It seems like yesterday when we finally left the “Covid-19 pandemic crisis” (although some say we will never leave it) and there is already a new “crisis”. According to the dominant bourgeois narrative the war in Ukraine is a new reason for the proletariat to put aside the satisfaction of their needs. Instead, we should join the united front with the forces of “our” bourgeoisie and sacrifice ourselves for a “greater good” of either “defense of territorial integrity of Ukraine” or its “denazification” – depending on where we live.
It seems like yesterday when we finally left the “Covid-19 pandemic crisis” (although some say we will never leave it) and there is already a new “crisis”. According to the dominant bourgeois narrative the war in Ukraine is a new reason for the proletariat to put aside the satisfaction of their needs. Instead, we should join the united front with the forces of “our” bourgeoisie and sacrifice ourselves for a “greater good” of either “defense of territorial integrity of Ukraine” or its “denazification” – depending on where we live.
They force us to become the cannon fodder in “the defense of the nation”, which means to suffer and die for the interests of one or another bourgeois camp – as it is now happening to the “Russian” and “Ukrainian” proletarians. Or they force us to make sacrifices on the “home front” – to accept the increase in prices of basic commodities that allow our day-to-day survival like food, housing, health, energy, transport, etc.; to accept increased repression and surveillance; to accept militarization of work and brutal increase in the rate of our exploitation.
The war is of course an integral part of the very logic in which capitalism operates. It is an expression of a need of competing factions of the Capital to conquer each other’s markets in order to realize their profit. In this sense the capitalist war and the capitalist peace are just two faces of the same coin and any war is just a continuation of this competition by military means.
The 2022 war in Ukraine (which is rather a new open phase of the war that started in 2014) is no exception. In the last several decades they dragged us into other incredibly bloody wars, some of which are still raging on – in Somalia, in ex-Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in African Great Lakes region, in Caucasus region, in Syria, in Yemen… or recently in Ethiopia… All of those conflicts were born from the competition between local bourgeois factions, but at the same time represented turf wars in proxy between “the great powers” and in all of them (as always) it was proletarians who got slaughtered.
Despite being just as brutal as the war currently raging in Ukraine is, these wars did not allow the bourgeoisie to mobilize the proletariat in support of the capitalist interests on such a global level. The main reason is that this time the formation of the capitalist super-blocks capable of a global confrontation is much closer and the clash of their opposing factional interests is much more obvious and direct. Therefore, it is easy for the bourgeois ideologues on both sides to pretend that it is “a Holy war” of “Good vs. Evil”. Yet again they push us towards the killing fields in the name of peace, this time towards the war that can end all life on this planet.
Faced with the reality of mobilization, militarization of our lives, nationalist propaganda and horrible carnage of proletarians, the communist position has always been the revolutionary defeatist rejection of both camps of the bourgeois conflict in favor of the “third camp”, camp of the global communist revolution! We have addressed this recently in our leaflet: Proletarians in Russia and in Ukraine! On production front and military front… Comrades! as well as in a second contribution: Internationalist Manifesto against capitalist war and peace in Ukraine (both texts can be found in the appendices of this bulletin).
Similarly to the “Covid-19 crisis”, we as communists reject all bourgeois falsifications of the reality as they all serve the same purpose to keep our class subjugated to the interests of the ruling class and to prevent it from realization of its own class interests – i.e. to abolish the society based on exploitation of the human labor. Whether the narrative they try to impose on us is based on official “sacred” science and medicine (pretending to be objective and impartial) and government statistics or on “dissident and banned” science that “New World Order does not want you to see” (yet somehow it is all over YouTube), our only response to this is to re-affirm the position of militant proletarian subjectivity – i.e. to always analyze the material reality based on the criteria of what advances or hinders the struggle for our class interests. And from this position, and in confrontation with all the above-mentioned falsifications, we try to always uncover the proletarian current in all this turmoil.
Just like the previous “Covid-19 crisis”, the war in Ukraine is also claimed to be at the root of the apparent “economic crisis” and as a justification for scarcity and/or rising prices of many basic commodities. In reality, both these crises simply unmasked the underlying crisis of valorization.
There is not such a thing on this planet as a scarcity of food or energy. It is the logic of capital what creates the “scarcity” as the only reason why the commodities are produced in capitalism is to sell them in order to realize profit. Their use value as food, clothes, fuel, etc. has meaning for Capital only as a mean to this end. It is therefore logical to let the food rot away or burn the fuel rather than to give it to those who are unable to pay for it. Wheat from Ukraine or Russia will therefore not be transported via other routes or replaced by wheat or other edible product from elsewhere to feed the hungry proletarians in Egypt or Lebanon or Sri Lanka unless it can be made profitable.
In the following pages we attempt to analyze the proletarian movements that have been shaking the world despite the Covid-19 and the related lock-downs and the war in Ukraine, against the misery of life in the capitalist society and in opposition to State’s inter-class mobilization efforts. This text is neither supposed to be a chronology of these proletarian movements nor an exhaustive detailed account of day-to-day militant and organizational activity “on the ground”. There are other militants, with more direct connection to these movements than we have, who have assumed these tasks well. We focus on movements that according to us represent the peak of the recent proletarian militancy, while also keeping the militant continuity, reappearing in other form after they had been repressed by the State, giving birth to militant minorities or energizing the existing ones and potentially creating the space for the programmatic ruptures.
Let’s mention here that we plan to cover the revolutionary defeatist actions of the proletariat in the territory of Russia and Ukraine against the capitalist war (desertions and mutinies on both sides, attacks on recruitment centers, sabotage of war efforts, subversion of the recent mobilization in Russia, etc.) in a separate material. We also have to mention here January riots in Kazakhstan triggered by the high fuel prices, although we don’t talk about it in detail in the following text. It was a very strong eruption of proletarian anger and contained some insurrectional moments which led the local bourgeoisie to call for reinforcements from Russia and other CTSO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) countries to crush it and prevent it to develop into a full-scale proletarian insurrection. We have published on our blog a collection of militant materials from various groups reporting on the movement in Kazakhstan.
READ AND DOWNLOAD THE BULLETIN #14 HERE
https://www.autistici.org/tridnivalka/class-war-14-2022-war-revolution/
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