The declaration by the French commerce union, Confédération générale du travail (CGT), on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict poses important questions for staff in France and internationally. It confirms the limitless help of union bureaucracies for the political and army operations of imperialism, which threaten to unleash a world conflict with Russia. Waging the essentially worldwide battle towards conflict, in France and elsewhere, requires mobilizing staff independently of the commerce unions.
“The chance of unleashing a world conflict is actual,” the CGT admits. Nonetheless, it makes no name to mobilize staff and arrange strikes towards the chance of a nuclear conflict. Reasonably, it welcomes the operations of Ukrainian nationalist militias and army items armed by NATO and requires a pro-NATO regime change in Russia itself.
“The principle hope resides due to this fact within the resistance of the Ukrainian inhabitants and within the aspiration for change of the Russian and Belarus peoples,” the CGT declares. Then denouncing Russian President Vladimir Putin, “The CGT’s condemnation should above all strike on the aggressor, that’s to say, Vladimir Putin.”
The Parti de l’égalité socialiste (Socialist Equality Celebration, PES) opposes the conflict launched by Putin in Ukraine, which divides Russian and Ukrainian staff and has killed hundreds. However the PES rejects all makes an attempt to put the blame on one or one other capitalist regime for risking the hazard of world conflict. As with the 2 world wars of the twentieth century, the capitalist nation-state system as a complete is accountable and should be overthrown. On this battle, the imperialist powers and NATO are probably the most brutal enemies of the worldwide working class.
The CGT, for its half, goals to dam the mobilization of staff in such a battle in France, and due to this fact the worldwide unity of staff towards conflict. The CGT proposes to mobilize not the employees towards conflict, however the banks and media of Europe towards Russia.
It proposes a “commerce union convoy for Ukraine” to assist Ukrainian troopers and nationalist militias, already armed by NATO to the tune of billions of {dollars}. Whereas admitting the devastating results of sanctions on the financial system and due to this fact staff, the CGT applauds the makes an attempt by US and European banks to strangle Russia:
The potential results of stopping Russian banks entry to the worldwide banking system of transactions (known as SWIFT) can provoke a complete destabilization of the Russian financial system with huge penalties for the inhabitants and world financial system. The query of intensifying the financial sanctions is due to this fact posed and a number of other voices in Russia lead us to know that it is a path value consideration.
The CGT requires commerce and monetary sanctions towards Russia, conscious of their “severe penalties” for staff worldwide. That’s, the embargo NATO is imposing on Russian oil, gasoline and wheat is driving up costs of gasoline, heating and meals, devastating staff’ residing requirements world wide.
This violently anti-working class and anti-Russian coverage of the CGT is all of the extra hanging on condition that it beforehand expressed a sure opposition to the neo-Nazi Ukrainians. For the reason that finish of World Warfare II, the CGT was intently tied to the counterrevolutionary Stalinist paperwork in Moscow. These ties survived the Stalinist paperwork’s dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and its restoration of capitalism throughout Jap Europe.
In 2014, the CGT, which nonetheless cultivated ties with the Russian post-Stalinist capitalist regime, despatched two railworkers’ union officers, Axel Persson and Mathieu Boll-Reddat, on a go to to the pro-Russian separatist zones of Ukraine. Talking within the separatist zone of Luhansk on the seventieth anniversary of the insurrectional strike of Parisian rail staff on August 10, 1944 towards the Nazi occupation, Bolle-Reddat stated:
Our commerce union fought towards the Nazis, which is why we’re right here, with the employees within the Donbas who’re preventing the fascists who’ve taken management of the Ukraine authorities. … I’m not right here as a vacationer. My union is witnessing what occurs right here, and we’ll put strain on the French authorities.
The CGT, which disavowed Persson and Boll-Reddat on the time, is now swinging to open help for Ukrainian neo-Nazis, President Macron and NATO. It ignores the affect of inflation on staff’ residing requirements, or the hazard of a nuclear world conflict, which it admits is actual. This reckless and reactionary coverage displays the category character of the CGT and, extra broadly, of what the bourgeois press falsely calls “the employees motion.”
The CGT doesn’t symbolize staff, however the privileged, pro-imperialist layers of the center class who make up the commerce union paperwork. For the reason that Stalinist dissolution of the USSR in 1991, they’ve advanced sharply to the appropriate. With the collapse of their working class base, the French commerce unions have relied virtually completely on financing from employers and the state, whereas particular person union officers’ wealth has been tied an increasing number of to the rise of worldwide monetary markets.
The CGT covers up NATO’s alliance with Ukrainian neo-fascism
Within the 30 years for the reason that dissolution of the USSR, the CGT paperwork has accomplished its alignment with imperialism. It’s not possible to not acknowledge in its declaration the echo of the geo-political ambitions of the strategists and propagandists of US imperialism. Denouncing the principle nations focused by the Pentagon, specifically Russia and China, the CGT claims {that a} NATO overthrow of Putin will magically restore peace:
The return to peace passes via the autumn of Putin. His victory could be catastrophic. If it have been endorsed by a peace settlement based on a partition of Ukraine, the aggressor could be rewarded for its belligerent and imperialist coverage. … And what could be the instance set for different main powers, notably China whose claims on Taiwan are widespread data! A draw or perhaps a Russian defeat with out the departure of Putin would enable the specter of a renewed conflict to linger on.
