Workers World is sending out this statement by one of the leaders of Union Borotba (Struggle) as a service in order to provide a brief socialist overview of the struggle in southeast Ukraine.

Borotba is an openly Marxist organization, formed in 2011, that has been deeply involved in the struggle in Ukraine. It was driven out of Kiev by the Right Sector after a fascist-led coup overthrew the Viktor Yanukovych government. Borotba has helped to organize resistance to the reactionary forces in Kharkov, Odessa and other cities.

The organization has suffered casualties and one of its members was killed in the Odessa massacre. It has recently moved to go underground after learning of measures by Kiev for a campaign of repression against the organization.

By Victor Shapinov
Union Borotba (Struggle)

Vyacheslav Ponomarev, the people’s mayor of Slavyansk, said that the city’s industry will be nationalized.

“So that no one has any illusions, I want to say that the entire industry in the city will be nationalized. We cannot leave the industrial potential of the city in the hands of unscrupulous businessmen,” said the people’s mayor.

The largely spontaneous anti-capitalist orientation of the Antimaidan activists who have created the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics is not surprising. The largest owner-oligarchs were customers, sponsors and the main “beneficiaries” of the Euromaidan [the pro-West demonstrations beginning last November that opposed the government of Viktor Yanukovych, eventually dominated by the ultraright]. Capitalist oligarchs such as Igor Kolomoysky, Dmytro Firtash, Sergei Taruta and, to a lesser extent, Rinat Akhmetov, funded the Euromaidan and promoted it in their media. When the Euromaidan won, those who previously governed the country indirectly through the administration of Yanukovych got direct control, including appointments as the governors of key areas.

Moreover, as it turns out, the oligarchy’s aid not only led to the victory of the ultranationalists and Euromaidan, but they tried to influence the resistance movement to the new government — the so-called Antimaidan.

As Pavel Gubarev, people’s governor of the Donetsk region, stated recently, Rinat Akhmetov paid a number of Antimaidan activists so that they “sat quietly” and “merged” protest. “All the activities of Akhmetov were aimed to drain people’s anger, and it all turned out well in Dnepropetrovsk. Oligarch Kolomoysky did it because there is a bit of pro-Ukrainian sentiment stronger than in the Donbass,” said Gubarev in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta. [http://tinyurl.com/p7c4qwo]

The oligarchy has sponsored the development of various neo-Nazi groups and their union under the brand “Right Sector.” Oligarchs indirectly finance them and the acknowledged leader of the Right Sector, Dmitry Jaros, told the media: “We do not mind if they (the oligarchs) fund our army.” Billionaire Igor Kolomoysky has shown special zeal, publicly meeting with Jaros and “headhunting” the militias of the southeast, offering $10,000 for a captured “saboteur.”

Thus, the very logic of the struggle is pushing the activists of the southeast into the camp of anti-capitalism. Participating in the Antimaidan movement in Kharkov and Odessa, I have seen how the popular masses have awakened to slogans indicting the oligarchy.

Sergei Kirichuk, one of the leaders of the Kharkov Antimaidan and coordinator of the socialist movement Borotba, also emphasizes the social agenda of the southeast movement: “People here in the southeast raised demands for their socioeconomic rights. There is a very serious anti-oligarchic, anti-capitalist component to these protests,” says Kirichuk, who now finds himself in exile.

Characterizing the funding of the Antimaidan, Kirichuk says: “The movement in the southeast, in its technical equipment and financial support, cannot be compared with the Maidan. Victoria Nuland said that the U.S. has spent $5 billion to ‘promote democracy’ in Ukraine. And in the east of Ukraine the protest movement shows no strong financial support. At least in the cities where we were active — in Kharkov and Odessa — I have seen no funding from the Russians or the Putin administration. And on the political landscape, we have not seen any people who have helped and financed this movement.”

I can confirm these words of Sergei: In Kharkov, we produced leaflets with our own money, with a total circulation of about 100,000 copies. We gathered small private donations. Ten thousand posters were pasted up to boycott the elections scheduled by the Kiev junta. At the monument to Lenin, there was a box for donations to assist the Defenders of Kharkov and the wounded. The Antimaidan organizers used the small basement office of Borotba. That’s all for the “financing” of Antimaidan. I do not exclude that some crooks collected large amounts using the movement’s name, but activists have not seen any of it.

