It is all-out war on Ukrainian soil. The word is out to the cannons, bombers, missiles and tanks that are advancing: destruction and death. Russia’s armed forces have attacked Ukraine from the north, east and southeast, destroying its military installations in order to invade its territory and install a pro-Russian government to replace Zelensky’s pro-Western one. Or perhaps to reduce it to a region of Russia.
As an organisation of workers from all over the world, including Ukraine, who are fighting against capital, which by its very nature is international, we are against all the agents of this war and sanctions, waged in both East and West by imperialist powers that are the expression of capital, over the heads of a population of 44 million people who have been living for decades in conditions of deprivation and exploitation, forced to emigrate (7 million of them) in order to provide a future for their children.
The proletarians are the aggressed ones, the aggressors are both Putin’s Russia – fresh from the repression of insurgent Kazakh workers and the second largest arms exporter in the world, which sends troops to half of Africa in competition with the former European colonisers in trouble – and all the NATO member states, including Italy, which have occupied a large part of the former Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and formed a belt bristling with missiles and aircraft and ships that can strike Russian cities.
We are for the right to self-determination of peoples, including the Ukrainians, whose “sovereignty” Putin and Lavrov would like to delete, and including minorities, such as the Russians in Ukraine, who have been deprived of the right to express themselves in their own language. But we are against nationalism in the fold of the imperialist powers, such as the Russian one (it was the supernationalist “Communist” party of Russia that served Putin’s plan by requesting the recognition of the Donbass “republics”), as well as the Ukrainian nationjalism that has lent itself to being a pawn in NATO’s hands.
As workers in Italy, we oppose the participation of the Italian government in the war of arms, the sending of another thousand troops and weapons promised by the Minister of Defence in addition to the Alpine troops and fighter-bombers already present in Latvia and Romania, and the war of sanctions, which will be suffered by Russian workers as well as Italian workers, who are already paying for the conflict with increases in gas, electricity and petrol prices.
We denounce the Russian invasion of Ukraine whose aim is the submission of that people to Russian imperialism. We demand the withdrawal of all Italian troops abroad and the slashing of military spending.
We oppose NATO and the idea of a European army with no ifs or buts.
Let’s demonstrate against the war, where the capitalists throw the proletarians against each other as cannon fodder, for their own exploitative interests.
Let’s work to form a common front of struggle of the workers of all countries against the capitalists and their governments, against military spending, repressive apparatuses and armies, to use those resources for health and education! For a classless society, without exploitation, where globalisation will mean collaboration and not war!
SI COBAS, 24 February, 2022
See the Indonesian version: https://fsedar.org/lawan-perang-imperialis-bentuk-front-persatuan-buruh/
