Oppose US war moves in Iraq, Syria!

Excerpt from editorial in new issue of The Militant:

....U.S. war moves in response to the advance of reactionary Islamic State forces are not designed to aid the toiling majority who live there, contrary to Washington's pretenses. Like all previous military actions in the region, Washington's current campaign is designed to defend the economic and political interests of the U.S. rulers and the local oppressors beholden to them.

At the same time, working people the world over should back the oppressed Kurdish people's fight to repel Islamic State forces and their struggle for a sovereign nation in Iraqi Kurdistan.

When the victorious powers of London and Paris carved up the Middle East following World War I, they denied the Kurds a homeland. Standing against their struggle today are the imperialist powers of America and Europe, as well as the Turkish, Arab and Persian rulers of the Middle East.
....

http://www.themilitant.com/2014/7834/783420.html

Long shadow of Stalinism still effects development of revolutionary working class leadership

Salient points that still hold up as an explanation for the leadership contradictions our class faces today, as much as when this editorial on the "Bush doctrine" was written in 2004.

.... Because of Stalinist betrayals from North Africa to the Mideast and Southeast Asia, there is a complete absence of revolutionary working-class organizations in these countries. The political vacuum thus created has been filled by bourgeois nationalist organizations—like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, or the National Salvation Front in Algeria—that have nothing to do with defending the interests of working people.

At the same time, the claims by Republicans or Democrats that Washington stands for bringing democracy and freedom to the world are bogus. It is true that compared to living under the Saddam Hussein regime, there is more space for working people to defend their interests in Iraq today, and elsewhere in the Mideast. Revolutionists need to take full advantage of this. But class-conscious workers don't therefore support democratic imperialism. The broad trends toward secularism, for women's rights, and in opposition to capital punishment and torture around the world that the Militant has described, for example, are the results of struggles by working people, students, and middle-class layers in the semicolonial world and internationally. They are products of the anticolonial revolutions of the last century, not imperialist benevolence. Washington and its allies will wield them as long as they serve to advance imperialist interests—but only so far.

U.S. imperialism's biggest enemy is the economic catastrophe capitalism is leading humanity toward and the resistance to its effects by workers and farmers. Only by joining this resistance and offering a working-class alternative to the parties of capitalism, such as that presented by the Socialist Workers Party ticket in the 2004 elections, can we defeat the "Bush agenda" and the program of Kerry too.

http://www.themilitant.com/2004/6836/683620.html

Chechnya: a long history of struggle for self-determination

Another useful 2004 article on national self-determination from The Militant.

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Chechnya: a long history of struggle
for self-determination
 
BY MICHAEL ITALIE  

Moscow's brutal ending of the Beslan hostage crisis, leaving more than 330 dead, has put a spotlight again on the Chechen people's struggle for self-determination. The toilers of this mountainous region on the Caucasus have resisted national oppression for decades.

The Chechens' fight for national self-determination began with the struggle against tsarist occupation forces in the 19th century, culminating in liberation as a result of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, which was led by the Bolsheviks. With the degeneration of the revolution in the late 1920s and early 1930s, however, the regime of Joseph Stalin re-imposed Great Russian chauvinism, which has continued until today. The Chechens' fight for national self-determination picked up steam again after the fracturing of the Stalinist regimes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the dawn of the 1990s.

The government of Russian president Vladimir Putin, however, like his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, is attempting to paint the struggle of the 1.5 million Chechens with the brush of "terrorism." Referring to the 53-hour crisis that began September 1 in the small town of the southern republic of North Ossetia, Putin's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said September 10 that Chechen leader Shamil Basayev "was in direct control of that operation." Moscow is also trying to link the school takeover to "international terrorism." Lavrov stated that "the information that there were Arabs has been confirmed," without offering evidence for his claims, reported the Associated Press.

In the midst of the takeover, former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov distanced himself from the attack. At the same time, he pointed to Moscow's military domination by calling "upon the world to condemn the policy that has made such tragedies not only possible but unavoidable."