Gubarev paints the same picture of the Donetsk Antimaidan: “In the militia there are different people. Miners and former officials, advertisers, my companions. … But what they have in common is that they are honest about money. They mortgaged their property, and they took the money and invested it in the movement when we had financial difficulties. They spent their own money.”

This is also a contrast: On one side, ultranationalist militants with great financing and gear, and on the other, workers, students and unemployed activists. When our comrades of Borotba seized Right Sector documents in the Kharkov Regional State Administration, among them were bank cards and checks. They testified that the boy from the village, a student at the Institute of Physical Education, has an amount of $10,000. [http://tinyurl.com/mn5r38a]

I emphasize again that there were no anti-oligarchic or even social slogans among the Euromaidan. A few leftists who wanted to “be with the people” and foolishly went among the Euromaidan were beaten and expelled in disgrace by the ultras dominant there. These neo-Nazis, once hooked on oligarchic funding, immediately forgot about their demagogic “anti-capitalism.”

This union of oligarchs and Nazis comes as if descended directly from the pages of history books, as does the union of anti-fascist and anti-capitalist slogans by opponents of the Kiev junta.

“Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialist elements of finance capital. … Fascism is not a supraclass power and not the power of the petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat over financial capital. Fascism is the power of financial capital. It is an organization of terrorist reprisals against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and the intelligentsia. Fascism in foreign policy is chauvinism in its crudest form, cultivating xenophobic hatred against other nations,” according to the classic definition of fascism formulated by Georgi Dimitrov. And what is happening in Ukraine today fully fits this definition.

The owner of Privat, Kolomoysky, is a living symbol of financial capital. The terrorist violence of Kolomoysky’s private armies, hastily hammered together from far-right militants, was seen by all in the media.

It is no accident that the proponents of the Maidan demolished monuments to Lenin while its opponents protect them. In this sense there is a deep class divide. And if you are looking for the seeds of socialism somewhere in Ukraine — it is in the movements in the southeast.

Of course, the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics will not be socialist. It is likely that part of the large and medium-sized businesses will retain their positions. To try to grab them and Russian corporations would be labelled “bad.” But at the “bottom,” the creation of the people’s republics, the experience of the anti-fascist, anti-imperialist and anti-oligarchic mass struggle, has undoubtedly moved not only southeast Ukraine, but also the entire post-Soviet space, to the left.

To those who did not see the progressive and even revolutionary content of events in the southeast, Lenin addressed these words:

“To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses … to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, ‘We are for socialism,’ and another, somewhere else says, ‘We are for imperialism,’ and that will be a social revolution! … Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.

“The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a bourgeois-democratic revolution. It consisted of a series of battles in which all the discontented classes, groups and elements of the population participated. Among these there were masses imbued with the crudest prejudices, with the vaguest and most fantastic aims of struggle; there were small groups which accepted Japanese money, there were speculators and adventurers, etc. …

“The socialist revolution in Europe cannot be anything other than an outburst of mass struggle on the part of all and sundry oppressed and discontented elements. Inevitably, sections of the petty bourgeoisie and of the backward workers will participate in it — without such participation, mass struggle is impossible, without it no revolution is possible — and just as inevitably will they bring into the movement their prejudices, their reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses and errors.” (From “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up,” July 1916)

The U.S. corporate media are in lock step lying and distorting the events in Ukraine. These are many little lies leading to another version of the Big Lie, as explained by Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and used to justify U.S. aggression from Vietnam to Iraq and Libya.

The good news is that despite all the lies about Ukraine, every opinion poll shows the U.S. population wants no active involvement there.

Every news feed and articles on Ukraine here are saturated with references to “Russian dominance,” “Russian schemes” and “Russian operatives.” Those who resist the illegal Kiev coup regime might be called “forces,” “terrorists,” “separatists,” “militias” or “saboteurs,” but always with the adjective “pro-Russian” or “Russian-speaking.” They confront “Ukrainian soldiers seeking the unity of Ukraine.”

In news articles, commentators and politicians will use these terms often 10 times or more, even though all the resistance fighters are Ukrainian citizens and many have ethnic Ukrainian names. It is no accident that the media characterize workers who have lived for generations in Ukraine this way.

