anti-imperialist struggle. But this is not enough. The catalytic intervention of communists armed with scientific revolutionary theory is required to achieve further radicalisation of the perceptions and dispositions of these people.
In any case, this sense of justice is organically linked to the position and condition of some who are or feel wronged or even “cheated” in the international division of labour, positions, and roles, in the global hierarchy of countries and regions. In this sense, even as a framework of protest expressing this sense of right, the rhetoric of “multipolarity” is extremely shallow and pessimistic if it is ever to become a frame of reference capable of inspiring an anti-imperialist movement with a certain perspective. In its narratives, this rhetoric takes as given by default the conditions and limits of the state of a certain type of transitional international relations on the planet. It moves by definition in the realm of hetero-definition, a negative identification with the old world, with the declining and waning imperialist unipolarity under the leadership and hegemony of the United States.
The rhetoric of “multipolarity” disorientates from the realisation of the nature of war and the imperative necessity of militant anti-imperialism, trapping consciences in the ideologies of the bourgeois pseudo-science of geopolitics, in the tail of the capitalist class of certain countries. Therefore, it does not and could not constitute a positive project of perspective that could as a strategically oriented purpose stimulate a mass anti-imperialist movement in a revolutionary direction.

……………
To the extent that geotectonic power shifts and war continue, this fluidity will be reflected in the existence of various attraction/repulsion movements of poles and centres. Hence, the “multipolarity” views will also be reproduced in various forms. This will continue to happen until — through the conflicts and the revolutionary potential that they gestate — the new transitional crystallisation of the global basic contradiction, together with its derivative essential manifestations, emerges more clearly in a new stage, in a new contradictory dipole, with the forces of the pole of socialism and its anti-imperialist allies strengthened in breadth and depth (extensively and intensively), in the event that it emerges victorious from the conflict.
This conflict of the WWIII, which has resulted from radical qualitative and essential changes in the content, forms and acting subjects involved in the resolution of the crux of the contradictions of the time and the conjuncture, in turn, catalytically counteracts all these variables, accelerating, widening and deepening the transformations and projections of the subjects involved.
The rapid resurgence of a new unprecedented wave of anti-imperialism, now capable of dynamically and drastically nullifying to a large extent the potential for super-exploitation of the majority of the world’s population by the imperialist powers (through the siphoning off of enormous surplus value, through various and multiply mediated mechanisms of neo-colonial super-exploitation through the extraction of monopoly super-profits), it is also significantly upgraded through new alliances, coalitions and integrations of an alternative type. The rapid expansion of BRICS at their recent 15th summit in South Africa alone is indicative of the quantitative changes that are now becoming qualitative and essential. We are no longer talking about a numerical aggregation of countries, populations, sizes, economic and military powers, but about a qualitative and substantial leap in the formation of a new pole-centre, i.e., a new subject-in-the-making with a decisive role in the global development process.
These trends are extremely encouraging. However, the revolutionary movement has no room for groundless over-optimism and complacency while life-or-death conflicts are escalating.
The history of early socialism and 20th century anti-imperialism has shown that the viability of the revolutionary camp depends directly on the interrelation of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces in the global revolutionary process.
In this correlation, the role of the camp of the socialist countries, the extent and depth of the consolidation of the socialist transformations within them, and the degree of their constitution as a collective historical subject are catalytic and decisive.
The degree of their constitution as a collective historical subject is in turn a function of the level of economic integration and internationalisation of socialist relations of production, the degree of collective subordination of their societies to scientific planning, and therefore of their monolithic unity in the face of the remaining lethal forces of shrinking imperialism.
The historical experience of the 20th century has shown that the camp of early socialism was clearly inferior to the imperialist camp, both in terms of its forces and in the degree of integration of socialist economies and societies compared to imperialism. Unfortunately, the “multipolarity” within the socialist camp (with disruptive tendencies that even reached the point of warlike inter-alliance conflicts, and even with elements of nationalist geopolitics) played an undermining and disintegrating role, contributing to the discrediting of socialism and the well-known phenomena of counter-revolutions at the end of the 20th century.
Only with a qualitative and substantial upgrade (a radical broadening and deepening) of the socialist camp as a leading pole will the upgrade of the anti-imperialist camp be achieved, the pulling power of which will strengthen the world/historical tendency of the “non-capitalist mode of development” with a clear socialist orientation for the countries that break the shackles of imperialist neo-colonial dependence.
In this way, through the victorious advance, military or peaceful, of the revolutionary pole (socialist and anti-imperialist), the process of the early socialist revolutions will be completed and revolutionary processes will be launched in the developed capitalist countries as well, in the centres of imperialism, since the financial oligarchy, having lost its sources of parasitism, will no longer be able to use the resources of monopoly superprofits to manipulate the working class in its countries of origin (through bribery, deception, divisions and brute force).
Then socialism will begin to develop (sublating the capitalist and pre-capitalist remnants, free from external sabotage and interference) on its own (scientific-technical, productive, and cultural) basis and will move rapidly towards communism, towards the maturity of society, towards a unified humanity.
Then the time will come for the mature and late socialist revolutions, with the victory of which the ground for any trace of “multipolar” phases and conceptions will have disappeared, since capitalism and all exploitative relations will have been eliminated from the historical arena.
No ideological construct of “multipolarity” is even capable of putting the complexity of this dialectic of strategic and tactical goals on a rational scientific basis.
These tasks call for a conscious struggle for the qualitative and essential theoretical, practical, and organisational upgrading of the world anti-imperialist and communist revolutionary movement, which confirms the strategic importance of achieving the aims of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform.

Notes
1) Multiple mediation, in dialectical logic and methodology of scientific research, refers to the type of connections, relations and interactions that characterise the contradictory complexity of a system that constitutes an organic whole. These are non-linear, complex, multi-level, contradictory, obscured, not directly visible on the surface, connections the investigation of which requires systematic scientific research. e.g. For some, the mere fact of the existence of formally independent states in Africa, is evidence of the absence of imperialist dependence, overexploitation, etc. while ignoring the profound and multiply mediated mechanisms of surplus value extraction in the form of monopoly superprofits, unequal exchange, overpricing and underpricing, loan agreements, currency manipulation, government takeovers, extortion, regime change, arms programmes, foreign bases, military interventions, etc. that are typical of neo-colonialism.
2) Primakov is ideologically and politically positioned in right-wing social democracy. He sought for Russia a version of capitalism with state-monopoly regulation of the Keynesian type. His popularity soared when, as prime minister of the Russian federation and while on his way to an official visit to the United States in 1999, upon learning of US and NATO bombings of Yugoslavia, he instructed the pilot of his aircraft to make a 180° turn over the Atlantic and return to Moscow. It was a cowardly symbolic act of dignity towards the US leadership. A leadership that in its unbridled arrogance had staged the complete national humiliation, the international vilification of counter-revolutionary Russia also on a symbolic level: with the media coverage of the official presence of the Russian Prime Minister alongside the coverage of the bombing of the fraternal for the Russian people Yugoslavia! Of course, it would have been of much greater value — and not only symbolic but mainly practical — if Mr. Primakov had allowed the then President of Belarus, Lukashenko, to deliver some S-300 anti-aircraft anti-ballistic missile batteries to the heroic Yugoslavia, which would have practically prevented an attack on it by the Western powers. However, Russia’s leadership at the time was far from adopting a dignified defence policy even at that level.
3) An internet search of the word “multipolarity”, as a rule, leads to the notorious irrational “philosopher” Aleksandr Dugin. Evidently, we are dealing with aggressive marketing over-promoting this version of eclecticist beliefs of a fascist hue, at the heart of which is consistently anti-Sovietism/anti-communism, the resurrection of reactionary doctrines of 18th-19th century slavophiles, a primitive version of russian nationalism, mysticism of orthodoxy and the projection of Russia as the bearer of a metaphysical mission of “Eurasianism”. The connections of these circles with the terrorist Nazi organisation “Golden Dawn” in Greece and with a multitude of far-right, nationalist, and fascist groups from Turkey and many other countries are anything but accidental. As long as some people base their “anti-imperialism” and their disposition for “independence” on bourgeois geopolitical narratives of “multipolarity” on the resurrection of the obscurantist “Eurasian” mysticism of the 19th century, seeking “philosophical depth” in the irrational fascist ravings such as Dugin’s, they are practically paving the way to fascism!

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Essence and characteristics are different but closely related. Each being or movement has innumerable characteristics, but their essential characteristic is the most important aspect that distinguishes them from one another. In short, essential characteristic corresponds to the ‘What’ of 5W1H (what, who, where, when, why and how). To understand this ‘What’, we need to answer the question of the ‘Why’. ‘What’ and ‘Why’ are the two main components of a goal. Without knowing ‘What’ and ‘Why’, we can never know ‘How’.

War is a struggle. The battle between those waging a just war and those waging an unjust war is one of the starkest class struggles. The highest level of class struggle is a revolutionary war, and the category of revolutionary war includes an anti-imperialist war.

