GUNFIRE erupted Sunday morning at a checkpoint, established by workers on the outskirts of the city of Slavyansk in Eastern Ukraine.
In the skirmishing, one of the troops from Kiev was killed and five others were injured, coup-appointed Interior Minister Arsen Avakov reported. The whole city is now roused and manning the bridges and key road crossings, to keep the fascist bands and the Kiev security police at bay.
On Saturday, Right Sector leader Dmitry Yarosh announced he was ‘mobilising’ his movement’s members ‘to take decisive steps to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.’
At the same time as these class battles are taking place in the Ukraine, huge clashes have been taking place in Athens, Rome and Madrid, where workers have been fighting the austerity measures of the EU’s bankers. Greek workers have not been shocked to learn, as in the Ukraine, that their government has a direct line connection with the Golden Dawn fascists.
In the USA, the working class is also on the rise, with millions of youth demanding jobs and a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour! The essence of this worldwide struggle, is that the austerity measures that capitalism, in its greatest crisis ever, has imposed on the working class, have ignited a new stage of the world socialist revolution.
This is what is raging, not only in the EU and the USA, but also in the Ukraine. Part of this crisis, is the way that the bankrupt ruling classes are seeking to wipe out all of the gains of the 1917 October revolution and restore the Ukraine and USSR to a semi-colonial status.
It was the US and the EU that spent over $5bn igniting the Kiev coup, to turn the Ukraine into a semi-colony of the EU. This was part of the struggle to wipe out the gains of the October revolution.
The workers in the West are to be bled white to save capitalism, while the workers in the East are to be reduced to semi-colonial slaves. The bourgeois of the world are now buying Greek debt bonds after imposing 28% unemployment, 60% youth unemployment, and pushing 40% of the population under the extreme poverty line. This is what the EU has in mind for the workers of the Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.
The response to the attacks of the bankers and bosses from Madrid to Athens and Rome, right through to the Ukraine, constitutes a new and vital stage of the world socialist revolution, whose essence is the taking of power by the working class throughout the whole of Europe.
The struggle of the workers of the Ukraine and Russia takes a special form, within this context of the world socialist revolution. It is to win back what was wrested from them by Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who allowed the oligarchs to emerge to plunder a section of the state economy.
We must support the building of soviets and soviet power all over the Ukraine to overthrow the Kiev Junta and expropriate the oligarchs. We must support all those workers in Russia and Belarus who are demanding the revolutionary reconstitution of the USSR as a measure necessary to defend the gains of the October revolution against imperialism, and as part of the world socialist revolution.
We support all those workers in the area of the USSR who are calling for putting Gorbachev on trial for preparing the illegal termination of the USSR and the emergence of the thieving oligarchs. We support the demands for a workers’ investigation into the conspiracy to try and restore capitalism in 100 days that was launched by Boris Yeltsin and his supporters, and stopped only when the working class threatened a political revolution.
The theory of socialism in a single country, the banner which was held high by the Stalinist bureaucracy as the reason for its existence as the defender of the USSR, has been visibly destroyed. The bureaucracy put an end to it in 1991-1993.
We are now in the most vital period of the world socialist revolution, when bankrupt capitalism has to be finished on a world scale. We urge workers to build sections of the Fourth International in every country, to organise the victory of the world revolution, including the political revolution in Russia, the Ukraine and China, to consign capitalism on a world scale to the Museum of Natural History.