This ploy is accompanied by massive corporate media demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He is called “scheming,” “domineering,” “secretive,” “authoritarian,” “manipulative,” “two-faced,” “overbearing,” and on down the thesaurus list of pejoratives. Pundits call Putin “solely responsible for the crisis” and demand he end it by submitting to Washington’s demands that Ukraine sign the Association Agreement and join the European Union and NATO.

They also want Putin to disarm the eastern Ukraine’s popular resistance to the fascist gangs that just burned 40 people to death in Odessa.

The Kiev coup regime — a completely illegal right-wing grouping that overturned the elected government to seize power in Ukraine — is neutrally described as the “Kiev government” or “Ukrainian government.” The corporate media call the fascist Right Sector and other neo-Nazi forces running this regime’s police and army, “government officials.”

These “officials” meet other officials in the White House, with the United Nations Security Council and with the EU to agree to austerity without the media challenging their legitimacy.

Every U.S. official who discusses the danger of Russian troop movement — within Russia — gets air time. Little to nothing is even reported of U.S. destroyers deploying in the Black Sea, NATO troop deployments eastward, jets and missile bases in eight countries encircling Russia or scheduled “U.S./NATO war games” in the region.

NATO’s expansion of military bases and interlocking U.S. dominated military commands with 28 NATO countries have been relabeled as a Russian campaign to expand its borders.

There are repeated warnings, without proof, about secret Russian agents, but little about CIA head Brennan’s visit to Kiev or the FBI agents and military advisers there.

Past Lies

U.S. imperialism has the world’s most powerful media, aimed during the buildup to war to saturate popular consciousness with justification for coming criminal actions. The challenge for corporate power in every war is that it must always hide with a saturation of slanders and non-facts repeated relentlessly this basic reality: Its endless wars are for profits, and the conquest and control of markets and resources.

The corporate media’s role is to set the terms of debate by using an unrelenting bias and a conscious distortion of even well-recognized facts, thus laying the ground for a fraudulent war provocation.

The Big Lie

The “Big Lie” that leads to military action is often exposed later, as with the fraudulent claim about “weapons of mass destruction” to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the wild charges of “genocide” that were used to justify a “humanitarian” bombing of Serbia in 1999 or Libya 2011.

After a “Big Lie” has achieved its aim, historians, media talking heads and politicians may later complain that they were lied to. But no one is ever held accountable for lies that led to millions of deaths.

Even those who oppose the war, in an effort to sound objective, may allow the chorus of war propaganda to infect their consciousness and terminology. The most important role for the anti-war movement, regardless of its size, is to take action and refuse to give any credibility to the lies of the ruling-class media.

Majority in U.S. oppose war

This time the lie campaign is failing. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who sold the murderous Iraq sanctions and the bombing of Yugoslavia, criticized the U.S. corporate media for this failure to sell the conflict with Russia.

On April 30, she told an audience at the militarist, neocon think tank of “foreign policy and business leaders” called the Atlantic Council, “There is not enough of an explanation to the American people as to how important it is to deal firmly with Russia’s attacks on Ukraine. … I am very troubled by today’s poll published by the Wall Street Journal,” which confirms other surveys showing that “Americans want to worry about themselves” so that fewer than one-fifth of the U.S. population want more active U.S. “engagement in Ukraine.”

A USA Today/Pew Research Center Poll released on April 28 reported that the U.S. population opposed by more than 2 to 1 the idea of sending arms or military supplies to the Ukrainian government “to bolster its defenses against Russian forces.” So even with the most twisted, inaccurate and loaded wording on this poll, the best spin the media could put on these figures was that half the population would support economic sanctions.

The slipping position of U.S. imperialism and the growing hardships faced at home do not mean less media war propaganda, but more likely expanding it to a “Big Lie” to prepare for a serious war provocation.

May 4 — Imagine a gathering of diverse activists in a medium-sized U.S. city, representing low-wage workers, communities mobilizing against police brutality and radical organizations. It might be an Occupy Wall Street encampment, a civil rights rally or anti-war conference. You may have attended such events yourself.

Now imagine this gathering was attacked by a thousand members of the Ku Klux Klan, dispatched with government approval. Consider that the Klan members, armed with gasoline bombs, baseball bats and firearms, chased the unarmed activists into a union hall and set fire to the building.