Not backing down from the government's justification for its course in Chechnya, Lavrov shot back that Maskhadov's statement "is a direct encouragement of terrorism, if not evidence that he was in control of all that."

Against similar charges of "terrorism" and "betrayal of the motherland," the Chechen people have fought for generations.

The tsarist government annexed the Caucasus in 1783 and began Russian colonization in order to better control the region. Organized resistance in Chechnya was led by national hero Imam Shamil in face of an invasion of Russian troops in 1830, finally going down to defeat with the 1859 incorporation of the territory into the empire of Tsar Alexander II.

Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin described the Russian empire as a "prison house of nations." Under tsarist rule the peoples of the Caucasus, the Baltic region, Ukrainians, Jews, and others were denied the most basic rights of language, religion, and control of cultural, economic, and political affairs. Great Russian chauvinism was the ideological whip used by the imperial rulers.  
 
Russian revolution and its degeneration

Following the victory of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Bolshevik Party headed by Lenin championed the right to national self-determination of peoples who had been oppressed under the tsarist empire, forging a genuinely voluntary federation of workers and farmers republics.

One of the very first actions of the Bolshevik-led government was to proclaim the right of all the subject peoples within the confines of the old tsarist empire to "free self-determination up to and including the right to secede." Finland, Estonia, and other states acted on this pledge, establishing their independence.

The Soviet government declared null and void all the tsar's colonial treaties and signed new treaties with China, India, and other countries that, among other provisions, canceled debts owed to the tsarist regime.

A few years later, at the 1920 Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, leaders of the Communist International joined with other revolutionary fighters—from inside the borders of the old tsarist empire and beyond—in calling on all Muslim toilers in the region to join in a "holy war for the liberation of all humanity from the yoke of capitalist and imperialist slavery, for the ending of all forms of exploitation of man by man!"

The bureaucratic caste that began to emerge in the early 1920s, with Joseph Stalin as its foremost figure, pushed to reverse this course. In 1922 Lenin opened a political battle against this counterrevolution. But Stalin's reactionary policies prevailed following Lenin's death, reversing the Bolsheviks' program and course of action. In the 1930s, the Stalinist apparatus increasingly relied on Great Russian chauvinism to reassert Moscow's dominance over the tsar's former colonial possessions and other oppressed nationalities. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reemerged as a prison house of nations inherited from tsarism and imperialism.

While Chechnya formally maintained its autonomy within the USSR, the reality was the opposite. During World War II the Stalin regime carried out deportations and brutal repression of oppressed nationalities who were charged as "collaborators" with the Nazi invaders. Under a decree issued by Stalin, the Crimean Tatars were "banished" from their native land for "betrayal of the motherland." Beginning in February 1944 hundreds of thousands of Chechens were forcibly taken from their homes and deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan on similar charges. They were not allowed to return until 1957.

The bureaucratic regimes in the Soviet Union, and those imposed on other countries of Eastern Europe where capitalist social relations had been overturned after World War II, served as reliable instruments for the transmission of capitalist values.

These regimes disintegrated in 1989-91 under the accumulated weight of the social and economic crisis generated by decades of bureaucratic misrule and the pressure of the deepening downturn of the capitalist system worldwide. As this process unfolded, the oppression of national groupings through the use of police repression and military force began to weaken.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former senior official in the Soviet air force, declared Chechnya's independence from Russia. Fearing the example this set for other oppressed nationalities, the government of Russian president Boris Yeltsin responded with military incursions, which were repelled by Chechen forces.  
 
Two full-scale wars
Since 1994, the Chechen people have fought two full-scale Russian invasions of their land aimed at restoring Moscow's domination. Yeltsin justified the bloody onslaught by raising the specter of "Islamic fanaticism" in Chechnya. Rebels there humiliated the Russian military in the 1994-96 war. At that time an invasion force of tens of thousands of Russian troops was dispatched to crush the independence movement. More than 30,000 people were killed and dozens of cities and villages were devastated, including the capital city of Grozny. But the Chechen resistance remained undefeated in a war that was unpopular from the outset among broad layers of working people and others in Russia. Chechen women blocking the way of Russian tanks on the road leading to Grozny, seen on television around the world, captured the heroic determination of the Chechen people's refusal to submit to Moscow's domination.

