By IWU-FI Press
We reproduce the corrected and updated transcript of the international talk by IWU-FI leader Miguel Sorans on 29 September 2022. Alongside the war, protests against falling living standards are ongoing, as a major women’s rebellion in Iran.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which started eight months ago, has highlighted the depth of the imperialist capitalist system crisis. Energy and food prices have risen; a global recession is looming; inflation is hiking all over the world, social inequality is growing and the environmental crisis is worsening.
The war in Ukraine has only deepened or added fuel to the fire of the capitalist crisis that had been going on for a long time. It is not because of the war in Ukraine that the people of the world are suffering hunger, unemployment, greater levels of misery, and plunder by the multinationals.
Where does the war stand today?
When Putin announced the invasion on 24 February, he thought it would last only a few weeks and already considered himself the winner. So much so that the US and European imperialism thought the same. Macron and Biden offered Zelensky support to leave Ukraine. They suggested he should surrender.
However, after over 7 months, Putin and his troops are in retreat. In September-October, the Ukrainian counteroffensive recaptured almost 8,000 km of territory and put Putin on the ropes. The world was shocked by the disorderly withdrawal of Russian troops. Such was the haste that they left behind weapons, ammunition boxes, tanks, and vehicles. Ukrainian troops retook villages and towns almost 3 km from the Russian border. Another important Russian defeat was the Ukrainian retaking of Liman on 1 October, a railway junction held by Russian troops. Liman is in the Donetsk region, which Putin had just declared annexed to Russia. This exacerbated Putin’s political crisis. To where the leader of the Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Karydov, spoke of ‘treason’ and urged the use of low-yield nuclear weapons in Ukraine. To make matters worse, on 8 October, Russia suffered another setback with the surprise blowing up of the bridge linking Crimea (annexed in 2014) to Russia that had been inaugurated by Putin in 2018.
The cause of the turn of the war and the morale factor
Morale in a war is crucial. Armaments are very important, but also the combatants’ morale. The moral factor was always on the side of the Ukrainian people. A people who united to defend their country, their land, and their homes, from the invasion of a capitalist power that wants to dominate them. The cause of the war’s turn lies in the strength and unity of the Ukrainian military and popular resistance.
From the very beginning, reports of low morale among the Russian troops have been growing. Reports of desertion abound. Russian soldiers do not believe Putin’s speech that the invasion was to defeat Nazism and to free the Ukrainian people. That is why the images in Russia and Ukraine are the opposite. While in Russia the youth is fleeing the country because of the call for 300 thousand new reservists, in Ukraine from the first moment thousands and thousands of women and young volunteers joined the ranks to fight. The women made Molotov bombs and the trade unions added workers to the territorial forces.
From the start, the revolutionary socialists of the IWU-FI supported the just cause of the Ukrainian people. We are not neutral in this war. On one side there is a capitalist power, an imperialism like Russian imperialism; on the other side, there is the Ukrainian nation which is an exploited country and a semi-colony. We support the Ukrainian resistance, giving no political support to the capitalist government of Zelensky and always saying No to NATO. We supported by campaigning and collecting medicines and all kinds of aid that a delegation of the IWU-FI took to Kyiv and gave to the left and the militant trade unionism of Ukraine.
Military defeats provoke a political crisis in Russia
The Russian military setback has provoked a political crisis in Russia for the first time. Both on the side of the so-called “hawks, the most reactionary right wing, who accuse Putin of being weak in his actions in Ukraine, and on the side of those who oppose the invasion. What is more important is the reaction of the popular sectors to the forced recruitment of 300 thousand reservists. Thousands and thousands took to the streets all over Russia, in over 40 cities. The repression led to over 1,500 arrests. Putin, during the crisis, responded by calling for fraudulent referendums to annex the occupied areas. They are “elections” at the point of a machine gun. In this way, they announced that they “achieved 90 per cent of the votes” and that the regions of Donbas (Lugansk and Donetsk), Kharkiv, and Zaporiyia, where the nuclear power plant is located, are part of the Russian Federation. With this, they then intend to declare that, if these regions are attacked, Russia would be under attack.
Putin’s gesture has already suffered a blow with the subsequent seizure of Liman in the Donetsk region, which was supposed to be “annexed”. This was compounded by the blowing up of the Crimean bridge. This led to the fall of the Russian forces’ head, and the launching of bombing raids on the capital Kyiv and other cities.
They have let it be known that they do not rule out the use of nuclear weapons. This is something that we revolutionaries and the peoples of the world must repudiate because there is also the danger that this criminal activity will be joined by European imperialism and NATO and will lead to a wider war that can affect the peoples of the world and the whole of humanity. As revolutionary socialists, we maintain the dilemma remains “Socialism or catastrophe”.
In this strategic struggle, we in the IWU-FI claimed the only alternative to stop all this is to support the military and popular resistance of the Ukrainian people to defeat Putin’s invasion. And now we add our support to the protests and mobilisation of the working class, the youth, and the people of Russia against the call-up of thousands of reservists, against the war, and for the freedom of political prisoners.
