Behind the curtain of war propaganda, the Ukrainian working class is suffocating under the weight of increasing state violence and corruption.
Getting reasonable analysis of the war in Ukraine is a total pain in the ass in the United States, at least. I appreciate this piece for being a straightforward and well-argued analysis of the class aspects of the war.
The modern Russian federation is no worker's state. Modern Ukraine is neither. I don't see a way to interpret this war as a fight that Leftists (& especially Marxists) need to 'support' on either side. However, also and importantly, this is not a case of entirely imperialist adventure -- the government of modern Ukraine is explicitly right-wing and interested in maintaining a relationship with the imperial core. The government of modern Russia is explicitly right-wing but not interested in maintaining a relationship with the imperial core (favoring the modern coalition of BRICS, which has fair things to critique but is definitively not part of the global imperialist core).
This robbery of the working class in Ukraine is of course no new phenomenon. Just as in Russia, since the reintroduction of capitalism, “big business [has] turned the state into an institutional tool for realising the interests of oligarchic groups. There [has] emerged a peculiar phenomenon of ‘state capture’”. However, the development of full scale war has led to a shift in the nature of capture, away from local oligarchs and instead in favour of internationalised (western) capital.
It is nearly impossible to overstate how much the current political terrain of the former Soviet nations was explicitly the goal of the American-led crusade to destroy the USSR. This war would not be happening if the USSR was still around. That is not a paean toward a past that we lost as much as a statement of reasonable fact! When I see the peoples of 'Ukraine' and 'Russia' fighting each other, it is heartbreaking precisely because we have living memory of a time when these lines of identification did not bring about warfare. It was in the time of the USSR.
Although many opposition parties have experienced wartime repression in Ukraine, anti-communist and anti-socialist repression has been widespread since 2015, when a number of authoritarian laws were passed following the victory of the far right during the Euromaidan.
I do not care for the modern Russian federation, the same as I do not care for the government of the United States. It is a tragedy what happened, and it is a tragedy that continues to unfold. But to support the Ukrainian state uncritically is also deeply fraught, and I would argue not any more defensible as an ideological position.
New laws banned the Communist Party and its publications, along with any communist symbols. Singing the Internationale, the international song of worker’s solidarity, was made punishable by up to five years in prison. The use of the state to persecute the left followed severe and bloody street violence perpetrated by fascist paramilitary groups in Ukraine during the Euromaidan. Just a year before the ban on communist party activities, on the 2nd of May 2014, around a thousand fascist thugs under the banner of Right Sector (a Neo-Nazi paramilitary group) surrounded the House of Trade Unions in Odessa, setting fire to the premises where dozens of terrified workers had sought sanctuary. Right Sector members, barricaded exits and beat the men, women and children who threw themselves out of the windows of the building trying to escape. A total of 48 people were burnt alive that day, in what Right Sector proudly described as “yet another bright page in our fatherland’s history.”
I don’t know if it’s coming from this wishful thinking that’s taken hold again that “neurodivergent people’s communication is honest and clear and direct, but neurotypicals’ is deceptive and unnecessarily vague,” but if it is— From the bottom of my heart, please get off of Twitter for a little bit.
The balance of power has shifted, and nations of the Middle East will no longer accept a regional order dictated by the US and Israel.
History continues apace!