The Communist Party of Russia, representing the interests of one of the competing factions of the bureaucratic caste that shattered in 1991, voiced support for Yeltsin's assault on Chechnya.

In 1999 then prime minister Vladimir Putin, under the pretext of the bombing of an apartment complex and other unexplained explosions in Moscow, ordered another invasion of Chechnya. Putin built his popularity as a champion of the military offensive against "Islamic terrorists." He was elected president in 2000. Revealing some of the arrogance of the ruling caste in Russia toward the lives of working people, after one year of war Putin offered that civilian casualties in the war "could be counted on one's fingers." At that point, Russian forces had already driven 200,000 from their homes and depopulated Grozny.

The Putin government claimed victory in the war in early 2002, and most of Chechnya is dominated by Russian troops and pro-Moscow forces. But the Russian government has been unable to put down the Chechen independence struggle, whose fighters continue to control a large portion of the mountainous southern region and regularly skirmish with Russian forces and their local henchmen.  

http://www.themilitant.com/2004/6835/683552.html

Self-determination for Chechnya

A 2004 editorial from The Militant. Today Moscow seeks through military and paramilitary means to prevent national self-determination struggles of Ukraine and the Crimean Tartars, among others.

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.... The independence struggle in Chechnya is a just one. If successful, it will strengthen the working class in Russia and the region. The revolutionary workers movement has always championed the right of oppressed nations to self-determination as a precondition to building genuine unity on the basis of equality among all the toilers.

There is an especially bitter irony to the Kremlin's anti-Islamic crusade that has reached its sharpest point in Chechnya over the last decade. One of the very first decrees the workers and farmers government in Russia issued in December 1917, just after the triumph of the Bolshevik-led revolution, was an "Appeal to all toiling Muslims of Russia and the East."

Without lending an iota of credence to any notion that Islam or other religious beliefs or institutions are progressive, the Soviet Republic declared: "All you whose mosques and shrines have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been trampled on by the czars and the Russian oppressors! Henceforth your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions are declared free and inviolable. Build your national life freely and without hindrance. It is your right. Know that your rights—like those of all the peoples of Russia—are defended by the full force of the revolution and its organs, the soviets of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies."

A few years later, at the 1920 Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, leaders of the Communist International joined with other revolutionary fighters—from inside the borders of the former czarist empire and beyond—in calling on all Muslim toilers in the region to join in a "holy war for the liberation of all humanity from the yoke of capitalist and imperialist slavery, for the ending of all forms of exploitation of man by man!"

More than eight decades later, we can confidently say that for militant workers around the world, reaffirming this clear pledge by the Bolsheviks to oppressed and exploited toilers who are Muslim, or who hail from parts of the world where the Islamic religion predominates, is not a remote or external matter. The campaigns against "Islamo-fascism"—from the Silk Road, to the Middle East, northern Africa and the imperialist world—which are part of capitalism's "antiterrorism" drive, are a case in point.

The Chechens and other oppressed peoples in the Caucasus will continue to resist the Great Russian chauvinism that was reimposed on them by the regime of Joseph Stalin with the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, and that continues to this day. Working people should back the Chechens' just struggle for national self-determination.
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2004/6834/683420.html

When Kerry was the lesser evil and Bush was turning the U.S. into a "snake pit of fascism" - 2004

New York protests target 'Bush agenda,'
push election of Democrat John Kerry

(front page)
 
BY PAUL PEDERSON
AND ANGEL LARISCY  
NEW YORK—Carrying placards reading "Defend America, Dump Bush," "Bush Lies, Who Dies?" and signs with the photo of the Republican president and the inscription "Darn Good Liar," throngs of protesters filled the streets of Midtown Manhattan August 29.
"Say No to the Bush Agenda," was the theme of the march, organized to help the campaign of Democratic presidential contender John Kerry. United for Peace and Justice, a coalition that organized large peace demonstrations before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, sponsored the action. Beginning at noon, the march wound slowly to an end around 5:00 p.m. at Union Square Park, where ushers instructed demonstrators through a loudspeaker to disperse.

