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The following greetings from the German and French sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International were read to the Third National Congress of the SEP in Sri Lanka held from May 14 to May 16. Salutations from the SEP in Australia, Canada and the UK will be published on June 21. Greetings from David North on behalf of the ICFI and the US SEP are available here.

Dear comrades,

I am very pleased to send the revolutionary greetings of the Socialist Equality Party in Germany to this important congress. A development in the working class is concentrated in Sri Lanka right now, which is actually taking place all over the world. This congress gives leadership and perspective to the working class.

When the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie faced mass working class struggles 58 years ago, it brought the LSSP into government to suppress the workers and secure bourgeois rule.

Because of the intervention of the British SLL [Socialist Labour League], it was possible to build the RCL [Revolutionary Communist League] as a section of the ICFI in Sri Lanka on the basis of these political lessons. Relentlessly you have fought ever since against the pseudo-left defenders of bourgeois rule, against communalism and chauvinism, and for the international unity of the working class, based on an independent, socialist program.

These historic principles are now intersecting with the struggles of the working class, as David North explained three years ago about the fifth phase of the development of the Trotskyist movement. Nowhere is this more visible today than in Sri Lanka.

But the mass struggles in Sri Lanka can only be understood as part of the international development of the working class. NATOs proxy war against Russia and the sanctions regime are causing rapidly rising food and energy prices around the world and driving workers into poverty. The coronavirus pandemic is claiming more and more lives as the ruling class prioritizes its profits over human lives.

In Germany, the bourgeoisie is pushing militarism at breathtaking speed. Seventy-seven years after the unconditional surrender, German tanks are rolling again against Russia. The German government is sending more and more heavy weapons to Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia on the backs of the Ukrainian population.

The return of German militarism is accompanied by a revival of the vilest anti-Russian chauvinism and racism and the trivialization of Nazi crimes.

For example, Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the Russian invasion of Ukraine a war of extermination and a breach of civilization, terms previously used only for the Nazis meticulously planned war of extermination in the Soviet Union and the Holocaust.

This unspeakable trivialization of Nazi crimes is taken even further in German newspapers. For example, the newspaper taz, which is close to the Green Party, published a long article by Julia Latynina in which she claims that Stalin planned World War II when Hitler was not even in power. The invasion of the Soviet Union would thus have been the pre-emptive war that Hitler always claimed.

With the proxy war against Russia and the justification and trivialization of Nazi crimes, everything we have shown in recent years is confirmed. German militarism continues its worst traditions and wants once again to become the biggest military power on the continent.

The burden of war and rearmament is to be borne by the working class. Food inflation of 20 to 50 percent lowers the wages of the entire working class and drives masses into poverty. While not a penny was left for pandemic control, education and health, over 100 billion euros are now being poured into rearmament.

As in Sri Lanka, the trade unions play a key role in pushing through these social attacks and militarism. The German Federation of Trade Unions has just concluded its national congress, which saw itself as part of the war machine.

But resistance is growing in the working class. After the horrors of two World Wars and the Holocaust, opposition to militarism and war is deeply rooted in the working class. Strikes and protests against wage theft and inflation are developing everywhere. Many workers are following events in Sri Lanka on the WSWS, while the bourgeois media are reporting next to nothing, knowing that here, too, only a spark is enough to provoke mass struggles.

The central task is to unite the workers struggles internationally and arm them with revolutionary leadership and a socialist perspective, and that means building the SEP in Sri Lanka and in every country in the world.

Your congress has an important role to play in this tense situation and will be closely followed by workers in Sri Lanka and around the world.

Yours fraternally,Christoph Vandreier, Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei chairman

***

Dear comrades,

We bring the warmest fraternal greetings of the Parti de lgalit socialiste (PES) of France to this very important congress of our Sri Lankan comrades.

The mass protests and strikes in Sri Lanka demanding the overthrow of the Rajapakse cliques executive presidency are events of the greatest historical and international importance. The unbearable problems of rising prices, food shortages, and pandemic deaths that are driving this struggle afflict workers in every country. And so the struggles in Sri Lanka are followed with interest and growing hope by workers and youth in France and beyond.

These struggles directly pose on the order of the day the role of your party and of our international tendency in providing revolutionary leadership to the working class. The vast political heritage of the ICFIs struggle against Stalinism and Pabloism allows us to fight for a decisive settlement of Trotskyisms political struggle against the petty-bourgeois anti-Marxist tendencies. Ever broader layers of workers and youth sense that this is the issue that is posed.

A French youth recently wrote to the WSWS, saying that he had found our site by reading about the Sri Lankan protests. He was moved by the courage and determination of the protesters and struck by the compelling coverage and perspectives advanced by the SEP in Sri Lanka. To this young man being radicalized by the unbearable social crisis and the political rot of the Macron presidency, it is clear that yours is the revolutionary party in Sri Lanka.

He immediately asked, based on this coverage, what we think of the NPA [New Anti-capitalist Party], the French Pabloite affiliate of the Sri Lankan NSSP, and other similar pseudo-left groups, like Jean-Luc Mlenchons Unsubmissive France (LFI) party.

Indeed, the struggle of the SEP in Sri Lanka against the pseudo-left is exposing the pseudo-left around the world.

The SEP in Sri Lanka has advanced the demand to bring down the executive presidency and mobilize the working class independently in action committees. You are firstly illuminating the revolutionary path that broad masses of workers and youth in Sri Lanka are seeking out, in deeds, by taking up the struggle against Rajapakse. You are, moreover, tracing out a path that workers around the world will seek in the coming months and years, as the international working class takes the path of a struggle for state power and for socialism.

France has just had its presidential election, which ended in a two-way contest between the banker Emmanuel Macron and the neo-fascist Marine Le Pen. The PES fought in the working class for voters to reject both candidates, boycott the vote, and prepare for the struggles of the working class that are to come in the next presidency. This placed us in irreconcilable opposition to Mlenchon, the NPA and the entire pseudo-left.

Mlenchon was shocked by the 22 percent vote that he received on the first round, as millions of French voters tried to impose a left-wing alternative on Macron and Le Pen. He did not welcome the evidence of a powerful movement to the left in the workers and youth of Frances largest cities. Instead, he panicked and even initially vowed to retire.

When he regained his wits, he proposed to serve as prime minister to carry out a peoples revolution, either under Macron or under a neo-fascist presidency of Marine Le Pen, if she won. He stressed that he aimed to lead not a socialist revolution by the working class, but a peoples revolution. This is a very particular type of revolution! It is a revolution led by an official of the capitalist state serving under a president pursuing extreme-right policies of imperialist war, mass COVID-19 infection, and police-state repression. It is, to speak plainly, a counter-revolution.

On this basis, Mlenchon has formed an alliance with the Socialist Party, a discredited, big-business party founded in 1971 that has for decades imposed austerity and war on the workers.

