As Ukraine slides towards civil war, anarchist group Autonomous Workers Union appeals to the working class to reject both sides and instead fight for their common class interests.
Pro-Russian militant in eastern Ukraine
There is a continuing confrontation on Ukraine’s territory between the groups of local and Russian ruling class which play off the working people one against another and stir up enmity, bringing the country closer to the state of civil war. The events in Mariupol’ are the embodiment of this confrontation. Many people, the combatants and civilians, contract military staff and conscripts, as well as volunteers, have suffered on both sides of the conflict as a result of the “anti-terrorist operation”
This is a critical situation for working people. The government treats all protesting Anti-Maidan people alike: soldiers don’t understand who they shoot at, and the ones who are being shot at don’t understand what they die for. Both sides of the condlict manipulate their “foot soldiers” with a particular cynicism, and because of this the working people fight for the ideas that do not have anything in common with their material, class interests. Ukrainian military units and other armed groups fight for the senseless ideals of national-patriotism and “unity of a nation”, while separatists fight for the creation of a new state and/or joining Russia. In all cases the aim is the borgeois national state with its bureaucrats, police, judges, prisons, capitalists and paupers.
Even now there are already dozens of victims and deaths as the consequence of struggle between those two reactionary movements. Army incompetence, on the one side, and the combatants’ depravity, on another side, increase the losses significantly.
The highest ranks of Anti-Maidan movement are generally made up of military retirees, as well as senior police officials, which are loyal to the previous regime. Therefore, the leadership of the “people’s republics” in the Eastern regions of Ukraine may indeed be styled as the junta – the dictatorship of the law enforcement and armed forces.
Fascist groups and criminals present in this movement make the overall character of junta deeply reactionary and radically contrary to the class interests of the working people in the Eastern regions.
Pro-Russian propaganda portrays separatist combatants as fighters of anti-fascist resistance. According to this propaganda, “anti-terrorist operation” started by Ukrainian government is nothing else but the attack of Ukrainian fascists from “Right Sector”, whose role in these and many other events is disturbingly blown way out of proportion.
“Right Sector” is a poorly coordinated coalition of several far-right organizations. Its social structure consists of far-right youth and criminal groups. The social structure of “people’s republics” combatants is mainly similar: teenagers, gangsters and declassed elements. The popular appeal of “Right Sector” in the present moment is very low (even lower than that of the totally discredited Communist Party of Ukraine); moreover, “Right Sector” is in the state of an undercover war with Ukrainian government.
Owing to the constant PR from the pseudo-antifascist international community, “Right Sector” acquires the dreadful image of a powerful organization which almost rules the Ukrainian state, which is obviously not true. But we are not trying to minimize the problem of fascist movements in Ukraine. AWU repeatedly emphasized the escalation of far-right violence, aimed particularly at leftists, as early as 2012, during Yanukovych’s regime. AWU activists were also attacked. One of our comrades was almost killed by the neo-nazis who had attacked him with knives. Also, the location of this year’s May Day march had to be moved due to the threat of clashes with far-right.
Resisting the fascist movements has been one of the primary tasks of anarchist movement in Ukraine for a long time. Unlike many post-Stalinist “antifascists” in Western countries we know this problem firsthand and not from the Internet. And yet, we and our comrades managed to organize May Day anarchist marches with social, anticapitalist and antinational agenda in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Zhytomyr.
Anarchists do not intend to give ground to the nazis and to the right-liberal government. It was AWU that organized the radical left protest campaign against the “Bat’kivshyna” ruling party.
We are ready to continue the fight against the state, capital and the far-right who protect them. But this fight is a hundred times more difficult when the state, the church, police structures and fascist movements are united into one force. Such is the situation in Donbass, where the “army of Donetsk people’s republic” is headed by Igor Strelkov, the Russian undercover man and a great fan of the historical Tsarist White Guard movement; where the organizer of the referendum, the founder of “Orthodox Donbass” movement, consults with the leader of the oldest post-Soviet neo-Nazi movement, legendary Aleksandr Barkashov; where activists of Anti-Maidan manifest their solidarity and respects to another icon of European fascists – Aleksandr Dugin; where co-chairman of the “Donetsk people’s republic government” Denis Pushilin openly regrets the revolution of 1917 that put end to tsarism and calls it a “bloody disaster”.
Social slogans did not fit into the manifests and official documents of separatists, while there are many phrases about the class peace and the interests of the “small business”. Criminal and fascist junta on the East at present organizes the tortures and abductions of trade union activists.
Nationalism is the deadly enemy of the working people. This is proved by the current events in Ukraine, when fascists on both sides help the ruling class to physically fight down the working people. The question is – how many victims and destructions are needed before Ukrainian proletariat realizes it.
We demand from the Kyiv government to remove the troops from the cities immediately, and from the Eastern junta to stop terrorizing peaceful working people. Our own goal is to keep up the resistance at all fronts and to build revolutionary labour movement against all the odds.
We call on our fellow Ukrainian workers to line up behind our common class interests, among which are peace and solidarity, but not the senseless fight for keeping the territories or their separation. Class struggle does not have anything to do with the fight for redistribution of power. Whoever wins in the confrontation between the government and separatists, – we will lose, that is why its boycott is our priority. Ignoring the government’s decisions, renouncing the militarism, striking and building the revolutionary labour movement – such are our weapons against the war imposed upon us. We can count only on ourselves and the international solidarity from other left-radical organizations. If we don’t start to rise now we will face the most difficult times.
No gods, no masters, no nations, no borders!
Workers of the world, unite!
From http://avtonomia.net/2014/05/14/regime-kyiv-junta-east-awu-kyiv-statement-conflict-eastern-regions/
Comments
Many thanks to comrades from
Many thanks to comrades from AWU for bringing us these reports which calrify the situation. We are blessed with your courage,carry on the fight for workers unity.
This broadly internationalist
This broadly internationalist text is better than some others the AWU have produced but doesn't in itself negate some of the other criticisms made of them and already aired on the 'Protests in the Ukraine' thread where there has been a useful ongoing discussion, if sometimes understandably marred by hints and more of either pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian sentiments.