Suppose dozens of activists died in the fire, while others were shot dead or beaten to death while trying to escape the inferno. What if police then arrested survivors and the media blamed them for the blaze, while the bigots responsible were allowed to escape?

How would the workers’ and progressive movements respond to such an atrocity?

This is the horrific scenario that played out in Odessa, Ukraine, on May 2.

Neo-Nazi gangs bused in from western Ukraine marched through the city, posing as sports fans going to a soccer match. They attacked local anti-fascist activists who tried to block them outside a shopping center.

The fascists set fire to the protest encampment set up by opponents of the U.S.-backed coup, forcing their unarmed opponents to retreat. Workers at the nearby House of Trade Unions opened their doors to shelter the activists.

Then the neo-Nazis attacked the trade union building, setting it ablaze. Paramilitary goons fired guns into windows, killing and wounding those attempting to escape. Some activists leaped from high windows and survived, only to be beaten to death on the ground.

In all, 46 anti-fascists were killed, most during the murderous attack on the trade union building. They included men and women, youths and seniors, activists and workers.

Photographs taken the following morning inside the trade union building show bodies charred beyond recognition, some having been shot, others suffocated or burned to death while half-hanging out of windows.

Some of the survivors were arrested. The killers were allowed to leave, to be used again another day.

On May 4, more than 1,000 courageous Odessans protested outside police headquarters and forced the authorities to release arrested anti-fascist protesters, including survivors of the attack on the trade union building. As they were released, the people chanted, “Heroes!”

Washington’s guilty silence

From the government of Russia to the European Left parliamentary group, angry messages of protest against the massacre and condolences for the people of Odessa poured in. But in Washington, there was silence — though President Obama did find time to praise Kiev’s attack on cities in the rebellious Donetsk region to “restore order.” So far, 13 unarmed activists and civilians in Slavyansk and 10 more in Kramatorsk have been killed in this latest offensive, falsely labeled “anti-terrorist.”

The corporate media have tied themselves in knots to avoid reporting the truth about Odessa. For example, a May 2 Reuters news agency report on the massacre never mentioned that those who died in the blaze were opponents of the Kiev regime, and only quoted pro-regime figures who blamed “Russian agents” for the violence.

Now, following lockstep with the latest fiction from Kiev, the media are trying to cast doubt on who set fire to the trade union building, or are even openly blaming the victims, despite ample video and photographic evidence of the fascist attack — much of it recorded and uploaded to the Internet by the fascists themselves!

Why are the media going to such lengths to cover up the truth?

Because the Kiev junta and its masters in Washington are responsible for the massacre.

The attack in Odessa was choreographed by Kiev. Police were deliberately withdrawn from the area of the fascist rampage to guard the Odessa headquarters of the Interior Ministry, headed by far rightist Arsen Avakov.

It also took place simultaneously with the fierce military assault on the city of Slavyansk.

Government leaders from both the Democratic and Republican parties were deeply involved in the planning and execution of the illegal February coup against the elected government. They have pushed their agents in the Ukrainian government to unleash neo-Nazi terror against the people of southeast Ukraine resisting the coup regime.

The U.S. has carried out a provocative military buildup in Eastern Europe and a propaganda war against Russia, blaming it for the anti-fascist rebellion sweeping southeast Ukraine.

Without even questioning its own support for the illegal Kiev junta, the U.S. has promised lavish loans, encouraged a multibillion-dollar IMF aid package and provided international political cover for Kiev.

Further, it was revealed by the German newspaper Bild am Sontag on May 4 that U.S. FBI and CIA agents are stationed in Kiev to “advise” the coup regime on its fight against the anti-fascist movement in the southeast.

This fits a long pattern of U.S. imperialist collaboration with fascist murderers to achieve its ends, from Indonesia to Chile to the former Yugoslavia.

‘Remember and fight’

Alex Albu, local coordinator of the leftist Union Borotba (Struggle), an elected member of the Odessa Regional Council, and candidate for mayor, was badly beaten while escaping the fire. Another Borotba member was shot in the stomach but survived.