What should we make of the Ukraine war that broke out in eastern Europe in 2022? This is a question about the character of the war in Ukraine. More specifically, a question about its essential character. In other words: what is the war in Ukraine, and why did it happen?

The simple and clear answer is that it is an anti-imperialist and antifascist war, a liberation war, and a preventive war. This describes the war from the anti-imperialist camp’s viewpoint, and directly, from the standpoint of Russia. For Russia’s opponents, the war has the opposite character.

The war in Ukraine is an anti-imperialist and antifascist war. Waged by Russia, it is an anti-imperialist war against imperialist NATO and also an antifascist war against the Ukrainian fascist forces, puppets of imperialist NATO. Russia called the war in Ukraine a ‘special military operation’ at the beginning of the war in February 2022 and revealed three goals: denazification, demilitarization, and protection of its population.

The elimination of the Azov battalion in Mariupol in May 2022 was an example of the denazification, the seizure of an underground arsenal in Bakhmut in May 2023 was an example of the demilitarization, and the merger of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson was an example of protection of the population.

Further, President Putin first referred to the conflict as a “war” in December last year and did so again at the Victory Day ceremony on 9 May this year. While the war in Ukraine appears to be a war between the Russian and Ukrainian armies, but it is in reality a war between Russia and NATO. The actual operational direction of the Ukraine’s military forces lies with NATO, and its soldiers are trained and its weapons are mainly provided by NATO. Other NATO forces are also directly and indirectly involved in the war in Ukraine in various forms and ways, whether as commanders or soldiers. Without NATO’s involvement, the war in Ukraine would have been over long ago. In fact, it would never have started.

The war in Ukraine is a liberation war. It did not begin in 2022 but in 2014. Its roots go as far back as 1991, with the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union and eastern European socialist bloc. Indeed, the imperialist’s plan to use Ukraine against Russia goes back to the 1950s and even earlier.

NATO’s eastward expansion policy since 1991 is one of the root causes of the war in Ukraine, and the Maidan coup in 2014 and the subsequent eight years of fascist genocide against the Russian people is one of the direct causes of the war in Ukraine. Therefore, from Russia’s point of view, the war in Ukraine is a liberation war to free the Russians and the Ukrainian people from fascist and beastly repression.

The war in Ukraine is a preventive war. The imperialist powers have continuously pursued isolation, division, and collapse strategies against Russia. From the infamous ‘grand chessboard’ strategy of Zbigniew Brzezinski to NATO’s eastward expansion policy and a succession of engineered ‘color revolutions’ to depose independent-minded or Russia-friendly governments in former socialist countries.

In February 2022, NATO was secretly propelling its forces towards a full-scale invasion of the besieged Donbass. Its attack forces were based in Mariupol and spearheaded by the neo-nazi Azov battalion. NATO, which had already invaded and dismantled Yugoslavia in the 1990s, was working on such a plan, so naturally, Russia had no choice but to prepare.

There is a view that defines the war in Ukraine as an interimperialist war. The premise of the argument is that Russia is an imperialist country, fighting in Ukraine for colonies and spheres of influence. According to this view, Russia is no different in essence to the imperialist leaders of NATO, namely the United States and western Europe.

This view rests on an unscientific characterization of Russia’s social character, which in turn is based on a wrong understanding of imperialism. The most egregious case of this erroneous reasoning can be found in the theory of the ‘Imperialist Pyramid’ put forward by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).

Russia is not an imperialist but a capitalist country with lots of socialist heritage. At the beginning of the retreat from socialism to capitalism, under the regime of Boris Yeltsin, Russia even degenerated into a colony of US and European imperialism. Since then, the country has mainly exported resources not capital. Russia is not a country that lives primarily by exporting capital, importing raw materials and plundering colonies for superprofits, quite the reverse.

The relationship between Russia’s politics and economy is also completely different from that of an imperialist country. In Russia, political circles take the initiative above the economic circles. Many companies, especially in the energy sector, are nationalized in Russia, and they implement the policy of voluntary deviation in which nationalized companies provide cheap supplies to the people and bear their own losses. This is also related to Russia’s socialist heritage.

This is one of the reasons why Russia has not deviated from the line of anti-imperialism even though it is not a communist and internationalist country. Especially in recent years, Russia has joined the unitary anti-imperialist front, along with North Korea and China, and never derailed or wavered from it.

In 2023, the probability of the spread of war in eastern Europe and the outbreak of war in East Asia is rising. In East Asia, Taiwan and South Korea are the most likely places for wars to break out. When the wars materialize, we should call them the Taiwanese War and the South Korean War. An agreement between the President of North Korea Kim Il Sung and the Premier of China Zhou Enlai in 1961 states that when war in either Taiwan or South Korea breaks out, the other will immediately follow. The prerequisite for this agreement is that it has to be an anti-imperialist war. In the current context, it is clear that such a war will have anti-imperialist character. So it can be affirmed that they will happen almost immediately.

The wars in Taiwan and South Korea are anti-imperialist wars, national-liberation wars and national reunification wars. Concretely, a war in South Korea is an anti-imperialist and antifascist war, when we consider the common point with a war in Taiwan, it is an anti-imperialist war.
The wars in Taiwan and South Korea are anti-imperialist wars. They are anti-imperialist wars in which China and North Korea are ostensibly fighting the Taiwanese and South Korean authorities respectively, but in reality they are fighting US imperialism, the true ruling power in Taiwan and South Korea.

The imperialist camp includes Japanese militar-ism and European imperialism which follow US imperialism. Unlike Taiwan, South Korea is a fascist society. It really has fascist evil laws such as the National Security Act and repressive institutions such as the National Intelligence Service. The regime of Yoon Suk-yeol is escalating fascistization by repressing political parties and conducting anti-communist campaigns in South Korea. It describes North Korea as the “main enemy”, insisting on its right to make a “preemptive nuclear strike” and holding huge nuclear war exercises one after another.

Recently, it joined in forming the US-Japan-South Korea trilateral military alliance to create an Asian version of the NATO. Clearly, the war in South Korea has a relatively more antifascist character compared to the war in Taiwan, so it should be considered both an anti-imperialist and an antifascist war.

The wars in Taiwan and South Korea are national liberation wars. Taiwan has been one with the Chinese mainland since the middle ages, and currently, only 1-2 percent of Taiwanese are ethnically Taiwan aboriginal. The vast majority of Taiwan’s people are Chinese. Meanwhile, Korea has been a single nation for over 5,000 years.

The war in Taiwan is a national-liberation war to free the Chinese people living in Taiwan from the domination of foreign imperialist powers. The war in Korea is a typical national-liberation war aimed at establishing the sovereignty of the Korean nation on a nationwide scale, not only in the north but also in the south, driving out the US army that entered South Korea as an occupying force in September 1945, and finally achieving the national liberation that was left incomplete in August 1945.

The wars in Taiwan and South Korea are national reunification wars. Taiwan and South Korea are the targets of the reunification, which is at the very heart of the both China’s and North Korea’s core interests. Taiwan was separated from the Chinese mainland when Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, and South Korea was divided from the north by the US occupying forces. The people in Taiwan and South Korea have as a result had to suffer the pain of division for more than 70 years.

There is no more important task or need for the Chinese and Koreans than resolving this issue of their countries’ division. There are many ethnic nations in the world that have been divided by foreign powers, and Korea is a representative example. That is why the war in Korea will be a representative national reunification war.

North Korea describes the war in South Korea as the “South Korean Liberation War”. This reflects North Korea’s recognition that it had already been liberated on 15 August 1945 and its determination to complete the victory that was only partially achieved on 27 July 1953. This concept also implies a national-liberation war and a national reunification war. Thus, the concept of the South Korean Liberation War centers on the goal of the war rather than the target of the war — that is, national liberation and national reunification rather than anti-imperialism and antifascism.

Anti-imperialist, antifascist, liberation, preventive, national-liberation and national reunification wars are all just wars. The character of the war is defined depending on one’s position. In this respect, for Marxists and anti-imperialists, the just character of these wars is historically, morally and scientifically proven and undeniable.

As we know, WW1 was an interimperialist war, WW2 was an antifascist war. Following the war in Ukraine, if wars break out in Taiwan and South Korea, WW3 will be in full swing. The common point of the wars in Ukraine, Taiwan, South Korea is that they are anti-imperialist wars. Absolutely, WW3, the anti-imperialist war, is a just war as like WW2, the antifascist war.

A just war may not necessarily be won, but political and moral superiority is undoubtedly one of the main factors that assist in it towards victory. If you have the way and means to achieve the goal of justice — namely, a strong army and exceptional operations — the chances of victory are close to perfection. And if the goal of justice is achieved, humanity has the opportunity to take a great leap forward.

The post The Character of the War appeared first on They Shall Not Pass.

Part 3: Imperialism vs. imperialism?

