Skip to main content

Rifts in the communist movement


The Ukraine war has divided communists around the world. The worst position is that of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) which calls it “Putin’s war” and demands an unconditional Russian withdrawal from Ukraine – which is also NATO’s demand . They also denounced what they called “Russian military adventurism” in a joint statement the CPB sponsored that only attracted the support of nine other communist and workers’ parties.

CPB election leaflets in the May local elections all carried the following statement "Communists opposed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine from the first hour. Putin and his cronies are opposed to Socialism and Communism. They stole what belonged to the Russian people. We say: Stop the war, Start the peace".

It didn’t do them any good. Five of their seven candidates got less than a hundred votes apiece. The others got the majestic sums of 119 and 126 votes. The CPB’s Blackheath Westcombe hopeful was beaten by the Official Monster Raving Loony candidate by 125 votes to 79.

Communist Party of Greece

A more significant section of the movement led by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) argues that Russia is an imperialist country and that the war is simply a quarrel between two imperialist blocs. This is a view rejected outright by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) that leads the opposition in the Russian parliament and is the largest communist party in Russia. The second biggest, the Russian Communist Workers Party (RCWP), which does think Russia is “imperialist”, nevertheless supports the Russian intervention in support of the people of the Donbas.

In March the KKE sponsored a joint statement that said “the decision of the Russian Federation to initially recognise the “independence” of the so-called “Peoples’ Republics” in Donbas and then to proceed to a Russian military intervention, which is taking place under the pretext of Russia’s “self-defence”, the “demilitarisation” and “defascistisation” of Ukraine, was not made to protect the people of the region or peace but to promote the interests of Russian monopolies in Ukrainian territory and their fierce competition with Western monopolies”.

The New Communist Party of Britain (NCP), along with the majority of the members of the Solidnet group it was sent to, including the CPRF and the RCWP, refused to sign it. But some 40 others did.

In April the Secretariat of the Communist Initiative (ECI) , a KKE-inspired European communist forum, issued a draft statement for May Day to the same effect. A number of parties, including the NCP and the RCWP, proposed amendments which forced the Secretariat to water-down the final statement.

But a few days later the Secretariat issued a statement for Victory Day on 9th May without any consultation that said “the Second World War, like the first one and the current war in Ukraine, is a result of imperialist contradictions and competition for the redivision of markets and spheres of influence. The people pay a heavy price for the condemnable Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the previous US-NATO-EU interventions that led to it: dead and wounded people, refugees, extremely expensive energy and fuel, and high prices”. This has led to the resignation of the Hungarian Workers Party from the Secretariat.

Meanwhile the KKE has launched public attacks, in their daily paper and online, on the stand of the CPRF and the RCWP in support of the Russian intervention which have been rebuffed in equally robust terms by the leaderships of both Russian parties.
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 29, 2022 at 2:27 PM

    This is the response of the RCWP to the KKE https://actofdefiance.wordpress.com/2022/06/28/international-department-of-the-central-committee-of-the-rcwp-on-the-class-understanding-of-the-struggle-against-fascism-and-the-mistakes-of-the-leftism-of-the-greek-comrades/

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJune 30, 2022 at 9:36 AM

    Communists worldwide should be united and not split over the role of Russia in the Ukraine.

    The CPB in Britain is not speaking in the name of many communists and working class activists, when it tries to equate Russian nationalism with US led imperialism.
    The normally strictly Marxist Leninist KKE by condemning Russia is siding up with the imperialists and Trotskyists and revisionists.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ukraine wants the Bomb!

By Alex Miller It didn’t take long. Just hours after Zelensky’s heated negotiations with Trump, Ukrainian banker Oleg Gorokovsky announced the start of a fundraising drive for a Ukrainian ‘Nuclear Bomb Project’. Gorokovsky is a well known Ukrainian businessman and the owner of  Monobank – the largest bank in the country. He explained to local media that Trump’s failure to provide Ukraine with a “nuclear armed security framework” is forcing Ukraine to act on its own, and called the Ukrainian Nuclear Bomb Project “Yaderka” (Nuke). He claimed he’d received "many requests to start collecting for Yaderka” and said that during the first 12 hours of the appeal a million dollars had been raised to finance the start of work on developing a Ukrainian nuclear bomb. Gorokovsky later tried to backtrack and began to explain that his nuke appeal was a “joke after a hard day”. But Monobank continues to support the appeal to raise funds for the nuclear campaign. The process of collecting money con...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zionists and Banderites find a common cause

 by Theo Russell An IUAFS member recently attended a meeting organised by the Jewish Vegetarian Society for Refugee Week. The topic was the 'Kindertransport', a British scheme to rescue nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi occupied territories during the Second World War. However the meeting then turned to the question of "rescuing" children from Ukraine today. The meeting chair expressed in no uncertain terms his support for Ukraine in the current war with the forces of Russia and the former Donbas republics. The meeting was then addressed by a Ukrainian refugee who was given accommodation by an ex-Kindertransport survivor, who suggested that the Jewish community in Britain could "return" the favour by helping Ukrainian children and their families. A discussion then took place about the practicalities of Jewish people in Britain accommodating Ukrainian child "refugees". When the issues of the many historical pogroms against Jews i...
Post a Comment
Read more

United States is abusing the UN Security Council

by Alex Miller The United States continues to abuse its powers as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, using them for its own interests and failing to fulfill its obligations as a guarantor of world stability.  Immediately after his inauguration, the US President-elect Donald Trump began implementing a set of measures proposed by his team. These measures led to a serious change in approaches to domestic and foreign policy. The White House has moved toward a more aggressive policy in the international arena, including through the United Nations. Trump is trying to solve the internal problems of the USA such as the increase in the number of immigrants, the inability to adequately respond to natural disasters, the economic collapse and the unprecedented growth of the national debt, the ineffective fight against the COVID-19 epidemic by meeting the demands of his supporters. He has also begun to implement the "America First" approach to foreign policy. Trump has long op...
Post a Comment
Read more