Among those killed was Andrew Brazhevsky, a young Borotba member. His comrades report that Brazhevsky tried to escape the inferno by jumping from a high floor of the trade union building. He survived the fall, but was beaten to death by neo-Nazis waiting below to attack survivors.

“Andrew was a staunch communist, who devoted a lot of time to self-education, read the Marxist classics and modern leftist authors,” his comrades recalled. “The Odessa left remembers that this modest, intelligent guy tried not to miss a single political action, and has always been at the forefront.

“When the neo-Nazi forces came to power in Ukraine, Andrew enrolled in Odessa militias to defend their city from the Nazis. Unfortunately, that day the superiority of the forces was not on the side of the defenders of Odessa.

“Andrew, your death will not remain unavenged. Neo-Nazis are not masters in our cities, in our streets. We promise to remember you and fight.”

The criminal attack on Odessa by the fascist gangs has the potential to galvanize the people of southeast Ukraine to fight back with even more determination to destroy the fascist junta and push back U.S. imperialism’s drive to war against Russia.

It is the responsibility of workers and all progressive forces in the U.S. to tell the truth about what happened in Odessa, and to stop the imperialists from carrying out further war crimes against the people of Odessa, Ukraine and Russia.

May 4 — U.S. imperialism has orchestrated and approved a new military offensive against the anti-Kiev resistance in towns and cities of the populous, industrial region of eastern Ukraine. This is playing with fire.

The offensive included an unspeakable massacre in Odessa, attacks on defenseless checkpoints around towns and cities, sudden helicopter raids and indiscriminate killing of civilians.

This offensive, underway now, aims at pumping some credibility into the discredited, illegal junta that Washington put in power by unleashing fascist violence against the elected Viktor Yanukovich government. These same fascists just carried out the Odessa massacre.

Besides trying to damage the resistance, the offensive is also aimed at provoking Russia’s government, which has repeatedly warned against launching violent attacks on the popular forces in Ukraine’s east.

Washington’s aim is to goad Russia into countermeasures that could serve as a pretext for a further escalation, either by wider sanctions, increased military pressure or both.

Aim is to stop incipient dual power

A more fundamental way to view this latest U.S.-backed “anti-terrorism offensive” is that it is a desperate attempt to break the momentum of a developing, incipient dual power in Ukraine’s southeastern region — especially to undermine the planned May 11 referendum in the east on federalization and autonomy.

This prospect became frighteningly evident to Washington after Kiev’s first offensive ended in ignominious collapse. The coup regime sent two columns of tanks and armored personnel carriers to oust the armed popular forces occupying government buildings. Local anti-Kiev authorities were widely supported by the population, who greeted the armored columns and prevailed upon them to refuse to attack their own people.

The result: Tanks, armored personnel carriers and ammunition were at day’s end in the hands of the resistance in Donetsk and Slovyansk. The Kiev putschists’ authority totally dissolved in the area. Two poles of authority were developing:  Kiev’s putschists, backed by imperialism and fascist forces, on one side; the resistance on the other. In a growing number of cities and towns of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions the anti-Kiev and anti-fascist forces had established local authority.

This first April 12 offensive came after a visit to Kiev by CIA head John Brennan. His strategy failed and his advice came to naught. The defeat was not only Kiev’s, but Washington’s.

The collapse of this offensive gave further impetus to the resistance, which took over more cities and towns.

This latest May 2 offensive, while inflicting some losses on the side of the resistance, has so far left the strategic centers under control of popular forces.

To get beyond the lying propaganda in nearly all the capitalist media — including the New York Times itself — that government officials and politicians were spouting daily,  and to better understand these popular forces, the Times sent two of its reporters to Slovyansk to get a real assessment of the forces on the ground.

Their article in the Times of May 3 focused on a key unit of military defense in Slovyansk — the 12th Company of the Peoples Militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Its commander was an “ordinary eastern Ukrainian” named Yuri, who was a former Soviet special forces commander in Afghanistan. He served four years in Kandahar fighting counterrevolutionaries who eventually overthrew the pro-socialist government in Kabul.

After all the propaganda insisting that Russian forces were behind the rebellion in the east, the reporters were forced to conclude that “the rebels of the 12th Company appear to be Ukrainian” who were veterans of the Soviet, Russian or Ukrainian armies.  They share a “passionate distrust of Ukraine’s government and the western powers that support it.”

