Friday, February 18, 2022

“When all you have is a hammer…”: why Agamben’s ideas were bound to lead to this


February 8, 2022


LONG READ
Length:5342 words


Summary: Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s attack on public health measures during Covid 19 is linked to undialectical perspectives rooted in Nietzsche, and contrasted to other thinkers like Toni Negri, Naomi Klein, and Peter Linebaugh – Editors


Padua, Italy — When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The Italian political philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, who for decades has warned us about the seemingly unstoppable ability and will of even democratic states to impose a “state of exception” – a state of emergency powers overriding all law, constitutional restraints, and citizen or human rights – has now become the most sophisticated spokesperson for the anti-vax and other forces opposed to the public health restrictions due to the Covid 19 virus crisis. He has founded an intellectual group opposed to the restrictions, public health measures, vaccination requirements and other actions taken by public officials to combat the spread of the virus and its lethality.

Agamben is one of the most influential philosophers of recent years, and he was especially “hot” and in fashion during the Bush/War on Terror years after 9/11, when his analysis seemed to help explain the restrictions on constitutional and human rights. Agamben has many admirers, and his work has influenced that of many in and out of academia. His recent insistence, however, that the entire Covid pandemic is a manufactured crisis, whose true intent has been to impose a “biopolitical” regime that “reduces us all to mere biophysical existence”, making us into “lemmings” who, bending to the will of state power and direction have been stripped of all ethical, moral and cultural traits, leading us to stand naked in front of the sovereign, willing to accept the destruction of our liberties for the sake of presumed security, has led many to wonder whether his current stance throws light – or better shadow – on his previous work which has been so widely celebrated.

Since in 2011 I wrote and got published a lengthy attack on Agamben and his work[1] , an essay I wrote when he was at the height of his popularity and his work at its most in fashion, I have to say that I saw something like this coming from a mile away, and think this seeming turn to the irrational Agamben was entirely predictable. But the problem with being a no-name independent scholar and activist publishing in a fine, reputable but hardly widely-read and followed journal an attack on the work of an intellectual superstar, is that you don’t have the impact you wish you had. So only now are people wondering what went wrong with Agamben. To which, the only reply is: nothing, his work was always wrongheaded. I hope to briefly explain why here.

Agamben is known mainly for his concept of the “state of exception” and for arguing, and seeming to demonstrate empirically, that the overriding of all constitutional or legal limits by state power has become the norm, not a “crisis” or a “state of emergency” but a sort of permanent state of emergency. So crushing of human and legal rights by reference to some crisis or emergency is the principal form of government – or better governance in the world today, including in the western democratic states. He uses categories from the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt to show how sovereignty is essentially the power to impose one’s will on others, that is, the power of the state or of its executive branch to declare a state of emergency at will and use that situation to put society into a Hobbesian state of nature – one where law does not yet exist, because law itself must be based on a prior condition in which law is made in the first place so that other laws can be fashioned based on this “constituent power”. Constituent power is a concept of Schmitt’s that the Italian autonomist Marxist Toni Negri has used with some creativity to describe the potential founding of new societies by social movements and revolutions, but which for Schmitt and Agamben instead describes the true power of the state that precedes law and constitutions, that power that makes law and constitutions in the first place, and so is mainly a menace, not a possibility, for popular forces. For Negri, this is the moment of revolution, when a movement is in a position to become the new order of society. For Agamben, it is instead the moment of state power that reveals the state’s real essence, as raw power to impose its will, the Leviathan of Hobbes. In the face of that state power, all of us, citizens and refugees alike, are mere Homo Sacer – an ancient Roman category that referred to persons who had no rights, nor any right to have rights, who could be killed with impunity. For Agamben, the Jews in the Nazi camps are the prototype of the human condition for all today.

I criticized Agamben ten years ago in my article of the time, and hold to my criticisms today, on the grounds of his not addressing any history or relationship of the state to capitalism and its processes, and of not addressing in any way the long history of struggles against capitalist expropriation and exploitation – the anti-slavery movement, the anti-colonial movements, the movements for women’s equality and the working class movements, as well as the democratization – partial as it is – of state power. By ignoring capitalism and the struggle against it, Agamben ignores the experiences of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, of colonized peoples, of women, of slaves and of proletarians, whose survival under capitalism is always contingent. Ignoring these central experiences of the modern world enables him to treat the states of emergency around the world and historically that are so important to him as more novel and more urgent and as new norms. Instead, as my list of social actors shows, the experience of being homo sacer in one form or another – of the very state he is warning us about, has in fact been the main experience of the majority of people around the world for centuries. And, until recently, with the end of slavery, advances in women’s rights, labor unions, democratization and advanced welfare state and social democracies, it has been the experience of the majority of people in every society since the rise of classes. I think these criticisms of his work still hold today, even before his recent seeming descent into madness over vaccinations, Covid restrictions and public health measures, positions I see as entirely in keeping with and consistent with his previous work, indeed their logical trajectory and outcome.

But it is the contrast of his work with that of Toni Negri’s on the shared concept of constituent power that I think can best show what problem is at the heart of not just both their work, but that of an entire field of works by various authors, of which Agamben is merely currently the worst and most extreme example.

Negri sees the state of exception as a potential moment of revolutionary reconstitution of society as a whole, to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, Agamben as the moment of greatest peril, as the expression of a state power whose guarantees to citizens of their rights is worth no more than the paper it is written on, since those rights can be annulled at will at any moment and apparently are being so as the new norm across the world.

Each, we see, has a one-sided view of the whole thing, and of the relationships involved. What is missing, in other words, is any dialectic in either of their analyses, though to be fair Negri’s work does utilize dialectics in other ways in its analysis of the relationship of social movements, capitalism and state forms. But not in seeing the side of constituent power that Agamben sees and vice-versa. In each case, missing is an opposing side, or even an interlocutor, and so no dialectic is possible. Put differently, with Agamben, there is no vision of what victory would constitute or look like, and with Negri, the possibility of defeat never really enters the picture or the analysis. The role of ruling classes opposing the movements Negri theorizes, most usefully is his master work Potere costituente, translated into English and published by the University of Minnesota Press as Insurgencies, or that of the pre-existing state institutions in re-shaping the efforts of revolutionary movements plays no or little role in his otherwise often admirable work. And the role of movements for democratizing the state, ending or abolishing concrete historical forms of “homo sacer” such as slavery, Native American genocide, the worst oppressions of patriarchy, colonial occupations, child labor, the conditions of labor before the ten-hour and eight-hour movements and so on, do not play any role at all in Agamben’s work. Not even the European Resistance to the very Nazi occupations and states of exception that are the center of his view of the modern state makes an appearance.