A long work
The first part has shown how inadequately the CPG refutes the opinions of communists who do not share its views. We have seen that it does not attempt fraternal debate, but resorts to misrepresentation of ideas and disqualifications which take the place of arguments.
In the second part, we have shown the main defects of the idea of the “imperialist pyramid” and concluded that this idea can in no way be considered Leninist.
Now it is time to move on to more concrete questions. Unfortunately, there are many questions that concern us but little time and space to develop the answers: Are China, Russia and other countries like Iran or Venezuela imperialist? Are countries like Niger or Argentina imperialist? Can Cuba be considered imperialist? And so on and so forth. However, due to limited time, we will only be able to cover the most important points. Therefore, we will focus on Russia and China and contrast their non-imperialist character with the states that we consider clearly imperialist: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan. It is possible to include Canada and Italy in the list of imperialist states. But beyond these 7 countries, it seems to us hardly possible to extend the list of imperialist states according to our criteria, the basis of which we will develop in the following pages.
Furthermore, we will explain why the People’s Republic of China is in our opinion socialist, although there is no socialism in it, at least not a mature and consolidated socialism. It could also be said that China is in the first phase of the construction of socialism, that it is, therefore, a primitive, immature and, as such, intrinsically contradictory socialism, with successes and failures, with advances and setbacks.
And we will set out the reasons why the postulates of the CPG and, in general, of so-called “Eurocommunism” are particularly harmful to the communist forces and the proletarian struggle in the world.
As the third part is more extensive than the previous two, it will not be possible to cover it in a single publication. We will have to divide it into several parts.

Brief and concise summary of the “imperialist pyramid” and the CPG study method
In part one and especially in part two of this article we have discovered the political purism of the CPG and its remarkable ability to jump from correct ideas (the rejection of opportunist, reformist and claudicative positions) to purist and chimerical ideas in a single paragraph and sometimes even in a single sentence. We have seen that its position divides communists into two absolutely and irretrievably separate groups: the “true communists” (at the top of which, according to the CPG itself, this party is situated) and the “opportunists” (a group made up of all those who do not share its positions 100%).
We discover that the CPG applies an idealist (in the philosophical and not in the moral sense) logical and not a dialectical-materialist method of analysis. To better substantiate this assertion let us look at what the postulate of Logic says: “a thing is what it is, a thing is or is not, but it cannot be and not be at the same time”1). And now let us look at what the postulate of Dialectics says: In the words of Frederick Engels Dialectics “understands things and their conceptual images essentially in their context, their concatenation, their movement, their formation and decay”2). Georges Politzer adds that from “the dialectical point of view, everything changes, nothing stays where it is, nothing remains what it is”3). Guerrero adds that for Dialectics: “A thing is never what it is. In order to be what it is, a thing has to let itself be what it is”4).
The political purism, the enormous leaps from correct to chimerical ideas, and the use of the logical rather than dialectical method of enquiry are seen in the following quotation:
“The confrontation within the ICM, as the KKE has highlighted many times, has many aspects. For example, it is taking place:

Between the parties that support the co-opting of the CPs into “broader left progressive alliances” and those that struggle for the preservation of the ideological-political independence of the CPs and the strengthening of their ties with the working class and the popular strata.
Between the parties that remain entrapped into the old strategy of “stages towards socialism” and support the participation in bourgeois “left”, “anti-neoliberal”, “progressive”, and “centre-left” governments in the framework of capitalism, and those that have rejected the participation in bourgeois governments and the rationale of stages and struggle for the overthrow of capitalist barbarity.
Between the parties that identify imperialism exclusively with the USA or some powerful capitalist countries of Europe or foreign aggressive policy, and the parties that are based on the Leninist conception that imperialism is monopoly capitalism, the highest and last stage of the exploitative system.
Between the parties that consider that the struggle for peace is inextricably linked to a “multipolar world” that would supposedly tame the USA, fostering illusions about a supposedly “peaceful international architecture”, which is promoted by social democracy and opportunists, and the parties that believe that the capitalist world cannot be “democratized”, that it cannot escape from wars no matter how many “poles” it has, and that it is necessary to strengthen the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, for the new, socialist society.
Between the parties that consider China to be a country “building socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the parties that believe that socialism has principles that have been violated in China, where capitalist relations of production have now prevailed; that this is a country of the modern capitalist world, which in fact is competing with the United States and threating its supremacy in the imperialist system.”5)

——————–

To give a few examples:

Political idealism (purism): “[…] and those that have rejected the participation in bourgeois governments and the rationale of stages and struggle for the overthrow of capitalist barbarity”. Remarkable aversion of the CPG to any bourgeois government. The CPG seems unable to distinguish between progressive bourgeois governments, on the one hand, and reactionary and counter-revolutionary (philo-fascist) governments, on the other. Reactionary bourgeois governments often disguise themselves as progressive and revolutionary. Instead of denouncing the “disguise”, the CPG, due to its inability to distinguish between form and substance, refuses to cooperate with any kind of bourgeois governments, even if they seek the nationalisation of enterprises of strategic interest, the reversal of privatisations and the deindustrialisation of the country, the strengthening of the country’s military power, the waging of a real war against the big organised crime capitalists, etc. If they are bourgeois governments, there can be no alliances of communists with them, says the CPG.

Logical method of analysis: “Between the parties that identify imperialism exclusively with the USA or some powerful capitalist countries of Europe or foreign aggressive policy, and the parties that are based on the Leninist conception that imperialism is monopoly capitalism, the highest and last stage of the exploitative system.

The CPG cannot conceive in the least that a synthesis between all this is possible, i.e. that it is possible to understand that the USA is the hegemonic country par excellence, that there are other countries which share with it the property of being imperialist, that from such a property emanates its aggressive foreign policy and furthermore that such an understanding means precisely supporting the “Leninist view that imperialism is monopoly capitalism, the highest and last stage of the system of exploitation”. The CPG separates the waters and then is incapable of bringing them back together again, which Moses at least succeeded in doing.

Big jumps: “Between the parties that support the co-opting of the CPs into “broader left progressive alliances” and those that struggle for the preservation of the ideological-political independence of the CPs and the strengthening of their ties with the working class and the popular strata.” 

How correct is the CPG’s position in rejecting opportunism, reformism and, more generally, those political and ideological positions which seek to alienate the working class and the other social sectors which share its destiny from the struggle for the new society. How correct is also his demand that the communist parties must preserve their “ideological-political” independence. How correct is also the postulate that the communist parties must strengthen their links with the working class and the popular strata. But all these correct ideas lead to an absolute chimerical purism in which the communist parties end up as sects prevented from forming “broader progressive left alliances”, and thus the CPG leaves the working class and the popular strata alone in a alone struggle against big national and imperialist capital, abandoning all possible good allies of the left to reaction.

——————–

We consider the term “imperialistic pyramid” used by the CPG to be rather imprecise, as it implies that a thing, in this case a pyramid, has a property, in this case that this pyramid is imperialistic (i.e. “the pyramid is imperialistic”, just as saying “the affable ladder” means that “the ladder is affable”). It should be obvious to any reader with average reading comprehension that a pyramid built of stone and surrounded by sand can hardly be imperialistic in itself. Perhaps the pharaohs buried in them were. But the pyramid, incapable of transforming its environment, is nothing more than an inert thing devoid of intellectual or moral qualities that could enable it to be imperialist. We believe that with this term the CPG wants to point out that “the structure of imperialism is pyramidal”. At least that is how we have interpreted it. If we are mistaken in our interpretation of the concept, we are grateful for the CPG’s fraternal clarification.

We have seen that imprecision of terms is a constant in the texts of the CPG.

We have also seen that the CPG bases its arguments on disqualifications, but above all on a revision of Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Now, it seems to us that the idea of the “imperialist pyramid” is not only a revision of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, but (in our opinion) a dangerous attempt to replace it.

The CPG’s “reasoning” is based on a moral and subjective assumption: “it is capitalist = it is bad”. With this idea in mind, it “weaves” a “sack” into which it puts all “imperialist countries”, which, given its purist assumption (“it is capitalist = it is bad”), includes practically all countries recognised by the United Nations (because very few, if any, countries today meet the criteria of being “purely socialist-communist”). This CPG argument can be translated into a new equation: “(almost) all countries of the world = imperialist countries = imperialism or international imperialist system”. Countries are neatly placed in the bag according to how much “power” they wield (the CPG does not explain why some countries wield more “power” than others, nor in what sense such countries are or are not “powerful”). Once the “sack” is filled to overflowing, the CPG finds that there are stubbornly a few countries at the top of the sack (those with a lot of “power”) and many at the bottom (those who, conversely, have little “power”). From the shape of the sack, which is narrower at the top and thicker at the bottom, the CPG extracts with “imaginative acuity” and “remarkable capacity for abstraction” the three-dimensional version of the triangle: a pyramid, and gives it the title ‘imperialism’ or ‘international imperialist system’. In short, all the countries of the world recognized by the United Nations (and probably also those not recognized) would be imperialist and together they would form the ‘international imperialist system’, which is also called ‘imperialism’.

This is the “model” of imperialism proposed by the CPG. We have seen that this idea is contrary to Lenin’s theory of imperialism, although the CPG insists with great vigour on claiming to be Leninist, as if by asserting something it makes the assertion that something.