Organizers decided to forego a closing rally even though they had obtained a permit for one on the West Side Highway on the southern tip of Manhattan, where refurbished piers by the Hudson River provide adequate facilities for such an event. United for Peace and Justice spokespeople stated they would not organize a rally after the city administration and the courts denied their requests to hold one in Central Park.

There is a more plausible reason for their decision, however, which organizers did not touch on: the leadership of the Democratic Party did not want to have anything to do with such a rally, a stance that apparently kept well-known entertainers and all major Democratic Party figures away from the protest.  
 
Top Democrats oppose protests

The action "has got top Democrats in a major fret," said an article in the August 28 Kansas City Star, headlined "Not Only GOP Fears New York Protests." GOP, or Grand Old Party, is a common reference to the Republicans.

"Please," said Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe, "let the Republicans have a great time, let them speak, let them go to their big corporate parties. If they can link us to a bunch of lawbreakers, they think people will not pay attention to the promises they've broken." McAuliffe added that the Democratic Party had nothing to do with any of the New York demonstrations.

A press conference at the beginning of the march featured a handful of low-ranking Democrats, a few labor officials, and peace group representatives. Actor Danny Glover and actress Rosie Pérez were the only artists present. Congressmen Charles Rangel of Harlem and Major Owens of Brooklyn, Jesse Jackson, and four members of the New York City Council were the only Democratic Party politicians at the press conference.

"Wake up America," declared Major Owens. "Because if you don't Bush will be reelected, and our country will be heading to the snake pit of fascism."

While relatively few signs at the demonstration promoted the false view that the Bush administration is "fascist," a number of marchers shared the point by Owens that the majority of voters in the United States would be at fault if Bush wins a second term. "Fool America once, shame on Bush," said a placard, the theme of which was repeated in other signs. "Fool America again and again and again and again, shame on America."

The widely circulated sign "Darn good liar" carried a similar message: Bush is succeeding in fooling the majority of voters.

"We're here today because we're really happy that the Republicans have only two months left," said filmmaker Michael Moore, in a dispirited presentation. Moore's so-called documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 has been widely used to promote the Kerry campaign. "To borrow an idea from Congressman Rangel, I think we should bring back the draft," Moore told the press. "But only for the sons of politicians and of owners of the Fortune 500 corporations," he remarked, in one of his trademark attempts at being funny that fall flat for most people.

Jesse Jackson, the featured speaker, concluded the press conference. While criticizing the way the Bush administration invaded Iraq and calling for bringing back the troops, he demanded that Washington intervene in the Sudan, which he had just visited. "We have a moral obligation to use our strength," he said, calling for a U.S. arms embargo against Sudan and military intervention to "disarm the Janjaweed," a militia that has carried out bloody attacks on the civilian population in that country.

Jackson went on to criticize the Bush administration for not spending enough money on "homeland defense."

"If Bush had given millionaires an $83,000 tax cut instead of $88,000, our ports could be secured from the threat of biological attack," he said. He also said the Republican administration was not putting enough police on the streets.  
 
American nationalism

American nationalism was in full display at the action. Many protesters held U.S. flags or signs that said "I am a true patriot" or "Dissent is patriotic." United for Peace and Justice sold T-shirts that read, "This is what a true patriot looks like."

One contingent at the end of the march carried nearly 1,000 coffins draped in U.S. flags, to symbolize the number of soldiers who have been killed in Iraq since the spring of 2003.