The PES rejects with contempt the political line of Mlenchon, who is now in discussions with a broad range of pseudo-left parties in France including the NPA. We brand the claim that a revolution can be carried out by the capitalist state as a political lie. The PES proudly defends the revolutionary heritage of the Trotskyist movement and the struggles of the international working class for socialism.

In that heritage, an important part is played by your party. The predecessor of the SEP (Sri Lanka), the Revolutionary Communist League, was formed in irreconcilable struggle against the Pabloite Great Betrayal of the LSSP [Lanka Sama Samaja Party] in 1964. Capitulating to the pressure of the Stalinist and bourgeois nationalist movements, it entered into bourgeois government, paving the way for the division of the working class along ethnic lines and, ultimately, a 26-year communal war in Sri Lanka.

This searing experience in the treachery of Pabloism underlies the irreconcilable opposition of the PES to all those petty-bourgeois figures, like Mlenchon and the NPA, who turn their backs on the international working class and socialism to orient to nationalism and the capitalist state.

The RCL rejected the United Left Front formed between the LSSP and the Sinhalese chauvinists during the Great Betrayal. In France, Mlenchon and the NPA are trying to rebuild the Union of the Left formed a few years later between the Stalinist French Communist Party and the Socialist Party. As the RCL/SEP fights all the reactionary descendants of the United Left Front, so the PES today fights all those like Mlenchon who try to breathe new life into the political corpses of the Union of the Left, so as to drive the workers into a blind alley.

Our collaboration with our Sri Lankan comrades is of enormous significance to the PES. Many PES comrades were won to Trotskyism and the Permanent Revolution in exile in Europe, after having fled Sri Lanka during the communal war. As we formed our section, we consciously sought to base ourselves on your partys long and proud history. Your assistant national secretary, comrade Jayasekera, traveled to Paris to give us lectures on the founding of the RCL, in the months before the founding of the PES in 2016.

Today, we look forward to deepening our collaboration with the SEP (Sri Lanka) as you face the enormous responsibility of intervening in an emerging international revolutionary movement in the working class.

Today in Sri Lanka, as in France during the yellow vest protests, one hears often the slogan that the movement is apolitical. In France, such remarks came from workers disgusted with the political experiences they had with the old Union of the Left parties, as well as from pseudo-left operatives who wanted above all to avoid discussing critical political issues. Indeed, they wanted to protect themselves from mounting anger in the working class.

But what the great mass of working and toiling people need is the truth, not cover-ups and lies. How else are to Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim workers to be unified in Sri Lankaand unified with their class brothers and sisters in India and beyondexcept on the perspectives of our party? Avoiding or evading the critical issues we raise only means aligning oneself, consciously or not, with the ruling elites moves to divide the workers along national lines and defeat them piecemeal.

Many comrades have already doubtless made the comparison between the revolutionary events in Sri Lanka in 2022 with those in Egypt in 2011. After years of uprisings and repression, and thanks to the confusion caused by the NATO war in Syria, the Egyptian army reimposed its dictatorship on the insurgent workers. But the ICFI had no presence in Egypt. Armed with the vast lessons of our history, we can fight to ensure that the struggles of the workers in Sri Lanka and internationally do not come to such an end, but are crowned by the world socialist revolution.

Your fraternally,

Alex Lantier, Parti de lgalit socialiste national secretary V. Gnana, Parti de lgalit socialiste assistant national secretary

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Third National Congress of the SEP (Sri Lanka): Greetings from the French and German sections of the world Trotskyist movement - WSWS

Features

Martin Empsons new book argues for a revolutionary transformation away from fossil fuel capitalism. Sophie Squire reviews the strategy and tactics he says we need to avoid climate disaster

Sunday 19 June 2022

Arguments about how we tackle the climate crisis are raging at every level of society, from those at the top to activists on the ground. As war in Ukraine grinds on, states are sprinting to invest in more fossil fuels. Martin Empsons new book, Socialism or ExtinctionThe meaning of Revolution in a Time of Ecological Disaster, takes on what sort of revolution we need to stop climate destruction.

It is a tool kit for activists, and argues a profit-led system is leading to climate collapse. But the book also says there is a way out. To understand how to fight the climate crisis that faces us, it is essential to know where it came from.

The starting chapters explore how capitalism, a system which began in Britain and parts of Low Land Europe in the 17th century, has created a climate crisis. Drawing on the writings of the revolutionary Karl Marx, Martin makes the case that capitalist accumulation and competition smashed humanitys relationship with nature apart.

Because competitive accumulation is central to capitalist production, there is no limit on the systems degradation of nature writes Martin. It is the uncontrolled accumulation of wealth, for the sake of further accumulation, that drives capitalisms destruction of nature. Just as capitalism cannot function without exploitation of human labour, it cannot avoid destroying nature in an uncontrolled, irrational, unplanned way.

And the irrational nature of the system we live in is plain to see. While billions go hungry, Martin cites that in 2018 the British food industry threw away 9.5 million tonnes of waste food.

But how did this irrational system become so deadly to the planet? Scientists and environmental campaigners argue that fossil fuel production must stop. Yet those in power refuse to be parted with them. The book also answers why the system is unable to break from fossil fuels, and how they got locked into the system in the first place. Martin argues that while early capitalist production did not necessarily require the use of fossil fuels, it spurred it on.

Competitive accumulation is what defines capitalism, not the use of fossil fuels, he writes. Early capitalist production did not require fossil fuels, and their adoption was the result of class strugglethe interests of the capitalist class conflicting with the interests of the workers.

It was because factory and mill owners wanted to improve their exploitation of the workers that they began the transition to fossil fuels.

The Industrial Revolution saw the creation and development of new technology that transformed production. Quickly the system became hooked on steam power, which was generated by burning coal.

As individual capitalists turned to steam power, others quickly followed or risked going bankrupt. This race to compete to make more profit is the same process that keeps the fossil fuel industry running today.

As Marx noted, previous forms of generating power such as wind and water were considered inconsistent when compared to steam. And steam power had another advantage over water or wind for the capitalistsit didnt chain production to the countryside and proximity to rivers.

Martin writes, Because coal could be transported to anywhere it was needed, steam power allowed the capitalist to build factories and mills where the workers were located. He adds, The ability to better exploit labour is a key reason why the switch to fossil fuel production took place so quicklyin a matter of a couple of decades.

Access to the human labour needed to keep profits flowing was always a necessity for the capitalists. They required workers to run their new colossal factories. And as Martin says, this led to the ruling class mounting a brutal process of enclosure and the destruction of traditional rural social organisation.

But as the book points out, this wholesale move to fossil fuel use was met with resistance from ordinary people. From the struggle against the enclosure of common land to the Luddite movement of the early 1800s, which opposed machinery to maximise profit, workers have always fought back.

And it is this kind of resistance, not just to the fossil fuel industry but to the whole capitalist system, that we need today. It is resistance that the final chapters of the book focuses on. Arguments rage within the environmental movement about what must be done to make change. In the later parts of the book, Martin takes on several of these arguments.