In its essence, this idea seeks to equate all countries in which the capitalist mode of production prevails with imperialism and thus to abolish the dialectical antagonism between the countries of the world postulated by Lenin, an antagonism which exists independently of the character of the mode of production prevailing in these countries and also independently of the orientation of their foreign and domestic policies. The central basis of Lenin’s theory of imperialism is the realisation that there is a very small group of imperialist countries and a large majority of countries which are plundered and exploited by these countries. This constitution comes about because such imperialist countries have huge monopolies and powerful banking systems which enable them to export gigantic amounts of finance capital or banking-industrial monopoly capital. The expansion of capital is followed by military expansion, which explains, for example, colour revolutions, the economic collapse of states (as in Greece, for example), coups d’état and wars.

In our opinion, it is essential not only to defend the Leninist postulate of a bunch of imperialist countries, but also to reject the attempt to revise and even replace Lenin’s profuse theory of imperialism with the (in our opinion infantile) idea of the “imperialist pyramid”, because the latter, as we have already seen, leads to dangerous and harmful conclusions from the point of view of the anti-imperialist struggle, the anti-fascist struggle and the struggle of the workers of the whole world for the conquest of political power and for their liberation from wage slavery.

One of the most dangerous findings of the CPG, derived from its concept of the “imperialist pyramid”, is the position it has taken on the conflict in Ukraine and how it classifies Russia and China as enemies of the international working class and the peoples of the world, even on the same level as the USA, the imperialist countries of the European Union, Japan and its belligerent spawn NATO.

These are the reasons that have led us to give a response to the CPG.

A big mess

The CPG, in its familiar tone unbecoming of a political debate among communists, claims that the assessment of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform that there is no economic data to justify calling China or Russia imperialist “once again seeks to distort reality”6) and “refuses [it refers here to the World Anti-Imperialist Platform] to face reality”.7) And to demonstrate “conclusively” that our opinion is wrong, it launches a veritable “hodgepodge” of data supposedly proving that China and Russia are imperialist:

“The WAP argues that “That there is no economic data to justify characterizing China or Russia as imperialist. These are countries that do not live by superexploiting or looting the world. They do not put other countries into military, technological or debt slavery” and that “Russia and China are not aggressive imperialist powers but, on the contrary, are targeted by our enemies because they stand in the way of the USA’s complete global domination”.

With these statements, the WAP once again seeks to distort reality. It is as if China and Russia do not participate in the G20 summits, the meetings of the 20 most powerful capitalist states of the world, together with the USA, Germany, the UK, France, etc. It is as if the Chinese and Russian monopolies do not export capital to other countries, aiming for the profit that comes from exploiting the labour power not only of the workers of their own country, but also of many other countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, wherever their monopolies develop. It is as if the Russian “Wagner” private army is deployed in Africa for charitable reasons and not to defend the interests of the Russian monopolies operating there. It is as if China is no longer moving in a similar direction to safeguard the Belt and Road Initiative by military means. It is notable that this initiative includes the small but very important in geographical terms state of Djibouti — whose debt to China amounts to 43% of its Gross National Income — where China’s first military base outside its borders was inaugurated in 2017.”8)

Here we have just read two paragraphs with a real “hodgepodge” of data. The second paragraph begins with an allusion to the G20, then lists some member countries, then alludes to the existence of exploitative Chinese and Russian monopolies, then stumbles over the Russian private army ‘Wagner’, then wanders along the “belt and road” to Djibouti and its 43% debt to China, and finally ends with a visit to the first Chinese foreign military base…

The CPG seems to think that a cascade of disconnected data proves something. In reality, however, what emerges is a gelatinous amalgam of unrelated data that is difficult to “grasp”. Perhaps that is even their intention. We do not know…

To respond to the above assertions, one has to dissect this gelatinous and convoluted paragraph and go step by step through the list of incoherent facts presented as arguments.

China and Russia belong to the G20

Let’s start with the first statement in the quote: China and Russia are members of the G20. 

The attentive reader will surely ask: What does this prove — that these two countries are imperialist by virtue of their membership of the G20?

Let us look at the full list of G20 members (in alphabetical order): Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Republic of Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States of America and, the only non-country member, the European Union. The G20 members (the 19 countries and the EU) account for approximately 85 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product, just over 75 per cent of international trade and about two-thirds of the world’s population, according to the G20 website9).

Membership of the G20 alone would make a country imperialist, argues the CPG. It claims this without having made the slightest attempt to prove it. If this were the case, all member countries would be imperialist. Thus, Indonesia, South Africa, Argentina, Australia, Turkey and Brazil (to name but a few) would be as imperialist as the UK, France, the US or Germany (coincidentally, the only countries mentioned in the above quote from the CPG text). This would be a direct deduction from the CPG statement.

In our opinion, the imperialist countries are those listed in the quoted paragraph of the CPG (plus Japan and eventually Canada and Italy). The others are large countries (some with reactionary political systems and governments and others with progressive political systems), but they cannot be called imperialist. The characteristic of being a big country and the characteristic of being an imperialist country are not synonymous. We have pointed out in our statements that “this line [we refer to lines of reasoning such as those of the CPG] is based on a wrong theoretical premise (that every large economy in the capitalist world must automatically be imperialist)”.10)

Even more curious is the fact that the CPG mentioned the G20 but not the G7. Let us look at the list of G7 countries (in alphabetical order): Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.11) Here we have a real list of the “world’s most powerful capitalist states” and it does not include China, nor, today, Russia.

In 1998, Russia joined the forum, which adopted the new name G8 or sometimes also called G7+1. Wikipedia, a notoriously unreliable source, seems to understand the facts better than the CPG. Its website (in its spanish version) claims that Russia joined the forum ‘because of its political weight and not its financial weight’.12) In 2014, imperialist states excluded Russia from the forum over the secession of Crimea and its incorporation into the Russian Federation.

It is striking that the CPG has decided not to mention the G7 as the international forum of the “most powerful capitalist states in the world”, but the G20. The reason seems to us to be that the G7 does not include Russia and China, which the CPG insists on considering among the “most reprehensible” countries in the world, but the G20 does. It should also be noted that of the G20 members, the CPG only mentions those countries that are generally considered imperialist and avoids mentioning those for which there is no such consensus. It is these argumentative quibbles that the idea of the “imperialist pyramid” makes possible. This construction allows the CPG to arbitrarily move an imaginary demarcation line up and down the “imperialist pyramid” and place it wherever it suits them. Apparently, the G7 sits “too” high up in its pyramid, leaving out Russia and China, so the CPG shifts its imaginary demarcation line down a little until it finds “something” that includes both countries. And then it calls this “something” the “most powerful capitalist states in the world”. It is fortunate for the CPG that the G20 is not a G80…

The CPG always has the possibility of adjusting its imaginary line of demarcation in its “imperialist pyramid” at will. It can raise or lower it even to the base of the pyramid. This shows that his “theoretical” construction is not scientific, since it can be adjusted at will. Science, on the contrary, demands that the analytical system be adjusted according to the objective reality independently of the will.

State presence in Russian companies

The same quote 6 lists a number of large Russian companies, followed by an etcetera and the claim that these companies “exploit millions of workers, not only in Russia”, but also in various parts of the world:

“They refer to Russia, where giant monopolies (Gazprom, Rosneft, Lukoil, Rosatom, Sberbank, Norilsk Nickel, Rosvooruzhenie, Rostec, Rusal, etc.) exploit millions of workers, not only in Russia but also in the former Soviet Republics, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Africa, South America, Europe, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, etc.”13)

The authors of the article do not consider it necessary to elaborate on the “data” they present. For example, the CPG list interchangeably mixes companies with and without state participation. However, this distinction is important in assessing Russia’s imperialist or non-imperialist character and cannot be ignored. A state that participates significantly in economic activity is not the same as a state whose main and almost exclusive function is to guarantee private ownership of the means of production.

And Russia is distinguished by a state with relatively high participation in production and distribution.

For example, the Russian state’s share in Gazprom is 50.23%14), in Rosneft it is 50% (indirectly)15), in Sberbank it is 50%16), in Rossatom it is 100%, in Aeroflot it is 73.84%17), in Rostec it is 100%18), in the United Aircraft Corporation (OAK) it is 92.3% (through Rosimushchestvo)19), in Rosoboronexport (successor company to Rosvooruzhenie and Promexport20)) it is 100% (through Rostec)21), in the Moscow Stock Exchange it is 30.1% (through the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, Sberbank and VEB. RF)22), in VTB Bank it is 92.2%23) and even in companies such as Novatek and VK Group the state is represented, albeit only to a small extent (4.5%24) through Gazprom and 5.7%25) through Rostec, respectively) and so on and so forth until there are 668 Russian companies with full or partial state participation. 

