June 27th, 2022

The war against Ukraine being carried on by the Russian ruler Vladimir Putin is totally a brutal war of aggression with the aim of exterminating the state of Ukraine and incorporating it into 'Great Russia'. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been massacred by the invading army, and more than a million people have been forcibly deported to the Russian Far East, Siberia, and elsewhere. We should never ever tolerate this barbarism of the century perpetrated by Putin, 'today's Hitler'!

By hailing shells upon the city of Sievierodonetsk in Luhansk Oblast, Putin's army reduced it to ashes and indiscriminately murdered its residents. This is what Putin did to conquer this strategic point for Ukraine. In the face of this atrocious attack, Armed Forces of Ukraine, together with Territorial Defence forces, had waged a life-and-death battle for a month and a half. They completed their mission of evacuating residents, and retreated from the city while preserving their combat power. By rearranging the line of battle, Ukrainian forces have started counteroffensives to recapture the Russian-occupied cities, including Kherson in southern Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the rulers of France, Germany, Italy and other states, daunted by Putin's 'counter-sanctions' such as reduction in natural gas supply, have now started applying 'cease-fire' pressures upon the Ukrainian government, which goes on with 'all-out resistance'. While the Zelensky administration is demanding 'large-scale and swift arms aids' to beat back the invading army, those rulers are planning to give only limited aids. Each with its state egoism laid bare, European and American rulers are leaving Ukrainians to their fate! Let us denounce them and fight in firm solidarity with Ukrainian working people and soldiers who are battling unbendingly!

We the revolutionary Left in Japan issued an international appeal of the JRCL-RMF to the whole world immediately after the Russian aggression began on February 24th: 'Denounce Russia's armed aggression against Ukraine! Working people all over the world, rise in an antiwar struggle!' Militant students of Zengakuren and workers of the Antiwar Youth Committee successively rose up in protest nationwide, which included a series of protest actions at the Russian Embassy in Tokyo. We have thus been resolutely creating 'Ukraine antiwar struggles' in Japan.

We now call on working people all over the world. Let us stir up a storm of antiwar struggle in every corner of the world to crush Putin's war! Don't isolate Ukrainian people battling against invaders! Let us fan the flames of antiwar struggle to besiege Putin the slaughter and drive him away!

Here in Asia, Xi Jinping-led neo-Stalinist state of China, which is now openly defending Putin, is repeatedly conducting threatening military actions with an unreserved ambition to 'absorb Taiwan'. In response, US imperialist ruler Joe Biden is intent on drastically strengthening the US-Japan military alliance and building up a multi-national military alliance centring on the former. Directly linked to the Ukrainian situation, the danger of a war is increasing in Asia, too, day by day between the US-Japan and China-Russia.

We alert you, comrades all over the world. The world is now faced with the gravest danger of a nuclear war since the Cuban crisis of 1962. We the revolutionary Left in Japan, the country that suffered atomic bombing, call on the world. By all means prevent a nuclear war, a Third World War, from breaking out amid the clash between the US and China-Russia.

We are holding the 60th International Antiwar Assembly in Japan on August 7th. Working people fighting all over the world! Let us raise together an earth-shaking 'antiwar' cry!

Crush the aggression in Ukraine, the barbarity of the century committed by Putin!

The concentrated attacks by Putin's army on Sievierodonetsk were carried out actually in the form of gruesome 'scorched earth' operations, the same as the ones conducted in Mariupol. They are the epitome of the cruelty of Putin's war.

The invading army deliberately targeted dwellings, hospitals, schools, shopping centres and other places for 'civilian' life, thus firing missiles and shells into them like hail. They forced residents into underground shelters and then ruthlessly shot those who appeared on the ground. By destroying essential lifelines for water, electric and food supplies, they drove the residents into starvation.

Having conquered cities, the Russian army is sending residents of the occupied areas into 'filtration camps', where the army immediately execute those whom it regards as disobedient or, otherwise, forcibly deport them to Siberia, with the exception of those whom it regards as cooperative with Russia. This modus operandi is exactly the same as that used by Stalin in his attempt to exterminate the Ukrainian nation as a whole.

In Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and other southern regions that the Russian army has put under its control, invaders are hell-bent on 'Russianizing' the regions. They have destroyed social infrastructures and public facilities so completely as to make residents unable to live without depending rations and supplies from Russians; and then they are distributing Russian passports, obligating the youths to learn the Russian language, and spreading propaganda programs of Russian state-run broadcasters. Despite all these, however, people in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are putting up resistance against invaders in the forms of partisan battle and 'disobedience', by stirring up their fighting spirits and determinations 'Never yield Ukraine to Russia'.

Putin narrowed the target of his offensives down to the 'complete control' of Luhansk Oblast and frantically carried out scorched-earth operations. This was because he had to pull through the miserable failures in the 'special military operation' that he had declared four months before. He first launched the operation to capture the capital Kyiv, with an optimistic forecast that he could topple the Zelensky government 'in two or three days'. But it was completely crushed by the strong counteroffensives of the Ukrainian Armed Forces united with grassroots masses. He had to leave heaps of destroyed Russian tanks in the battlefields. He then carried out operations to seize Kharkiv, the second largest industrial city, where he again miserably failed because he was unable to concentrate his forces on account of the unyielding resistance of Ukrainian forces in Mariupol. The Russian death toll surpassed thirty thousand. Although he schemed to declare 'victory in the special military operation' on Victory Day, the scheme was completely blown away.

Putin's biggest miscalculation lies in that he did not even imagine that Armed Forces and the toiling masses would be united to fight against the Russian forces so bravely, so strongly, raising their rallying cries, 'Never give in to Russia!' 'Don't return the country to the Russian rule of thirty years ago!' Putin the petty-czar did not give the least thought to their deep resentment that had been kept alive among the Ukrainian masses against Russia as 'the oppressor' (since Stalin), and their strong fighting spirit, so that he dug his own grave.

Putin justifies this war of aggression, this act of genocide, with the outrageous pretext that it is 'a battle to liberate Ukraine from neo-Nazis'. But the fact that the battle is taking a heavy toll of lives is now widely known at home, so that the voice 'against war' is rapidly spreading. Unable to suppress this 'No War' voice of the working masses, he has started glorifying Stalin, by saying, 'Remember the Great Patriotic War, which defended Russia against the Nazis!' That is to say, he is shouting to the people that people must not be daunted but be willing to give their lives for the nation no matter how many lives are taken in the war. But, however desperately he may scream so, it is impossible to brainwash Russian toiling people who have come to be aware of the truth of this war.

Putin is now faced with a marked increase in war deaths, a serious loss of war potential, a loss of morale of his troops, and the swelling war expenditure. Because of the economic sanctions by the Western states, Russia is no more able to secure supplies of semiconductors and other products, so that Putin is driven into a predicament where his army can hardly update or increase its high-tech weapons. But this petty-czar, frantic to somehow save the appearance of 'victory', is forcibly sending reservists, ethnic minorities and prisoners to the frontlines, only to leave their corpses lying in heaps. The Russian army is now able to do nothing but resort to offensives dependent on sheer 'material superiority', something like in the Soviet-German War, by drawing half-a-century-old tanks and cannons from storehouses.

By 'prolonging the war', Machiavellian Putin is pressuring German, French and Italian rulers, who have been dependent on Russian oil and natural gas, to give in. He has dared to reduce Russian gas supply to these countries, as if to say 'I show you what will happen if you ban the import of Russian gas.'

This is not all. Putin enforced a naval blockade to prevent the export of grains from Ukraine, the 'breadbasket of the world', thereby deliberately creating a global shortage of foods. By this means, he is pressing the power-holders of countries to 'lift the sanctions'. Because of this, the world has been hit by a food crisis and a terrible rise of food prices. In developing countries such as those in Africa and the Middle East, a disastrous famine is being imposed on the masses. Denounce this inhuman act that imposes a hell upon those people who are suffering from poverty and hunger!

The rulers of Germany, France, Italy and other countries, which are suffering from skyrocketing prices of energies and foods caused by Putin's crafty 'counter-sanctions', have started urging Zelensky to move to an 'early cease-fire' by shamelessly saying 'Don't humiliate Russia' (Macron). This is tantamount to saying that Ukraine should give up its territories presently occupied by the Russian army. The more the war is prolonged, the more rulers of the West, including the US president, will probably move to leave Ukrainians in the lurch.

Despite difficulties, brave Ukrainian working people are resolutely going on with their battles, with their burning determination to 'fight out to drive away the Russian army', each as a member of the Territorial Defence Forces, partisan units or otherwise.

We call on working people all over the world. In solidarity with Ukrainian people waging their unbending fights, let us create a storm of antiwar struggles world-wide to crush Putin's war!

Break through the crisis of war erupting in Asia-Pacific!

Russian's aggression against Ukraine has also triggered a great upheaval in the east of Eurasia.

Xi Jingpin-led China is massively purchasing oil and natural gas from Russia now in a dire plight due to the economic sanctions by the West. It has also foiled every resolution 'to condemn Russia' in the United Nations and other international organizations. China is thus helping Russia in every respect. In the wake of Russia's aggression against Ukraine, the clash between the US and China-Russia has become decisive. In the middle of this upheaval, the Xi leadership has found 'a chance' to surpass America, thus intensifying its impulse to 'absorb Taiwan' - while keenly watching disarray among Western powers over anti-Russian sanctions. In order to achieve this aim, Chinese forces are repeatedly conducting threatening military actions in concert with Russian forces by mobilizing warships, bombers and combat planes in the waters ranging from the South China Sea to the whole western Pacific. On top of that, North Korea led by Kim Jong-un, who witnessed the aggression in Ukraine and deepened his belief that 'If only we have nuclear arms, we can defend the nation', is desperate to develop and 'test-fire' nuclear missiles with the support of China and Russia.

The Biden-led US administration, driven by its sense of crisis towards these escalated military actions by China and Russia, successively held bilateral summit meetings with Japan and South Korea and the quadripartite Quad meeting with Japan, Australia and India. This imperialist administration is hell-bent on building up a multi-national military alliance against China and Russia, that to be called an Asia-Pacific version of NATO. Thus, the whole of the Japanese archipelago is being turned into a frontline base for US and Japanese forces in jointly carrying out a war on China; in particular, Japan's Southwest Islands as a whole including Okinawa is literally being made to be a military fortress for 'pre-emptive attacks' against China.