"The officers in my unit let me know it was something they didn't like," said Bryan Crowe, a Marine who spent five months in Iraq, of the reaction to his anti-war views. Crowe, a member of a group called Iraq Veterans Against the War, which had a contingent of about a dozen at the march, said he got some heat from his superiors after he spoke at an antiwar rally and was interviewed by a reporter. "Nothing really happened to me like on paper. More an intimidation thing.… I got some phone calls. I was asked to explain myself and I told them I didn't have to explain myself, it's my First Amendment right."

Crowe said it wasn't accurate to say half the U.S. troops in Iraq suffer from low morale, a statement made by two speakers at the press conference. "I don't think anyone's happy to be there, or as many people support the war as the media makes it out," Crowe said. "But even though I was against the war when I was sent there, I still had a job to do. Being miserable and not paying attention can cause you to lose your life, so I stayed on point." Crowe, a registered Green, said he wasn't sure electing Kerry will make a difference in Iraq.

Only one or two soldiers have deserted the U.S. military so far because of opposition to the Anglo-American assault on Iraq.

At several points, small groups of rightist counterdemonstrators lined side streets along the march route. At the intersection of 27th Street and 7th Avenue, the pro-Bush hecklers chanted "U.S.A!, U.S.A!" Protesters countered them by repeating the same chant, though more loudly, stealing the rightists' thunder.  
 
'Anything to get Bush out'
"I just want to beat Bush," said Anna Odem, a psychologist from Manhattan, in a comment reflecting the views most protesters who were interviewed expressed. "Anything just to get Bush out. He's destroyed most of what we stand for as a country. It's time to get Bush out."

Many of the demonstrators were from the middle classes, like Odem. A good portion were students or other youth.

A number of signs peddled conspiracy theories blaming Bush and the "neoconservative cabal" around him for covering up the truth about the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. "Expose the 9-11 coverup" was a sign held by many demonstrators. A group held a large banner reading "The Bush regime engineered 9-11." Protesters from that contingent passed out leaflets claiming that the Bush administration knew about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and helped orchestrate them.

Low-level, personalized attacks on Bush, including the false assertion that he is "stupid," were not uncommon, reflecting the coarsening discourse of bourgeois politics. "A village in Texas is missing its idiot; send him home," said a placard, for example, held by a number of protesters.

Estimates of the march size varied. The free dailies Metro and AM New York, and an unofficial police count reported by the Daily News, put the figure at more than 120,000. Organizers said that about 400,000 took part. The New York Times said reports of half a million protesters were "at best, a rough estimate."

The action was largely peaceful. Protesters marched slowly and patiently. While there was a heavy police presence around Madison Square Garden, site of the Republican convention, and along the demonstration route, relatively few arrests were made. According to the Daily News, cops arrested about 240 people that day, including 50 bikers who allegedly tried to crash the parade. Arrests were also made when a group called Black Bloc, self-described as anarchist, torched a papier-mâché dragon's head mounted on a rickshaw in front of Madison Square Garden.

Many more people were arrested the next two days, after the Republican convention started. About 1,000 people were arrested August 31, most while trying to block traffic. About 200 supporters of the War Resisters League were rounded up and arrested that day for a march up a sidewalk toward Madison Square Garden, for which the pacifist group said it had obtained a permit. Cops also arrested about 150 people gathered on sidewalks near the convention site who refused to heed police orders to disperse. According to the Washington Post, this brought to 1,600 the total number of those apprehended since August 26 during protest activities.  
 
Little enthusiasm for Kerry

A relatively small number of marchers wore buttons and T-shirts endorsing Kerry. The only pro-Kerry chant Militant reporters heard was "Bush is scary, vote Kerry." Not much enthusiasm for Kerry was on display, especially among younger protesters, a number of whom told Militant reporters they dislike the Democratic nominee's pro-war record and considered the action a peace rally.

"I don't think it's appropriate to wear John Kerry buttons to this rally since this is an antiwar march and Kerry is not opposed to the war," said Gil Wasserman, for example, 17, a high school student from Brooklyn. Wasserman said, however, he felt Kerry is the only realistic alternative to Bush in the elections.