In my article of ten years ago, and still today, I contrast these one-sided accounts with two other works, in my view more useful for our needs in the service of struggles today. One is that of Naomi Klein, in her bestseller Shock Doctrine, and the other is the work of Peter Linebaugh in his Magna Carta Manifesto. The dialectic in Klein’s work is that the struggles that gave rise to social democracy, the end of colonialism and apartheid, and to even the welfare state elements of Stalinist regimes are what capital is working to overcome through neoliberalism – privatization, deregulation, governance by central banks and openness to capital markets and global markets for goods. Since these policies are deeply unpopular, a state of emergency of some sort or another, permitting “shock therapy” –a swift reorganization of the economy in favor of capital, is needed. So Agamben’s states of exception are directly the result of the class struggle and a particular capitalist strategy to overcome working class, democratic and popular opposition. It happens because nothing else would enable the reforms that shift the balance of power in favor of capitalism. And it is needed, because capitalism finds itself in crisis or facing eventual crisis if profit rates cannot be increased through these neoliberal mechanisms.

For Linebaugh, our legal rights, our constitutional rights, have an economic basis in access to subsistence and in control of common lands and common goods. When these are expropriated, our legal rights do become, or risk becoming if a new form of class struggle does not emerge to protect them, merely the paper they are written on. Our rights and freedoms, which Agamben is so concerned about, always risk becoming dead letters, except when struggles and movements emerge to defend them, movements and struggles for whom the legal rights are tools. But movements and struggles for whom the real objective is the concrete meeting of needs and control over or access to common goods and resources we need for our lives, and guarantees and access to subsistence. These analyses by Linebaugh and Klein are light-years ahead of those of Agamben on the very question that tortures him and informs his whole body of work, because in each there is a dialectic at work – the struggle between capitalist forces and those of people defending their access to livelihoods and needs. The form of the state, its policies, and its institutions, and the balance of power between these in the formal constitutions of states – and in what Negri usefully calls the material constitutions – are both the outcome of, and themselves actors in these struggles.

Historic struggles against states of exception, be they antislavery or anticolonialism, the resistance to capitalist coups in Chile in 1973 (unsuccessful) or Venezuela in 2002 (successful) or Honduras or Brazil in recent years, or even the seizure of the Bastille by the people of Paris on July 14, 1789 to prevent Louis XVI’s attempt at a state of exception, all these are nowhere to be found in Agamben’s view of the world. Yet WE need to know about these cases, who the actors were, what they wanted and why, how and why they succeeded or failed.

Marxists Humanists and readers here of course, don’t need me to tell them how important to an analysis dialectics are, but I would like to show how lacking a dialectic in social and political analysis leads directly to Agamben’s disastrous current project of anti-vax, anti-public health measures in the face of a pandemic that has taken millions of lives around the world. The point is, that lack of a dialectic has been a central part of his work all along, and not only of his. So I will conclude after the analysis of Agamben’s accusations regarding Covid requirements with a comment on some other recently fashionable thinkers and political stances.

All Agamben has is a hammer: the state is bad, it is Nietzsche’s Will to Power personified, its “biopolitics” (Foucault) is deadly in nature and reduces us to bare life, naked homo sacer stripped of ethical, moral, legal and cultural features before it, requiring us to do everything for mere survival, especially now when it requires us to stay home, or get a vaccine, or wear a mask, or not interact with each other. As if this reduction of human being’s cultural and ethical characteristics to “mere worker” – a means to an end were not already a primary feature of capitalism as Marx showed as long ago as his manuscripts on Alienation in 1844. But Agamben’s state is entirely one-sided: it is only repression.

As Hal Draper showed in his monumental Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, the state takes on basic and necessary public functions – community collective defense, roads, schools, law and a judicial system – that will exist in any society or community of any kind – as paradoxically Graeber and Wengrow’s recent celebrated work The Dawn of Everythingdemonstrates. In a class society, however, the state, under the primary influence of the dominant class and defending its interests, will carry out these basic functions in a distorted way, in a way that both carries them out and enhances the wealth and power of the ruling class and the inequalities of wealth and power in society as whole, at least more often than not. When the two conflict, the struggle between classes, within the state and across society as a whole decides which will win out. The state’s legitimacy is bound up with its ability to carry out these essential functions for society, and its failure to do so can lead to it, or at least its leaders, losing the support of society’s larger membership, something that the Chinese “Mandate of Heaven” being lost due to inability to provide for people during famines, floods or earthquakes, the dangers to the Egyptian Pharaohs if they failed to organize the Nile flooding and agricultural adequately, and even George W. Bush’s failure to secure New Orleans from the Mississippi’s overflowing the levees, stand as examples of. So, there is a dialectic within the state: legitimate social functions versus state power qua ruling class power. And on the side of legitimate social functions stand the social and physical needs of the non-ruling class part of the population. This conflict is at least as old as Hammurabi’s Code, which both protected the poor, widows, orphans and slaves, and codified the class power and privilege of nobles. With the rise of democracy, this struggle becomes even more central, as structural and institutional pressure by popular forces are also written into the form and content of the state, even as capitalist power and dominance are as well. Thus, the dialectic inherent to the state in a class society is directly tied to the class struggle in society itself. With the rise of democracy, this dialectic is now written into the relationships between the institutions of the state themselves. Some agencies, institutions and actors lean toward basic social functions, and are more directly linked to and under the pressure of popular needs and demands. Others are more well-sheltered from popular pressure and democratic power – this is where Klein’s emphasis on the role of shifting decision-making to Central Banks for instance is important – leaning toward a more one-sided preoccupation with ruling class and capitalist interests.

Thus, during a crisis such as the Covid crisis, we should turn our attention to these dialectics – is capital taking advantage of a crisis to further its project of privatizing wealth and power and public policy? – an issue at the center of Klein’s work on “disaster capitalism” but nowhere to be found in Agamben; are capitalists profiting off the now vital and emergency needs of people in the face of a public health catastrophe? Are the restrictions that a basic and necessary social function of the state – the protection of society and its members in the face of a natural or public health disaster – designed and implemented in a way that is appropriate to the crisis and its resolution? Can the state act as an organizer of production and distribution of basic necessities such as medical products and implements, and if so, will it do so with an eye toward production for use or for exchange and capital accumulation? Are policies designed and implemented in ways that are fair and equitable and take into account the needs of various social actors – teachers and students and parents, workers and employers, health providers and patients, the marginalized and the majority, or are they clearly or subtly means of only favoring the interests of, and shifting of power to, employers, large firms versus small business, the rich and well-connected? These are the kinds of questions we need to, and have every right to ask.