In league with the Biden administration, the Liberal Democratic Party government of Japan led by Prime Minister Kishida Fumio is intent on a drastic strengthening of the US-Japan military alliance as an offensive and defensive alliance against China and Russia. Using Russia's aggression in Ukraine as a pretext, it has decided to swiftly increase its military budget to the double amount. This increase is to boost Japan up into the third largest military power in the world. Kishida is to attend the summit meeting of NATO as the Japanese Prime Minister for the first time, where he is to pledge that Japan will fulfill a key role in building up a global-wide political and military encirclement against China and Russia in close cooperation with NATO member states.

This is not all. Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, a self-proclaimed militarist, publicly advocated 'nuclear sharing between Japan and the US'. PM Kishida flatly refused to attend the first Meeting of States Parties to the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, even in the capacity of an observer. By so doing, they themselves revealed that they are scheming for 'Japan's nuclear armament'.

The Japanese government, thus rushing to be a military big power, has started a dash for an ultra-reactionary offensive, that is, the nullification of Article 9 of Japan's Constitution, which stipulates the 'renouncement of the right of belligerency of the state' and 'non-retention of war potential'.
In Japan, the labour movement is now controlled and distorted by the labour aristocrats of Rengo [JCTU], who have degraded themselves as menial servants of monopoly capitalists. The Japanese Communist Party, a neo-Stalinist party, has not only abandoned its opposition to the US-Japan military alliance but also proposed even a 'practical use of Self-Defence Forces', i.e. use of imperialist military forces, thus degrading as a complement to the LDP government. We the revolutionary Left is striving to overcome such a degeneration of the labour movement and the peace movement in Japan and resolutely fighting under the banner 'No to the strengthening of the US-Japan military alliance!' and 'Prevent the constitutional revision!'
East Asia and the Pacific are now in impending danger of a new war between the US with Japan and China with Russia (plus North Korea) with Taiwan as a flashpoint. We call on comrades all over the world to strive together with us to create a powerful antiwar struggle worldwide to break through the crisis of global warfare amid the intensified clash between the US and China-Russia!

Stir up the flame of antiwar struggle all over the world!

Comrades! The only power to prevent Putin's war lies in the united struggles of working people in Ukraine, in Russia and all over the world.

Nonetheless, what are the so-called leftists of the world doing at this very moment when thousands of Ukrainian people are being sunk into seas of blood!

Some say knowingly that both Putin and Zelensky are to blame, for the latter have brought in NATO. They are trying to impose 'surrender' on Ukrainian people now in a life-and-death battle, that is, preaching that they should lay down their arms. Others shamelessly say 'Russia is just making a self-defensive response', thereby degrading themselves to be agents for Putin.

Not a single word of denunciation do they utter when the would-be czar Putin is devastating the neighbouring country and massacring people. Those 'leftists' who do not condemn it are unworthy to be called so.

We know, of course, that many conscientious leftists denounce Putin's war and are fighting shoulder to shoulder with Ukrainians. However, it is also a fact that not a small number of so-called leftists are showing anti-working class responses as mentioned above.

They always say 'We stand by the oppressed'. But they do not have an iota of indignation against Putin, who is indiscriminately killing Ukrainians. Neither do they have the standpoint of 'living together and suffering together' with Ukrainians now exposed to the outrageous gunfire. In a matter-of-fact manner, they recommend abandoning resistance to Ukrainians who are fighting at the peril of their lives. They have revealed here the arrogance and degeneration of the self-styled leftists who are defanged and live in peace in imperialist countries!

It goes without saying that Lenin regards it as a 'just war' when the invaded nation wages a war of counterattack against the war of aggression by a 'great power' as an invader. Lenin encouraged the working class of the oppressed nation to resolutely wage a war against invaders in its forefront. Those who look on themselves as leftists must carry through with this revolutionary spirit of Lenin in the middle of today's war of aggression in Ukraine.

Many of so-called leftists, who cannot face up to Putin's war, thereby revealing their miserable states, retain the feeling that they should defend Russia, the country that was formerly the 'Soviet Union', in opposition to imperialist powers. This is because they have never carried out a serious confrontation at all with Stalinism.

First of all, those degenerate leftists have avoided wrestling with the historic event of the self-destruction of the USSR in 1991 from the standpoint of the proletariat.

In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled the Stalinist USSR by introducing bourgeois democracy and market economy; he thus finally buried away the Russian revolution of 1917, which ushered in the period of transition to a world proletarian revolution. We the anti-Stalinist revolutionary Left grasped this event, deplorable for the world proletariat, as anti-revolutionary, as the 'grand reversal of the history'; thereafter we have been fighting consistently with our resolve to 're-reverse' the reversal.

We have exposed the historic decline of the militarist empire of America as the 'sole superpower', which committed all possible barbarities around the world with extreme arrogance right after the collapse of the USSR. And we have been sounding an alarm to the 'danger of the outbreak of another world war amid the new East-West cold war'. That is to say, we have revealed the fact that Xi-led neo-Stalinist China has launched its political, military challenges against US imperialism to seize world hegemony as the 'centre of the world', and that Putin-led Russia is making a headlong rush to 'recover the territories' by relying on the FSB-based authoritarian rule and the monstrous nuclear capabilities because it has yet to get out of its ruinous situations. We have thus been denouncing China and Russia for emerging as the main culprits that plunge the world working people into the hell of war, famine, poverty and authoritarian rule, in rivalry and competition with imperialist powers.

All of the self-styled leftists that failed to squarely face up to the self-collapse of the USSR with proletarian indignation have averted their eyes from anti-proletarian crimes by today's China and Russia, so that they can do nothing but brandish a desiccated proposition 'Imperialism is worse'. This is because they do not reflect upon their own (pro-) Stalinist nature whereby in the past they called the USSR a 'socialist country' or 'workers' state' and overlooked its repeated crimes, thus defending it. The fundamental problem lies in that they have neglected confrontation with Stalinism from first to last.

We the revolutionary Left in Japan founded ourselves through our confrontation and wrestle with the Hungarian incident of 1956. Since then, every time the Stalinist USSR has committed an anti-working class crime - the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the aggression in Afghanistan, the suppression of the Polish 'Solidarity' and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster - we have denounced it through and through, thus creating struggles on a mass base to expose the crimes of Stalinism.

It is therefore only the anti-Stalinist revolutionary Left in Japan that denounces Putin's war and is striving to create Ukraine antiwar struggles, while criticizing the degeneration of the Japanese neo-Stalinist party, which is chattering about a 'solution through talks in the United Nations'.

Comrades all over the world. Let us denounce and break through the degeneration of so-called leftists! Now is the time to resolutely create an international struggle to crush Putin's war!

From our heart, we call on Ukrainian working people who are battling against Russia's aggression. Beat back the abominable invading army in the unity among the national forces, territorial defence forces, residents and volunteers with the working class as its core!

We call on Russian working people. Despite brutal repression, now is the time to create a struggle with the aim of overthrowing the Putin regime!

We call on both Ukrainian and Russian working people to fight in solidarity with each other by reviving the great spirit of the soviet-based revolution in 1917-18, in which the proletariat, peasants and soldiers of both nations joined together.

Working people all over the world, envelop Putin the massacrer with the flame of anger! Create antiwar struggles to break through the crisis of a war erupting with Taiwan as a focus!

In the autumn of 1961, when the USSR perpetrated its nuclear testing, we fought under the slogan 'Oppose USSR nuclear testing!' in opposition to the degeneration of the Japanese Stalinist party and its controlled Movement against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, which defended the USSR testing. Then in 1963, we launched the first International Antiwar Assembly in the atomic-bombed city of Hiroshima under the revolutionary slogan, 'Down with US and USSR nuclear testing!' Today, six decades after that, the world is again verging on a crisis of a Third World War as a thermo-nuclear war amid the bitter rivalry between the US and China with Russia.

We call on the world's working people. Let us fight all out to break through the crisis of the outbreak of another world war! Fighting people all over the world, arise together with us!

The Journal of Social Criticism “Commons” (Ukraine)

Alt Left (Russia)

Revolutionary Marxists in Britain

The Union Pacifiste de France

Tamworth Surrealist Manifestation (UK)

Исайчиков Виктор Фёдорович (Russia)

AntiCapitalist Resistance (UK)

News and Letters Committees (USA)

Lotta Comunista (Italy)

The All Pakistan Federation of United Trade Unions (APFUTU)

War Resisters League (USA)

Socialist League of Internationalist Workers of Bolivia – FLTI

Commission of Convicted Workers, Families and Friends of Las Heras / International Network for the Freedom of All the World Political Prisoners and Justice to our Martyrs (Argentina)

Fracción Leninista Trotskista Internacional

Tavini Huiraatira no te Ao Maohi (French Polinesia)

Organising Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International (OCRFI)

◆ The Journal of Social Criticism “Commons”

Thank you for your support and solidarity. We are sending a message.

Russian full-scale invasion in Ukraine took many, including most of the Ukrainian leftists, by surprise. The long unprecedented and ruthless aggression led to chaotic reactions in the left political field. However, being sixth month into the war, it is time to recognize that open and hidden opposition to Ukrainian resistance from many on the left is not a result of the fog of war anymore, but rather a result of long-lasting problems on the left. Those problems are rooted in general decades-long demobilization in the face of the global system’s reactionary turns.

We urgently need to reconstruct leftist alternatives so that the political left can propose viable options which can mobilize people. If no such alternatives will be provided, we will continue to face campism with this or that imperial power to oppose another. This will never lead us to a just and peaceful future. In the face of many failures of the global security system, where Russian invasion is just the most recent one, we must look for alternatives beyond unipolar or multipolar worlds, where the first would always be about domination, and the second would always be on the brink of global nuclear disaster.