Santiago Santos, a maintenance worker in a building in Queens who is a member of Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, was marching with a sign that said Bush, with an arrow pointed in one direction, and verdad (truth, in Spanish) with an arrow pointed in the other. "I hope Kerry will be better for the economy," said Santos. "It's a choice between a bad one and a halfway bad one. A little less bad."

The demonstration was billed in part as a peace march. Organizers distributed a large number of signs held by demonstrators calling for Washington to bring the troops home from Iraq. But relatively few chants expressed opposition to the war in Iraq, although this was the view held by all protesters the Militant interviewed.

Partly because of this reality, the Democratic Party cannot claim many of the protesters as its own or be assured they will even go to the polls to cast a vote for Kerry. Militant reporters observed a number of activists with Democratic National Committee T-shirts trying to sign up volunteers to help the Kerry campaign at the end of the march and getting the cold shoulder from most protesters.  
 
Bourgeois 'third' party campaigns

Supporters of the "third-party" campaigns of the Greens and Ralph Nader/Peter Camejo also took part in the march. While presenting themselves as "independent" alternatives to the two-party system of American capitalism, the banners of these contingents and comments by participants made it clear these are pro-capitalist campaigns aimed at pressuring the Democratic Party and attempting to nudge it a little to the left.

Green Party supporters marched with signs for their presidential candidates, David Cobb and Patricia LaMarche.

Cobb and LaMarche "believe very much that George Bush is an enormous threat to the United States," said Lynn Serpe, a New Yorker who was marching with the Greens contingent. "So the Greens are offering an alternative to the two-party system.… But, in swing states we say to Green supporters: if you can't vote Green, we understand, it's a tough election year."

Another contingent marched in support of the Nader/Camejo ticket behind a large banner that read "Impeach Bush/Cheney." A few hundred people marching with the campus-based group International Socialist Organization also carried placards supporting the Nader/Camejo ticket.

"I was a petitioner in Maryland," said Joe Schroeder, 20, a student at the Baltimore Community College who supports the Nader campaign. "We are 500 signatures short so I'm going through the list to find the valid ones. "It was tough," Schroeder said of the petitioning effort. He said that a Nader petitioner was attacked and three Republican supporters came out and defended him. "There are a lot of Democratic Party supporters in Baltimore."

Supporters of the Socialist Workers Party 2004 presidential ticket of Róger Calero for president and Arrin Hawkins for vice president, marched behind a banner reading, "It's not who you're against; it's what you're for. Vote Socialist Workers in 2004!" Many teams of SWP campaigners worked the crowd.

"People take this campaign very seriously," said Raúl, a worker at a meatpacking plant in San Francisco who was campaigning with the socialists at Union Square Park. "Some say it is utopian for Róger to run. 'He's Nicaraguan, not born in the United States,' they say. But when I explain that the campaign is part of organizing a working-class movement, for a working-class alternative to the parties of capitalism that goes beyond the elections, many people began to understand and appreciate it."

The socialists held a forum featuring SWP candidates the night before the August 29 march and an open house at their Garment District SWP campaign center, just a few blocks from the march route, after the demonstration. About two dozen people who first met the socialists at the protests took part in these campaign activities.

http://www.themilitant.com/2004/6833/683302.html

Moscow's invasion of Ukraine spurs Russia's anti-war movement

.... Lev Shlosberg, publisher of Pskovskaya Gubernia in western Russia, was brutally attacked and hospitalized after he began investigations into the deaths of dozens of soldiers from Pskov, Russia, who were sent to Ukraine.

The paper printed a recorded conversation between Russian troops in Ukraine in which a soldier says that 80 Russian troops were killed by shelling Aug. 20.

The body of Anton Tumanov, 20, was delivered Aug. 20 to his mother, Elena Tumanova, in Kozmodemyansk, Russia. He was killed in battle in Snizhne, Ukraine, east of Donetsk.

Tumanov joined the Russian army in June, after searching for months for a job. He worked temporary jobs in construction and at a car plant in Moscow and Nizhniy Novgorod, but couldn't find steady work, his mother told Novaya Gazeta.