But if instead one has no sense of these dialectics within and between the state, civil society and social classes and actors, then one cannot see the reality of the pandemic. To see the pandemic as real means to see that some public health measures are called for, as well as some changes in individual and collective behavior for the period of the crisis, realizing that merely because extreme measures are needed temporarily, they are not necessarily – and indeed are not intended – to be permanent. States of emergency over short-term natural disasters are a frequent occurrence, but are usually lifted as soon as the hurricane, flood, fire or earthquake is over or its consequences have been sufficiently cleaned up. At times public interest would be better served by prolonging states of emergency lifted too quickly in order to satisfy business interests. Other times, they are lifted too slowly, as the concerns of everyday people are not listened to and taken into account. And legitimate struggles and protests may ensue in these cases and sometimes do. Indeed, in some extreme cases, the state utterly fails in its social obligations and allows people to suffer from such emergencies without assuming emergency powers to help, or even doing so, but then not really helping. But if there is no such dialectic within the state as a complex entity, between legitimate public power in the service of social needs, and the distortion of these powers and their use due to the influence of dominant class interests and power, then all one sees is the bad state imposing its will. The pandemic itself has to be, according to the already existing logic of Agamben’s work, wished away as non-existent, since any emergency or crisis must be manufactured by the state as an excuse to impose a state of exception. And this is what Agamben claims, in ever-escalating and insulting rhetoric, is happening now and has been for the past two years.

Thus, Agamben refers to “The Invention of a Pandemic” (https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia ) in a widely-read article of February 2020, at the start of the Covid impact in Italy, which was the first country outside of China to have a major wave of Coronavirus cases. Comparing the virus to the flu, and downplaying its dangers, Agamben accused Italian media of “spreading a climate of panic”. He has more recently claimed in on Twitter that “Today in my country measures are applied against “anti-vaxxers” that are 10X (ten times) more restrictive than the fascist legislation of 1938 against ‘non-Aryans’” (https://twitter.com/Agonhamza/status/1489978672215904257 )– by which he means Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws that led tens of thousands of Italian Jews to the death camps. A more insulting and false set of claims would be hard to imagine, and here Agamben’s rhetoric is at one with that of the American far right, not something we would expect from a supposedly left-wing philosopher. In November 2020 in a talk with students in Venice, Agamben claimed that these restrictions are bringing humanity “towards extinction – if not physical at least ethical and political”. (https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-intervento-al-convegno-degli-studenti-veneziano-). I would be tempted to suggest that Agamben, in clinging to his February 2020 view, based on early information and misinformation as to the real nature of the virus and its impact, is engaging in what Hegel termed “Understanding” – maintain rigid fidelity to categories based on old realities that they no longer explain under newer conditions. But for Hegel, Understanding did correspond to reality, was a right or least useful way of explaining or defining phenomena at one time at least. Instead, in the case of Agamben, all we have is what in Organizational Behavior is called “anchoring” – sticking with your initial way of understanding something that is happening, and not changing your view when more or new information comes about, because you have already made up your mind.

To claim that the efforts to stop the spread of, and reduce or end the fatalities it has caused and continues to cause lack ethical, political, moral, cultural, or even religious characteristics from a humanist point of view, as Agamben does, is sheer madness and falsehood. The vast majority of the population in every country has recognized the ethical need to vaccinate oneself and to wear masks and engage in social distancing. This reality is something we should find cause of hope and cautious optimism in – an affirmation of basic ethical concerns overriding even economic interests and needs. This extended even to the patience with which populations around the world accepted total or near total lockdowns – NOT as Agamben claims, because we are lemmings, an echo of the “sheeple” insult by the US right to those who act to protect others and themselves, but out of a sense of ethics born of a sense of collective belonging and interdependence.

And though predictably capital has lobbied hard, used its influence and in general has done all it could as a class interest to reopen business, and to continue to have work done in very unsafe conditions, the majority around the world have made clear that they want workplaces and classrooms to be safe. In many cases, as in the mass refusal that has come to be known as the Great Resignation in the US and UK, millions of workers have stayed home, quit jobs, or refused to take new ones if they are not satisfied as to the conditions, including the public health ones. In other words, most people – even if hardly unaware that government can be repressive or unfair or corrupt – are aware of the two-sidedness of the state – that in this case it is at least to a great extent acting in the legitimate public interest of protecting public health and lives. People get angry at corruption, but stop at traffic lights. There is a difference. Where people aside from the anti-vax minority have made demands, these have been completely legitimate demands that if one’s workplace or small business must shut down directly as a government policy, that compensation be made to keep people’s livelihoods protected; that parents needing to work at home have their privacy protected from employers; that schools be made safe and opened whenever possible, and so on. These demands reflect the clear understanding that the crisis must not be used to expropriate or exploit their work and small businesses by capital, while accepting the legitimate side of state policy in the public interest. Such demands led to job and payroll guarantees in Denmark, the UK and elsewhere and the – even if minimalist – direct payments by the US government to citizens to provide some income, as well as rent and student debt moratoriums. Public pressure has led even to the Italian government’s distribution of small funds to certain categories of unprotected workers and self-employed people, and some job protections here. And in Italy and elsewhere demands were made on the EU to act as a legitimate public power and provide aid, materials for health care, and money to Eurozone countries that can’t produce their own currency, demanding in other words that it be more than a mere institutionalization of the power of finance capital.

What Agamben and others could usefully be doing instead is making clear the danger of the finally arriving EU funds to Italy being turned over primarily to the banks and large corporations and corrupt political organizations. The near-unanimous consensus among ruling class spokespeople is that former EU Central Bank President Mario Draghi, now Italy’s unelected prime minister is a genius, a wizard, the zeitgeist on a white horse. But his government seems determined to distribute the EU funds and most likely to the class forces that Draghi has represented all his professional life. Here indeed we have an example of the capitalist interests overriding, or seeking to override, the legitimate public functions of the state in a crisis. Draghi replaced a popular and elected government that, whatever its errors and failings had, under Giuseppe Conte, guided the country through the worst with palpable compassion and empathy, and with continual communication and responses to the public and press. the Draghi government has already lowered taxes on the very rich, and seems prepared to be the “executive committee of the bourgeoisie as a whole.” But even in this case, popular outrage was reflected in the decision of Italy’s parliament not to make Draghi the next President of the Republic, Italy’s head of state. To ignore popular struggles, to ignore the dialectics of society and state, will lead one into trouble every time. Agamben seems unconcerned with the real threats to democracy of technocratic governance in the interests of capital, on one side, and the rising and growing fascist threat – one that he is either knowingly or unwittingly feeding with his stance on Covid restrictions – on the other, and their mutual reinforcement. Instead, his attacks are on the legitimate role of the state in protecting public health and the ethical actions and legitimate class demands of the people. These latter are manifested most people abiding by the requirements of being vaccinated, and of having the “Green Pass” confirming one’s vaccination status as a requirement to be in public restaurants and on public transportation, and living with the requirements to wear masks and social distance. All while demanding that state policies meet economic needs arising from these restrictions, and not protect privileged sectors instead.