We should remember that construction of leftist alternatives cannot be based on disregard of popular struggles, which smaller and weaker societies are waging for their self-determination against imperial domination. Leftist alternatives can never be about order, rooted in the right of the powerful, as well as they can never be about keeping the reactionary status quo.

With the Russian imperial aggression we also see again how capitalist dependency on fossil fuel facilitates autocratic regimes and how it corrupts economic and political elites in “democratic” countries. We should have no illusions that those elites are ready to give up their capitalist short-term interest — neither for global progressive political order, nor for the collective survival of humanity, challenged with environmental disaster.

In the face of Russian imperial aggression against Ukrainian society we call for support of Ukrainian popular resistance and struggle for self-determination. We call for mobilization around viable alternatives, built on solidarity and internationalism. Down with all imperialisms, for social justice, environmental sustainability and peace!

◆ Alt Left

Уважаемые товарищи!

Мы приветствуем 60-ю антивоенную ассамблею, приветствуем всех ее участниц и участников!

Наша страна ведет агрессивную захватническую войну в Украине. Мы находимся внутри России и ведем антивоенную деятельность. Сегодня сама возможность революции в России поставлена в прямую зависимость от военного поражения путинского режима.

Военное поражение Путина в Украине будет одновременно победой и украинского, и российского народов. Напротив, победа Путина будет означать поражение наших народов и утверждение молодого и агрессивного российского империализма, живущего идеями реваншизма.

Мы благодарны всем, кто прилагает усилия для борьбы с путинским режимом и неолиберальной верхушкой России. Однако критика режима и удар по нему должны происходить слева.

В России существует сильная правая либеральная оппозиция. Ее лидеры не являются принципиальными противниками империализма и войны. Они не поддерживали Чечню (республику в составе России), когда предшественник Путина – Борис Ельцин – подавлял ее независимость. Лидеры правой либеральной оппозиции не враги Путина, а его конкуренты. Нельзя обманываться их антивоенной риторикой.

Правая либеральная оппозиция пользуется поддержкой правительств других империалистических стран, в первую очередь США. Их хорошо финансируют и поддерживают различными способами.

Сегодня левой антивоенной оппозиции в России нужна поддержка. Коммунистическая партия Российской Федерации во главе с Зюгановым поддерживает войну и Путина. Наши силы незначительны. Нас не поддерживают западные политики.

Поэтому сейчас мы можем рассчитывать только на помощь своих классовых сестер и братьев из других стран. Нам как никогда нужна ваша солидарность и поддержка в борьбе с преступным путинским режимом!

◆ Revolutionary Marxists in Britain

We, Revolutionary Marxists in Britain, express our solidarity with the 60^th Antiwar Assembly.

We welcome your call on working people all over the world: “In solidarity with Ukrainian people waging their unbending fights, let us create a storm of antiwar struggles world-wide to crush Putin’s war.”

We support your protest actions at the Russian embassy in Tokyo. We agree with your statement that: “The only power to prevent Putin’s war lies in the united struggles of working people in Ukraine, in Russia and all over the world. We also agree with your criticism of “the so-called leftists” who are, as you rightly state, “trying to impose ‘surrender’ on Ukrainian people now in a life-and-death battle, that is, preaching that they should lay down their arms.”

The working class of the world is the only force that can overcome aggressive wars and the famine, poverty and environmental destruction that is caused by the current crisis of capitalism and by Putin’s war and other manifestations of the conflict where Russia and China confront the western imperialist powers.

One aspect of Putin’s war has been the “weaponization” of grain supplies that are desperately needed by millions of people in the poorest regions of Africa, already suffering from the environmental degradation caused by climate change.

As we write, the effects of the environmental destruction caused by capitalism’s drive for profit are also being felt strongly in Europe, with temperatures rising to unprecedented levels, forest fires and destruction of crops.

In Britain, the series of corruption scandals have finally led to the resignation of prime minister Boris Johnson. This corruption included awarding contracts to his friends and to companies who donated to the Conservative Party which resulted in the purchase of huge quantities of useless protective clothing that had to be discarded, and ineffective “test and trace” systems, resulting in COVID-19 infections that would otherwise have been prevented. Another aspect of the Johnson regime was the ignoring of his own government’s ban on social gatherings during the COVID crisis, with illegal parties involving the prime minister and his senior staff held at his official office and residence, No. 10 Downing Street, the very centre of power. Johnson tried to lie about these events but the British people saw that Johnson and those around him believed that there was “one rule for them and another for everyone else”. Johnson misjudged the effect that had on the lives of those who had been prevented from seeing loved ones who were ill or dying. Johnson claimed that the partying at Downing Street was part of a “normal working day”, but for health workers a working day was very different.

While as we write the Conservative Party have still to choose Johnson’s successor, we know that all the candidates will pursue right-wing, market-oriented policies, which will increase poverty and environmental damage. All the candidates are pressing for tax cuts for the rich and for cuts in public spending, and support even more restrictions on the rights of trade unions. They all wish to prevent wages rising as much as prices, and to make the working class pay for the crisis through imposing a low wage economy.

The working class in Britain is now fighting against attempts by employers to dismiss workers and rehire them on lower wages and worse terms of employment, and for wage rises to keep up with price rises of 10%. The national railway workers’ strike in June was perhaps the largest among a number of strike actions by transport workers, by cleaners and security staff in “outsourced” employment, and health workers, and there has even been a strike by barristers.

Working class action has also taken place in solidarity with refugees threatened with deportation. In the Scottish cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the London districts of Hackney and Peckham, massed crowds have successfully prevented police from seizing asylum seekers to take them to deportation centres.

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has refused to support the strikers and offers no serious alternative to the Conservative government policies. Although Starmer was forced to abandon his attempt to discipline those Labour MPs who had supported the striking railway workers, his bureaucratic manoeuvrings have meant the expulsion of thousands of left-wingers from the Labour Party, and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn remains suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party. Working class resistance to the employers and government is taking place in spite of Starmer’s hostility.

We salute your struggle since 1963 against nuclear weapons. The threat of a nuclear war is now greater than for several decades, and we support your call to the world’s working people to fight to prevent the outbreak of another world war.

19 July 2022

◆      The Union Pacifiste de France

Dear fellows,

Th Union pacifiste de France wish you a fructful congress.

We try and work to stop war, and are against the russian government as against NATO.

We try and support the pacifists of the countries in war.

With all our solidarity,

Maurice Montet,

Secretary Union pacifiste de France

◆ Tamworth Surrealist Manifestation

Comrades, 

We have seen your anti-war appeal and we agree with its sentiment and wish you well. 

We are a local group of activists, artists, Surrealists based in a small town in England.

Below is our short statement in support of the Ukrainian people's heroic resistance against Putin's brutal invasion.

Comradely, 

Rob

IT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS

We support the Ukrainian popular resistance and defence against invasion, assault, murder, rape and plunder. They have our tears.

We stand with the anti-war movement in Russia. Their courage in the face of a corrupt and brutal state shames us. They have our fists.

At that level it is simple. The lines are clear.

But to clarify further.

In standing with Ukraine we do not endorse its government. We are against all bourgeois regimes and especially their rightist elements.

However, in the fight against imperialist Russia, we may find ourselves on the same side.

This is a conjuncture. It will pass.

We support the right of the Ukrainian people to resist in any way they choose and any way they can. That implies their right to demand arms from any quarter and, inevitably, that means the ‘western’ powers and their NATO bulldogs. We abhor NATO and all military pacts and alliances. We hope, one day, that the people’s strength will break them.

For now we demand they give freely, military and material aid, without strings or conditions and without direct intervention.

We are against war but we support just wars.

Wars of defence and wars of honour.

Underdogs in home-made mail coats.

After the war… We would see Russian guns broken into trinkets.

And joined with the metals of Ukrainian rifles, NATO drones and British warships.

Smelted to make cutlery and kitchen utensils.

Tea strainers, mandolines and spoons, just long enough to sup with the devil…

The future lies in darkness and the forces of right are weak, but free peoples must rise and be seen above all these armaments.

◆ Исайчиков Виктор Фёдорович

Уважаемые товарищи!

В преддверии вашей 60-ой Ассамблеи борцов за мир нам, борцам за мир, следует честно признать, что наша предыдущая борьба оказалась малоуспешной: Третья мировая война вступила в новый этап — прямого военного противостояния. При том, что внешне представляется как конфликт России и Украины, она, как и ранее Вторая мировая война, развязана империалистами США путём закулисных махинаций и стравливания своих потенциальных противников. 85 лет назад марионетками были не только политические дурачки Чемберлен и Даладье, но и множество иных примитивных политиков; сейчас такая же картина.

Мы разделяем ваши оценки, что основными противниками в этой войне будут КНР и США — основные экономические и политические конкуренты в мире. Однако цель этой войны, развязанной империалистами США, гораздо шире, чем просто экономическое соперничество, но эта цель до поры скрывается от народов и правительств.

Главная мировая проблема сейчас — это наступающая из-за анархии капиталистической системы угроза экологической катастрофы, вызванной бесконтрольным перенаселением. Настоящая цель войны — чудовищна: уничтожение 7,5 миллиардов "лишних" людей.

Но при этом империалисты США рассчитывают уничтожить всех своих конкурентов: КНР, ЕС, Японию, Индию и пр. Эта мировая война не будет похожа ни на одну предыдущую; даже ядерное оружие, которое ранее применяли США против населения Японии, вряд-ли будет основным видом оружия массового поражения. Скорее всего, более дешёвые и более эффективные химические и биологические виды оружия будут играть главную роль при уничтожении "лишних" людей, особенно в слабо развитых странах.

Россия с 1,5% мирового ВВП в сырьевых отраслях — не конкурент США. Ей отведена иная роль — быть марионеткой в борьбе против конкурентов США, в первую очередь, ЕС и Японии. Роль марионеточной Украины ещё более жалкая — быть спичкой в новой войне и полигоном для испытания нового оружия и политических манипуляций общественным мнением.

В этих совершенно новых условиях борцам за мир следует кардинально изменить тактику борьбы. Сейчас, когда мировые рабочее и коммунистическое движения не являются действенной силой мировой политики, а уничтожение угрожает не только трудящимся, следует объединить все классовые антиолигархические силы и государства, не желающие собственного уничтожения по планам империалистов США и их подручных из Англии, Австралии и пр.