"'God forbid, they'll send you to Ukraine,' I told him," Tumanova said. "He told me the army wouldn't be sent to Ukraine."

Members of his unit, the 18th Motor Rifle Brigade, formation 27777, were sent to Ukraine disguised as Ukraine separatists, Tumanov's fellow soldiers told his mother. Tumanov was one of 120 killed and 450 wounded Aug. 12.

"No to war in Ukraine!" and "Let us not allow Afghanistan 2.0!" read the signs carried by veterans of the Russian war in Afghanistan in Bryansk, near the border with Belarus.

"How will we look the Ukrainians in the eyes if the war ends tomorrow," said Vladimir Barabanov, who served in Afghanistan from 1986 to 1988 and is head of the Bezhitsky district Afghanistan veterans' organization.

The Russian Anti-War Movement, formed in Moscow in late August, issued a statement Sept. 6 pointing to the growing number of soldiers who have died in Ukraine "that the government takes pains to cover up" and urging the soldiers' mothers to speak out.

"This bloody war is not being waged for the 'Russian world,' as the Kremlin propagandists try to convince us," the group said. "It is being waged to punish the people of Ukraine who rose up against Yanukovych the thief." Viktor Yanukovych, former pro-Moscow president of Ukraine, was brought down in February by mass demonstrations and street battles, known as the Maidan, the name of the square in Kiev where the actions were centered.

Putin sees czarist continuity

Moscow's intervention in Ukraine has been backed by both ultra-right and petty-bourgeois leftists, ranging from Marie Le Pen's National Front in France to the Workers World Party in the U.S. At the same time, Putin has made it clear that he sees his actions in Ukraine in continuity with the imperial invasions and wars of Russia's czarist rulers.

In a speech to the Seliger 2014 10th National Youth Forum in Tver, Russia, Aug. 29, the Russian president attacked V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party for the overthrow of the czar and leading the workers, farmers and soldiers to power in 1917. "In the First World War, the Bolsheviks wished to see their Fatherland defeated," Putin said. "And while the heroic Russian soldiers shed their blood on the fronts in World War I, some were shaking Russia from within and shook it to the point that Russia as a state collapsed. … This was a complete betrayal of national interests."

Tatars active in politics in Crimea have faced harassment since the peninsula was forcibly annexed by Moscow in March. Most Crimean Tatars, who, as an entire people were rounded up by the regime of Joseph Stalin and deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia in Russia in the 1940s, are strong opponents of Moscow's occupation.

Leaders of the Tatar Mejlis (council) have been special targets of the Russian secret police and Crimean authorities. Moscow banned former Mejlis central leader Mustafa Dzhemilev from entering his Crimean homeland for five years in April. About 100 Tatars who blocked roads in May protesting Moscow's refusal to allow Dzhemilev into the country were slapped with fines. Some now face criminal investigations for "extremist behavior."

On Sept. 4, 15 riot and local cops showed up at the homes of several families in the Nizhnegorsk district, claiming they were searching for weapons and drugs, but only confiscating books and religious literature.

Since Russia took over, Crimean authorities have also searched schools, looking for titles on a list of more than 2,000 books that are banned in Russia.

On Sept. 9 a half dozen plainclothes cops entered the boarding school for gifted students in Tankove, heading straight for the library. They seized three books and wandered around the school demanding that all Crimean Tatar national symbols be taken down.

That same day 30-40 students gathered on the steps of the Crimean Industrial Pedagogical University and sang the Ukraine national anthem in protest against the appearance of the speaker of the Moscow-imposed Crimea State Council.  
 
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2014/7833/783303.html

The material basis of alienation

Capitalist system dehumanizes
and alienates workers

 
Below is an excerpt from The Marxist Theory of Alienation by Ernest Mandel and George Novack. In the book Mandel (1923-1995), a European leader of the Fourth International, and Novack (1905-1992), a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, explained that alienation is not an eternal condition of humanity, but rather a product of social relations under capitalism that can be overcome with the rise of a working-class fight for power. Copyright © 1970 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY GEORGE NOVACK

--

It is necessary to analyze the economic foundations of capitalist society in order to bring out its characteristic processes of alienation.