But Agamben should also, I believe, be seen in a wider context of a number of influential thinkers that sees the state as the main, indeed usually the only threat to liberty and human well-being, to the exclusion of the dynamics of capitalism, or at least playing down the role of the latter. Each of these has a one-sided view of the state, based either loosely, or closely, either unconsciously and indirectly or consciously and directly on the ahistorical Nietzschean will to power, or on a one-sided view of the state as entirely and exclusively capitalist in form and content. This field stretches from Foucault’s biopolitics with its concern about the state being ever more involved in questions of health care, science, housing, employment and livelihoods with the rise of the welfare states, a view that deeply informs Agamben’s, to John Holloway’s call to avoid the state at all costs as an entirely capitalist enterprise, and to change society exclusively by not taking power, to Guattari and Deleuze’s writings that ignore the longest part of human history of hunters and gatherers and egalitarian societies, but then go on to theorize state power ahistorically on the basis of the questionable category “nomadism”, to Raul Zibechi’s writings on Latin American social movements, James Scott’s anthropology of grain-based societies, and Graeber and Wengrow’s recent bestseller. All see the state as only bad. A default anarchism has taken hold of a considerable part of the intellectual left in recent years and while we must gain what we can from the insights that these present us with, we need to see that such one-sidedness, such lack of dialectic, can only lead one to grave errors. Agamben has not gone mad recently, his work was always flawed, and he is not alone. We need better theoretical ways of understanding what is happening, and the ways things are; ones that see the all-sidedness of crises, struggles, states, societies, institutions and ideas, that can grasp what Marx called “the ensemble of social relations”. We can only hope that those who have instead decided to guide themselves by such deeply wrong ideas about ethics, public health and public authority, democracy and freedom, will not lose their lives in the process to this still dangerous and terrible pandemic is indeed very real, nor cost the lives of others.

Addendum: As I was writing this article, the crisis in Canada grew, such that, on Saturday February 6, 2022, the mayor of the capital city of Ottawa declared a state of emergency, in response to a blockade and mass occupation of the city’s streets by mostly self-employed truckers and right wing, including openly neo-Nazi militants, protesting requirements that truckers entering the country from the United States, where Covid remains rampant, and other public health measures, including mask wearing. The protesters have been threatening and harassing neighborhood residents, entering shops maskless en masse, forcing many to remain shut and essentially keeping a large part of the population of the nation’s capital hostages, shut up in their homes fearing for their safety. The protests have spread to Quebec City and Toronto. For Agamben, the danger is the declaration of a state of emergency. In reality, the danger, to the health and physical safety of the people living in these cities, and to Canadian democracy and the freedoms enjoyed by Canada’s people, is to the very forces Agamben now justifies openly, and with whom his analysis was always in danger of justifying: the fascists threat of a few thousand aggressive and violent activists who demand a right to put the lives of others in danger, the right to have no concern for the lives and safety of others, and who refuse even the most innocuous limits on their personal license and activities, regardless of the consequences for other people or for society. Just as in the time of Lincoln and the US Civil War, a state of emergency is the recognition of reality: a genuine threat to democratic government that needs to be addressed by organized self-defense of society by society, a concept lacking in Agamben, and most of the other thinkers criticized above.

The people of Canada, or anywhere else, we, have a right to resist this will to power by a fascist minority, through collective struggle, through the use of law and institutions, through self-organization, and yes, if necessary through the use of force organized collectively in democratic states and public authorities in defense of democracy and of our collective lives and well-being. That is no state of exception, that is legitimate popular government. And if we need to go beyond it to an even more democratic, more egalitarian system, we will do so while dialectically maintaining the good in what we have already won through centuries of popular struggle, or not at all.

[1] Available through the following sites: 
http://www.jceps.com/wp-content/uploads/PDFs/09-1-05.pdf ; https://www.academia.edu/29698373/Nothing_Exceptional_Against_Agamben .


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Colatrella  is the author of the recent book, Looking Over the Abyss: The US and Europe Beyond Capitalism, Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ 2021.

Wagging the dog? America and the UK respond to the crisis in Ukraine

Likely the best way to understand the reaction of the U.S., UK and other English speaking countries to the latest ‘crisis’ in the Ukraine is that there is, as always, plenty of money to be made out of it.


SOURCENationofChange

Although it existed before and had a somewhat different meaning,  the term ‘wag the dog’ to describe the use of or threat of the use of military force in other countries to distract from domestic troubles was popularized as part of the discourse around politics, especially in the United States, in the late summer of 1998.

Within days of the release of the film version of a popular book by this name that portrayed a U.S. president threatening a war with Albania to distract form a sex scandal at home, it was reported that the then real president, Bill Clinton, had had an affair with an 21 year old intern in the White House and had lied to investigators about it.

Just 3 days after Clinton’s taped testimony before a grand jury, the then president seemed to pull a real world version of what happened in the book and the film when he ordered strikes against targets in Afghanistan and Sudan that he claimed would punish Osama Bin Laden and his support network for attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa earlier that month. 

The strike on Sudan destroyed the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant, which the U.S. government said had financial ties to the Al Qaeda leader and was producing chemical weapons. It turned out that the plant mostly produced antibiotics, had no Bin Laden connection and that innocent lives would be lost as a result of the bombing beyond the 12 who were killed when the facility was leveled, a real world consequence of ‘wagging the dog’ that wasn’t contemplated in the fictional versions that preceded it.

But Clinton wasn’t done with lying and using force in other countries to distract from his domestic troubles. Just prior to the start of impeachment proceedings, he ordered the bombing of various sites in Iraq that his administration claimed were involved in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. The next president, George W. Bush would use this same pretext to illegally invade that country, where no WMD were found.

As if to demonstrate his cynicism, Clinton called off the strikes as soon as the impeachment vote had taken place.

One major difference between the Clintonian ‘wagging of the dog’ and what seems lke a current version involving the the leaders of the UK and U.S., who, along with allies like Canada have created a panic about Russian saber rattling in regards to Ukraine, is the relative danger represented by the possible reactions of the countries targeted then, who couldn’t retaliate, and the much more dangerous brinkmanship that the world is watching as these NATO allies engage in a war of words with the Russian Federation. In economic terms the country may be a shadow of its former self but it still has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Although President Biden has ample reason for a ‘rally around the flag’ moment considering his domestic failures and low numbers in terms of polling, of the two leaders, the one with the most to gain by creating the illusion of competent crisis leadership is surely Boris Johnson, who has been continuously embarrassed in recent weeks by parties held at his residence and workplace during the Covid 19 crisis that were never supposed to have happened under the rules put in place by his own government. 