One argument about protests is made by some in the climate movement, such as Roger Hallam, a co-founder and ex-member of Extinction Rebellion (XR). He says that so-called A to B marches are ineffective.

Instead Hallam advocates for non-violent disruptive action, which he believes those in power are likely to notice. But as Martin rightly points out, A to B marches have some real benefits.

Using the example of the mobilisation of millions of people against the Iraq war, he points out that although the demos didnt stop the war on Iraq, they did make it difficult for the government to attack Iran and Syria.

Even more importantly, big mobilisations, as Martin says, can boost the confidence of working class people and lead to a broader fight against the system. And this broad fight must combine all forms of action, from A to B marches, to strikes and to direct action.

Martin writes, The most radical action possible is workers going on strike precisely because it hits profits and is a direct challenge to the system. In doing this, workers are raising the potential for alternative forms of power. And importantly, he is keen to stress the centrality of workers in the climate struggle. He writes, Workers are not separate to the environmental movement.

Most people on XR protests, climate strikes or the Cop26 demonstrations will work for a living. However, the working class is much larger than the environmental movement. The movement must reach out to the wider working class and maximise the involvement of workers in our protests and demonstrations.

While small groups of committed activists might have the power to shut down some fossil fuel infrastructure, workers withdrawing their labour can shut it down for good. The books early chapters clearly explain that capitalism leads us to destruction, and the later parts set out a clear plan of how we can upend the system itself. And as Martin says, only overturning the capitalist state and revolutioncan do this.

The book draws on several examples of revolutionary uprisings, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Egyptian revolution of 2011, highlighting the successes and failures of these revolutions.

Martin says that a revolutionary party was needed in many cases to intervene in the struggles with arguments to guide the working class. But these accounts also show that ordinary people will rise against oppression, tyranny and poverty. As the warnings about the climate crisis become starker, and with the climate movement remaining relatively small, some activists may fall into despair.

Socialism or Extinction provides an antidote to this pessimism and is an assurance that hope can be found in ordinary people. Fixing around 200 years of unabated fossil fuel use will be a momentous task.

So in the last chapters of the book, Martin argues for a solutiona democratically planned society that puts ordinary people in charge. He explains, Unlike under capitalism where governments hope that industries, organisations or workplaces will reduce their emissions in line with their targets, as an add-on to their normal activities, a socialist planned economy would see tackling climate changeand other ecological issuesas intrinsic to their day-to-day behaviour.

Indeed a socialist world would prioritise action on the climate crisis, in contrast to capitalism, which fails to deploy resources and wealth to tackle the issue. Under socialism, addressing the ecological crisis would require immediate and priority use of resources and labour.

Drawing on a history of resistance, this book shows that renewed struggle is more than possible today. Socialism or Extinction is essential reading for all of those in the climate movement.

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Why it's socialism or extinction - Socialist Worker

On September 26, 2021, voters in the German capital Berlin not only cast their votes in federal, state, and municipal elections, they also cast their verdict on a referendum proposition, named Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen and Co., to expropriate housing companies. Once all of the votes had been counted, it was clear that a majority of Berliners had registered their support for the initiatives demands: 56.4percent backed the socialization of all large real estate corporations, such as Deutsche Wohnen, that own more than 3,000 rental apartments in the city.

Right now, a commission in Berlin is discussing the political consequences of the referendum vote. The mayor of Berlin, Franziska Giffey, proposed a law a few weeks ago that would allow tenants to reduce their rent if it amounts to more than 30percent of their income. Giffey is a member of the SPD, the same party that appointed Olaf Scholz as chancellor of Germany.

But the demands are becoming increasingly radical, even from within the ranks of the SPD. If everything were tutti here, then from my point of view everyone would only have the apartment they actually live in, declared the SPDs Secretary-General Kevin Khnert a few days ago on a popular TV program. I first had to look up what tutti is supposed to mean. In Italian, tutti means all or all together, so everything ... tutti is a tautology and otherwise meaningless. But Khnert uses it to express his vision of an ideal economic system, namely without private landlords.

In 2019, during an appearance on the popular political talk show Maischberger, Khnert, then still chairman of the SPD youth organization Jusos, posed the following question: By what right does someone own more than 20 apartments? And in the same year, he declared in a newspaper interview: I dont think its a legitimate business model to make a living off other peoples living space ... Taken to its logical conclusion, everyone should own at most the living space in which they themselves actually live.

More Socialist than the GDR

Thus, the SPDs secretary-general wants even more socialism in the German housing sector than existed in the socialist GDR (Eastern Germany). After all, in the GDR, not only were 84.4percent of one- and two-family houses privately owned, but so were 20.6percent of apartment buildings. Democratic socialists always vehemently defend themselves against the accusation that they want to create conditions similar to those in the GDR. But Khnerts proposal shows that their economic policies are very similar: The basic conviction that, with the exception of owner-occupied housing, the only good housing is state housing is identical to the philosophy prevalent in the GDR. The only difference is that Khnert wants to implement socialism in housing even more consistently than in the GDR, where private renting was regarded as undesirable and made more difficult, but every fifth apartment in a multi-family house still remained in private hands.

The rent freeze, another of the SPDs pet policies, also prevailed in the GDR, whose leaders had adopted an analogous law from the Adolf Hitler era almost word for word. As a consequence of this policy, the last of the GDRs problems was that living space per person was 22percent lower than in the West (twenty-seven square meters versus thirty-five square meters). In 1989, when the GDR finally collapsed, 65percent of all apartmentsincluding 3.2 million postwar buildingswere still being heated with coal stoves,24percent did not have their own toilets,and 18percent did not have a bathroom. Elevators, balconies, and modern kitchens were even less common, and 40percent of apartment buildings were classified as severely damaged, while 11percent were deemed to be completely uninhabitable.

At present, the SPD is unable to implement its plans because it is in government together with the Greens (who are quite sympathetic to such ideas) and the pro-market FDP, who are resisting them.

Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and the author of The Power of Capitalism and Hitlers National Socialism.

Image: Reuters.

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In Germany, Calls for a Socialist Housing Policy Are Growing Ever Louder - The National Interest Online

On June 3, Tempest published an article entitled Solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance! by Ashley Smith, a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and former leader of the now-defunct International Socialist Organization (ISO).

The article calls for arming Ukraine with heavy NATO weapons and is a tirade against all who question the propaganda of US imperialism. It justifies US escalation by claiming the Ukrainian people are engaged in a democratic struggle for self-determination against Russian imperialism.

Smiths article is an attempt to preempt opposition within the milieu of the Democratic Socialists of America to the prolonged US/NATO-led war, which has provoked widespread shortages of basic necessities all over the world and risks plunging the globe into a nuclear nightmare. As Smith says in a brief preface, the article aims to review the ongoing Left debates about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the continuing need to defend Ukrainian resistance as the starting point for rebuilding international solidarity from below.