The number and size of state-owned enterprises is higher than in most other countries in the capitalist world. State ownership is concentrated in sectors of strategic interest to the country (energy (oil, gas, nuclear and electricity), banking, defence and transport).26)

The Rosimushchestvo report27) shows that there are a total of 668 Russian companies in which the state has a more or less significant shareholding. The absolute majority 563 companies are owned by the Russian Federation through Rosimushchestvo. Of the 668, the state has a 100% stake in 299 companies. In other words: In 44.7% of Russian companies with state participation, the state is the full owner. In 36 companies it has a 50-100% stake. In another 49 companies it has a 25-50% stake, and in the remaining 263 companies it has a stake of less than 25%. It should also be noted that only about 40 companies out of the 668 companies listed in the Rosimushchestvo report are listed on the Russian stock exchange.28)

These facts, as we have pointed out, must be taken into account in assessing Russia’s possible imperialist character.29) The bourgeois ideologues, unlike the CPG, understand them very well:

“In his book ‘Property Rights in Post-Soviet Russia’, UC Berkeley professor Jordan Gans-Morse writes that ‘after the Khodorkovsky incident, everyone’s bureaucrats and law enforcement officials increased government pressure on business. Threats of asset seizures, facilitation of illegal business raids, extortion, unlawful fines or unlawful arrests were threatened’.

More and more companies came under state control, especially in the case of banks and companies in the energy industry. Already in 2016, Joshua Kurlantzick, an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), wrote about these issues in his book State Capitalism. How the return of statism is transforming the world. In his opinion, ‘in Russia, state-owned enterprises strangle any potential competitor that might emerge from the private sector. Under Putin, the Kremlin has allowed one or two state-owned companies to dominate almost all leading industries. Each company is staffed by management loyal and faithful to Putin. Companies that have resisted the state takeover have been hit with taxes, regulations and other punishments. Many of the most promising young entrepreneurs have fled the country’.”30)

As indignant as the bourgeois ideologues are about state involvement in the Russian economy, so indifferent is the CPG to it. This quote makes it abundantly clear that state ownership and control, especially in areas of strategic interest to the country, are an obstacle to free capitalist exploitation.

The importance we attach to the participation of the Russian state31) in the Russian economy arises from the role Russia plays today in the struggle against imperialism and the resurgence of fascism in Europe. Probably, the present Russian government was not pushed to adopt an anti-imperialist and anti-fascist position by its own decision, good will or anti-imperialist and socialist sentiments, but independently and even in spite of this will because of NATO’s relentlessly aggressive policy against Russia. Possibly, it was the desire of Russia’s post-Soviet governments to take a different path from that imposed on them by the war policy of imperialism, which never saw Russia as a state that would be part of the sharing of the world, but as another appetizing piece of land to be plundered, like the continents of Africa, Latin America and Asia. From its aspiration to join NATO and become part of the “Western” system of exploitation, Russia eventually reoriented itself towards the East and South:

“Russia is turning away from the West and towards the East. 

‘If there was ever an illusion that one day we could trust our Western partners, that illusion no longer exists,’ Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told state broadcaster RT on Friday. His country will never accept a world order dominated by the United States.”32)

“Lavrov announces Russia’s reorientation of economic and foreign policy towards Asia

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced today that Russia will reorient its economic and foreign policy towards Asia as it antagonises the West over the military campaign in Ukraine.”33)

Since the CPG applies an idealistic and logical method of analysis, it is not at all capable of grasping the importance of the fact described above for the international struggle against imperialism.34)

It is precisely the presence of the state in the economic affairs of the country that has contributed significantly to the fact that the economy of today’s Russia has not been taken over by imperialist capital. In other words, the point of maintaining a Russian state presence in the production and distribution of the country is to guarantee degrees of national sovereignty, to prevent the full colonisation of the Russian economy by finance capital, or rather imperialist capital, and to enable the Russian state, which has been unwilling to place its sources of strategic raw materials under the direct domination of imperialist enterprises and subordinate its chains of production and distribution to those dominated by imperialist states, to cope with the onslaught of NATO.

And Russia’s ability to stand up to NATO coincides with the independence aspirations of more and more countries in the non-imperialist world: 

The World Anti-Imperialist Platform has pointed out in its statements that Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, carried out against NATO and the reborn fascism in Europe, was going to open up new possibilities of struggle in the oppressed world, plundered and outraged by imperialism. For us, the militants of the Communist Party of Chile (Proletarian Action), affiliated to the World Anti-imperialist Platform, the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine was a welcome surprise.35)

Russia’s increasing reorientation towards the East and South has strengthened many of the economies of the countries in these regions and their efforts to become independent from US and EU hegemony.

A weak Russia would be a serious blow to the processes of emancipation against imperialism that are developing in more and more countries. The most recent case is Niger, where the military forces, supported by the broad masses of the people, decided to stage a coup d’état to overthrow the former president of the country, Mohamed Bazoum, a corrupt lackey of France and the USA. On this very important event from the point of view of the struggle against imperialism, the CPG, to our astonishment (again), has maintained a stony silence. On its English-language website not even a negative statement calling for the reinstatement of imperialism’s lackey government can be found.36)

Contrary to the CPG’s assumption, we “face reality”. Even if the CPG does not believe it, we are clear enough to agree with it that there is exploitation of the workers by the bourgeoisie in all countries where the bourgeois mode of production prevails. In Russia as well. It is also clear enough to us that the state bureaucracy exploits the workers in its own country and, of course, this is also the case in Russia. Our defence of state involvement in Russian production is not based on the fact that we ignore the existence of exploitation in Russia’s state enterprises or in the Russian economy in general. 

We express our support for Russia, even if it is capitalist, for the following reasons:

(1) The rates of exploitation of the workers by the state enterprises are lower than the rates of exploitation by the big private monopolies.

(2) The struggle for the final defeat of imperialism is the central struggle of the present.

(3) A strong state is a good basis for building socialism in a country.

In general, workers in state-owned enterprises enjoy stable jobs, higher levels of qualification and job security and social protection.

The presence of the Russian state in Russian enterprises allows for the influence of the broad masses of the people in Russian politics. A state that (almost) only represents the interests of private capital leaves political decisions exclusively in the hands of big national capital and, through it, foreign capital, as is the case in most dependent countries. But at the same time we recognise the inadequacy of such participation and warn of the vulnerability of the Russian state if it does not become more involved in domestic production and control the supply (distribution) chains more tightly, because we believe that it is in the interests of the struggle for the new society that Russia can continue to stand victoriously against NATO and rising fascism in Europe. This requires a strong, guiding, planning state with greater degrees of political participation of the broad masses of people, particularly the working class. More workers in the state sector also means lower degrees of wage exploitation.

We see that the CPG is unable to recognise the positive importance of the present Russian state for the defence of national interests, for the Russian working class and, at the same time, the obstacle it represents for big imperialist capital. The latter coincides with the aspirations of the peoples of the world for emancipation from imperialism. What the CPG does not achieve, the bourgeois press does. Thus, an article in the “Berliner Zeitung” with the headline “Putin rächt sich am Westen: Konzerne werden verstaatlicht — bevor sie ihr Russland-Geschäft verkaufen” (in english: “Putin takes revenge on the West: nationalises companies before they sell their businesses in Russia”) reads as follows:

“The Russian government suddenly takes over the business of Danone and Carlsberg in the country. The two companies had already found a buyer.

The Russian government has taken control of the Russian subsidiaries of Danone and Carlsberg’s Baltika breweries. It is the first nationalisation since the takeover of energy groups Uniper of Germany and Fortum of Finland, which were put under state supervision in April this year.

The Danish brewing group said on Monday that the company had not been officially informed of the move. ‘The Carlsberg Group has acted in accordance with local rules and regulations in Russia and finds this development unexpected,’ Carlsberg said.

Carlsberg had already submitted an application for sale in Moscow

The decree, signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday evening, said Russia was taking the shares in the companies, owned by the French food group and Russia’s leading beer producer, under ‘temporary administration’.

The Carlsberg subsidiary Baltika employs 8400 people in eight plants in Russia. Shortly after the Russian attack on Ukraine, Carlsberg had declared that it was ‘seeking a complete divestment of our business in Russia’. The move by the Russian government caused confusion as Carlsberg had only announced at the end of June that it had found a buyer for the Russian plants. In order to complete the sale, Carlsberg said it had already submitted an application to the Russian regulatory commission. 

If Western companies want to withdraw from Russia, however, they have to accept high discounts. Their Russian assets can only be sold for a maximum of half their price and they have to make a ‘voluntary contribution’ to the Russian state of five to ten percent of the sale proceeds. Ultimately, the sale still requires government approval.”37)

The claim of the article is clear: How could Putin think of nationalising. We welcome these measures and would like to see the nationalised companies remain in state hands. But even if, sooner or later, these nationalised companies will be taken over in whole or in part by the country’s private capital, at least they are national capital and the economic resources circulate within the country and not abroad.

Foreign penetration of the Russian economy

Although the presence of the state in areas of strategic interest to Russia has been a major obstacle to the penetration of imperialist capital in Russia, this penetration unfortunately exists.38).

Let’s look at some facts. 16.71% of Gazprom’s share capital are ADRs (American depositary receipts)39). The issuing bank of these ADRs is the Bank of New York Mellon, based in the United States, New York.