Johnson, or ‘Bojo’ as he is often called with a mixture of affection and derision by supporters and foes alike, has long cultivated an image as something of a lovable rogue. The former London mayor never really came across as a rightwing populist, a role fulfilled by UKIP leader Nigel Farage prior to the political opportunity offered by the surprising result of the Brexit referendum in 2016 that would take the country out of the European Union and make the country even more reliant on its ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

The racheting up of tensions by these two powers has provoked worried responses and diplomatic overtures from allies France and Germany, who have their own political and economic reasons to end the war of words. 

It was reported on Tuesday, that the Russian Federation would be removing some troops from the border in a move that at least temporarily de-escalated tensions. As we might expect, despite some skepticism on the part of some in Ukraine like its Defense Minister, Dmytro Kuleba and Boris Johnson who accused the Russian government of sending “mixed signals”, both sides declared victory. 

For its part, Russia’s government wants assurances that Ukraine, whose history is entwined, often tragically, with its own, and which has a large Russian speaking minority in two administrative regions in the country’s east, which they collectively call Donbas and which has been the site of a low level insurgency since the Spring of 2014, will remain neutral and not become a NATO member or join the EU. 

Unlike many commentators on the right (and some who have the nerve to call themselves ‘leftists’ or ‘anti-imperialists’) who seem to admire President Putin’s populist nationalist style, I’ve never been comfortable making excuses for him and the United Russia Party that is his main basis of support. Besides brutal policies attacking already vulnerable LGBTQ+ communities in the Russian Federation up until the present day, shortly after former President Clinton launched his missiles, Putin’s government began committing war crimes in Chechnya that that country has yet to recover from. 

It’s interesting that the right of Chechens to self determination was not considered an issue at the turn of the century but these same rights for Georgia and Ukraine have been widely defended in the Western press in the years since.

It’s also true that war games in Belarus and in the Azov and Black Seas are provocative, but no more so than those NATO routinely holds on its borders are from the Kremlin’s point of view. Militarism is always inexcusable regardless of the country or countries engaged in it, more so when it’s used as a distraction from domestic problems.

Rather than acting as the unbiased watchdogs they portray themselves as, the major English speaking periodicals and other media like the BBC and CNN have only stoked the flames of conflict making claims, usually based on ‘anonymous official sources’ that an invasion was imminent, with some even claiming that the Russian president had told his forces to be ready for war by Wednesday, February 16th

Despite this, on Thursday it was reported the U.S. president still fears an invasion could occur over “the next several days” and Russia expelled the second highest ranking U.S. diplomat in the country.

Likely the best way to understand the reaction of the U.S., UK and other English speaking countries to the latest ‘crisis’ in the Ukraine is that there is, as always, plenty of money to be made out of it, with multiple countries promising and sending arms to Ukraine, all in the hope of ensuring peace. On Tuesday, Joe Biden promised that no Americans will have to fight in Ukraine, nor does it seem likely that the UK will send combat troops there. Instead they and other NATO countries have promised arms, music to the ears of purveyors of death like B&E Systems, General Dynamics and Raytheon.

This is one of the things about wagging the dog, barring a cataclysmic conflict, a real if unlikely possibility in this case as opposed to most others, arms manufacturers and the politicians and think tanks they support always win.

Derek Royden is a freelance writer based in Montreal, Canada with an interest in activism, politics and culture. His work has appeared on Occupy.com, Truthout, Antiwar.com and Gonzo Today as well as in Skunk Magazine.

PROEM
“As Putin and Biden bluster threats of war, and so-called antiwar activists echo imperial lies

A long-time socialist’s poem reminiscing about friends and experiences in Kyiv in the shadow of the threat of war in Ukraine. — Editors

As Putin and Biden bluster threats of war, and so-called antiwar activists echo imperial lies

The sounds and smells of Kyiv’s Sunday market,
of Andreisky Descent,
fill my nose and eyes;

visions of stalls selling souvenirs
of half-remembered Soviet Union years,
and fur hats white, of local design.
I recall wandering through icy streets in Odessa,
bending to stroke the cat before the tiny market
below the office nineteen floors above
where Pasha, Anya and I once nibbled pastries
and talked of AIDS and how to fight it.

Will tanks and bombs rubble Gorki’s hallowed home tomorrow?
Transform the quirky statues above the Descent into
bundles burning like my dreams of long-lost friends?
Will the restaurant where we ate pickled carrots and well-spiced shashlik
and the lawn before it where I often scribbled poems beneath the chestnuts blooming
now reek of blasted bodies
of social worker friends who taught homeless children
how to avoid the modern plague?

And will the chessboards of Shevchenko Park
lie shattered, mated,
where young invaders cook tasteless noodles,
rue their nineteen weeks away from life-mates
and pray to someday return to home?

Ukraine Solidarity Campaign 

seeks to organise solidarity and provide information in support of Ukrainian socialists and trade unionists

Mission

The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign seeks to organise solidarity and provide information in support of Ukrainian socialists and trade unionists, campaigning for working class, and democratic rights, against imperialist intervention and national chauvinism. It seeks to co-ordinate socialist and labour movement organisations who agree on this task, regardless of differences and opinions on other questions.
Basic aims are:
• to support and build direct links with the independent socialists and the labour movement in Ukraine.
• to support the right of the Ukrainian people to determine their own future free from external intervention from Russian or Western imperialism


Ukraineminersdemo2Українська Кампанія Солідарності прагне організувати солідарність та надавати інформацію в підтримку українських соціалістів та профспілкових діячів та проводити кампанії в підтримку робітничого класу та демократичних прав, проти імперіалістичної інтервенції та національного шовінізму. Кампанія прагне координувати організації соціалістичного та робітничого руху, які згодні з цими завданнями, незалежно від відмінностей та позицій по іншим питанням.

Базовими завданнями є:  • підтримка та створення прямих зв’язків між незалежними соціалістами та робітничим рухом в Україні.

• підтримка права українського народу визначати своє майбутнє вільно від зовнішніх втручань з боку російського або західного імперіалізму.


Украинская Кампания Солидарности стремится организовать солидарность и предоставлять информацию об украинских социалистах и профсоюзных деятелях и проводить кампании в поддержку рабочего класса и демократических прав, против империалистической интервенции и национального шовинизма. Кампания стремится координировать организации социалистического и рабочего движения, согласные с этими задачами, независимо от разногласий и позиций по другим вопросам.