In his article, Smith declares that the international Left now more than ever must organize solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance and defend its right to secure arms. Smith argues that the Ukrainian military has waged a national popular struggle for self-determination, a fundamentally democratic aim and one that deserves the full support of the international left.

There can be no talk of NATO expansion, which Smith claims is merely Putins alibi, because the states of Eastern Europe only joined NATO out of longtime fear of their imperial overlord, Russia. The crux of Smiths argument is that the war is one of popular working class resistance to Russia. In this vein, Smith attacks Faux anti-imperialists who oppose arming the so-called Ukrainian resistance and thereby betray Ukraine.

These are not serious theoretical arguments, they are absurdities. Smith makes no attempt to explain how Ukraines attempt to join NATO, a military network run by the worlds largest imperialist powers, constitutes a step toward self-determination, nor can he explain why pro-Russian separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk cannot assert the same right to leave Ukraine. He praises the Ukrainian left for fighting the governments oligarchic capitalism, but he cannot explain how it is that this same government is leading a struggle against imperialism. The subject of the Ukrainian regimes glorification of Stepan Banderathe leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which participated in the mass extermination of Jews during World War IIis all but ignored.

Smiths targets are not those who openly defend Russia, but rather parties and individuals that might criticize Russia but blame the US and NATO for the conflict and thereby justify Russias war. Even worse, Smith writes, they back actions like strikes by workers to block arms shipments to Ukraine. He attacks those who condemn Russias invasion but also oppose Ukraines military resistance as well as US and NATO arms shipments in support of it.

Smith often uses this type of provocative language to justify US intervention. In 2016, for example, he advocated US imperialist support for the so-called democratic opposition in Syria by writing: The Syrian Revolution has tested the left internationally by posing a blunt question: Which side are you on? Do you support the popular struggle against dictatorship and for democracy? Or are you with Bashar al-Assads brutal regime, his imperial backer Russia, his regional ally Iran and Irans proxies like Hezbollah from Lebanon?

In his article on the Ukrainian resistance, Smith denounces pacifists who oppose Ukraines right to secure arms and the arms shipments themselves, instead calling for the US to broker a ceasefire, engage in diplomacy, and secure a negotiated settlement. This, Smith says, is an attack on Ukraines right to self-determination. Since Ukraines government and its people have made clear that they remain committed to resisting Russian occupation, the left must demand the bloody war be dragged out until all Ukrainian territory is taken from Russian control.

To the extent that Smith criticizes American and European imperialism at all, it is to claim they are insufficiently bellicose against Russia. Smith worries that a growing chorus in the elite, most notably in western Europe, is actually calling for a ceasefire which would betray Ukraines struggle. The proponents of such pacifism include multinational capital and the corporate media and political class in the US and Europe.

Calling the Biden administration hypersensitive to such pressure from its European allies, Smith warns there is a real danger that Western imperialism could force Ukraine into a rotten deal that ratifies the Russian partition of the country. In other words, Smiths position is to the right of finance capital and the Biden administration. On this basis he proposes: Now more than ever we should build solidarity with Ukraines resistance and defend its right to secure arms including from the US and NATO to free itself from Russian occupation.

It is politically revealing that Smith writes of the need to correct the distortions made by some sections of the Left about the nature of this war: it is one of imperialist aggression by Russia to re-impose its rule over its oldest former colony, Ukraine.

The claim that Ukraine is a colony of Russian imperialism is an intentional historical sleight of hand. It bypasses the Russian Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the Tsarist regime and ended the bloody struggle of German and Russian imperialism for control over Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe in the First World War. The Bolsheviks overturned the imperial-colonial relationship and, in the pre-Stalin period, sought to counteract the influence of Great Russian chauvinism and to facilitate the political unification of the workers of Ukraine and Russia.

But Smith has no concern for making an appraisal of the actual social forces involved in this conflict. His reference to Ukraine as Russias oldest former colony is an attempt to equate the brutal tsarist colonial subjugation of Ukraine with the Soviet Unions policy toward the country, and to thereby present the Soviet Union as an imperialist power which did not represent a progressive development from the tsarist regime that preceded it.

In a separate article, Smith attacked critics of US imperialisms war aims against Russia for practicing what he called abstract morality. To those who believe that the historic record of American imperialisms wars give reason to doubt its humanitarian pretenses, Smith wrote: In place of abstract morality, which can lead to a frankly immoral position of neutrality in the struggle between oppressors and oppressed, we should approach the question of violence and war politically and as a tactical question. We should oppose wars that enforce domination, oppression, and exploitation, and support wars that free people from those structures.

To Marxists, the struggle against imperialism and imperialist violence and oppression is not a tactical question, it is a principled strategic question upon which the fate of the revolution depends. Whether a state is imperialist or oppressed is not an abstract moral label, it is a historical-sociological determination with concrete political consequences. Here, Smith references abstract morality only as a means to justify the death and destruction wrought by US imperialism and to hide behind the fig leaf of the so-called Ukrainian resistance to the Russian empire, and he cannot claim the moral high ground when his own position corresponds with that of a government dripping with blood from 30 years of permanent war in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Smiths presentation of Ukraine as a victim of longstanding Russian imperialism echoes the argument of 20th century anti-communists who argued that the Soviet Union was an imperialist state and that non-Russian republics of the USSR were captive states in the imperial Soviet empire. The term captive states was promoted by the National Captive Nations Committee, a far-right group whose chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, was a Nazi collaborator who led the OUN after Banderas death. The group changed its name to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in 1993.

This is not an accidental correspondence of views. Smith belongs to the tradition of Shachtmanism, which is rooted in pro-imperialist anti-communism.

The DSA and its predecessor organization (the Democratic Socialist Organizing CommitteeDSOC) emerged out of a political tendency led by Max Shachtman, who had joined the communist movement in 1923 and co-founded the American section of the Trotskyist Left Opposition with James P. Cannon when Trotskyists were expelled by the Stalinists in 1928.

Shachtman split from the Trotskyist movement in the United States at the onset of the Second World War in 1939-40 and moved far from the socialist traditions he had once defended. He argued that the Stalinist bureaucracy was a new ruling class and put forward the position that socialists must support democratic American imperialism in the Cold War against authoritarian Russia.

On this basis, Shachtman supported the Korean War, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the Vietnam War, and became an adviser to the AFL-CIO. His political progeny, including figures like Tom Kahn, became deeply embedded in the AFL-CIOs activity on behalf of American imperialism through the American Institute for Free Labor Development. This organization, which was the predecessor to todays Solidarity Center, was a critical mechanism through which US imperialism has manipulated elections, organized coups and suppressed the class struggle on a world scale for decades.

Another of Shachtmans apprentices, DSOC founder Michael Harrington, brought the anti-communist essence of Shachtmans politics into the movement against the war in Vietnam and then into the foundation of DSOC and the DSA. Historian Todd Gitlin said, Anti-Communism was Harringtons emotional touchstone, which he had acquired with the brilliant and bitter Max Shachtman. Harringtons principle was that the left must, as he put it, play a pro-American, Cold War, State Department kind of role.

