VANGUARD - Expressing the viewpoint of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)
For National Independence and Socialism • www.cpaml.org
(We recently published six these on the war in Ukraine by the Russian Maoist Party. A statement from the Marxist-Leninist Platform of Russia has now become available, and we reprint it below. Both the RMP and MLPR are, like our Party, affiliates of the International Coordination of Revolutionary Parties and Organisations, or ICOR.)
The struggle against war today is first and foremost a struggle against one‘s own imperialist government
The Marxist-Leninist Platform of Russia 6 March 2022
In the early morning hours of February 24, Putin's imperialist regime attacked Ukraine! The peoples of Russia, Ukraine and the Donbass are hostages of a conflict of interests between the two imperialist groups of traditional U.S. imperialism and EU imperialism on one side and the new Russian imperialism on the other. Today, Russian bombs are falling on Ukrainian cities, Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are dying for the interests of international monopolies or oligarchs, and the world is on the brink of a global nuclear catastrophe.
Under these circumstances, we call on the working people of Russia to protest against the war, to sabotage the transfer of troops and military equipment, and thus to say their firm "No". Comrades, explain to your acquaintances the criminal character of this war! Don t believe the lying propaganda that only a "special operation to protect the population of the Donbass" and to denazify Ukraine is taking place. If Putin's reactionary regime had cared about the fate of the population in the Donetsk region, the recognition of the People's Republics would have taken place back in 2014. Throughout Ukraine, fighting is currently taking place in regions where the majority of the population rejects the prospect of submission to Putin's dictatorial regime. Russian propaganda justifies the aggression with the need to support Donetsk and Luhansk, which rebelled against Kiev in 2014. But today, they are not at all the people's republics that were established eight years ago. Pro-people leaders and commanders have been physically eliminated or imprisoned, while Donetsk and Luhansk have turned into beggarly puppet regimes completely dependent on the Kremlin. The Russian regime's justification for protecting the population of Donetsk and Luhansk is no more true than the tsarist regime's claim that Russia had to enter World War I to protect Serbia under attack, or NATO's claim at the beginning of this century that Yugoslavia had to be bombed to protect the Albanian population of Kosovo.
This does not mean that the Ukrainian power in the current conflict would be the side to support. The current Ukrainian government is only a puppet of the other imperialist group - the USA and the European Union. At the same time, the Ukrainian authorities have been pursuing a policy of decommunization for eight years now, using neo-Nazi paramilitary formations for this purpose and to fight the rebels in the Donbass. But Putin's ideology, no matter how much he repeats his words about fighting the successors of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, is in reality only a reflection of the ideas and practice of his opponents. The source of Putin's "conservative ideology" - and he makes no secret of this - is collaborator Ivan Ilyin, an apologist for fascism who advised Hitler's regime throughout the war on how best to organize the occupation regime in the USSR. And on the eve of the invasion, Putin openly declared that his goal was to decommunize and destroy the Leninist legacy. In reality, there is only a formal difference between the two imperialist groupings that have plunged the peoples into a bloodbath. Therefore, it is the duty of the real revolutionaries, the Marxist-Leninists, to fight against the war, each in his own country, against his own government, to fight to transform the imperialist war into a civil war.
War to the war! Peace to the peoples! Our main enemy is in the Kremlin!
Long live proletarian internationalism and international solidarity!