Это- наша сложнейшая задача. Но если мы с ней не справимся, то в числе 7,5 миллиардов жертв мы будем одними из первых.

С уважением, Исайчиков Виктор Фёдорович, Марксисткая платформа, журнал "Просвещение".

P.S Ситуация в России показывает, что , похоже, опять инспирируется появление "красного путинизма" — надежды на Путина как борца против империализма.  Чего быть не может....

◆ AntiCapitalist Resistance

Dear friends,

Thanks for your invitation to send a message to your conference. We are glad to hear that there are also internationalists in Japan campaigning in solidarity with the people of Ukraine in its resistance against Russian imperialism. We wish your movement courage and determination in putting out this internationalist message amongst all progressives, trade-unionists, and socialists, but also towards the population in general who is naturally repulsed by the crimes of imperialism whether committed by the West or Russia.

In solidarity,

Fred for AntiCapitalist Resistance

*****   *****

AntiCapitalist Resistance and the War in Ukraine.

1.        ACR condemns the invasion of Ukraine, calls for all Russian troops to immediately withdraw from Ukraine, and supports the resistance, armed and otherwise, of the people of Ukraine. The Ukrainians are fighting for the liberation of their country from occupation and annexation by Russian imperialism. This war is one of self-determination against Russian aggression. We support the supply of arms to Ukraine from wherever it can obtain them to defend of the country. All the necessary military and humanitarian aid should be sent to Ukraine so that it can push back and defeat the Russian army. The war is an existential threat to the people of Ukraine, who have to resist and win. A victory by Russia would be devasting for Ukraine, leading to ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide. It would also strengthen the forces of the far right and neo-fascism around the world.

2.        The UK should promptly open borders and lift visa requirements for refugees from Ukraine, as it should do for all refugees fleeing wars and persecution. The cancelation of the debt owed by Ukraine to western banks is crucial to allow its reconstruction.

3.        We support the anti-war movement in Russia and the call for sanctions, which comes from Ukrainians, against Russia including boycotting gas and oil. These sanctions should be targeted at the oligarchs and the war machine. The assets of Russian oligarchs in the UK should be confiscated and used to support refugees and rebuild Ukraine. Russian oil and gas should be replaced immediately by energy from renewable sources, energy consumption reduced and new sites for carbon extraction and nuclear power opposed.

4.        NATO has expanded as several countries in the east of Europe have joined Europe over the last 20 years. But neither NATO nor Ukraine presented an immediate security threat to Russia. Putin has used the pretext of NATO expansion for the war. Putin’s objective is the imperialist annexation of Ukraine, like those of other former republics of the USSR. It is dressed up with nationalist and racist tropes about denazification, and Ukraine not existing as a nation and being historically part of Russia.

5.        We support the right of Ukraine to obtain the weapons they need from wherever they can, including NATO countries. There should be no illusions or trust in NATO who can and would abandon Ukraine when necessary for its own geopolitical and economic interests. They will use the supply of weapons to force a rotten peace deal in which Ukraine would be forced to accept if not recognise a partition of the country.

6.        The military support of the EU, UK, NATO and the US to the Zelenski government and the economic sanctions against Russia is not disinterested. For them, it is a war by proxy against Russia to cripple its economy and military capabilities, returning to a post 1989 unipolar world dominated by US imperialism. It is dressed up as supporting a fight for democracy, but NATO countries support brutal dictatorships elsewhere, such as Saudi Arabia. NATO and western imperialism have seized the opportunity of this war to renew their ideological justification for military interventions. After 2001, it was the “clash of civilisation”, now it is a fight for democracy. This new ideological narrative has infected some on the left who believe that NATO could be reformed to defend democracy against totalitarian regimes.

7.        While there is at the moment no direct military action between Russia and the west, there is an inter-imperialist conflict. But it is secondary to the war for liberation and independence by Ukraine. There is a danger of an escalation with the war-mongering rhetoric from the UK and US. Direct military intervention by NATO must be opposed as it could escalate into a new world war with nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, the left and internationalists should support unconditionally - and critically when necessary - the Ukrainian people’s resistance.

8.        ACR supports in Britain the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, which is the only campaign in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, supporting their resistance (armed and otherwise), and linking up with the trade-unions and the left in Ukraine. It does so without endorsing the Zelenski regime. The support is unconditional but when necessary critical as it is over the attack on workers’ rights in the Ukrainian parliament. Socialists should be particularly in solidarity with the socialist, trade-union, feminist and other progressive organisations in Ukraine. The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign has the support of the National Union of Mineworkers, the Public and Civil Services Union, ASLEF the train drivers’ union, and several Members of Parliament. ACR also works with the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine.

9.        The starting point for ACR is solidarity with the people of Ukraine. This is not the case for the Stop the War Coalition, the Socialist Workers Party, Counterfire or the Communist Party of Britain. They place responsibility for the war equally on both NATO and Russia, and some support Russia’s claim that it had “genuine security concerns”. They characterise this war as purely an inter-imperialist war, with the Ukrainians being puppets of western imperialism. While opposing NATO expansion and calling for Russian troops out, they are against arms being sent to Ukraine, and call for a ceasefire and negotiations. A ceasefire by Ukraine in the present situation amounts to a capitulation to Russia, which would lead to an annexation of the country.

◆ News and Letters Committees

August 1, 2022

Comrades!

We welcome your call for working people all over the world to unite to crush Putin’s brutal war of aggression, which you correctly do not fear to label genocide. We welcome your firm solidarity with the Ukrainian people fighting the invasion. We join with your warning of the rising danger of a nuclear war and the clash between U.S.-Japan and China-Russia, all acting as militaristic forces of capitalist-imperialism. We recognize that these dangers call for humanity to abolish the whole global system of capitalism and the imperialism that is its natural outgrowth. We are in full solidarity with your opposition to the constitutional revision and strengthening of the U.S.-Japan military alliance.

Like you, we support growth of antiwar struggle around the world. We always strive to keep it unseparated from revolutionary struggle to abolish capitalism and replace it with a new human society, and oppose defense of or conciliation with capitalism or with particular capitalist governments, whether they are the states of the U.S., Russia, China or Japan, and even when it is part of the Left that conciliates these capitalist state powers.

The failure of much of today’s left to oppose Putin resolutely is in part due to the failure to recognize that the challenge of Stalinism was not only political but rather could only be met by making new beginnings in philosophy of revolution. Anti-Stalinism and theoretical comprehension of state-capitalism are a necessary first negation, which can only be completed by such new philosophical beginnings rooted in a return to Marx’s Humanism and its roots in the Hegelian dialectic. In this time of multiple, connected existential crises, the future of revolution and therefore the future of humanity depends on it.

Onward in solidarity toward the end of capitalism, imperialism, genocide, militarism, racism, narrow nationalism, xenophobia, sexism, and heterosexism, and toward revolution in permanence with the foundation of a society with totally new human relations!

For freedom,

Franklin Dmitryev, National Organizer, for 

The National Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees,

◆ Lotta Comunista

July 29, 2022, Italy

Comrades,

This year the 60th International Antiwar Assembly in Japan takes on great significance as a war of global implications is underway.

Like the vast majority of contemporary wars, the war in Ukraine has many dimensions. It is a class war of the bourgeoisies against the proletariat, bombed in its homes, exploited in Ukrainian factories, with anti-union impositions, and repressed by martial law; it is an intra-state war between the pro-European Ukrainian West and the pro-Russian Donbass; it is a national war between the Ukrainian state and the Russian imperialist aggressor; but it is primarily an imperialist war, a clash between the great powers through the war in Ukraine, through the financial, political and military means of imperialism, through the imperialist division of spheres of influence.

The Russian imperialists have shamelessly attacked the Ukrainian state, but what are the interests at stake in this war? Isn't the annexation of Kiev to the EU one of the objectives of European imperialism? Isn't the US waging a "proxy war" against Russia? Isn't it perhaps one of Moscow's declared intentions to "bring out a multipolar order" of which Russia, China and other powers would be the new poles? Doesn't Beijing claim "a globalization that is not controlled by the West"? Doesn't even Japanese imperialism take advantage of this to accelerate its rearmament?

And aren't these the characteristics of a war of imperialism? Of course, a partial and not a general war, a local and not a world war, but an imperialist war: this is the prevailing and characteristic aspect of this war, which calls the Leninists to resolutely refuse the support each belligerent bourgeoisie, and to fight for the international unity of the proletarians against all the bourgeoisies.

Russian imperialism is fighting not simply for Ukraine, but for its own place in the worsening contention between all the powers of imperialism. Only Stalin's hypocritical grandchildren can believe they are hiding it: this is only the first war of the current crisis of the imperialist world order, it is only the first link in a chain of wars that will be able to hasten or delay the Third World War but cannot prevent it. Comrades, let us denounce the chain of imperialist wars which opens the way to the world revolution! Our slogan in Ukraine must be that of Lenin against the imperialist war!

Comrades, in your appeal you recall Lenin's position on the "just war", when an "oppressed nation" responds to the aggression of a "great power". You express yourselves "in firm solidarity with Ukrainian working people and soldiers who are battling unbendingly". You ask "Don't isolate Ukrainian people battling against invaders". You see "strong counteroffensives of the Ukrainian Armed Forces united with grassroots masses".

Furthermore, you address the Ukrainian workers inviting them to repel the Russian armies "in the unity among the national forces, territorial defence forces, residents and volunteers with the working class as its core". Finally, you denounce the degeneration of the so-called "leftists" both on pro-Russian positions (prisoners of Stalinist nostalgia), and on centrist positions. On all these points, and in particular on Lenin's watchwords, an in-depth theoretical debate between all the internationalist forces available today is necessary because, with the advance of the chain of wars of imperialism and in the face of the next catastrophic break in the World War, these problems and the revolutionary perspectives will have to be widely discussed, in a way that, at the earliest opportunity, the movement is not caught off guard.