For decades, the DSA has functioned as a faction within the Democratic Party. After years of isolation, the DSA benefited from its identification with Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign to acquire tens of thousands of paper members in a relatively short period of time. Sanders, with the support of the DSA, almost won the Democratic Partys nomination against Hillary Clinton that year, to the shock of the entire political establishment, including Sanders himself.

In 2018, DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a primary election against top House Democrat Joe Crowley, and the DSA witnessed another influx of new members, largely young people who supported the organization because they believed it to be anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.

But the DSA is not a vehicle for opposing capitalism and war, it is a catchment area for the political establishment, where social opposition is to be trapped and neutralized within the Democratic Party. That is the role it has played for decades, in which it has functioned as a loyal faction of the Democratic Party.

In particular, the historical role of the DSA has been to disorient anti-war sentiment, color American imperialisms foreign policy objectives as left-wing or democratic, and facilitate the global machinations of the US war machine.

But the fight for socialism is incompatible with support for US imperialism, and the DSA is not a socialist organization. Like the viciously pro-war Green parties in Europe, its social base is a section of the affluent upper-middle class which forms a key social constituency for imperialist war against Russia. The political actions of the DSAs elected officials reflect its class character. In mid-May the DSAs entire congressional slate (including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders) voted for the Biden administrations $40 billion Ukraine military aid bill.

In the spring of 2019, the International Socialist Organization (which also belongs to the Shachtmanite tradition but remained separate from the DSA for decades) dissolved itself almost overnight. The pretense for the dissolution was an allegation of sexual assault by one member against another from six years earlier, but the real reason was the leaderships recognition that they could best fulfill their political aims within the broader radicalized milieu of the DSA, with whom they shared common roots. After the organizations leaders successfully disentangled the highly profitable book publishing company Haymarket Books from the organization, the ISO voted to dissolve itself and the bulk of its members promptly joined the DSA.

While in the ISO, Smith had been one of the organizations chief writers on foreign policy, consistently promoting various US-backed color movements, including in Syria, where Smith repeatedly presented the CIA-funded democratic forces as a popular resistance and denounced opponents of US intervention.

When Smith and other ISO leaders joined the DSA, their primary responsibility was to ensure that the anti-imperialist aspirations of the newly radicalized membership did not develop as a challenge to the pro-imperialist political essence of the DSA, which over its entire existence has functioned as a faction within the imperialist Democratic Party.

To this end, the ex-ISO members founded the Tempest Collective in 2020. Tempest Collective publishes Tempest magazine, the DSA-affiliated publication in which Smiths June 3 article on Ukraine appeared. Over 35 contributors to Tempest (the overwhelming majority of its total writers) are former members of the ISO and/or former contributors to its publications, Socialist Worker and the International Socialist Review.

Smith is also the publication manager for Spectre, a journal focusing on foreign policy and identity politics, whose editorial board includes a number of former ISO leaders, including Charles Post, David McNally, Tithi Bhattacharya and Shireen Akram-Boshar.

The title of Smiths articleSolidarity with the Ukrainian resistance!announces a new stage in the pro-war propaganda campaign. It is the hallmark of Shachtmanism to present a left face on American imperialisms wars. In this tradition, Smith and other proponents of war are inventing a Ukrainian resistance to present the war as an anti-colonial struggle by the Ukrainian people.

The model of the so-called resistance is an organization that was totally unknown before the outbreak of the war: Sotsialnyi Rukh.

Sotsialnyi Rukh has played a key role in creating an international network for war against Russia. It has hosted international gatherings advocating war, including one in Lvov on May 5-6 that was attended by representatives of the Polish party Razem, the French New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) and the Argentinian Morenoite Left Front-Workers Unity, as well as delegations from British trade unions. According to a statement posted by Sotsialnyi Rukh after the May gathering, all delegates called for armed support of Ukraine and strict sanctions. Some of them directly influence the making of these decisions by their own governments.

Since Russias invasion of Ukraine, Sotsialnyi Rukhs leaders have given a flood of interviews to international left publications to promote war and advocate the delivery of NATO weapons to Ukraine. During media appearances, Sotsialnyi Rukh leaders stick to the same script, consistently parroting US imperialisms claim that the war is a national liberation struggle and that the left must support weapons shipments. A common feature of these interviews is vicious denunciations of Western leftists who oppose US/NATO escalation and who claim the war is anything but a war for national liberation.

Some examples include the following:

On February 25, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, Sotsialnyi Rukh leader Taras Bilous, who is also editor of a Sotsialnyi Rukh-aligned journal, Commons, published a widely-circulated document on OpenDemocracy.net titled A letter to the Western Left from Kiev. The article denounces those opposing US military aid as imagining NATO aggression in Ukraine and practicing the anti-imperialism of idiots. He states his opposition to those who exaggerated the influence of the far-right in Ukraine, adding: Part of the responsibility for what is happening rests with you.

The letter quotes Leila Al-Shami, a British intellectual and writer for the ISOs International Socialist Review who denounced the World Socialist Web Site as so-called leftists in 2018 for our opposition to US imperialisms war in Syria. Bilous praises Al-Shami for attacking socialists who argue that the main enemy is at home. He concludes: There will be no compromise. Putin can plan whatever he wants the struggle will last until Russia gets out of Ukraine and pays for all the victims and the destruction.

On April 3, ex-ISO member and current DSA member Todd Chretien moderated a DSA panel featuring Sotsialnyi Rukh leader Vladyslav Starodubstev, who declared that the war creates the possibility for a push of socialist ideas in Ukraine. Starodubstev said the Ukrainian military is comprised of socialists who need weapons to fight the Russians and thereby win others to socialism.

On April 8, International Viewpoint published an interview with Sotsialnyi Rukh Chairman Vitaly Dudin, who said that socialists are joining the Ukrainian military and need weapons: Some Social Movement activists, as well as many trade unions members, have joined the Ukrainian Territorial Defence as volunteers, and a lot of leftists are helping as volunteers to supply the army. Dudin criticized NATO: We believe NATO has played the role of a passive spectator in this war. Starting from the end of 2021, they have done nothing to support Ukraine with arms, he said.

On May 10, Haymarket Books hosted a panel with Commons co-editor Oksana Dutchak and Yuliya Yurchenko titled How Can Feminist Solidarity help Ukraine? which presented war and weapons shipments as necessary to protect Ukrainian women.

On May 30, Spectre hosted a Facebook event titled Spectre presents: Ukraine, imperialism and the world economy, in which all the panelists attacked opponents of the US imperialist war in Ukraine. The event featured Zakhar Popovych, a member of Sotsialnyi Rukh, who declared that he was very disappointed by those on the left who criticize Russia but who also insist that US government is escalating the war for its own imperialist aims.