Основными задачами являются:
• поддержка и создание прямых связей между независимыми социалистами и рабочим движением в Украине.
• поддержка права украинского народа определять своё будущее не зависимо от внешних воздействий со стороны российского или западного империализма.


Supporters of Ukraine Solidarity Campaign  include:

NUM National Union of Mineworkers

ASLEF the train drivers union

ASLEF Peterborough (161) Branch

ASLEF Weymouth Branch No.231

ASLEF Northern Line Branch 067

ASLEF Motherwell Branch No.137

Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers

Labour Representation Committee

Labour Briefing 

Real Democracy Movement

Emancipation & Liberation

ALLIANCE FOR WORKERS LIBERTY
SOCIALIST RESISTANCE
RS21

 


These sites are to assist in providing sources of information on Ukraine and the Ukrainian Labour Movement, the sites and their content do not necessarily reflect the views of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign.

Ukrainian Trade Unions

KVPU – The Confederation of Free Trade Unions

FPSU – Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine

NGPU Independent Union of Miners of Ukraine

Regional Organisations of NGPU

Trade Union of the Coal Industry of Ukraine

Trade Union Labour Solidarity

Independent Trade Union Defence of Labour

Independent Media Trade Union of UkraineAll-Ukrainian Union of Finance Workers

Independent Trade Unions of the Energy Sector

Ukrainian Left Organisations

Left-Opposition

Spilne/Commons Journal

Assembly for Social Revolution

Vpered on-line journal

Bulletin of the Left-Opposition

Autonomous Workers Union

National-Communist Front

Strike, Solidarity Portal

Independent Student Union Direct Action

Ukraine: Activist Perspective (after Maidan)

Socialist Party of Ukraine

Research and Analysis

Centre for Social Research

Kharkiv human rights protection group

Amnesty International Ukraine

Observer Ukraine

LeftEast – platform where our common struggles and political commitments come together

Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe

Journal of Ukrainian Studies

Labour Focus on Eastern Europe

Russian Left

Russian Socialist Movement

Praxis Centre Moscow

Solidarity

Irish Ukrainian Solidarity Group

Global Labour Institute

Press and Media

Krytyka, Journal of Critical Thinking

Glavred

Ukrainian Pravda

Community TV

Spilno TV

Ukraine Today

Ukraine and its History

ISN Ukraine Crisis Reader – sources

EuroMaidan Research Forum

BRAMA – History of Ukraine Chronologically Synchronized Tables

Ukrainian Socialists in Canada, 1900-1918

A Memoir of Auschwitz and Birkenau Roman Rosdolsky

Engels and the `Nonhistoric’ Peoples: the National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Roman Rosdolsky

The Dialectics of the Ukrainian Revolution – Introduction to Borotbism by Ivan Maistrenko

Borotbism: A Chapter in the History of the Ukrainian Revolution by Ivan Maistrenko

Internationalism or Russification?: A study in the Soviet nationalities problem, by Ivan Dzyuba

On the Current Situation in the Ukraine by Serhii Mazlakh and Vasyl’ Shakhrai

Ukrainian Marxists and Russian Imperialism 1918-1923: Prelude to the Present in Eastern Europe’s Ireland

Ukrainian National Communism in International Context Olena Palko

A Bolshevik Party with a National Face Being Ukrainian among Communists by Olena Palko

Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies

Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine

Ukraine-related information on the Internet

 

 

EuroMaidan

maydan

Euromaidan’s popularity has nothing to do with Ukrainians finding the question of free trade with the European Union so significant that it emboldened them to survive sleepless nights on the square. The country’s socioeconomic problems, which are much more acute than those of its neighbors to the East and West, gave the protest its meaning. The average salary in Ukraine is 2 to 2.5 times lower than in Russia and Belarus, and much lower than in the EU. The worldwide economic crisis affected the Ukrainian economy much more drastically than almost any other economy in Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals. Economic growth after the crisis nearly froze, and industry will most likely continue to decline in 2013. Furthermore, Ukraine’s economic system more or less exempts oligarchs from paying taxes. One can completely legally export tens of billions of dollars worth of minerals, metals, ammonia, wheat, and sunflowers, and report no profit. All earnings are stashed in offshore jurisdictions, where almost all of Ukraine’s functioning enterprises are formally located. Any profits earned by an enterprise inside the country can be legally and effortlessly transported to offshore locations by reframing them as a fictitious loan, for example.

Is it any surprise that the Ukrainian government systematically has trouble replenishing the budget? At the end of last year, Ukraine was in a pre-default stage. Withholding wages owed to state employees became common practice, and the budget practically stopped allotting funds to social programs. The situation was exacerbated by a trade war with Russia, when Gazprom forced Ukrainian gas prices to record heights in Eastern Europe. Oligarchs drove the country into a corner; even after endless discussion, they could not formulate a coherent development strategy, avoiding any investment in the state while systematically draining it. Any development strategy must include a curbing of their appetites – it must at least partially ban offshore schemes and enforce minimum tax payments. But that’s exactly what oligarchs cannot accept, even though they understand that if they don’t change the rules of the game, they will drive the state into socioeconomic catastrophe, chopping off the branch where they themselves sit.

The right-wing opposition, when speaking about economic problems, focuses almost exclusively on the themes of corruption and ineffective rule. And if the conversation does turn to oligarchs looting the state, then it limits itself to the businessmen who are close to the Party of Regions, and most often does not delve further than the business that belongs to Yanukovich’s sons. From the right wing’s point of view, the other oligarchs are not a problem, because they have national consciousness. By this logic, when Ukraine is plundered by a “щирый” (Ukr. for “authentic”– editor’s note) Ukrainian, it is still beneficial to the national cause.

A paradoxical situation is unfolding. All conscientious economists (even quite neoliberal ones like, for example, Viktor Pinzenik) agree that the tax and regulatory systems of the country were built to completely exempt oligarchs from paying taxes. Everyone can see that this system won’t last much longer, but none of the politicians in the Parliament have dared to offer the obvious and realistic systemic alternative. Almost nobody dares to publicly admit that the most pressing issue facing Ukraine is not the EU or the trade union, but simply that oligarchs should start paying their taxes. The apparatus of the state is perfectly capable of forcing them to do so since the oligarchs’ functioning assets are all located in Ukraine. However, as Andrei Hunko recently pointed out, the oligarchization of Ukrainian politics has reached such proportions that not a single one of the existing parliamentary parties can even mention this matter.

Sadly enough, only radical leftists voice these minimal and obvious demands. I emphasize that these demands must be seen not as the agenda of the Left Opposition, but as first steps toward the formation of policies that could gather together all anti-oligarchic forces, who don’t consider an ultra-right fascist dictatorship to be any kind of solution – the kind of dictatorship the All-Ukrainian Union “Svoboda” so insistently pushes us towards, while the official opposition leaders sit by and watch.