As you know, there is no space in our position for justification, silence, tolerance or ambiguity about the Russian imperialist aggression in Ukraine; neither is there any room for Ukrainian nationalism, Ukrainian national defence against Russian imperialist aggression, unity among the national forces, subjection of the Ukrainian proletariat to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and therefore for the national question in Ukraine: it is no longer possible for the proletariat to use the national claim without being grasped by the imperialist forces. The class character of the need of proletarian internationalism, expressly aimed at the Russian, Ukrainian, European (and international) “proletariat”, and not generically to “peoples”, is therefore unequivocal for us: unity of the Ukrainian and Russian proletariat against the Ukrainian and Russian bourgeoisies!

Today Ukraine is on fire; tomorrow the same could happen anywhere else in the world. The massive rearmament race, the fleets crossing the seas, the aircraft and missiles flying over cities and states, up to the multiplication of nuclear devices, clearly tell us what, once again, the inevitable outcome of imperialism is: war. As ever, men and women belonging to our class will pay the price in Ukraine. And many millions of children! We are and we will always be at their side, against all imperialisms, against Russia imperialistic aggression and against all nationalisms.

As for the international theoretical confrontation on the national question, we think it is correct to recall Lenin's position on the Balkan wars, a local conflict directed by the imperialist powers; and then Lenin's positions on the First imperialist World War. But we also remember Trotsky's position on the war in Ukraine on the eve of the Second World War!

Lenin obviously takes into account all the national factors present but believes that they are subordinate to the general course of confrontation between the imperialist powers operating in the Balkan area before the first imperialist World War.

It is certainly not a question of indifferentism towards the Ukrainian defence to emphasize this aspect today: for Marxism the "national question" is not a question of principle, but has always been a question of class struggle, that is, of the possibility for the proletariat to utilise of the national question. Therefore, only those national bourgeois claims which benefit the international struggle of the proletariat are supported by Marxism. So-called "leftists", opportunists and Stalinists should know that the revolutionary party that adheres to this principle cannot be dragged, through the transmission belt of the "national question", into social-imperialist positions; it can be reduced to extreme isolation but cannot be distorted.

Comrades, as night follows day, in capitalism peace and war alternate continuously: they are two sides of the same coin. The imperialist war in Ukraine once again calls the revolutionaries to reflect on the exhaustion of the national question in the era of imperialism. Not by chance, in the writing on the "Problem of the Ukraine" of April 1939, Trotsky attacked the «"nationalists" who proposed to solve the Ukrainian question by entering the service of one imperialism against another» (!) and warned the transformation of the national question «in the epoch of imperialism»: «Insofar as the [Ukrainian] issue depends upon the military strength of the imperialist states, the victory of one grouping or another can signify only a new dismemberment and a still more brutal subjugation of the Ukrainian people. The program of independence for the Ukraine in the epoch of imperialism is directly and indissolubly bound up with the program of the proletarian revolution. It would be criminal to entertain any illusions on this score»!

Unfortunately, we do not know how the reflection of the great revolutionary would have developed had it not been interrupted by the vile ax of Stalinism, but we have a duty to develop it ourselves "in the epoch of imperialism".

1) For Marx and Engels, the "national question" was part of the strategy of the "permanent revolution" which rested on the national bourgeois-democratic revolutions carried out by the most revolutionary elements of the bourgeoisie and the people, as in 1793, and were supported by Marx and Engels in 1848 and in subsequent strategic junctures in Germany and Europe. The feudal and dynastic wars of the Middle Ages were then opposed by the revolutionary democratic wars, wars of national liberation that the communists supported against the reaction because they developed the productive forces, and thus made the class struggle progress towards the next leap of the social revolution.

2) For Lenin, the "era of imperialism" on the one hand surpasses the program of 1848 in the great European powers: it is no longer a question of supporting the bourgeoisie because the bourgeoisie becomes reactionary and imperialism, instead of developing the productive forces and class, it destroys them in war and social putrefaction. The proletarians of all countries must therefore unite against all the reactionary bourgeoisies: the revolutionary strategy "in the age of imperialism" is clear and sharp. But on the other hand, imperialism itself places the national question on "new foundations" in the bourgeois-democratic revolutions of the colonies. We communists support the anti-colonial democratic revolutions, the formation of the great states and the great modern proletariats in Asia and in the new areas of imperialist development, the new "flammable substances" of the world revolution.

3) At a certain stage of industrialization, now fully global, in the second half of the twentieth century, even the national question in the new areas loses its specific importance because, in very vast economic areas, the social forces are now polarized in the predominant and generalized relationship between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The bourgeois-proletariat class struggle is internationalized and interdependent, the proletarian revolution links all world trends, the revolutionary strategy will be homogeneous, the communists are no longer forced to support the national bourgeoisies.

Now the revolution no longer depends on the link between class struggle and bourgeois revolution as it had been for Marx and Engels in Europe, or on the link between imperialist struggles and the independence movements of the new areas as it had been for Lenin: for the first time, the revolutionary strategy can do without the "national question" all over the world, the proletarians are no longer forced to fight for the national bourgeoisie because, moreover, through it they would be used by the imperialist forces. Even today, the Ukrainian national question, which is certainly resurfacing, is completely dominated by the confrontation of imperialist powers and by the full development of the class opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. So, in the current imperialist phase, the only “just war” is the revolutionary war! The class contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat is prevalent all over the world.

Today, the revolutionary strategy passes through the unity of the proletariat of all countries - Russian proletariat with Ukrainian proletariat, as Palestinian proletariat with Israeli proletariat (!) or Japanese proletariat with Chinese proletariat (!!) etc. - against all bourgeoisies (Russian, Ukrainian, Arab, Israeli, Japanese, Chinese, etc.) and against all imperialist powers (USA, Russia, EU, China, Japan, etc.) which, with their capitals and the supplies of their weapons, prepare and fuel conflicts.

Comrades, let us denounce the imperialist contradictions of this war! Putin saw the crisis of imperialistic order as an opportunity to regain part of the positions lost thirty years ago, but already from decades Russian imperialism revealed its intrinsic weakness: when in 1953 in Berlin, in 1956 in Budapest, in 1968 in Prague, in 1981 in Gdansk and in Warsaw with the coup of General Jaruzelski, it was forced to secure his dominion by military force, where it lacked the economic and financial strength of the other imperialisms. With the usual brutality, Russian imperialism once again plays the game of spheres of influence by crushing the workers of Eastern Europe. Only unrepentant Stalinists can invoke the Russian defence against NATO provocations: in imperialism it is not important who attacks first, which power attacks and which power reacts. Imperialism is the aggressor; proletariat is the attacked!

The US is challenged by China for global primacy: it cannot accept being challenged by Russia even at the risk of pushing it towards China, but it has failed to defend its positions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; it is no longer able to persuade its allies in the Gulf and in Asia by now suspicious; moreover, it is traversed by profound political fluctuations. The US imperialists use the Ukrainian war to weaken Russia, divide the EU, condition other powers and counter their own decline!

Europe is caught in the middle of the confrontation between the US and Russia and between the US and China. EU imperialism is lagging behind in the federalization of foreign and defence policy: it seeks its strategic autonomy but is divided between the Franco-German axis which has historical ties with Russia and Eastern Europe mainly hostile to Moscow. This favours the American intrusive game in Europe and between Europe and Russia, which also conditions the relations between the European imperialists and the Chinese imperialists. Imperialism is a balance between brigands: what does Ukrainian national defence have to do with it?

China and India manage their "active neutrality" in the conflict; the war in Ukraine foreshadows the clashes that will accompany the rise of China in Asia. Beijing observes with own eye on the dispute over Taiwan; it measures American determination or velleity to resist the decline; and in reality it calibrates its support for Moscow without going beyond the "quasi-alliance". India is also trying to secure the benefits of its non-alignment policy now transformed into multi-alignment. Japanese imperialism accelerates war spending plans and the revision of the defence doctrine, dosing the confirmation of the American relationship with the search for a space of autonomy from Washington vis-à-vis China. What does Ukrainian "defence of the homeland" have to do with all of this?

Turkey sees space for its own initiative. Other medium and small powers, including Israel, the petromonarchies of the Gulf, South Africa and other Asian and African states are watching the conflict as they watch the wear and tear of Euro-Atlantic dominance; they suspect the use of the dollar and sanctions as weapons of economic warfare; they weigh the advantages of neutrality and the influence of Chinese orientations. Each big and small marauder tries to take advantage of the situation: on the skin of the Ukrainian proletariat! And then there is the despicable Ukrainian bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie of the small national state of Kiev crossed by the great world currents, a deeply cynical and divided bourgeoisie: from Lviv they look to the European Union and NATO; from the Donbass and the Russian-speaking areas they look instead to Moscow, passing through its secession. The Ukrainian bourgeois fractions are tied by a thousand threads to imperialism.

However, Ukraine is the land of a large and modern proletariat, made of almost 16 million wage workers, a size similar to that of the Italian one! An extraordinary force which, if combined with the proletariat army of Russia and Europe, would have the power to immediately silence the weapons, as you write in your appeal. Here is the internationalist lever against Russian, European and American imperialism, and all imperialisms. Our flag has not changed at all: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!"

Comrades, let us not be fooled by the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, cynical and divided between Russian imperialists and European and American imperialists! Down with Ukrainian national unity! Long live the revolt of the Ukrainian exploited masses against their government! Down with the Russian imperialistic aggression! Long live the revolt of the Russian exploited masses against the barbaric Putin regime!

Leninists have always condemned wars between peoples as bestial barbarism, but they distinguish themselves from pacifists as they understand the inevitable link between wars and class struggle, they understand the impossibility of destroying wars without destroying the division of society into classes through the proletarian revolution, and therefore - as Lenin says – they "fully recognize the legitimacy, the progressive character and the necessity of civil wars, that is, of the wars of the oppressed class against the one it oppresses, of the slaves against the slave masters, of the serfs against landlords, of the wage workers against the bourgeoisie".