19.75% of Rosneft’s share capital is owned by BP Russian Investments Limited, a British company, and another 18.46% is owned by the Qatari company ‘QH Oil Investments LLC’. In other words, 38.21% is non-domestic capital.40)

33% of Sberbank’s share capital comes from US investors and another 6.24% from European investors. In other words, 39.24% are not national capital.41)

The shares of Novatek, a quasi-private company (as we saw above, through Gazprom the state has a 4.5% stake) are distributed among three main shareholders, two individuals (Russian oligarchs) and one company. The two individuals are the CEO, Leonid Mikhelson (25%) and Gennady Timchenko (23%). The company, which ranks third among Novatek’s shareholders, is not a Russian company, but a French monopoly: TotalEnegrie.42)

The case of the Moscow Stock Exchange is equally worrying. From a corporate point of view, 15.8% of the shares of this body are held by the following three companies: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, State Street Bank & Trust Company and The Capital Group Companies, Inc (each holding just over 5% of the shares). The situation becomes even more worrying if share ownership is broken down by country: the US holds 35.90% in the form of companies and individuals, the UK 9.40%, France 6.20%, Canada 3.00% and Sweden 2.60%. Together these countries account for 57.1% of the shares of the Moscow Stock Exchange against 39.7% for Russia (including the state’s share).43)

Accessing information on the ownership structure of companies is not easy. There are companies that provide insufficient information and others that do not. However, these examples show an ownership structure of Russian companies penetrated by foreign capital.

Contrary to CPG claims, Russia is not a plunderer, but a plundered country that tries to limit the subjugation of its companies, production capacities and control over supply chains precisely by a state that assumes responsibility for the economy. 

We believe that the Russian state would do well to take over on a larger scale both the enterprises in the hands of large domestic private capital and foreign capital, at least in areas of strategic interest to the country. The Russian state in its present form does not yet seem to us insufficiently strong to confront NATO as a whole in a very possible future direct confrontation.

Unfortunately, the interests of the big capital often, but not always, conflict with national interest44). The current Russian government, while defending Russia’s national interests, also defends the private interests of the big capital at home. National interests often clash with the interests of the national, and especially foreign, big capital. This prevents the Russian state from changing its character from a state that serves to defend the private ownership of the means of production (and distribution) to a state with big economic responsibility and a centrally planned system to govern the national economy. But it is precisely the political forces that demand this that communists outside Russia should support, among them the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

A formulation that more accurately describes the reality of the exploitation of Russian enterprises is that imperialist capital, through Russian enterprises, exploits the national workers, in unison with Russian big capital. This fact that big national capital joins forces with imperialist capital to exploit the working class is a common feature of all non-imperialist countries. In this context, the importance of the Russian state is crucial, as it further limits national economic dependence on imperialism.

It is possible to point out then that Russia has a relatively strong state which enables it to counteract economic penetration as well as NATO’s military aggression against it. It is also true that Russian enterprises, including those of strategic interest to the country, are affected by the penetration of imperialist capital.

We strongly defend the role of the Russian state in defending national interests and its attempts to advance the strengthening of national industry. We also recognize that Russia’s current role against NATO and fascism in Europe is congruent with the struggle of the peoples of the world for national sovereignty and against imperialism. A weakening of Russia would be detrimental to the peoples of the world who want to achieve their national sovereignty.

That is why we are very concerned about the penetration of imperialist capital into the Russian economy. We want to see a strengthening of the Russian state, a greater planning role for it and greater interference in national production. In our opinion, the strengthening of the Russian state must necessarily come at the expense of the big oligarchic groups in the country, in whom we see the main problem for Russia and for the rest of the world fighting for freedom. The interests of the owners of big capital are in conflict with the interests of the great majorities of the country. And in the face of the growing danger of a direct NATO confrontation with Russia, we hope that the Russian government will have the wisdom to lower the living standards of the Russian oligarchs in favor of national industry, in favor of the technological development of the country, in favor of the Russian army, in favor of health, housing and education.

The ability to critically analyze reality, i.e. to recognize contradictions, to understand that every part of reality is contradictory in itself, as is also the case in Russia, and to extract a synthesis from this critical analysis, is absent in the CPG. It recognizes the “bad” or the “good”, but is unable to grasp both aspects at the same time and to extract a synthesis from them. Despite the negative aspects of Russia, the synthesis says that Russia’s role in the struggle for the emancipation of the peoples of the world from imperialism is relevant and positive. Its failure to recognize this is the basis of the damage the CPG is doing to the international communist movement at present.

In the following parts we will look at issues such as: the export of capital from Russia abroad, Russia’s productive and commercial structure, Russian banking and Russia’s military presence in the world. 

Notes

1)   Guerrero, Patricio, “Campo de estudio de la ciencia económica: algunos aspectos básicos” (in english: “Field of study of economic science: some basics”), (photocopy), 1999, p. 4. 

A book version is available at: https://books.google.de/books/about/Campo_y_m%C3%A9todo_de_estudio_de_la_ciencia.html?id=bcaBzgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y

2)   In the original in German: “die Dinge und ihre begrifflichen Abbilder wesentlich in ihrem Zusammenhang, ihrer Verkettung, ihrer Bewegung, ihrem Entstehn und Vergehn” auffast.

Engels, Frederick, “Herrn Eugen Dühring’s Umwälzung der Wissenschaft” (in english: “Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science”), in: Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels — Werke, Berlin, DDR: Dietz Verlag, Band 20, 1962, p. 22. 

A digital version of the work in English is available from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/index.htm

3)   Politzer, Georges, “Principios elementales y fundamentales de Filosofía” (in english: “Elementary and Fundamental Principles of Philosophy”), Argentina, Colección Eneida, 1971, p. 115. 

A book version is available at: https://www.casadellibro.com/libro-principios-elementales-y-fundamentales-de-filosofia/9788446022107/975911

4)   Guerrero, op. cit.

5)   Communist Party of Greece (CPG), “On the ideological-political confrontation at the 22nd International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties and the “trick” about the “anti-Russian” and “pro-Russian” sentiment”, in: https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/On-the-ideologicalpolitical-confrontation-at-the-22nd-International-Meeting-of-Communist-and-Workers-Parties-and-the-trick-about-the-anti-Russian-and-pro-Russian-sentiment/

6)   Communist Party of Greece (CPG), “On the so-called World Anti-Imperialist Platform and its damaging and disorienting position”, in: https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/On-the-so-called-World-Anti-Imperialist-Platform-and-its-damaging-and-disorienting-position/ 

7)   Communist Party of Greece (CPG), op. cit.: “On the so-called World Anti-Imperialist Platform…”

8)   Partido Comunista de Grecia (PCG), op. cit.: “On the so-called World Anti-Imperialist Platform…”

9)   G20, “About G20”, last updated on 30.06.2023, in: https://www.g20.org/en/about-g20/ 

10)   World Anti-Imperialist Platform (WAP), “The rising tide of global war and the tasks of anti-imperialists (Full text)”, in: https://wap21.org/?p=566

11)   We would also like to point out a fact. From the statement: “The PAM claims that ‘There would be no economic data to justify calling China or Russia imperialist.’ […] It is as if China and Russia did not participate in the G20 summits, the meetings of the 20 most powerful capitalist states in the world”, it follows that the member states of the G20 are without exception imperialist countries. This idea contrasts with the idea of the “imperialist pyramid”, according to which almost all or perhaps all countries recognised by the UN would be imperialist. Either all countries in the world are imperialist because they have more or less developed trade relations, or only the G20 countries are imperialist.

12)   Wikipedia, “Creación y  evolución del G7”, in: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/G7

13)   Partido Comunista de Grecia (PCG), op. cit.: “On the so-called World Anti-Imperialist Platform…”

14)   Gazprom, “Grwoth at Scale, Gazprom Annual Report 2020”, in: https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReports/PDF/LSE_OGZD_2020.pdf, p. 31, in the section “Share Capital”.

15)   Rosneft, “Shareholder structure”, 1 July 2021, in: https://www.rosneft.com/Investors/Equity/Shareholder_structure/

Fin-plan, “Компании с государственным участием на российском фондовом рынке” (in english “Empresas con participación estatal en la bolsa rusas”), 11 July 2022, in: https://fin-plan.org/blog/investitsii/kompanii-s-gosudarstvennym-uchastiem-na-rossiyskom-fondovom-rynke/?ysclid=ll6d6lqh77551810745

16)   Smart-Lab, “структура и состав акционеров Сбербанк” (in english “Companies with state participation at the”), 8 May 2020, in: https://smart-lab.ru/q/SBER/shareholders/ 

Fin-plan, op. cit. “Компании с государственным участием на…” (in the footnote 63)

17)   Aeroflot, “Shareholder Capital Structure”, last seen on 7 August 2023, in: https://ir.aeroflot.com/ensecurities/shareholder-capital-structure/

18)   Smart-Lab, op. cit. “структура и состав …” .