Popovych said, For me, if we are opposing this global system of imperialism, of big powers suppressing other peoples of the world, we should support the national liberation of Ukraine, which he called an anti-imperialist fight. For me this is the first step to challenge the system of imperialism.

On April 13, Ashley Smith published an interview in Spectre with Ukrainian political figure Yuliya Yurchenko, who is also associated with Sotsialnyi Rukh, asking her the loaded question, Why is it inaccurate to reduce the war to a conflict between the US/NATO and Russia? How does this ignore the struggle for national liberation?

Yurchenko replied, Reducing this war to conflict between the West and Russia overlooks Ukraine and treats it as a mere pawn between powers. She compared the struggle of the Ukrainian military to the national liberation struggles in Africa and elsewhere, adding, Anti-colonial thinkers and leaders taught us to give voice to them and their struggle. Ukraine is in a similar struggle.

Smith asked Yurchenko, There is a significant debate in the international left about what position to take on the war and what demands to raise. What do you argue we should do? She replied, Again, the international left must put its decolonial hat on in thinking about Ukraine. We are fighting Russia, our historic imperial oppressor. I think some people still get their vision clouded by a one-dimensional opposition to US imperialism alone. But the US is not the aggressor in this situation, Russia is.

She concluded, The international left must be in solidarity with Ukraine as an oppressed nation and our fight for self-determination. That includes our right to secure arms for our fighters and volunteers to win our freedom.

Smith introduced Yurchenko as an author and left-wing academic. But he did not mention that this representative of Ukraines fight for self-determination is also a fellow at the pro-imperialist George Kennan Institute at Princetons Wilson Center, which is funded by the US Congress. The Wilson Centers advisory council includes General David Petraeus, the Embassy of Qatar, and representatives of BP, Citi Bank, Goldman Sachs and other major corporations. Yurchenkos byline also appears in Jacobin magazine.

At the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the globalized character of world production exposed the bankruptcy of the Stalinist program of socialism in one country, the International Committee of the Fourth International addressed the imperialist powers appropriation of the slogan of national self-determination as a method for justifying imperialist carve-ups like that currently undertaken by the US and its European allies in Eastern Europe.

In a 1993 statement Perspectives and Tasks of the ICFI: The Permanent Revolution Today, David North wrote:

Communal, ethnic and chauvinist movements hide behind democratic phraseologythe slogan of self-determination, national liberationwhile they pursue a policy whose economic content is the renewed enslavement of the broad masses by imperialism. They are directed not toward national liberation, in the sense that this term was understood in an earlier historical period, but to wipe out even the limited gains that were previously made by the masses.

Subsequent experiences have proven the correctness of this perspective. In 1990, the Bush administration used the Kuwaiti sheikdoms right to self-determination as an excuse to invade Iraq in the Persian Gulf War. The Clinton administration cited the same right to justify the carve-up of Yugoslavia by referencing first Bosnia and then Kosovo as the basis for bloody wars that pacified the region on behalf of American and European capital at the cost of tens of thousands of lives.

A review of the political background of todays fighters for self-determination reveals that the Ukrainian resistance is in reality an operation set up by US imperialism and its agents.

Most of Sotsialnyi Rukhs political leadership is or was employed by the Ukrainian Center for Social and Labor Research (CSLR), which is publicly documented to have been funded over many years by the CIAs National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED is so openly connected to the US intelligence agencies that it is often called the second CIA.

After Russias invasion of Ukraine, the NED deleted records of its past grants to Ukraine, but some documents are accessible using the Wayback Machine. The documents confirm that the Center for Social and Labor Research received a grant for $22,980 in 2014 in order to promote an awareness of fundamental rights and freedoms.

The grant notes that the Center will continue fostering a greater awareness of the freedom of assembly in Ukraine and that as part of a larger national advocacy campaign, the Center will monitor protest activity throughout the country, share the data with campaign activists [and the US intelligence agencies], distribute them through social media, and produce 12 reports.

Information on workers strikes and protests throughout the country were doubtless of high value to the NED (and the CIA), as US government funding for the project continued for several years.

According to the CV of longtime CSLR director Volodymyr Ishchenko, the CSLR was supported by National Endowment for Democracy (in 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2015) and by International Renaissance Foundation (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013) as well as by the Volkswagen Foundation. Ishchenko is the founder of the Center for Society Research, which is also funded by the NED. The International Renaissance Foundation is George Soros main Non-Governmental Organization in Ukraine. Soros has recently called for all-out war against Russia. Ishchenko has written numerous articles for Jacobin magazine.

Sotsialnyi Rukh leaders who are or were employed by CSLR at the time it received NED grants include:

Sotsialnyi Rukh is also connected to the AFL-CIOs Solidarity Center, an institution so closely linked to the intelligence agencies that it is referred to in popular parlance as the AFL-CIA. The Solidarity Center forms part of the NED.

In 2015, Dudin and Pilash co-authored a CSLR report detailing a conference during which Pilash shared the stage with Tristan Masat, the coordinator of Solidarity Centers programs in Ukraine.

Dudin and Pilash write that Masat (whom they acknowledge as a representative of Solidarity Center) advised the representatives of unions and NGOs present at the conference to develop membership-based organizations for mass mobilization (particularly the campaign against the new labor law).

This article was also posted on Commons. Contemporaneous social media posts show Sotsialnyi Rukh took Masats advice seriously and made the campaign against the proposed labor law a central political focus.

By Sotsialnyi Rukhs own admission, its membership consists mostly of individuals recruited out of the Ukrainian trade unions that are dominated by Solidarity Center.

A 2021 report published by the CIA-linked USAID, titled External Evaluation of the Global Labor Program, gushes over the role of the Solidarity Center in Ukraine. The US government has developed very close ties with the Ukrainian Confederation of Free Trade Unions (KVPU) and the Independent Union of Miners of Ukraine (NPGU), organizations founded as a protest against the existing old post-USSR union, the report explains.

A 2019 statement Sotsialnyi Rukh: Who we are states: Most of us are involved in independent trade union movement, including the Independent Trade Union of Miners (NPGU), the Free Trade Union of Railway Workers (parts of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of UkraineKVPU), and some militant factions of Federation of Trade Unions (FPU). In a November 2018 Facebook post by Sotsialnyi Rukh that was shared by current Sotsialnyi Rukh Chairman Vitaly Dudin, Dudin is referred to as the NPGU headquarters representative.

In 2014, Solidarity Center established Labor Initiatives, a national program in Ukraine aimed at training and recruiting Ukrainian activists. According to the 2021 USAID report, a significant expansion of Labor Initiatives started in 2015, which also led to an increase in staff members.

This corresponds to the founding of Sotsialnyi Rukh, which, according to the partys Who are we statement, grew out of the 2013-14 Maidan protests.