The watchword in Ukraine and Russia is therefore that of Lenin against the imperialist war! Lenin's indications are an inestimable patrimony available to the entire world proletariat: "In every country one must first of all fight against the chauvinism of that country, arouse hatred towards one's own government, make repeated, insistent, frequent, incessant appeals to solidarity between the workers of the belligerent countries, to their common civil war against the bourgeoisie". No one can guarantee to what extent such a revolutionary preparatory work will bear fruits: "The question is not there" replies Lenin, "only cowardly sophists repudiate revolutionary agitation for the reason that no one knows when the revolution will come". The point that distinguishes the communists is work "along this line".

We therefore reject national unity with the Ukrainian bourgeoisie in national defence against Russian imperialist aggression, since the Ukrainian national question is now dominated by global imperialism. This does not mean that the proletariat is not forced to defend itself from the military aggression, but what - also in this war - distinguishes the communists from all bourgeois, opportunistic and social-nationalist forces is the revolutionary struggle, certainly not the defence against the aggression from any power. Even in the - temporary!, Lenin specifies – impossibility to carry out the social revolution, even if forced to temporarily submit to the majority of the nation, that is to the will of the ruling class, and go to war, the communists will still work against the bourgeoisie, organizing illegal revolutionary propaganda in the national army, in the militias of the oligarchs, in the territorial defence forces, in the invader army, where necessary depending on the circumstances, orienting the fraternization of worker-soldiers among the belligerent armies, preparing the civil war of the proletarians of all countries, going to prison if necessary as traitors of the national bourgeoisie, but always as true members of the working class. No to the political unity of the Ukrainian proletariat with the Ukrainian Armed Forces, yes to the illegal internationalist propaganda in the armies!

Comrades, let us reread Lenin in these moments of acute world tension! As for the civil war: "we cannot 'do it', but we preach it and work in this direction". As for the transformation of "hatred against the "enemy", a feeling aroused by the bourgeoisie, into "hatred against their own government and their own bourgeoisie", it will be the waves of war that will transform the psychologies of the masses: the "experience of war changes their heads" says Lenin. Today, we do not know if and when the continuation of the Ukrainian war will have such a profound impact on the condition of the classes that the rejection of their own governments in the proletariat in Kiev as well as in Moscow will arose; certainly such a revolutionary prospect pays for the delay of the international party of our class, a party that fights for the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian proletariat against the new Tsar of Moscow and against the oligarchs of Kiev, as in 1917-18! At the moment, not even a Kiev Commune is conceivable.

Regardless of how difficult this is, in the minority, even in extreme isolation, it is decisive for revolutionaries to work in this sense, with this spirit, to point this direction. Again Lenin: "the problems of the revolutionary struggle (tactics, means, propaganda in the army, fraternization in the trenches, etc.) must absolutely be examined point by point, discussed, meditated on, controlled, explained to the masses". Without this, the revolution remains a sentence, and in these circumstances only the bourgeois national defence remains, used by imperialism. If one sees only or predominantly the defence war against Russian imperialist aggression, without seeing the revolutionary struggle against world imperialism, one sees the tree but not the forest, and the Ukrainian workers are left to the bourgeois national forces and the manoeuvres of the world imperialism, without the possibility of revolutionary salvation.

We do not know yet whether it will be up to the Ukrainian proletariat to write other tragic and luminous pages: as it was for the Berlin workers in 1953; for the proletarians and students of Budapest in 1956, who claimed in the Councils their opposition to Hungarian state capitalism and Russian imperialism; for the workers of Gdansk in 1980 and 1981 who deserve the undying merit of having revealed the true nature of Polish state capitalism and its Moscow protector. The substance of capitalist rule in the former USSR has certainly not changed: the Ukrainian and the Russian proletarians face the tremendous challenge of conquering their own class autonomy.

Comrades, in your appeal you call the Ukrainian proletarians and the Russian proletarians to unite "to fight in solidarity with each other by reviving the great spirit of the soviet-based revolution in 1917-18, in which the proletariat, peasants and soldiers of both nations joined together". Historical experience has shown, as you write, that the only power that can truly stop the war of imperialism "lies in the united struggles of working people in Ukraine, in Russia and all over the world." This is the path indicated by world Bolshevism: against the war, the revolution!

It is in these tragic and terrible circumstances that the full weight of the historical delay of the international revolutionary party is felt, a force that would have the possibility of addressing the Ukrainian and Russian proletarians, and that could link the opposition to that war to an internationalist strategy rooted in all the capitals of imperialism. This does not prevent that internationalist battle from being fought, in the given conditions and with the forces that exist, with the aim at least of attesting internationalist minorities in Europe, in Japan, wherever possible.

Long live the unity of the workers of Europe, Ukraine, Russia and all countries!

Internationalist solidarity with Ukrainian workers against Russian imperialist aggression and against their own government!

Long live the combined action of the European and Japanese communists!

Lotta Comunista

◆The All Pakistan Federation of United Trade Unions (APFUTU)

Thank you very much for receiving the annual invitation and newsletter.

Our organization  pays tribute to you for your services and efforts and we stand by your side in promoting peace efforts in the world. Our organization has always opposed the race of nuclear weapons because the amount of money that is being spent on nuclear weapons every year can be eradicated from the world by correct use of this money, poverty, unemployment, hunger and poverty.

In the past, our organization also opposed the nuclear blasts by the government of Pakistan in 1998 and protested across Pakistan against this move, which would result in anti-national charges against our leaders and all the leaders including the organization. Assets were confiscated. But we are still trying to promote peace efforts in limited and difficult economic conditions.

Pakistan and Japan have old and strong relations, we are with you to expand the relations,

Next year we will definitely participate in your program and increase this friendship, there are great people who participate in the program and play a role in organizing this program every year. Congratulations for the wonderful program.

Mr. Zia Syed

Secretary General 

All Pakistan Federation of United Trade Unions (APFUTU)

◆ War Resisters League

Dear Antiwar Japan,

The War Resisters League sends you warm greetings of solidarity for your 60th International Antiwar Assembly. These are trying times for all of us that seek as war-free demilitarized and denuclearized world.

We strongly oppose the Russia's attack on Ukraine and the massive influx of weapons into the region. We support resisters from all nations to this and all wars. We are dismayed by threats to use nuclear weapons made during this conflict.

We are watching events in Japan with and support maintaining Article 9 of  constitution and join you opposing the expansion of Japan's so-called self-defense forces.

Globally, we call for an end to military alliances and fully support the removal of all foreign military bases, including  the U.S. bases in Okinawa and in Japan.

In solidarity.

John M. Miller
member, International Task Force, War Resisters League. USA

◆ Socialist League of Internationalist Workers of Bolivia - FLTI

July 31, 2022

We send our warm revolutionary internationalist greetings to all the organizers and participants of the 60th International Antiwar Assembly in Japan.

Comrades, in this opportunity in which the 60th International Anti-War Assembly will meet, we address you about the campaign that is promoting the "International Network for the Freedom of Political Prisoners" which we, from Bolivia, also have taken into our own hands. In particular, we are taking the campaign for the freedom of the young Greek anarchist Giannis Michailidis who, as part of the militant youth, confronted the Troika and its plans of oppression, in addition to being in solidarity with the Syrian refugees fleeing the bloody war of the assassins Assad and Putin.

Likewise, we have been battling for solidarity with the Italian workers who took to the streets due to the situation of our Ukrainian class brothers and sisters, at the battle-cry "War on war!", even facing their own bourgeoisie that imprisoned the union leaders who were part of that fight without mercy.

In this struggle, a sector of the Bolivian working class and of the militant youth has been aware of strengthening the internationalist solidarity ties. For this reason, a group of mining workers from the mining district Huanuni (Oruro), from the shafts, through their notes expressed their support. In the same way, women workers from the construction area joined this struggle.

Fortunately, the youth is also beginning to take these solidarity flags and painted graffiti in the main streets of the city of La Paz, Bolivia, for the freedom of the young Giannis Michailidis.

We enthusiastically share you images of this that we are explaining you, so that you take knowledge of them; so that they reach the revolutionary Marxists of the JRCL-RMF and the Zengakuren Youth; so that you can take them to the heart of all the revolutionary students of Japan, of each Japanese revolutionary worker, promoting together this campaign and this fight against the capitalist regimes that imprison militant workers and rebellious youth.

That is why we propose you to launch this campaign for the freedom of all political prisoners, from Tokyo to New York, from Milan to Beijing, from La Paz to Moscow. One single enemy, one single fight!

Revolutionary greetings to all the participants of the Antiwar Assembly in Japan

Let's continue fighting across borders!

Justice to our martyrs!

Long live international proletarian solidarity!

◆ Commission of Convicted Workers, Families and Friends of Las Heras / International Network for the Freedom of All the World Political Prisoners and Justice to our Martyrs

Las Heras, Santa Cruz, Argentine Patagonia, July 31, 2022

We wanted to salute the new yearly meeting you are holding and reaffirm we keep on fighting together across borders.

Our families will never forget that from the very first moment we fought against the oil companies in Patagonia, you, from the other side of the world, were shoulder to shoulder together with us striking as a single fist. We also have recorded in our memories and in our hearts that in the dark days of jail, torture and humiliations we suffered for more than three years, the banner demanding our freedom never left the streets of Japan.

In 2013, up to the day of the brutal sentence to life in jail on December 12, you were the first to arrive to the court that among shadows and under a brutal isolation, intended to imprison us in order to chastise all the workers of our country.

That’s why we lost any fear and took to the streets in our town. And also why we went through the whole country seeking solidarity and unity in the struggle with all the workers to confront the Videlaist judges, coordinating ourselves above borders and through the prison bars of the dungeons of the States.

Finally, despite the sentence imposed by the justice, today we are in our homes with our families. We will not rest a single day in our fighting so that no worker has to live what we went through, knowing that the best way the workers have to stop these brutal attacks is to get together, all of us workers, including all of us who are political prisoners, and the relatives of the martyrs that gave their blood confronting the exploiters and their constant attacks to our gains and living conditions.

Therefore, once again, we renew our call to fight together, because the jails of Latin America keep on being filled with prisoners for fighting, as v.g., in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia. The blood of our class is still being poured on the streets of our continent and the world. We cannot let this happen! We want justice to the martyrs of Senkata and Sacaba, Bolivia! We have to prevent the daily murders of the rebel youth and worker activists in Colombia to remain unpunished! The fallen in the struggle of our whole continent are martyrs of the entire world working class!