Fin-plan, op. cit. “Компании с государственным участием на…” (in the footnote 63)

Rotec, “History”, last seen on 14.08.2023, in: https://rostec.ru/en/about/history/ 

19)   Gazprombank, “Компании с государственным участием на Московской бирже” (in english: “Companies with state participation on the Moscow Exchange”), 17 February 2023, in: https://gazprombank.investments/blog/reviews/state-participation-companies/?ysclid=ll6d6fo92l147691067 

20)   The CPG is not distinguished by a high level of rigour. In its list of Russian ‘giant monopolies’ (Gazprom, Rosneft, Lukoil, Rosatom, Sberbank, Norilsk Nickel, Rosvooruzhenie, Rostec, Rusal, etc.) it lists the name of the company ‘Rosvooruzhenie’, which no longer exists because it merged with ‘Promexport’ and together they became ‘Rosoboronexport’.

21)   “On 10 January 2017, in accordance with the resolution of 26 December 2016 of the sole shareholder, Rostec State Corporation, Alexander Mikheev assumed the position of General Director of JSC Rosoboronexport.”

Rosoboronexport, “History of the company”, last seen on 14.08.2023, in: http://roe.ru/eng/rosoboronexport/history/index.php 

22)   Moscos Exchange, “Shareholders owning over 5 per cent of shares”, data updated as of 4 April 2023, in: https://www.moex.com/s1352 

23)   VTB Bank, “VTB Bank Annual Report 2022”, in: https://www.vtb.com/media-files/vtb.com/sitepages/ir/VTB_Annual_report_2022_ENG.pdf

24)   Energy Intelligence, “Gazprom Restructures Minority Ownership in Novatek”, in: https://www.energyintel.com/0000017b-a7da-de4c-a17b-e7dac5550000

25)   Fin-plan, op. cit. “Компании с государственным участием на…” (in the footnote 63)

26)   Apparently, there is a case of privatisation: the case of Gazprombank. As North Stream II failed to get off the ground, it seems that Gazprom was forced to sell its voting shares in Gazprombank to private individuals. It does not seem to be clear who the new owners of these shares are. At the time of writing, we have not been able to find more precise information.

Warsaw Institute, “Gazprombank CEO: Gazprom’s Shares Acquired by Russian Entities”, in: https://warsawinstitute.org/gazprombank-ceo-gazproms-shares-acquired-russian-entities/ 

27)   Rosimushchestvo, “Учет и мониторинг федерального имущества. Состав и структура пакетов акций (долей), находящихся в федеральной собственности по состоянию на 26.11.2021” (in english “Accounting and monitoring of federal property. Composition and structure of blocks of shares (stakes) in federal ownership as of 26.11.2021”, from 03.06.2022, in: https://rosim.gov.ru/Attachment.aspx?Id=202132 

28)   Fin-plan, op. cit. “Компании с государственным участием на…”

29)   The arguments that are usually put forward to refute the importance of state involvement in the Russian economy are similar to the following: “state capitalism is not socialism”, “if the state is capitalist, it makes no difference whether the enterprises are state or private, the exploitation of the working class is one and the same”, “the Russian state bureaucrats exploit the Russian working class and the working class of other countries”.

30)   MercadoLibre, “Así secuestró Putin la propiedad privada en Rusia” (in english: “How Putin hijacked private property in Russia”), published on 14/4/2022 – 10:11 hrs., in: https://www.libremercado.com/2022-04-14/putin-propiedad-privada-rusia-6885221/

31)   It is debatable whether or not the Russian economy can be described as state capitalism. But it is not the purpose of this paper to enter into this debate.

32)   Fundscene, “Lawrow – Russland hat alle Illusionen über den Westen verloren” (in english “Lavrov – Russia has lost all illusions about the West”), 18 March, 2014, in: https://fundscene.com/lawrow-russland-hat-alle-illusionen-uber-den-westen-verloren/

33)   Swissinfo.ch, “Lavrov anuncia que Rusia reorientará política económica y exterior hacia Asia” (in english: “Lavrov announces Russia’s reorientation of economic and foreign policy towards Asia”), published on 07 December 2022 at 11:47 hrs., in: https://www.swissinfo.ch/spa/ucrania-guerra_lavrov-anuncia-que-rusia-reorientar%C3%A1-pol%C3%ADtica-econ%C3%B3mica-y-exterior-hacia-asia/48115656

34)   The usual arguments to dismiss Russia’s new orientation towards the East and South include: “the Russians do not fight fascism and imperialism on principle”, “they say they fight fascism in Ukraine, but in reality they only want to spread their imperialist wings over new markets (in Ukraine)”, “how naive those who think they see something good in the Russians”, and so on a list of arguments based on moral values and not on objective facts.

35)   Our party, a few days after the Russian special military operation began, published a statement of support entitled “Declaration of the Communist Party of Chile (Proletarian Action) in the face of the latest events in the Ukraine” which reads for example: 

“We see Russia’s military incursion as a decisive response to the ongoing violations and breaches of international agreements signed by Russia and the ‘West’.”

Communist Party of Chile (Acción Proletaria), “Declaración del Partido Comunista Chileno (Acción Proletaria) ante los últimos sucesos en Ucrania” (in english: “Statement of the Communist Party of Chile (Acción Proletaria) on the latest events in Ukraine”), written on 27.04.2022 and published a few days later, in: https://accionproletaria.com/declaracion-del-partido-comunista-chileno-accion-proletaria-ante-los-ultimos-sucesos-en-ucrania/

36)   Our party quickly issued a statement on this important development in Niger. The statement reads:

“Russia’s struggle in Ukraine against NATO and fascism opens a space of struggle for all peoples who want to free themselves from the imperialist yoke. The new world must have a sovereign and industrialised Africa!”

Communist Party of Chile (Acción Proletaria), “Los Comunistas, el Partido Comunista Chileno (Acción Proletaria), saludan el despertar de África” (in english: 

“The Communists, the Communist Party of Chile (Acción Proletaria), salute the awakening of Africa”), 7 de agosto 20237 August 2023, in: https://accionproletaria.com/los-comunistas-el-partido-comunista-chileno-accion-proletaria-saludan-el-despertar-de-africa/

37)   Berliner Zeitung. “Putin rächt sich am Westen: Konzerne werden verstaatlicht — bevor sie ihr Russland-Geschäft verkaufen” (in english “Putin takes revenge on the West: corporations are nationalised — before they sell their Russia business”), 17 of July 2023, in: https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/wirtschaft-verantwortung/sanktionen-wladimir-putin-raecht-sich-am-westen-danone-und-carlsberg-werden-von-russland-verstaatlicht-li.370088

38)   Since sanctions against Russia came into force, it has become more difficult to obtain data, at least from some parts of the globe. For several Russian companies, links to annual reports are inaccessible. We do not know why. To obtain the relevant data, we have had to find ingenious ways to get around the obstacles as much as possible.

39)   Gazprom, op. cit. “Grwoth at Scale, Gazprom Annual…”, p. 31, in the section “Share Capital”.

40)   Rosneft, op. cit. “Shareholder structure”

Fin-plan, op. cit. “Компании с государственным участием на российско…”

41)   Smart-Lab, “структура и состав акционеров Сбербанк” (in: “Estructura y composición del accionariado de Sberbank”), 8 de mayo de 2020, in: https://smart-lab.ru/q/SBER/shareholders/

42)   Energy Intelligence, op. cit. “Gazprom Restructures Minority…”

43)   Moscos Exchange, “Shareholders owning over 5 percent of shares”, data updated as of 4 April 2023, in: https://www.moex.com/s1352 

44)   National interests are those that transcend social classes and are shared by the majority of the population, such as strong production, national sovereignty, territorial integrity, food and energy security.

The post The political stance of the Communist Party of Greece a communist stance? appeared first on They Shall Not Pass.

Dear comrades!

I cordially welcome the participants in the 22nd International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties on behalf of the Communist Party of Ukraine. The party which has been illegally banned in my country where our comrades and like-thinking people suffer political persecution, arrests and physical violence on the part of the ruling Neo-Nazi-oligarchic regime, a regime which is, in essence, reactionary and Fascist.

We have gathered here on the Island of Freedom at a difficult time. The forces of international imperialism, the sharks of globalization in their struggle for redrawing the political map of the world, for resources and commodity markets resort to any methods and in fact act as instigators of the Third World War. The tragedy is that the reactionary forces make active use of Neo-Nazism and Neo-Fascism to achieve their goals.

Analysis of the international situation shows growing aggressiveness of imperialism and a dramatic sharpening of its internal contradictions in two areas:

• the ideological – between the US-led imperialist West and Communist China which, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, they consider to be “an empire of evil,” as well as Vietnam and Cuba;
• and the inter-imperialist –The USA seeks to preserve its hegemony and the world order under which it plays the dominant role.

The USA is creating new miliary blocs in Southeast Asia, stoking up tensions in the Middle East and North Africa, and is pursuing an aggressive policy in using Ukraine against Russia, and Taiwan against China. The provocative visit of Pelosi to Yerevan and her pledges of support for Armenia inevitably lead to a widening of the conflict in the Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The situation in Central Asia gives grounds for concern (recent conflict between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan).

After the breakup of the USSR it was the USA and Britain that set about creating a neo-Fascist state on the territory of the former Soviet Ukraine and became the main sponsors and beneficiaries of it.