To say that Russia is the principle impediment to peace is to whitewash the crimes of imperialism. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 eliminated the army impediment to a neo-colonial offensive by the imperialist powers. NATO may perform a collection of bloody wars, typically concentrating on nations allied to the ex-USSR. Tens of millions of individuals died and tens of hundreds of thousands needed to flee their properties in Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria and Mali.
The overthrow of Putin by NATO wouldn’t result in peace however the crushing of Russia, the set up of a neo-colonial collaborationist regime in Moscow and the intensification of imperialist wars and plunder of Eurasia.
The CGT insists that Moscow is completely answerable for the conflict, equating Putin with Hitler. It identifies Putin’s Russian coverage in Ukraine with the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938, accredited by prime ministers Neville Chamberlain of Britain and Edouard Daladier of France on the 1938 Munich summit. It thus creates a monstrous amalgam between opposition to a world conflict launched towards Russia and the coverage of figures implicated in collaboration with Hitler. The CGT writes:
Is Putin solely answerable for this example? He’s completely and practically completely. This conflict was his resolution. He has mounted the scope and the length. He has dreamt of it for years and if the West is accountable, it’s initially for having let him annex Crimea in 2014, accepting de facto this example over time, together with on the geo-political degree. His annexation of the Sudetenland may to his thoughts solely affirm the feasibility of his dream of annexation pure and easy.
That’s only a falsification aimed toward hiding the CGT’s alignment with the imperialist powers mainly answerable for the battle. Trying to posture as anti-imperialist, the CGT mildly criticizes NATO. On NATO’s enlargement into Jap Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, regardless of NATO guarantees to Moscow on the contrary, the CGT admits that Russian leaders “legitimately thought of that the gesticulations and stomach dancing of NATO have been a violation of the 1991 agreements.”
The CGT doesn’t deny both that the Ukrainian neo-fascists are preventing Russia and have been for the reason that coming to energy of the present regime via a putsch in February 2014 in Kiev. It even admits the decisive function performed by neo-Nazism within the putsch that adopted the Maidan protests:
There may be the unmistakeable undeniable fact that in 2014, through the Maidan protests which led to the autumn of Yanukovitch, the taking of Crimea and the conflict within the Donbas (practically 14,000 lifeless of which 3,000 have been civilians), many excessive right-wing teams occupied the streets, terrorizing and weighing closely on Poroshenko and his administration. A number of ministers from the acute proper even entered his authorities.
Nonetheless, the CGT retains silent on the truth that this revolt was accredited and directed by the NATO powers. US, German and French diplomats went to Kiev in 2014 to encourage protests after which applaud the right-wing regime put in by the putsch, led by the neo-Nazi Proper Sector militia. The set up of anti-Russian, anti-Semitic forces on the coronary heart of the Ukrainian regime provoked a civil conflict with the Russian-speaking areas of the nation.
If in 2014 layers of the CGT in 2014 have been troubled by this far-right coverage, the CGT has since adopted it. Certainly, the putsch in Kiev was a part of a NATO and French neo-colonial technique overtly supported by French commerce unions.
The battle between Kiev and Moscow over Crimea, which voted for its integration into Russia after the Kiev putsch, is linked to NATO’s neo-colonial conflict in Syria since 2011. In September 2013, Russian ships based mostly in Sebastopol in Crimea protected the Syrian coast from army strikes that US and French ships supposed to hold out. Washington, Paris, Berlin and different NATO powers then supported a neo-fascist putsch to put in a regime which unsuccessfully tried to beat Crimea and Sebastopol.
This battle in Ukraine has been ongoing since 2014, with a couple of truces, just like the conflict in Syria that pits NATO on one facet towards Russia and Iran on the opposite. The arming of Ukraine by NATO towards Russia throughout this battle corresponds to US imperialism’s world technique. Certainly, in 2017, Washington declared in its Nationwide Safety Technique that “China and Russia threatened America’s energy” and that it needed to confront these nations, thought of as “hostile rivals.”
The CGT’s pro-NATO place on Ukraine flows from its help for French imperialism’s neo-colonial conflict coverage of in Syria. Already in 2012, the CGT nationwide govt printed a declaration, “Cease the massacres in Syria,” whitewashing the function of Islamist “insurgent” militias backed by NATO and demanding an imperialist intervention. Denouncing solely the Syrian regime and demanding sanctions towards it, the CGT wrote:
The French commerce unions CFDT, CGT, UNSA, FSU and Solidaires salute the unbelievable braveness of the Syrian individuals who rose up peacefully towards the despotic household energy of the corrupt Assad household. … Syria can not be remoted nor the regime allowed to impose its terror. It is just a query of time. However what number of lives should be sacrificed earlier than the worldwide neighborhood condemns this bloody regime and imposes sanctions towards it and its leaders?