Latin America is being brutally plundered, and that’s why they attack all those who want to confront this war that imperialism has declared on us.

We see the tragedy of our Cuban brothers and sisters, who had the bravery of rising against the hunger imposed by Diaz-Canel and the government of the new rich of the Cuban Communist Party. On July 11, 2021, the Revolution Square of La Havana was full of starving comrades fighting for bread, and the police of the Cuban regime, together with a number of thugs from the Communist Party, beat and imprisoned hundreds of workers. Let’s cry together, Free the imprisoned workers that rose for bread on 11J!

At the same time, comrade Giannis Michailidis, an exponent of the struggle against the Greek State, keeps being a hostage of the monopolies and the government of the Troika. He performed a 67-days long hunger strike which almost cost him his life and left him with serious health sequels. The hunger strike Giannis was in  demand of conditional freedom after years in jail and harassments on him and tens of rebel Greek youth.

Giannis is already a foster child for all our families in Las Heras and we will not rest until seeing him free.

The genocide in Syria is still going on. Millions have been expelled from their homes and are living in tents in true concentration camps. There are more than 500 thousand political prisoners and disappeared for fighting against the fascist al-Assad for bread and freedom. Their families and comrades still demand freedom for all the prisoners and the appearance alive of thousands of disappeared.

Today, the workers and exploited in Ukraine are being massacred under the bombs of the butcher Putin and entire cities are under the rubble. But the workers haven’t said the last word, yet.

In Italy, different union organizations rose up under the slogan “War on the war!” confronting the bloody occupation of Putin and the military power of NATO in Europe. This great struggle paralyzed the main Italian cities in a social and general strike and in response different leaders have been imprisoned. They are our comrades! Let’s fight for their unconditional freedom!

We trust in you and know that we will keep on fighting together until freeing every comrade imprisoned for fighting for his or her rights and we call all the organizations that will be part of the 60^th Antiwar Assembly to unite in a single struggle of the exploited against the exploiters.

Let’s reinforce the struggle to unite the working class across the prison bars, above the borders, in the whole world!

The rebellion of the slaves is not a crime, IT IS JUSTICE!

Claudia Pafundi, member of the Commission of Convicted Workers, Families and Friends of Las Heras

International Network for the Freedom of All the World Political Prisoners and Justice to our Martyrs

◆ Fracción Leninista Trotskista Internacional

July 30, 2022

To the Executive Committee of the 60^th International Anti-war Assembly

To the revolutionary Zengakuren youth

From the Collective for the re-foundation of the Fourth International – FLTI, we are sending our internationalist revolutionary greetings to the assembly you are holding. We here adopt as ours your war-cry:

“Working people all over the world, let's unite to crush Putin's war!”

We adopt as ours the call of the workers of Milan, who 30 days ago called to the general strike to defeat NATO and stop the massacre of Putin in Ukraine to the war cry:

“War on the war!”

We, the internationalists, call to defeat the counterrevolutionary offensive of Putin, who wants to complete the crushing of the Ukrainian working class, from Donbass to Kyiv, to impose the same plan that the IMF has sought to impose to that subjugated nation for years.

We denounce that the US imperialism, at the command of NATO, is handing over Ukraine as a pawn to a war of massacre and partition, for itself to enter in the European business, of which the US were marginalized by the French-German axis, in order to be the one that deeply penetrates into Russia and gets its whole sources of raw materials and commodities. This is what the other character of the ongoing war is about.

Maastricht Europe was threatening to take the huge oil, gas and raw materials reserves of the “great” Russia as well as to control also other key branches of production. USA couldn’t allow this, or else it would be risking losing its hegemony in the world market.

The US “is now in the front row” in the fight for Moscow, leading the European continent and its rival powers to a brutal energy crisis, an increase in the prices of commodities and food, which have made inflation to sky-rocket. Meanwhile, it besieges the “great” Russia with a huge trade war.

The shutting down of the gas pipeline “Nordstream 2” indicated that, for now, the European imperialist powers have subordinated to the US offensive, which commands NATO.

After three world crashes in the 21st century, the US imperialism returns to the world to throw its entire crisis on it, and recover its hegemonic role in the world economy which it had begun to lose.

Comrades

These inter-imperialist disputes, the disputes for the new markets of the “great” Russia and the powerful China are paid by the masses with massacres, as in Ukraine and in Syria and Middle East before, just to give an example. They are paid by the working class, while the capitalists do big businesses with the war, selling weapons and guaranteeing, as it happens now, the circulation of grains from the bombed ports of Ukraine at extraordinary high prices for which Cargill, Monsanto and other imperialist cereal companies have been scoring record profits.

The big oil companies, such as Exxon, Shell, Total, distribute tens of thousands of millions of dollars in dividends to their shareholders for the increase in the price of energy and fuel. The transnational companies save themselves from the catastrophes by emptying the treasuries of the states, printing dollars, currency and values without backup. And by throwing to the workers of all the continents a brutal inflation and increase in the cost of living, which turn the subsistence of the exploited class impossible in the whole world.

There’s also the example of the “powerful” China in which a housing bubble exploded, in the same caliber as that of Wall Street in 2008, sending millions of savers to ruin and increasing the sufferings on the working class.

In this moment, the one bleeding out is the Ukrainian working class, today divided between the Russian invasion and the “siren songs” of the EU, which peddles that the workers would have the wellbeing they need inside it. They want to impose the Ukrainian workers the alternative that either they stay on the burning embers of the EU or in the boiling oil of the “great” Russia, crushed by the jackboot of the butcher Putin.

IT IS A LIE! Whether under the control of Moscow or NATO, Ukraine will be a colony under tutelage.

The one paying the war is the Ukrainian working class. The very Zelensky government has decreed, in the midst of Putin’s bombing, that the capitalists can fire the workers as they want, without compensation, and are even able to not paying their wages. While in Donbass, which is under the control of the Russian troops, the dismissals of thousands of miners and the mine closures continue, as the IMF has demanded for years and is still doing.

Comrades,

The counterrevolutionary forces of Stalinism and broad sectors of the renegades of Marxism have “joined Putin’s tanks” and supported his counterrevolutionary invasion to Ukraine. They make one of the biggest enemies of the working class, such as Putin, appear as an ally before their eyes. The excuse is no other than to say that he and the “great” Russia confront US imperialism and that Putin would be invading Ukraine “to crush fascism.”

IT IS A LIE! In Russia, the workers on strike, and moreover if they set up independent unions are convicted to jail and death penalty. Thus, thousands of workers and youth who refuse to go to fight in Ukraine are located in the dungeons of the counterrevolutionary regime of the new wannabe Czar of Russia.

Comrades, the revolutionary Marxists must openly confront Stalinism and other renegades of Marxism and neo-Trotskyist currents that support the butcher Putin. His bayonets point to the Russian working class and the masses in the former Soviet republics. They have been sent to kill the masses in Syria in a true genocide. They have supported al-Assad and, with Turkey and the US, they shared among themselves the businesses of a partitioned and bloodied Syria. The same thing they want to do in Ukraine, under Russian troops occupation.

With its military bases in Armenia, Moscow guaranteed Nagorno Karabakh to Azerbaijan for British Petroleum and Turkey to steal the oil from the Black Sea for the route of the oil pipelines across the Caucasus.

Months before invading Ukraine, the counterrevolutionary shock forces of Putin went to crush a revolutionary general strike of the workers of Kazakhstan, who had risen up against the plundering and brutal exploitation of the imperialist transnational companies, its oil companies and big steel factories such as Arcelor Mittal. Before invading Ukraine, the route followed by Putin was Belarus to crush the workers which, in political struggle and huge strikes, sought to defeat Putin’s ally Lukashenko government.

This counterrevolutionary raid of Moscow is a response to the entering to the fight of theenormous battalions of the working class in the former soviet republics, in both, the Muslim republics and the ones of Europe itself. The heroic struggle of the Ukrainian working class over these last years are the expression of it.

Comrades,

The pro-Stalinist left at international level declares itself an “enemy of NATO”. This is a lie. They, together with Podemos and the PSOE from the Spanish State, are in the same government supervised by the Bourbon monarchy. The last NATO meeting was held there, where Stalinists, social democrats and other traitors were their hosts. Likewise, in France, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain itself, the Stalinists control the most powerful unions in Europe. From them, the Stalinists, as internal police within the labor movement, support and protect the regimes of the imperialist Europe of Maastricht, all members of NATO.

The Stalinist left and other traitors to Marxism called to support Biden with the excuse of supporting "democracy" against Trump's "fascism": Traitors! A thousand times traitors! Biden, as Trump before, is the commander in chief of NATO and the U.S. government that, from the majority of the IMF directory, imposes the worst looting plans in the semi-colonial world, and in Ukraine in particular, which is indebted at more than 88 billion of dollars, which are paid for with the hunger, super-exploitation and misery of the people.

This class collaboration policy is what has also diverted and strangled the revolutionary uprisings in Latin America in Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Cuba itself. A bourgeois and pro-gringo "new left" is trying to stand up to close the road to socialist revolution, while the new lackeys of the Cuban bourgeoisie, from the island's Communist Party, have crushed a hunger uprising in the streets of La Havana filling Cuban's jails with political prisoners.

The war and the massacre of the Ukrainian working class, then, as before the counterrevolutionary crushing with the massacre in Syria, is the consequence of a chain of betrayals to the world working class by Stalinism, the remnants of social democracy and the renegades of Marxism.

Comrades,

In Ukraine, the way to finish defeating the Russian invasion is to recompose the unity of the working class so that it takes the military leadership of the war against national oppression everywhere. Only with a united working class will Ukraine be able to defeat the invasion of Putin and Moscow and stop the pretensions of NATO and  IMF to plunder it. That is why our battle cry is:

Out with Putin and the invading troops! Out with the IMF! Out with imperialism!

Enough of misery wages! Nationalization without compensation of all the mines, the lands, the transnationals and the banks that are in the hands of the oligarchs associated with imperialism or the butchers of Moscow!

