The global crisis of capitalism, particularly after the historic implosion of its world financial system in 2007/2008 , led to the dramatic reversal of the imperialist West with post-Soviet Russia under Putin ( and China under Xi}. From a devastated and humiliated country coming out of the ruins of former Soviet Union, at the mercy of the imperialists and the IMF under Yeltsin, Russia together with China are presented by the Trump Administration as ‘the major strategic threats.
Capitalist restoration proved to be not an accomplished fact but a process colliding at its phases with sharpening internal and external contradictions, in constant interaction with world developments. The first decade after the dissolution of the USSR with the IMF imposed shock therapy and the mass plundering of the public property by the oligarchs emerging out of the State bureaucracy and the Mafia networks ended into a State default in 1998 under the impact of the 1997 world crisis, a renationalization of the strategic sectors of the economy under Primakov and a transition to the Putin Bonapartist regime.
The relative stabilization was based on the the conjunctural rise of the price of oil and gaz, the main exports of the Russian economy in the world market. The post Lehman Brothers maelstrom and world depression shattered the basis of this relative stabilization at the same time that US and EU imperialists escalated their offensive for their strategic goal , from the initial times of the war against Yugoslavia, for a colonization of the former Soviet space. A major turning point to this escalation is the coup d’ etat in Ukraine and the war launched in Donbass by fascist mercenary forces under US/NATO political, military and financial support.
The Bonapartist regime of Putin seeks always to find a compromise with imperialism to save itself, as it is seen in the Minsk I and Minsk II temporary agreements. At home the current Russian regime, which continues to have a line of a capitalist restoration under the aegis of the State, base the popular consensus on three main factors 1. The fear of the masses for a return to the chaotic years of the Yeltsin decade 2. On popular opposition to the threat of a dismemberment of the country and colonization by the West, and 3. A relative stabilization of living standards.
The global capitalist crisis undermines all the means by which the Putin regime has based its power. The economy of a huge deindustrialized country is no more sustainable basing itself mainly on the exports of raw materials in conditions of world depression and trade wars, being also at the mercy of conflicting oligarchic interests. Oligarchs are both economically and politically the fifth column of global capital.
Nationalist frenzy and imperial fantasies cannot save the peoples of Russia as they did not save Yugoslavia but acclearted its pulverization into a number of impotent protectorates of the EU and the US. The Soviet people defeated Nazism by defending not eternal Russian idea but the legacy of the October Revolution.
Against imperialist aggression from abroad and, against both Bonapartism and the liberal procapitalist opposition at home, the working people fo Russia, with its tremendous revolutionary heritage, has to develop a revolutionary alternative and a salvation program of struggle
- Expropriation of all oligarchs under the control of the workers
- Worker control and workers management in the State sector of the economy against the corrupt bureaucrats and administrators tied with global capital and local Mafia networks.. Nationalization of all banks under workers control. A democratic planning with a constant interaction between central planners and local producers.
- Reindustrialization under workers control and management
- Down with Bonapartism and liberalism, all power to the Soviets in the Land of Soviets. For a genuine, antibureaucratic revolutionary socialist renewal of the Land of October!
Against the imperialist war drive, the duty of the international working class and of all revolutionary popular forces is to mobilize and fight for the defeat of imperialism, without giving any support to the Kremlin autocracy or to its policies of compromise with imperialism, with reactionary far right forces in Europe and of capitalist restoration at home. The only real allies of the peoples in Russia are the workers and oppressed mobilized all over the world against the same historic bankruptcy of global capitalism and imperialist barbarism, from the March for our Lives of the youth in the US, to the workers in France or in Greece and the oppressed in the Middle east, Asia and Latin America.
Now more than ever we need a revolutionary International to defeat imperialism, capitalism, war and fascism, and lead to victory the world socialist revolution that started in1917 in Russia.