(1) Capitalism emerges as a distinct and separate economic formation by wrenching away working people from precapitalist conditions of production. Before capitalism could be established, the mass of direct producers had to be separated from the material means of production and transformed into propertyless proletarians. The processes of expropriation whereby the peasants were uprooted from the land and the social elements fashioned for the wage labor required for capitalist exploitation in Western Europe were summarized by Marx in Chapter XIX of Capital.

(2) However, the alienation of the producers only begins with the primary accumulation of capital; it is continually reproduced on an ever-extended scale once capital takes over industry. Even before he physically engages in the productive process, the wage-worker finds his labor taken away from him by the stipulations of the labor contract. The worker agrees to hand over his labor power to the capitalist in return for the payment of the prevailing wage. The employer is then free to use and exploit this labor as he pleases.

(3) During the productive process, by virtue of the peculiar divisions of labor in capitalist enterprise, all the knowledge, will and direction is concentrated in the capitalist and his superintendents. The worker is converted into a mere physical accessory factor of production. "The capitalist represents the unity and will of the social working body" while the workers who make up that body are "dehumanized" and degraded to the status of things. The plan, the process, and the aim of capitalist production all confront the workers as alien, hostile, dominating powers. The auto workers on the assembly line can testify to the truth of this fact.

(4) At the end of the industrial process the product which is its result does not belong to the workers who made it but to the capitalist who owns it. In this way the product of labor is torn from the workers and goes into the market to be sold.

(5) The capitalist market, which is the totality of commodities and money in their circulation, likewise confronts the working class—whether as sellers of their labor power or as buyers of commodities—as an alien power. Its laws of operation dictate how much they shall get for their labor power, whether it is saleable at all, what their living standards shall be.

The world market is the ultimate arbiter of capitalist society. It not only rules over the wage-slaves; it is greater than the most powerful group of capitalists. The overriding laws of the market dominate all classes like uncontrollable forces of nature which bring weal or woe regardless of anyone's plans or intentions.

(6) In addition to the fundamental antagonism between the exploiters and the exploited, the competition characteristic of capitalism's economic activities pits the members of both classes against one another. The capitalists strive to get the better of their rivals so that the bigger and more efficient devour the smaller and less productive.

The workers who go into the labor market to sell their labor power are compelled to buck one another for available jobs. In the shop and factory they are often obliged to compete against one another under the goad of piece-work.

Both capitalists and workers try to mitigate the consequences of their competition by combination. The capitalists set up trusts and monopolies; the workers organize into trade unions. But however much these opposing forms of class organization modify and restrict competition, they cannot abolish it. The competitiveness eliminated from a monopolized industry springs up more violently in the struggles between one aggregation of capital and another. The workers in one craft, category or country are pitted, contrary to their will, against the workers of another.

These economic circumstances generate unbridled individualism, egotism, and self-seeking throughout bourgeois society. The members of this society, whatever their status, have to live in an atmosphere of mutual hostility rather than of solidarity.

Thus the real basis of the forms of alienation within capitalist society is found in the contradictory relations of its mode of production and in the class antagonisms arising from them. …

These internal social antagonisms are not everlasting. They do not spring from any intrinsic and inescapable evil in the nature of mankind as a species. They were generated by specific historico-social conditions which have been uncovered and can be explained.

Now that humanity has acquired superiority over nature through triumphs of technology and science, the next great step is to gain collective control over the blind forces of society. There is only one conscious agency in present-day life strong enough and strategically placed to shoulder and carry through this imperative task, says Marxism. That is the force of alienated labor incorporated in the industrial working class.

The material means for liberating mankind can be brought into existence only through the world socialist revolution which will concentrate political and economic power in the hands of the working people.  
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2014/7833/783349.html