These are the minimum demands with which the working class can unite their ranks from Donbass to Kyiv, open the path to take the military leadership of the war, putting under its command all the military forces of the nation.

The unity of the Ukrainian working class, leading the fight against the butcher Putin, would arouse the enthusiasm and win the support of the European working class from Portugal to Moscow.

From Ukraine, a military workers' command of the war would incite tens of millions of exploited Russians to rise up against Putin and close the path to the "peace of the graveyards" and the division of Ukraine that Zelensky, the lackey of the U.S., is preparing, together with Putin, as soon as imperialism gives him the order.

Meanwhile, a pro-social-democratic and pro-imperialist left proclaims that through NATO and “democratic imperialisms” the masses will get the weapons to defeat Putin. This sinister policy is promoted by the so-called "anti-capitalists" in Europe, pro-social democratic currents like the LIT, which treat NATO as if they were liberation troops and not tools for subjugation, counterrevolutionary wars and oppression.

We revolutionary Marxists have the program and the strategy to win, inherited from the combat of the Bolsheviks and the Third International and from Trotsky's combat against the Stalinist scourge. The way is none other than setting up the combat:

FOR AN INDEPENDENT SOVIET UKRAINE

This conquest would undoubtedly be a bastion of the struggle for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms, without Stalinists or traitors, in all the territories of the former USSR, as a decisive link in the struggle for the United Socialist States of Europe.

Comrades,

Like yesterday in Syria, in the combats in Chile, Colombia and Latin America, fighting for the freedom of the world's political prisoners, fighting against imperialism that threatens to lead the entire planet to barbarism, the internationalist Trotskyists of the FLTI have met you fighting together in the same trench, now in the Ukraine, fighting the same enemy.

The working class has not given up and has put up huge battles. The forces of the proletariat of the imperialist powers prevent the latter, for the time being, from leading the civilization to new large-scale military conflagrations. First, the imperialist powers, in their disputes, must crush their own working classes, which yesterday forced them, like in the U.S., to leave Iraq and Afghanistan. That is the path that the Russian working class must follow in order to defeat the Russian war machine from within.

The alternative, comrades, is not only war, but also that the road to international socialist revolution remains open. The working class has not been defeated. Therefore, the alternative is and remains to be:

“socialism or war”

The tragedy for the masses, the one that pushes here and there to setbacks and partial defeats, is not their weakness in their combats, but the betrayal of their leaderships... The war cry that reformism has raised on the planet and the so called "New Left ” is that “socialism is no more”. It does so at the moment of the greatest catastrophe of the capitalist system, which threatens to lead human civilization to barbarism and widespread famine.

Comrades,

In different countries, where the masses have entered the fight, the regimes of the expropriators of the people take hostages that they keep locked up in the dungeons of their states. Palestinian youth, Greek and Chilean youth, the rebels in Cuba, the oppressed in Moscow who refuse to accompany Putin in his military attack on Ukraine, among others, are locked up in the prisons of the capitalists.

The leaders of the SiCobas and USB unions in Milan, Italy, have recently been arrested. They are the ones who put forward the motion:

“War to war throughout Europe and for the general strike”

They fought to combat Putin's invasion of Ukraine and NATO's counterrevolutionary forces. They are the most advanced, together with the combative trade unionism of the Spanish State, of the internationalist forces that are regrouping in Europe to fight alongside the Ukrainian working class and stop the NATO war machine.

In the prisons of Greece, the young anarchist Giannis Michailidis is on a hunger strike fighting for his freedom. He was at the head of the fight against the infamous Troika regime and supported, from the dungeons of the regime, the Leon Sedov Brigade, which left its martyrs in the fight for the Syrian revolution.

Comrades, there is no time to lose. We must unite the forces of revolutionary Marxism. The time has cometo set up an internationalist bloc to confront all the traitorous leaderships that paralyze the working-class offensives.

The time to promote international days of combat, as the Zengakuren youth did when marching to the Russian embassy in Tokyo, to defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has come.

The time to jointly call for an international campaign for the freedom of the workers of Milan, the vanguard of the fight against Putin's counterrevolutionary war on Ukraine and NATO has arrived.

Not one more day the rebellious youth of Greece, the revolutionary Chilean youth, the revolted youth of the hungry in Cuba, should be repressed by the Stalinist scourge, nor the tens of thousands of tortured, mutilated and murdered in the prisons of the fascist al-Assad, may stay in the prisons of the bourgeois regimes!

Freedom now to all the political prisoners of the world working class!

Comrades,

In wars, be they of oppression and looting or inter-imperialist, the unity and centrality of internationalist revolutionary Marxism is put on the order of the day to transform them into the beginning of the socialist revolution and to present a battle to reformism throughout the world.

The hour of the great world military conflagrations is approaching. Only the socialist revolution can stop it. This is what the battle of the revolutionary Marxists is about.

Carlos Munzer, Abu Muad, Paula Medrano, James Sakala and Milenka Lopez

for the International Secretariat of the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI

◆ Tavini Huiraatira no te Ao Maohi

Dear comrades and friends, ia ora na !

First of all, warmest greetings from Maohi Nui to Japanese People and to our friends from Zengakuren.

We express great solidarity on the occasion of the 60^th International Antiwar Assemblies in Japan. Our solidarity with the Japanese people is guided by our common goal to reach a nuclear free World and to remind humanity about the devastating power of the nuclear bomb.

As we all know, the Pacific Ocean has been where nuclear bombs have been fully developed, tested, like in the Marshall Islands and in Maohi Nui, and used to directly kill people, like in Japan. In the near future, humanity might face a thermo-nuclear world war.

A peaceful world could only be reached if imperialist nations stop colonialism and stop invading other nations. Imperialist countries have always forwarded any reason to conquer new land like claiming that they come to civilize and educate the people living on them. Ins reality, imperialist countries are mainly interested by the extension of their territory and the resource of the new land. Africa has been the playground of Europe, South America of Europe and US, and now China and Russia want theirs as well.

Pacific small island countries also have been invaded by Europe well before World War II and small island countries has been re-shared after WWII.

So has France inherited of Maohi Nui which already were a French colony for 140 years. Annexation of Maohi Nui in 1880 did not happened without war. Of course, this war was unheard since it happens long time ago and in our history taught at school, France which is controlling the education, did everything to hide it to the people of Maohi Nui.

Today, France is proud to tell the world that it has the second biggest Economic Exclusive Zone where half of it is located in Maohi Nui. France has used Maohi Nui for their nuclear test leaving irradiated islands and people with cancer. France exploited Maohi Nui resources like phosphate in the past and now claims to be the owner of all the mineral deposits in the sea floor of the Maohi Nui EEZ.

Today, people of Maohi Nui seek for their freedom like any people living in an invaded and colonized country. There are two paths to freedom: war or diplomacy. As for us, only diplomacy applies as promoted by the United Nations Organization.

We have not yet healed our old wounds but imperialist countries would not give us a rest since a new world emerges where concerns are dominance, welfare and benefit of a minority by making use or by selling arms often tested and developed on foreign grounds.

The world is now near chaos and the Anti War movement is important to remind us of the terrifying destructive power of the nuclear bomb and that a peaceful approach should be preferred.     

Faaitoito, with Solidarity !

Keitapu Maamaatuaiahutapu, Heinui Le Caill and Guillaune Colombani

Members of the Tavini Huiraatira

◆ Organising Committee for the Reconstitution of the Fourth International (OCRFI)

August 1, 2022

Dear comrades,

We wish full success to your assembly and send our revolutionary greetings to all those attending the Assembly in Tokyo and in other main towns of Japan, against war and in memory of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American imperialism in 1945. Through this barbarous act of American imperialism, the capitalist system made use of the most advanced technical steps forward for mass destruction of human lives. This sums up the nature of the world capitalist system and of it allies.

Those assemblies take place today at a time when global war is threatening once again mankind and civilisation. The barbarous and reactionary aggression of Poutine against Ukraine has created a situation in which world imperialism, and especially its main representative American imperialism are heading, under the banner of NATO, towards the generalised used of military means to preserve and strengthen their world domination.

From the very start of the aggression against Ukraine, the OCRFI has denounced its reactionary character and called for the immediate withdrawal lf all Russian troops from Ukraine.

At the same time, the OCFRI denounced the military and aggressive escalation on the part of American imperialism and lining behind it, of all capitalist states. Under the banner of NATO, they are in fact explicitly preparing for a world war.

Russian troops out of Ukraine!

Dismantling of NATO!

Against Putin, Biden and his allies: No holy union with war mongering governments !

When Putin decided the aggression against Ukraine, he justified his move by saying that Ukraine should be called “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine”. Indeed, the liberation of the oppressed nations of the Russian empire was a result of the proletarian revolution of October 1917, and of the Bolshevik policy of Lenin and Trotsky.

The reactionary regime of Putin and his oligarchs, built upon the destruction of all what was left of the conquests of the Russian revolution and on the plunder of the national economy, wants to reintegrate the Ukrainian people in the territories of the old Russian empire. By doing so, Putin is striking a blow against the Ukrainian and Russian workers and playing into the hands of world imperialism.

The world capitalist system is now engaged in a deep and deadly crisis. It can only face it by intensifying its onslaught against the world working class and preparing a worldwide destructive war, in order to wipe out all the elements which stand in the way of its world domination.

That is why an effective struggle against the threats of war on a world scale and destruction of civilisation and mankind can only be waged under the leadership of the world working class fighting for its interests and therefore for the survival of mankind.

The NATO war plans are not limited to Europe, on the contrary the conflict in Ukraine is giving an opportunity for American imperialism to increase is diplomatic, economic and military pressure on China. The imperialist leaders openly state that their aim is to impose by all means its will to China.

That fact does in no way alter the reactionary character of the leading Chinese bureaucracy which is expressed in its relentless attacks against the Chinese working class, which includes its onslaught against the trade union movement in Hong Kong.

The struggle waged today in Japan against the changes in the Constitution aiming at turning Japan into a more closely subordinated ally of the United States, is a crucial component of the struggle of workers and peoples all over the world against war and exploitation.