Written by: Central Committee, CPA (M-L) on 25 February 2022
Imperialist rivalry, brinksmanship and now Russian invasion threatens death and suffering for the masses of ordinary people in and around Ukraine. Many are already dead and wounded.
Our comrades in the Ukrainian Koordinazionnyj Sowjet Rabotschewo Dvizhenija (Coordination Council of the Workers Class Movement) said not long before the Russian invasion:
We Marxist-Leninists of Ukraine are firmly against all the forms of imperialist aggression in our country. We call on our comrades from all countries not to accept the thought that some imperialists can be `better` than others. Imperialism, capitalism is always war and pain. The aspirations of the Ukrainian workers are not to follow any kind of bourgeois propaganda, and to struggle for the real rights, for decent wages and adequate social protection, for higher standards of living. And, of course, they have the right to live without war, without the roar of shells under the lying words of the Kremlin or the Western bourgeoisie!
They call for struggle against imperialist invaders, for unity and for socialism.
Our class demands peace
Imperialism is characteristic of the most powerful capitalist countries whose major corporations demand that “their” governments secure for them areas in which to invest, raw materials for them to extract, cheap labour to exploit and markets to saturate with their commodities. To the greatest extent possible, they seek to deny these things to competitors and control them as their own spheres of influence.
Ukraine has become the plaything of the rival imperialist blocs of the US-NATO-EU and of the Russian Federation. A struggle over imperialist spheres of influence is at the heart of the crisis. It arises due to the uneven development of the strengths and weaknesses of the powers and of their abilities to protect their respective spheres of influence.
The US-led bloc wants to extend its military power to the borders of Russia, while Russia seeks to push back by incorporating the “republics”, and eventually, all of the Ukraine within its political and military sphere of influence.
Far-right nationalist passions have been aroused in both the “republican” and greater Ukrainian regions. The two imperialist blocs share responsibility for this.
In opposition to the clamour for war promoted by both imperialist blocs, the working class is demanding peace.
“Peace” was the leading demand in the slogan “Peace, bread and land” that united the Russian and Ukrainian working classes behind Lenin’s revolutionary Bolshevik Party.
Peace becomes a reactionary slogan only when used to disarm the masses who struggle for justice.
Lecturing others about invasion from stolen lands
No corner of the world is safe from imperialist rivalry.
Here the Coalition and ALP pledge total allegiance to the US imperialist regime.
They and the media express outrage against invasion. Yet Australia is built on ongoing invasion and on dispossession of First Peoples.
They lecture others about democratic values and democratic allies. Yet our jails are filled with First Peoples, the poor, the mentally ill and the illiterate. Exactly what democracy do these sermon makers mean?
The Prime Minister even uses the reckless threat of war to get himself re-elected.
We have to make it backfire on him!
Nature of class war, democracy and nationalism
Despite the propaganda, and rewriting of history, our peoples are not fools.
We have a hundred years of imperialist wars into which Australia followed its colonial and corporate masters to mass slaughter.
Our party connects with women workers from Russian and Ukrainian backgrounds, decades long friends in struggles for working class unity here in Ausralia, who call out as equally corrupt, Russia and Ukraine and the US.
Times like these, when people are thinking and worrying, compel us to raise questions about the nature of class war against imperialist war, about class dictatorship disguised as democracy, about bourgeois nationalism that divides us to conquer, and its opposite – revolutionary love of Country and place and peoples undivided.
As struggle for control of the Ukraine rises, we raise again the demand for Peace. We refuse follow US imperialism into another war!
Yes to peace. Russia get out! US and NATO stay out!
No to Australian involvement imperialist war.
Remove all US bases and troops from Australia.
Struggle in unity for an independent, socialist Australia.
CPA (M-L) Central Committee, 25 February 2022
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