International Luxemburgist Network Statement on the Russian Attack on Ukraine

International Luxemburgist Network Statement on the Russian Attack on Ukraine
We unequivocally condemn Putin’s attack on Ukraine. Such warfare is without any justification. Ukrainian workers have every right to defend themselves against such an attack. We demand immediate withdrawal of Russian armed forces from Ukraine.
Putin’s justification for this attack –that he is undoing the misguided nationalism of Lenin and the criminals who dissolved the Soviet Union-- shows that he has been taking lessons in hypocrisy from the US leadership, whom Putin portrays as the real enemy. Putin owes his present position entirely to Boris Yeltsin, the chief engineer of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Putin has become the loudest advocate of the worst forms of Great Russian nationalism and the ally of nationalists everywhere in the world outside the former Soviet Union. His description of the crimes of the Ukrainian oligarchy could be applied word for word to his own regime.
His hypocrisy as a virulent nationalist expressing horror at Ukraine’s nationalism is matched by the hypocrisy of the United States leadership in expressing horror at the invasion of another nation—a horror that did not stop the United States from invading Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic and countless other nations. The US-led expansions of NATO in 1999 and 2004, clearly aimed without a shred of justification against Russia, have provided the excuse for Putin’s attack.
As Luxemburg emphasized a century ago, nations do not have interests—classes have interests. This war serves the interest of the US-led global capitalist class by distracting workers everywhere from the crucial task of building a movement to take back the trillions stolen during and before the current world crisis. It will drive up oil prices, increasing the capitalists’ tax imposed on workers everywhere. For Putin, it is an attempt to divert attention from his catastrophic response to the pandemic, in which more than a million Russian have died and, probably, a crazed effort to expand Russia’s population at a time when it is cratering.
The response of the working class must be to turn Putin’s war into a class war, following the example of the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 and the ensuing mass strikes and Revolution. The protests already breaking out all over Russia show the possibility for a coordinated response among the workers of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the rest of the world.
The key to the success of such a movement, as Luxemburg showed in her Mass Strike pamphlet that was based on the experience of 1905, is the linking of political demands, including the immediate end to this war, with economic demands around a common program. The essence of that program is the massive rebuilding of the health, education, and housing infrastructure, paid for by seizing the stolen billions of the oligarchs, and by everywhere dismantling the war machine and converting it to civilian needs.
In the course of building such a mass movement, the creation of political organizations of the working class, entirely independent of capitalist parties and governments, is essential. Cooperation with all for common goals in actions, strikes, demonstrations and all forms of resistance, is necessary. But such cooperation can only be effective if workers are simultaneously organizing rigorously democratic and completely independent organizations.
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