According to USAID, Labor Initiatives and Solidarity Center began to hold three annual intensive youth leadership trainings, known as summer school, which include both trade unions and allied community advocates that provide extensive one-on-one and small group mentoring with young worker leaders. The report explained that the summer schools led to the successful recruitment of many pro-US activists: Many activists who attended summer schools as rank-and-file participants now have positions at different levels of both the KVPU and FPU Union structures, the organizations which Sotsialnyi Rukh says most of its membership came out of.

The connection between Solidarity Center and Sotsialnyi Rukh is not a secret. In 2021, the Sotsialnyi Rukh-aligned Ukraine Solidarity Campaign published an article by Inna Kudinska and George Sandul, who run Solidarity Centers Labor Initiatives. The article was originally published on the website of the Solidarity Centers program and was simply reposted by the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign with a link to the AFL-CIO page.

Sotsyalyni Rukh also regularly promotes NPGU miners union president Mykhailo Volynets, who is a self-acknowledged US government asset. Volynets was awarded the AFL-CIO George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award for his support in the US-backed Orange Revolution that took place in Ukraine in 2004. In one 2015 article, Sotsyalyni Rukh featured Volynets marking May Day by laying flowers at the monument to Ukraines revolutionary national poet, Taras Shevchenko.

According to a March 2022 report by Covert Action Magazine, Volynets was photographed meeting with fascist Azov Battalion leader Ihor The Suffocator Kniazhanksy and attended a meeting in 2014 with American Federation of Teachers president and National Endowment for Democracy executive board member Randi Weingarten. Volynets is quoted in a 2005 Radio Free Europe article as saying, Our protest movement grew into a workers movement. The Solidarity Center visited us, and soon the leaders of the strike committees became leaders of trade unions.

The 2021 USAID report on the activity of Solidarity Center in Ukraine also states that the US government is working with the German government to develop grassroots forces on the ground in Ukraine: The SC [Solidarity Center] program is designed to work with direct beneficiaries, who are primarily independent trade unions of Ukraine. SC also engages to varying extents with civil society organizations, the ILO Office in Kyiv, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), the Ukrainian Parliament and other foreign and local institutions present in Ukraine.

Volynets was also a special invited guest at the AFL-CIOs 2022 convention in Philadelphia.

Taras Bilous, a leader of Sotsialnyi Rukh and editor of its associated publication, Commons, has played a central role in the international campaign for war in Ukraine. Bilous deserves special attention because his February 25 article Letter to the Western Left from Kiev set the tone for the international campaign against left-wing opposition to imperialist war.He regularly comments on Ashley Smiths personal Facebook page, defending Smiths posts.

First, Bilous letter was published on OpenDemocracy.net, whose largest funders are the Soros Open Society Institute and the CIA-linked Ford Foundation. In 2021, OpenDemocracy.net received over 100,000 British pounds from both the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Institute. It is common practice for Sotsialnyi Rukh members to publish articles on OpenDemocracy.net.

In a subsequent Twitter post, Bilous explained that OpenDemocracy.net translated the document and distributed it to a number of international publications on his behalf. Those publications and organizations which re-published Bilous letter or positively referenced it include: International Viewpoint, the Washington DC Democratic Socialists of America, The Anarchist Library, New Politics, Green Left Weekly, Dissent, the International Workers League-Fourth International, The Nation, Workers Liberty, and News and Letters. Ashley Smith was among the first who shared Bilous initial tweet about the letter.

But Bilous is not an authentic representative of the left whose word should be taken seriously by left-wing people internationally. He has close ties with institutions that are funded by the American state.

In February 2016, the NGO New Donbass posted a photograph of Bilous speaking at the Ukrainian House of Free People. That year, New Donbass received several thousand euros from the government of Latvia, a NATO power.

In June 2016, Bilous is photographed attending another event at the House of Free People, and he is depicted in front of a banner that says USAID on it. A 2017 article in USAIDs magazine FrontLines acknowledges the organization was founded with help from USAID.

In November 2018, the OZON Public Monitoring Group posted a photograph of Bilous attending an event at the Center for Civil Liberties. The latter NGOs website states that The OZON Public Monitoring Group is an initiative of the Center for Civil Liberties, which exercises public control over law enforcement agencies, courts and local governments in various regions of Ukraine. In addition, the project reports on protests throughout the country (it monitors freedom of peaceful assembly).

The Center for Civil Liberties is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, the US State Department, the Open Society Institute and the European Commission.

NED documents show that it has given $139,900 worth of grants to the center in the last several years. One NED grant states that the purpose is to engage new activists and convene trainings for those activists.

In December 2018, Bilous and fellow Sotsialnyi Rukh leader Denys Pilash spoke on Hromadske Radio, which is also funded by the NED and received at least one grant (to promote access to independent information and foster democratic discourse).

An article posted on Hromadskes website notes, The guests of the studio are a journalist, a member of the public organization Social Movement Denis Pilash and a historian from the editorial board of the magazine Common Taras Bilous.

In November 2019, Bilous also appeared at a public event held by the IZOLYATSIA Platform for Cultural Initiatives, an organization that was also funded by the NED. According to its website, IZOLYATSIA carries out its work with the support from the National Endowment for Democracy.

In June, following the publication of Smiths article calling for support for the Ukrainian resistance, an unknown group published a statement With the resistance of the Ukrainian people for its victory against the aggression, which begins, As in the days of the Vietnamese peoples liberation struggle, we have always been on the side of the oppressed and aggressed peoples. The article takes up the themes in Smiths June 3 Tempest article and concludes, like Smith does, by calling for arming Ukraine.

The letter was signed by Bilous and fellow Sotsialnyi Rukh leader Vladislav Starodubstev, as well as a series of leading pro-war figures. This list includes Ashley Smith, fellow Spectre editor Charles Post, NewPol editor Dan La Botz, Susan Weissman, Wendy Thompson, Stephen R. Shalom, Simon Pirani, Eric Poulos (nephew of former Stalinist agent Sylvia Ageloff), Gilbert Achcar, Zofia Malisz, Rohini Hensman, Michael Lwy, Olivier Besancenot and many more.

The politically principled opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is rooted in a Marxist appraisal of the character of the Russian state in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was carried out with the help of the Stalinist bureaucracy and brought to power an oligarchic capitalist class that is incapable of opposing the imperialist encirclement of the Russian Federation and of the Eurasian landmass as a whole.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) opposes Putins invasion, but not by solidarizing ourselves with either the gangsters in Kiev or their puppet-masters in Washington and London. We oppose labeling Russia as imperialist. Such a label rips Russia out of any objective analysis of its position within the world economy and its historical development. It serves only to legitimize American imperialisms longstanding efforts to break up Russia and transform it into a modern colony. The same applies for claims that China is an imperialist power.

The attitude of the International Committee is the polar opposite of the pro-imperialist organizations around the Democratic Party. In a May 17, 2022 statement, we wrote:

Marxists define their attitude toward a given war by analyzing the profound historical and material forces that give rise to it, and which are manifested in the development of the conflict. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), while opposing the invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putins government, places the current war in the context of a broader Marxist analysis of the entire 20th century, in particular of the historical processes triggered by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the subsequent three decades of imperialist war waged by the US and NATO.