The glaring absence of any coherent plan of action to help Ukraine out of its crisis has become so pressing that even quite liberal, almost right-liberal publications have started discussing our “Ten Points” – such as, for example, Lvov’s zaxid.net.
Zahar Popovich, “Left Opposition”

Evrosocializm1-1024x682

 

Plan for Social Change, in ten points.

Foreword, by the Left Opposition.

We submit to your attention a document titled “Plan for Social Change”, which outlines ways to increase the well-being of the citizens and ensure social progress. It was created partly because most socio-economic demands at the Euromaidan demonstrations have been ignored. Our hope is that this document might serve as a platform to unify a wide range of social, leftist, and trade-union initiatives. This document was written by activists belonging to the Left Opposition, a socialist organization that aims to unify all those who belong to the community provisionally called #leftmaidan.

It goes without saying that political parties transform the protest movement and direct it toward electoral politics; they try to find new voices, instead of making significant changes to the system. We do not support the ideas of liberal structures, which propagandize free market economics, nor do we support radical nationalists who push discriminatory policies.

Our hope is that the protest movement, spurred to action by social injustice, might ultimately eradicate the root causes of this injustice. We believe that the cause of most social problems is the oligarchy that formed as a result of unbridled capitalism and corruption. It is important to limit the egotistic interests of our oligarchs, instead of relying on the help of Russia or the IMF, with the consequent national dependence. We believe that it is harmful to add our voices to the demands for Euro-integration; instead, we need to clearly delineate the changes necessary to support the interests of ordinary citizens, especially hired laborers. On several occasions, we cite the progressive experiences of a few European states that have taken similar measures.

The goals we’ve created are relatively moderate, so that they might appeal to the widest possible range of organizations. We won’t conceal the fact that, for us, this plan is less a reaction to current events than a step toward the formulation of a contemporary leftist political force – a force that is capable of influencing those in power and offering an alternative to the existing social order. The Left Opposition considers the proposed plan to be the minimum for building socialism on the principles of self-government: the socialization of industry, the allocation of profit for social needs, and the appointment for citizens to government functions.

We welcome you to subscribe to our Facebook and VKontakte pages to voice your opinions there, or to email us at gaslo.info@gmail.com.
Replacing one set of politicians and oligarchs with another without overall systemic changes will not improve our lives. Instead, our group of social and union activists is proposing ten basic conditions for overcoming the economic crisis and ensuring Ukraine’s future growth.

The Left Opposition Collective

  1. GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE, NOT BY THE OLIGARCHS      
    There must be a transition from a presidential to a parliamentary republic, in which presidential power is limited to representative functions on the international stage. Authority should be transferred from state administrators to elected regional committees (soviets). Authorities should have the right to fire delegates who have not met expectations; judges and police chiefs should be elected, not appointed.
  2. NATIONALIZATION OF PRIMARY INDUSTRIES
    Metallurgy, mining, and chemical industries, along with infrastructural enterprises (energy, transport, and communications) should contribute to social welfare.
  3. WORKERS SHOULD CONTROL ALL FORMS OF OWNERSHIP
    Following successful European examples, we should construct a wide network of independent workers’ unions, which will control management and guarantee workers’ rights. Workers should have the right to strike (refuse to work when payment is not received). Workers should also have the right to take out loans at the employer’s expense if wages are delayed (following Portugal’s example).  Production, accounting, and management data of all enterprises that employ more than 50 people, or have a capital turnover of over $1 million, should be published online.
  4. INTRODUCTION OF A LUXURY TAX
    We should instate a 50% tax on luxury items – yachts, elite automobiles, and other items that cost more than 1 million gryvna. A progressive personal income tax should also be introduced. Individuals with an annual income of more than 1 million gryvna should be taxed up to 50%, following Denmark’s example (in such a system, Renat Ahmetov alone would have paid 1.2 billion gryvna to the federal budget, as compared to the 400 million he actually paid in 2013 on a 17% tax).
  5. PROHIBITION OF OFFSHORE CAPITAL TRANSFERS
    The bylaws that exempt Ukrainian enterprises from taxation in a number of offshore countries should be revoked, in order to prevent the transfer of capital offshore. The assets of offshore companies in Ukraine should be frozen, and a temporary administration should be appointed until the legality of the investments can be proven.
  6. SEPARATION OF BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT   
    Citizens with incomes that exceed 1 million grivni should be banned from government positions and seats in local government. Nationwide reelections should be held in compliance with this rule.
  7. REDUCTION OF SPENDING ON THE BUREAUCRATIC APPARATUS
    Government spending should be controlled and transparent. Administrative reforms should take place, resulting in a reduction in the number of managerial employees. Today, whole departments could be replaced by computer programs. But instead, in the last eight years the number of bureaucrats in the government has grown by almost 10%, comprising more than 372,000 people (in Ukraine, there are 8 bureaucrats for every 1000 people – in France, there are only 5 per 1000!).
  8. DISSOLUTION OF BERKUT AND OTHER SPECIAL FORCES
    Beginning in 2014, there should be subsequent reductions in spending on the sercurity apparatus of the state: the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Security Service, the Office of the Prosecutor General, and special police forces. It is unacceptable that the Ministry of Internal Affairs was allocated more than 16.9 million grivni in 2013 – 6.9 million more than all public health expenditures!
  9. ACCESS TO FREE EDUCATION AND HEALTHCARE
    Funds for this initiative should come from the nationalization of industries and reduced spending on the security and bureaucratic apparati. To eliminate corruption in education and medicine, we must raise doctors’ and teachers’ salaries and restore the prestige of those fields.
  10. WITHDRAWAL FROM OPPRESIVE INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONSWe support the termination of further cooperation with the International Monetary Fund and other international financial institutions. We should follow the example of Iceland, which refused to pay debts accrued by bankers and bureaucrats (under government warranty) for the purposes of personal enrichment and “social handouts”, rather than for the development of industry.

Published in Russian on the Open Left platform: http://openleft.ru/?p=1157

Translated from the Russian by: Jordan Maze and Helen Tsykynovska

 https://ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org

Now is the time for socialists to stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people
15FEB 2022


Mick Antoniw

For those socialists who oppose imperialism and believe in the right of nations to self-determination, international law and democracy, now is the time to stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people. The situation in Ukraine for most comrades is admittedly confusing and Vladimir Putin’s propaganda strategy has been hard at work for over eight years, in Ukraine and throughout Europe. But there are certain facts which cannot be credibly ignored.

