Support the anti-fascist struggle!

It is good that trade unionists are meeting to debate the attacks on working-class people resulting from the war NATO has been waging in Ukraine, and the war itself. But to be effective, we need a better understanding of what is at stake.
    The government has been banging a jingoistic drum, denouncing strikers as doing “Putin’s work”. They only dare try this because of censorship of the real nature of the war. But truth is leaking out. The warmongers are increasingly not trusted. Too many lies. 

    This is not a predatory war by Russia against ‘poor little Ukraine’ but the result of a 2014 coup by the US using Neo-Nazis as their weapon. They started a war against almost half of the population: the Russian speakers in the South and East of Ukraine. This war has been going on since then: Russia’s intervention was simply defensive against a massive escalation of those attacks in mid-February. Biden ‘predicted’ the intervention at the end of the month because the US had planned an attack that would give Russia no choice. The last thing the Russian government wanted was to intervene militarily in Ukraine, hence they pursued futile talks with European leaders for eight years to realise the Minsk agreements. Putin was well aware that intervention would bring huge costs for Russia.

    Then on 7th December, German ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel revealed that the aim of the Minsk talks was not to achieve a peace deal, but to give Ukraine time "to get stronger" (interview with Die Zeit). In practice, this meant preparing a Ukrainian offensive in the Donbas with 120,000 NATO-armed troops, which began eight days before the Russian military intervention on 24th February. This is about NATO expansion and US world domination, nothing else. That is where the threat of nuclear war comes from. There is a clear democratic and anti-fascist imperative to take the side of the Donbas population who have been subjected to Nazi-style ethnic warfare, sponsored by the US and NATO. Only the Russian army are available to protect them. 

    There are no Russian troops in the Ukrainian-speaking West and no converse ethnic war waged by Russia. Saying that these are equivalent is a lie, connected with the fallacy that Russia is ‘imperialist’. Unlike the West, Russia does not enrich itself at the expense of developing countries. Therefore, BRICS is growing as a bloc of developing countries – Russia and China act as points of support against Western domination and are correctly perceived as allies against imperialist exploitation. The same is true of the ‘Cost of Greed’ crisis that is crucifying workers in Western Europe – it is not Russian energy prices that have gone through the roof, but the prices of oil and gas from Western energy profiteers who are profiting from the attempts to keep Russia’s products out, which include the US-British terrorism against the Nord Stream pipeline and the attempt to ‘cap’ Russian oil prices – i.e. force them to sell it to the West at a discount. 

    The proof of this is Western energy monopolies’ profits, which in many cases have near tripled over the past year: This includes Shell, rising from $12.8 billion in the period Jan-September 2021 to $30.1 Billion in the same period in 2022 (actual, not estimate); BP rising from $8.2 billion to $20.7 billion over the same period (estimate); ExxonMobil from $14.3 billion to $42.7 billion (estimate); Chevron from $10.7 billion to $27.3 billion (estimate), TotalEnergies from $11.3 to $28.7 billion (actual, not estimate); Eni from $2.6 billion to $10.3 billion (estimate) and ConocoPhillips from $5 billion to $13.8 billion (estimate) (see Guardian, 27 Oct 2022). This is a fleecing of working-class people around the world, including in imperialist countries as part of a desperate attempt by US/NATO imperialism to stay dominant globally against former colonies and their sometime non-capitalist allies.

     The efforts to ban strikes and trade union activity, by the liberal Nazi-lover Joe Biden as well as the Tory scum here (with no opposition from Starmer and Labour) reflect that they are supporting Hitlerism in Ukraine and increasingly using Hitler-like methods here, against workers and migrants. We need to reject ‘third camp’/social pacifist politics of supposed even-handedness and call for victory to the Russian forces defending the Donbas against NATO imperialist terrorism. And we need to see the struggle against the attempt to fleece the working class and poor around the world as part of the same anti-imperialist struggle.