The reforms they were foisting on Ukraine put capital in control of all the spheres of society’s life and ensured total control of transnational corporations over the country’s socio-economic life and as a result created the material basis for the advent and establishment, as a result of an armed coup in February 2014, of the power of the most reactionary forces: the comprador bourgeoisie allied with neo-Fascists and organized crime. 

It was these forces in Ukraine that were instrumental in destroying all the socialist gains, economic sovereignty and bringing about a profound lumpenization of society.

It is through these forces that the USA formed a puppet vertical power structure and introduced external control of the country.

It was through these forces that the USA unleashed in Ukraine a fratricidal civil war, a war against the citizens of Donbass who are upholding their constitutional rights and freedoms. It was these forces which, at the instigation of the US ruling circles, brought about a development of the civil war in Donbass into a war against Russia.

Humankind has in fact already been dragged into a new world war. I would like to draw one of the many tragic parallels.

During the Second World War Europe was working for Hitler in the war against the USSR. Today, acting in the interests of the USA, Europe is supplying weapons to the pro-Fascist regime in Ukraine and is strengthening it financially.

The continuation of this policy will inevitably lead to the spread of the theatre of hostilities to the territory of the EU.

The aggressive attempts of some new European countries, notably Poland, Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states, to revise the post- World War II borders will merely speed up this process.

The former Foreign Minister of Romania, Marga, recently said without mincing words: “Ukraine is within unnatural borders. It should cede territories: Transcarpathia to Hungary, Galicia to Poland, Bukovina to Romania. These are the territories of other countries.”

US senator Lindsey Graham said cynically that with American weapons Ukraine will fight Russia to the last man.

Civilians, innocent people—old folks, women and children — are dying in Ukraine. This is a tragedy.

In backing the fascist regime in Ukraine, the USA and NATO are pursuing a policy which former US senator Richard Blake outlined like this: “we don’t care how many Ukrainians die. How many women, children, civilians and military die. We don’t care. It is like a football match and we want to win. Ukraine cannot accept a peace solution. It is up to Washington to take the peace decision, but in the meantime we want to continue this war, we will fight to the last Ukrainian.”

Such statements by war hawks vindicate our position and the warnings the Ukrainian communists voiced in Izmir last week: the threat of a Fascist offensive is real, the war which the USA and NATO are waging with Ukrainian hands on Ukrainian territory is a war solely in the interests of the USA imperialists.

Billions of dollars are funneled into the production of lethal weapons and ammunition, Britain’s new-baked Prime Minister Liz Truss is prepared to use nuclear weapons, huge numbers of NATO troops are concentrated on the borders of Ukraine and Belarus.

The imperialists turn a blind eye to the fact that Zelensky’s pro-Fascist regime is ruthlessly doing away with political opponents. Any manifestations of free thinking are quashed by punitive units. The crimes of Hitlerites and their accomplices during the Second World War who burned people alive in Oswiecim and who staged Gernica and Khatyn massacres are being glorified.

The monuments and graves of Soviet soldiers who gave their lives to have the flames in the furnaces of Nazi death camps doused are being destroyed.

This happens not only in Ukraine but all over Europe. The Moloch of glorification of Nazi criminals devours minds turning homo sapiens (“the wise man”) into a “mad man.”

The process of recreating a semblance of the Nazi Third Reich is practically underway.

This “Reich,” like its prototype nurtured by transnational capital, American and British corporations, bases its ideology on the superiority of the “indigenous” race. Hence the law on indigenous peoples which has turned into outcasts the Russians who have always lived on Ukrainian territory, including Donbass, Kharkov, Odessa, Nikolayev, Kherson, indeed the whole territory of our country. Like Jews in Nazi Germany. We know from history what tragedy it visited on millions of people.

Comrades!

In view of what is happening in Ukraine, I would like first of all to note that unfortunately, there is no consensus between Communist and workers’ parties on the nature of the armed conflict in Ukraine, as well as on the position of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which has supported the special operation.

Since any military confrontation has its own specific features, the very first task of any Marxist is to identify its class-oriented nature with appropriate assessment. 

As we believe, the war of Donbass against the Kiev regime should be considered as national liberation struggle, in essence, a war for independence from the ruling fascist regime, for the right of the people to speak their native Russian language and not to follow the anti-Russian course imposed by the United States.  

Hence, on the basis of Marxist theory, the military conflict in Ukraine should not be considered as an imperialist war in a literal sense of the word, and moreover in view of Russia, it is considered as the struggle against an external threat to national security and fascism.

We all understand that people’s militia of Donbass was not able to resist the Ukrainian army of many thousands equipped with foreign weaponry, so their defeat would have inevitably lead to the total destruction of the Russian-speaking population, many of whom were citizens of Russia.

The army of thousands of Ukrainian nationalists under the command of American and NATO instructors concentrated on the borders of the republics, the detailed invasion plan had been developed by Washington generals in advance. They all were waiting for the command.

Accordingly, in order to protect its citizens and ensure national security, Russia had no other choice but to deliver a preventive strike.  

In accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the President has taken the actions stipulated by the Law, since it was impossible to resist aggression in any other way.

In addition, the negotiation process within the framework of the Minsk agreements has been deliberately sabotaged by Kiev with the support of the United States and the European Union, since the establishment of peace in Ukraine is not stipulated by the plans of Washington and NATO.

In this regard, the position of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation seems to us quite reasonable.

The increasingly reactionary character of modern imperialism is the result of several factors that have brought about a decline of the workers’ movement and the weakening of the communist and workers’ parties.

Ukrainian communists believe that in working out the tactics of our actions and defining the main areas of struggle it is necessary to proceed on the basis that the modern balance of forces in the world has tilted in favour of reaction which is making use of Fascism.

Sowing discord within the working classes, using puppet regimes, Neo-Fascists and Neo-Nazis, imperialism intensifies the exploitation of countries and peoples and destroys the foundations of people’s democracy and a just world order.

Modern world trends and constant economic crises, unfortunately, diminish the revolutionary potential of the principles of proletarian internationalism and undermine the unity of the working classes. This is happening also in Ukraine where a special “working” class of war is being created, the class which lives off the war and cannot imagine itself without it.

The sanctions policy initiated by the USA and Britain and their political satellites inevitably worsens the life of common people, weakens the states’ economic potential, provokes unemployment and consequently increases social discontent and, unfortunately, disunites the workers’ movement. World imperialism uses all these phenomena as a weapon in the class struggle.

What do we see today in Europe and indeed in the USA? Prices and tariffs have grown many times over. Enterprises are shutting down, people publicly burn their bills for gas, electricity and water, stage protest actions against their governments demanding, among other things, an end to the sanctions madness and the war in Ukraine. All this is happening against the background of militarization of the economy, politics and the media hysteria around the nuclear war.

I am convinced that the communist and workers’ parties must channel people’s economic and social demands towards political struggle. The struggle against the threat of Fascism and a change of the social system that engenders it, that is, the capitalist system as such.

Today the progressive forces – we have to admit it honestly – are losing the cognitive battle for the minds of people. It is our task to win it. This is the only way if we want to prevent the catastrophe of a Third World War.

In this connection I believe that in the context of the goals and tasks of our meeting and considering the situation in the world and the need to struggle for an end to the war and the establishment of a just world order we –the communist and workers’ parties – should concentrate our efforts on the following areas:

• the strengthening of our solidarity, solidarity with other progressive forces in the struggle against Neo-Fascism and the instigators of a Third World War;
• organising a system of truthful public information about what is taking place in Ukraine today, how it threatens Europe and how it threatens humankind;
• explaining to people that the civil war in Donbass (2014-2022), like the Ukraine-Russia war, have been provoked and unleashed by the pro-Fascist regimes in Ukraine on the demand and in the interests of the USA in order to create a bridgehead for the dismemberment and destruction of Russia as a geopolitical rival;
• stepping up the struggle against any attempts to glorify the Nazi ideology, restoring the true history of the Second World War;
• supporting (without going back on our ideological principles) those who come out for a peaceful settlement and an end to the war in Ukraine regardless of their political affiliation. Such politicians and such forces exist in every country.

I also consider it necessary to bend every effort at the level of national parliaments and the European parliament to neutralise the provocative actions of the USA and its allies in the Asia Pacific Region against China. Combined with the war in Ukraine and the possible direct clash of nuclear powers, China and the USA, especially against the background of declarations about a Russian “nuclear threat” the worst forecasts may, unfortunately, become a reality.

Dear comrades!

The struggle to put an end to the fratricidal war in Ukraine unleashed by the transnational corporations and their stooges in the governments of European and not only European states, the war in which Washington-led NATO is a de facto side to the conflict (supply of arms, ammunition and training of Ukrainian armed forces, funding and controlling the  military campaign) is the struggle for preventing a Third World War which is but a step away. We must do everything to prevent it.

Once again, thank you for the opportunity to address the participants in this international meeting and to express confidence of our victory, a victory of “light” over “darkness”.

The post SPEECH BY THE FIRST SECRETARY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF UKRAINE PYOTR SIMONENKO appeared first on They Shall Not Pass.