The current tensions are a threat to European peace and economic stability. They are also a direct result of eight years of hybrid warfare on the border of Ukraine, sponsored and co-ordinated by the Russian government, and accelerated by the build-up of an invasion force of around 130,000 soldiers and an array of military equipment and weaponry the like of which has not been seen in Europe since the Second World War. Putin has added to this with his increasing military engagement to the North of Ukraine in Belarus, the additional build up of forces and the Russian Black sea fleet in occupied Crimea and some 8,000 troops in Transdnistra to the West of Ukraine.


Ukraine is de facto surrounded by a Russian invasion force. Every month that has gone by since 2014, Russia has been controlling, financing and arming mercenary and surrogate separatist groups it has created and controls in parts of Eastern Ukraine in Luhansk and Donetsk, which has led to over 14,000 deaths and nearly two million displaced persons.

The risk of war with Ukraine will only be realised if Russia invades Ukraine. It is clear that Ukraine has no intention or even capacity to invade or in any way threaten Russia. Nobody should be under any illusion that this conflict is a direct result of Putin’s commitment to recreating a greater Russian empire. He sees Ukraine and Belarus as one people, one volk, with Russia. He has made it clear that he does not recognise Ukraine as a sovereign nation.

Prior to the 2014 invasion, the overwhelming population of Ukraine did not see any need or desire to join NATO. The invasion and Putin’s actions and rhetoric have changed all that, probably irreversibly. Ukraine now looks for allies who will help it resist Russian aggression and asserts its right to defend its sovereignty.

It is ironic that Putin now seeks legally binding defence guarantees from the West, yet it is the very same Putin who, alongside the United States, Britain and France, signed a legally binding guarantee of Ukrainian sovereignty in return for unilaterally giving up its nuclear weapons. It is a tragedy that, at a stroke, Putin has, by his actions, guaranteed that there will never be any further unilateral nuclear disarmament in any part of the world. Why would any country now ever give up its nuclear weaponry in return for such a worthless guarantee?

For socialists, there are, of course, many valid issues and concerns about NATO and its role in Europe – but these have little to do with the current conflict. Putin is intent on the assimilation of Ukraine and Belarus in any event, and his speeches and writings make that clear. Blaming NATO and his absurd claim of protecting Russian speakers are merely camouflage for these ambitions.

Even if NATO succumbed to all of Putin’s demands, it would not change his geopolitical strategy of creating a greater Russia under the direction of Moscow. The invasion of Eastern Ukraine and the illegal occupation of Crimea had nothing to do with NATO. The current aggression is a continuation of a strategy he could not complete in 2014 when the Ukrainian army and volunteers turned back the tide of invasion by Russian and hybrid forces.

Were NATO to agree, it would in all likelihood only make this process, in time, inevitable, and without military support and weaponry Ukraine would have no substantial ability to resist other than in the form of long-term and bloody partisan resistance.

There are those on the left who are so fixated with NATO and American imperialism that they have become blinded and indeed apologists for a ruthless Russian expansionism, for Russian imperialism based on a greater Russian nationalist ideology.

The belief amongst some sections of the left that what is happening is a result of NATO expansionism does not stand up to scrutiny. It is at best misguided and at worst delusional. It puts the Ukrainian people into the category of mere geopolitical pawns and lends succour to the authoritarian and fascistic politics that now dominate Russia. It denies the Ukrainian people the fundamental right to determine their own future.

To add to the mythology is the assertion that this is somehow about protecting Russian speaking people. Most of those resisting Russian-backed aggression on a daily basis, on the front line of the occupied territories, are Russian-speaking.

There is no doubt that Russian propaganda has been increasingly effective in promoting these ideas across the world, but the scale of interference and manipulation across Eastern and Central Europe is significant as it is in the US and in Europe. Russian money has increasingly been manipulating political systems across Europe, including the Conservative Party, which may explain their reluctance to act on the Russia report commissioned by the Tory government following the Skripal murders by Russian agents, and their total failure to tackle oligarchic money laundering and corruption in London, which has become the money laundering capital for the world’s oligarchs.

Ukrainians have never expected NATO to fight their battles for them. They do, however, expect those countries to at least give it the weaponry ability to deter aggression and, if invasion occurs, to defend itself.

There is a route to peace. It is by Russia fulfilling its obligations under the Budapest agreement, ending the supply of weaponry to its hybrid forces in the East, withdrawing its invasion forces and entering into multilateral discussions to reduce militarisation throughout Central and Eastern Europe and Russia.

The fear amongst Ukrainians is that the US and European will try force some sort of Minsk 3 deal upon Ukraine, which will only strengthen Russia’s foothold in Eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea, delaying but not ending the risk of invasion.

Mick Antoniw MS is a second generation Ukrainian, a former member of the EU committee of the regions taskforce on Ukraine, and is regularly engaged with Ukrainian civic organisations and trade unions. He is a member of Ukraine Solidarity.

NO to war – Russia’s hands off Ukraine!



February 8, 2022

An international statement of solidarity launched by the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. The International Marxist-Humanist Organization has signed and supports this statement. — Editors

We, socialists, trade unionists, scholars, activists for human rights, social justice and peace, stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine against Russian imperialism.

The international left and labour movement must vigorously oppose Russia’s threats against Ukraine.

We say neither Washington nor Moscow. We oppose the policy and manoeuvrings of the big Western powers and NATO.

But currently it is Russia that is threatening the Ukrainian people’s right to self-determination and challenging their legitimacy as an independent nation.

It is Russia that has massed troops on Ukraine’s borders; Russia that has annexed Crimea and persecuted the Crimean Tatars; and Russia that has organised an eight-year war in eastern Ukraine leading to 14,000 deaths, 30,000 wounded and 1.9 million displaced people on the Ukrainian side alone.

Subjugated by Russian Tsarist and Stalinist rulers, for centuries Ukraine was the object of exploitation and national oppression, its culture and language subject to discrimination. Millions perished at the hands of the Kremlin.

We call for peace through self-determination of the Ukrainian people. That does not mean support for the current government of Ukraine or the capitalist oligarchs it serves.

Despite its rhetoric, self-evidently the Russian government is interested in neither democracy nor opposing fascism. The Russian government actively promotes pro-Russian sections of the far right in occupied eastern Ukraine and other parts of Europe; and its anti-Ukrainian policy strengthens the hand of far-right Ukrainian nationalists too.

We hail the brave internationalists in Russia protesting against Putin’s war politics. We demand the release of Russian political prisoners.

We stand in solidarity with socialists, trade unionists and activists for democratic and human rights who, who can bring real progress – in Ukraine and in Russia..

We demand the withdrawal of Russia’s troops from the Ukrainian borders and occupied territories, and an end to Russian interference in Ukraine.


This statement was launched by the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign (UK) https://ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org.