The fighters shook their heads when asked if they were paid by Russia or the oligarchs to fight. “This is not a job. It is a service,” said a fighter named Dmitri. If Russia were behind them, they would have new weapons. The weapons they have were “taken from police buildings and a column of captured Ukrainian armored vehicles or bought from corrupt Ukrainian soldiers.”

The unit has widespread popular support. It has a network of spotters who track Ukrainian armed forces and fascists.  The Times reporters witnessed a crowd laboring to build a barricade and a bunker beside a bridge over a canal.

The population feeds them with healthful food. A volunteer’s mother set up a company kitchen, stocked by the people. There are barracks in a garage and an armory in a shed. The local police accept the militia’s authority and go about their patrols normally.

The fighters denounced the fascists and right wing in Kiev because “in western Ukraine they showed their faces: Nazis, fascist. … They destroyed monuments to Lenin, attacked our history.”

This is a clear picture in microcosm of incipient dual power. The anti-Kiev forces still have no central regional body to represent them politically. They have no centralized, regional military command yet, nor have they agreed upon common political demands. There is a long way to go.

But these obstacles can be overcome in time. If they succeed in holding the May 11 regional referendum in the east on federation, this can be a step toward regional autonomy or even regional separation.  This is precisely what imperialism and its right-wing stooges in Kiev are trying to forestall, disrupt and destroy, by any means necessary.

Where are the ruling class ‘doves’?

Just days before this second offensive, Secretary of State John Kerry declared at the Atlantic Council, “We will defend every inch of NATO territory.” In almost the same breath he mentioned Ukraine.

In fact, no NATO nation is under attack or under threat by Russia or anybody else. So this belligerent statement implied that NATO had military responsibility for Ukraine. By using ambiguous language, Kerry had virtually inducted Ukraine into NATO for purposes of military defense, without actually saying so.

This was a highly provocative pronouncement by the U.S. secretary of state. It was preceded by a statement from the Obama administration that its new doctrine was the “containment of Russia” and an end to dealing with the Putin administration.

The lack of any opposition to these provocations from any significant quarters in the U.S. ruling class is telling and ominous.

In fact, the present scenario is reminiscent of the run-up to the U.S. war on Iraq. The most adventurous sectors of the capitalist state and the political establishment seized the initiative to push U.S. imperialism’s aggressive expansion. President George W. Bush was backed by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz as they engineered the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

They promoted the doctrine of “preemptive warfare.” They lied repeatedly about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction.” “Shock and awe” followed, and U.S. troops marched to Baghdad and accomplished the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration predicted that the war would be over and Iraq reorganized in three to six months.

Eight years of violent U.S. occupation and the current unstable puppet regime themselves document the strategic blunders and monumental miscalculations of the Bush administration.

In the same way, the adventurist wing of the present U.S. capitalist state seems to be running U.S. policy in Ukraine. These elements engineered the seizure of the government in Kiev and dragged Ukraine into the EU and closer to NATO. They thought the Feb. 22 Kiev coup would end the conflict. But, as with the invasion of Iraq, it was just the beginning.

The differences between 2003 and 2014 are two-fold. First, the stakes involved in a conflict with Russia are potentially far greater than in the Iraq occupation. Second, the ruling class, the political establishment and its brain trust have all lined up and are marching in lock step behind the new war drive without even a discussion. This contrasts with the fears expressed in the ruling class before the war on Iraq, especially after the massive anti-war demonstrations of January and February 2003, before the March invasion.

In the past decade, the political moderates who might have been expected to express alarm over the present belligerent posture toward Russia have either retired or been pushed out of most of the significant political and administrative positions in the state. To be sure, no moderate ruling-class opposition ever stopped an imperialist war. But open debate in the ruling class can awaken the masses to the danger and help give impetus to an anti-war movement.

The working class must be made aware of the potential danger of the current situation, and the movement must mobilize without waiting for a bourgeois imperialist opposition, which may not develop until the direct conflict with Russia sharpens. The time to fight against this war is now.

Fred Goldstein is the author of “Low-Wage Capitalism” and “Capitalism at a Dead End,” which has been translated into Spanish as “El capitalismo en un callejón sin salida.” Website and blog: lowwagecapitalism.com