English General

We refute the lies being spread about AMI

2024/05/22
antimilitarismus

We regularly face accusations that we allegedly do not support the self-defense of people in the war in the Ukraine. So, we reiterate a few facts in response to these lies.

1) All wars between states are wars of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. We support the self-defense of all proletarians, regardless of where they live in the Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Israel or anywhere else in the world at the time. By self-defense we mean the defense of class autonomy, that is to say, the waging of struggle (including armed struggle) against all factions of the bourgeoisie, against all states, against all state armies whose primary function is to defend the state, not to defend the population they govern. As the anarchist Sasha Kaluzha, who is active in Ukraine, rightly points out in his article:

“The goal of the Ukrainian state and their military structures in this war is to keep their power, the goal of the Russian state and their military structures is to seize power. The participation of anarchists in the structures of either of these states does not make the situation any easier for the people living in Ukraine, who are suffering from the war between two states. All the words about the army defending people, society and their land are only part of state propaganda, and history shows this. It is only possible to stop the war by opposing both states.”

2) We do not interpret the war in the Ukraine in vague and misleading terms of “good versus evil” or as a binary narrative of “an aggressor (Russia) versus a defending victim (the Ukraine)”. The reality is much more complicated than these black and white “analyses”, which furthermore lack a class perspective and instead flirt with a nationalist and bourgeois democratic perspective.

The proletariat in the Ukraine is not only subjected to the aggression of Russian imperialism, but also to the aggression of the Ukrainian state, the local bourgeoisie, the police, the army, the bureaucracy, the nationalists, the politicians… Therefore, the superficial definition of the aggressor only on the side of Russia can be interpreted as a conscious or unconscious advocacy of the aggressor who is decimating the proletariat in Ukraine under the pretext of “popular resistance” or “defending the right to national self-determination”. If we clearly define Putin’s army as the aggressor, we cannot skip the aggression of the Ukrainian army, which kidnaps men off the streets and forces them to go to the front, massacres deserters who want to flee to a safe place. Nor can we forget the aggression of the Ukrainian capitalists, who are taking advantage of the war situation to exploit workers even more, or the aggression of the Ukrainian state, which treats men with Ukrainian passports as a property that it can arbitrarily deploy for war purposes against their will. In short, people in Ukraine are not only dying as a result of bombing by Putin’s army, but also as a result of the actions of the Ukrainian state, which denies people one of the most basic forms of self-defense, such as taking refuge in safety outside the Ukraine or outside a war zone. We support self-defense against Putin’s aggressors, which doesn’t mean at the same time defending and aiding the aggressors of the Zelensky’s regime.

3) Our friends from Ukraine have been urging for a long time that we get organized to open the Ukrainian borders to men who want to avoid mobilization or to desert, because that is their self-defense in a state of war. At the same time, however, we encounter propaganda from NATO, the EU, US imperialism and the left. This propaganda presents a distorted narrative in which the entire Ukrainian population is voluntarily supporting the struggle on the frontline. However, according to our friends from the Ukraine, the initial “nationalist impulse” and voluntary involvement in the army is receding and discontent is spreading through society, directed both against Russian imperialism and against the Ukrainian government, army and authorities. Some even talk about the fact that the distinction between the occupying power of Russia and the power of Ukraine, which claims the right to its integrity, is slowly wiping off in the eyes of the population. To obscure this fact with propaganda is, on the one hand, seen as a way of contributing to the invisibility of the mass of proletarians who are creating the germs of collective defense structures, and on the other hand, it is essentially a way of sabotaging such independent self-defense. Paradoxically, those who nonsensically accuse us of not supporting people defending themselves against aggression are actually, through their propaganda and political activity, complicating the situation for the people who want to defend themselves.

4) Our attitude to the war partly reflects the insights shared with us by people from Ukrainian cities or those who have emigrated from them. Here are a few links to the sources that inspired us. The list is far from complete.