The war and the crisis of the world capitalist economy
Undoubtedly, with the invasion of Ukraine, the capitalist world economy is undergoing a tremendous tremor. All the data show a new setback in the indicators and forecasts of imperialism itself. For example, the IMF says in its latest report that “the world may soon teeter on the brink of a global recession”. There is the pessimism of imperialism and the world’s bosses. The US and the European Union (EU) are leading an inflation hike spreading across the globe. The euro has fallen to its lowest level against the dollar, and the British pound sterling has just staggered and fell to its value of 50 years ago, in 1971. Germany, which is the leading capitalist economy in the EU, stagnated and grew 0 per cent in the last quarter. The World Bank has just said that China will cease to be the economic locomotive of Asia for the first time since 1990.
All this is provoking a deepening of the fall in the standard of living of the masses in the world. Before the invasion of Ukraine, the UN declared that in 2021 there were 828 million people suffering from hunger, and 2.3 billion were food insecure. We are talking about 30 per cent of the world’s population.
The war in Ukraine has caused energy and food prices to skyrocket. This has undoubtedly created new situations of famine in Africa, Burkina Faso, and in many other places. But what is most symptomatic of the seriousness of the crisis of capitalism that is leading to the deterioration of the countries of the world is that this crisis has reached the imperialist countries. An example of the crisis and of what the proletariat and the popular sectors will suffer or are suffering is the United Kingdom. Between July and September, gas and electricity tariffs increased by 140 per cent, which is making it impossible for the working and popular sectors to pay them. There is even a growing movement called Don’t Pay! It is estimated that 40 per cent of UK households cannot heat their homes adequately for the winter, which for the northern hemisphere starts in December. That’s no less than 28 million people in the UK. And such is the crisis that one of the most popular programmes on British television, This Morning, which usually draws fridges, electrical appliances, and televisions, has now added to pay winners’ gas and electricity tariffs for three to six months and up to a year. Winners choose this prize and not electric appliances.
But not everyone suffers from the tariffs in the UK. The ones who enjoy it are the private energy companies. They are known as the Big Six, which already has a profit rate of 40 per cent. These are companies, as has happened in South America and elsewhere in the world, that were privatised in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher. And this happens while energy multinationals are making super-profits, such as the Anglo-Dutch Shell, which has had record profits in the second quarter of 11.5 billion dollars, the North American Exxon Mobile, which reached 17.6 billion dollars, or the French Total, which accumulated 9800 million dollars in the second quarter of 2022 alone.
Strikes in Europe and popular rebellions in the world against falling living standards are growing
But the most remarkable thing for socialists in the world situation is that the working class and the people have come out to confront this offensive of the capitalist governments around the world. Just one place of this struggle is the UK, under the government of Liz Truss of the Conservative party, who has just taken office. The last act of Queen Elizabeth II was to confirm her as the new prime minister to replace Boris Johnson, who resigned because of social protests. Truss has launched an austerity plan based on cutting taxes for all big companies and the rich in order to recover the economy.
Such is the severity of the austerity and the danger it poses for the capitalists that, unusually, the US government and the IMF have sent a letter asking the British government to backtrack on this plan, saying (the IMF, not the left) that it would “dangerously increase social inequality” in the UK. Within a week, the government backed down on tax cuts for the rich. What is brewing in the UK is a hot October of strikes, which were only suspended because of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. After these holidays, new strikes are being prepared. One of the most striking is that of the nurses in the national health system, who, for the first time in history, will go on strike in October. Railway and metro workers are resuming their strikes. In Belgium, there were strikes and marches against the high cost of living and wage increases on 20 September, and the unions have already announced a general strike in November. In Spain, strikes increased by 20 per cent compared to 2021. There was a strike at an oil refinery in France. In Berlin and Rome, there were marches against inflation.
Months ago, we saw the great popular uprising in Sri Lanka that brought down a dictatorial regime that had been in power for years. There was the rebellion of Ecuador’s indigenous movement against petrol hikes. There were strikes in Panama. In Argentina, there was a heroic strike for wages by the tyre workers, led by SUTNA, a combative and anti-bureaucratic union, which triumphed. There was also a strike by teachers and junior doctors. In Venezuela, trade union protests against the Maduro government returned. And there was a new popular rebellion in Haiti against fuel increases.
A huge women’s rebellion in Iran puts the theocratic regime on the ropes
Since 16 September, a large rebellion of women and people in Iran has erupted in repudiation of the murder by the police of the young woman Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested on charges of improperly wearing the hijab. But to the surprise of Iran’s dictatorial theocratic regime, thousands and thousands of women took to the streets all over the country, publicly cutting their hair and taking off their hijabs. These protests spread to men, workers, and popular sectors, who mobilised all over the country. There were strikes in several cities, and student assemblies and sit-ins. In this way, workers, women, students, and popular sectors came together. And despite the criminal repression of the Iranian regime, which has already killed over 60 people, the rebellion has not stopped. It has been going on for a month now and they are not only revolting against patriarchy and the wearing of the hijab but also shouting “death to the dictator” and Ayatollah Khamenei.
IWU-FI supports the women and people of Iran. In every corner of the world, there is a crisis of capitalism. We must support the workers and the peoples in these struggles, these rebellions, these strikes, under the slogan “let the capitalists pay for the crisis and not the workers”. The IWU-FI calls for a united plan of action in each country and internationally to demand workers’ and peoples’ emergency economic plans for the nationalisation of the energy companies under the control of workers and users. To impose high taxes on big businesses and financial groups; for the non-payment of foreign debts. For all these measures to reverse the brutal austerity measures and to achieve an emergency wage increase, as well as decent jobs for the entire working class. This is being debated today as part of a worldwide process of struggle against imperialism, the multinationals and their austerity plans.