Having backed France and NATO’s intervention within the Syrian battle, the CGT paperwork is once more aligning itself with NATO and the Ukrainian far proper within the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. NATO’s argument that it’s defending the weaker social gathering struggling for liberation from Russia’s overwhelming energy is refuted by the course of the conflict. Armed to the tooth with billions of euros in weapons from NATO, the militias and the Ukrainian armed forces are the spearhead of a NATO conflict towards Russia.
The stability of forces within the conflict launched by NATO towards Russia on Ukrainian soil isn’t in Russia’s favor. NATO has a inhabitants of roughly 900 million inhabitants of which 3.3 million are armed, in comparison with 144 million Russians with a military of 1 million. The GDP of NATO is about $40 trillion, or about 20 instances that of Russia. It’s the US and European banks that are stealing Russia’s export revenues, not the reverse.
Construct unbiased, worldwide staff organizations of battle
A battle can’t be waged towards capitalism’s drive to conflict and authoritarian rule with out a global mobilization of the working class in a battle for socialism. The CGT is working to dam the emergence of such a motion. It tries to cross off its pro-imperialist politics as socialist, using a couple of hole references to communism:
Our pacifism, flowing from the Zimmerwald convention of 1915, up to date by the rejection of “campism,” means a rejection of the sport of alliances which drives peoples into world conflicts within the pursuits of the bourgeoisie or the aristocrats which govern them.
This historic reference is cynical and false. The worldwide convention at Zimmerwald introduced collectively Lenin, Trotsky and different employee opponents of the First World Warfare. Two years later, in October 1917, Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks led the working class within the overthrow of Russian capitalism and the muse of a staff’ state based mostly on the soviets, the employees councils. The upsurge of the worldwide class battle this triggered introduced the First World Warfare to an finish and led to the development of the Communist Worldwide.
Is it actually vital to indicate that the CGT’s technique is diametrically against that of the Bolsheviks and Trotsky? The CGT equipment, which accredited of the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union, now backs the conflict goals of the imperialist powers. It aligns itself with the try to make use of the Ukrainian far proper towards Russia, ignoring the hazard of world conflict.
The category gulf separating the working class from the nationalist CGT paperwork is that between revolution and counterrevolution. The CGT equipment tells its supporters to place “strain” on the state for a coverage extra favorable to staff throughout the borders of France. However the main issues of this epoch are worldwide—conflict, pandemic, the diktat of world monetary markets over social life—and on them, the CGT paperwork has no progressive coverage to supply.
It was overtly hostile to a significant mobilization for social equality which introduced collectively massive numbers of staff in France, the “Yellow Vest” motion in 2018-2019 organized through social media. CGT chief Philippe Martinez known as them “unhealthy firm” and blocked a truckers strike of their help. He lined up with the petty-bourgeois propaganda of the Pabloite New Anticapitalist Celebration, which denounced the “yellow vests” as neo-fascists:
Just like the CGT and Solidarity commerce unions, we is not going to combine our anger on Saturday, November 17, with the bosses’ maneuvers exploited by the far proper, which isn’t a short lived ally however a mortal enemy. Sure, every part goes up besides wages, and the decrease lessons are proper to have had sufficient with value rises for gasoline. … However we can’t say it on Saturday, November 17, in actions or supposedly residents’ gatherings that seem like far-right mobs, during which we might line up with the deadliest enemies of the employees’ motion.
The Russo-Ukrainian conflict confirms that it was not the “Yellow Vests” however the petty-bourgeois equipment of the CGT that aligned itself with imperialism towards the employees. At the moment, the CGT’s anti-worker coverage is labored out in a de facto alliance with Ukrainian neo-Nazis.
On the COVID-19 pandemic, the CGT aligned itself with the coverage of mass an infection dictated by the European Union and the banks. In June 2020, the CGT signed its help for EU bailouts handing trillions of euros to the banks and main firms and for a European army build-up. Nonetheless, these bailouts have been predicated on a refusal of any Zero COVID technique or any severe try and halt the contagion.
The CGT paperwork successfully accredited a reactionary public well being coverage that has value over 1.7 million lives in Europe, together with over 140,000 in France. In the present day, tens of hundreds of French persons are contaminated each day by a virus whose long-term penalties are unknown.
These positions justify the historic battle of the Trotskyist motion, the Worldwide Committee of the Fourth Worldwide and its French part, the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES), to interrupt the diktat of the union paperwork over the working class. To battle the pandemic, the banks and the hazard of conflict, it’s essential to mobilize and unite staff in battle internationally. This requires breaking the reactionary affect of the nationwide commerce union bureaucracies, that are consciously hostile to the traditions of October 1917.
In opposition to the conflict in Ukraine and the Stalinist CGT, the PES requires the constructing of the Worldwide Employees Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) and the worldwide unity of staff based mostly on this system of world socialist revolution.