The Marxist position is the position of revolutionary defeatism, in Russia, Ukraine, the United States and every country involved in the war. The May 17 statement explained:

Nearly 90 years ago, Trotsky explained that A socialist who preaches national defense is a petty-bourgeois reactionary at the service of decaying capitalism. The task of Marxists in Ukraine is not to defend their own imperialist-backed national state against Russia in the war, but to advance an internationalist revolutionary perspective based on socialist defeatism to unify and mobilize the Ukrainian, Russian and international working class against the NATO powers, as well as the Kiev and Kremlin regimes.

The Russian Marxists must also base their perspective on socialist defeatism, mobilizing masses of workers and youth against the Putin regime with the demand for an immediate end of the reactionary invasion. The only allies of the Russian workers are their Ukrainian and international class sisters and brothers. This position is an integral part of a single program for the Ukrainian and international working class based on a world socialist revolutionary strategy.

This means building the ICFI in every country and mobilizing the working class for socialist revolution.

WSWS Review

What is the pseudo-left?

This review examines the response of pseudo-left political tendencies internationally to the major world political events of the past decade.

Link:
The Democratic Socialists of America and the invention of the pro-imperialist Ukrainian resistance - WSWS

A Socialist Equality Party (SEP) online public meeting last Sunday reviewed the historic collapse in support for Australias dominant parliamentary parties in the May 21 national elections and the socialist program required to combat the pro-war and social austerity policies now being implemented by the new Labor government.

Attended by over 120 people, the meeting was the only public forum held by any party since the election. Its extended Q&A session, following the main speakers, provided a much-appreciated forum for democratic discussion about the election result and the class battles now unfolding in Australia and internationally.

Senate candidate and SEP assistant national secretary Max Body chaired the meeting, with SEP National Secretary Cheryl Crisp, WSWS journalist and SEP Senate candidate Oscar Grenfell and Sri Lanka SEP National Secretary Deepal Jayasekera the featured speakers. SEP candidatesPeter Byrne, Jason Wardle, Mike Head and John Daviscontributed during the Q&A session.

The livestreamed event, which included detailed graphics, can be viewed in its entirety above.

Opening the meeting, Max Boddy explained that the low combined primary vote of just 68.3 percent for the Liberal-National Coalition and the Labor Party constituted a historic political crisis for Australias ruling elites. Labor won office, he said, but its primary vote dropped to 32.6 percent, another record low for the party, with its vote falling in 85 of Australias 151 electorates.

Millions of workers and young people saw no fundamental difference between Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition and instead voted for the so-called minor parties or independents, Boddy said.

The ongoing decline in support for the establishment parties, the speaker explained, motivated their bi-partisan imposition last year of new election laws that deregistered the SEP and other parties, blocking their party names from appearing on ballot papers.

In the face of these anti-democratic obstacles, the SEP conducted a vigorous and powerful intervention during the short election period, winning 10,723 votes across the three states, Boddy said. We have always said a vote for our party is a conscious one. Never has this been so true as in this election, he added.

SEP National Secretary Cheryl Crisp told the meeting that the world political situation is characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat and referenced Leon Trotskys Transitional Program.

Our meeting has been called to discuss the Australian election but it is not possible to understand this event outside the international situation in which it was held, she said. The worlds population face threats on multiple fronts, she continued, reviewing the disastrous and ongoing COVID pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the danger a global nuclear conflagration, and the surging inflation, food shortages, poverty, hunger and starvation.

The war in Ukraine against Russia, which was planned, devised and orchestrated by the US and NATO, is the working out of long-held perspectives to colonise and subjugate Russia and China to the interests of US imperialism, she said, which will be paid for by a war against workers at home.

Trotskys prediction that mankind faces socialism or barbarism is a very stark and real one today, the speaker said, and emphasised that this crisis could only be resolved by the independent mobilisation of the working class on a revolutionary socialist and internationalist perspective.

The task today, Crisp said, is to turn the developing struggles of the working class, now emerging in every country into a conscious political movement against capitalism.

Deepal Jayasekera, the national secretary of the SEP in Sri Lanka, told the meeting that huge foreign debts, the COVID-19 pandemic, a collapse of the tourist industry, and the war in Ukraine had led to a catastrophic implosion of the islands economy.

This had produced three months of mass anti-government protests and two general strikes demanding resignation of President Rajapakse and his government over skyrocketing prices and shortages of fuel, cooking gas and basic food items and hours-long power outages, he said.

The trade unions are playing a treacherous role in this situation and doing their utmost to defend the government by blocking any independent political and industrial action by the working class. This has allowed the regime to appoint a new prime ministerRanil Wickremasingheto unleash a new round brutal austerity and secure an International Monetary Fund bail-out loan, he explained.

Like our Australian comrades, Jayasekera continued, the SEP is advocating the formation of rank-and-file committeesaction committeesin every workplace, factory, plantation and neighbourhood, independent of the unions, to lead the struggles of the working class for their basic social and democratic rights.

In this way, he concluded, we are taking forward the struggle for a government of workers and peasants committed to socialist policies, as part of the broader struggle for socialism in South Asia and internationally.

SEP Senate candidate Oscar Grenfell, the final speaker, said the SEP was alone in warning during the election that whichever party won government, its program would be dictated by the global breakdown of capitalism, the US confrontations with Russia and China, and the predatory interests of the financial oligarchy. This analysis, he said, has proven completely correct.

The new Labor government, he continued, is a right-wing government that represents the banks, the corporations and the military-intelligence establishments of Australia and the US

Labors pro-business agenda will provoke mass opposition in the working class and pointed to recent strikes by nurses, teachers, aged care staff, bus drivers, and disputes involving many other sections of the working class.

In every instance, these struggles come up against the trade unions, which are not workers organisations in any sense of the term and are responsible for the record low wages and the social crisis that flows from them, he said.

Like other speakers, Grenfell stressed the necessity for workers to break from the trade unions and establish independent rank-and-file committees to defend the wages, jobs and basic rights on the basis of a socialist program. There is no national solution, and there is no short cut The decisive issue is building a socialist leadership of the working class, he said. Concretely, that means joining and building the SEP, which Id urge everyone here to do.

The reports provoked a range of questions from those in attendance and a collection of almost $3,700 donated to the SEPs special election fund. Some of those participating met the SEP during the election campaign and were attending their first party event. Questions were asked and fully answered about quantitative easing and inflation, the minimum wage, the social crisis facing young people, the significance of Trumps January 6 attempted coup for workers in Australia, whether it was possible or necessary to unite the left, and the role of protest groups based on racial identity politics.

Join the SEP campaign against anti-democratic electoral laws!

The working class must have a political voice, which the Australian ruling class is seeking to stifle with this legislation.

Excerpt from:
Socialist Equality Party meeting discusses crisis of Australia's two-party system and the way forward for the working class - WSWS