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I thought comrades may be intrested in the following letter in this week's Weekly Worker: FI and Ukraine The left’s response to the recent developments in the Ukraine has taken a very wide variety of forms. Some have taken a variant of the third camp position (with greater or lesser emphasis on the role of the working class), while others adopt either critical or uncritical support for Russia’s intervention. However, the position of the Fourth International stands out like a sore thumb. It endorses the recent coup, which it refuses to call a coup (see statement of March 2 by the International Committee of the Fourth International) and it declares support for “the social and political forces which are trying to build a left opposition within that movement”. In practice this is a call for some kind of united front - doubtless of a very special type - with the neo-Nazis. Yanukovych’s regime is described as “oligarchic and criminal”, but no such condemnation is made of the successor regime. It makes repeated references to such non-Marxist, cross-class abstractions as “the population” and “the Ukrainian people as a whole” in a vein reminiscent of the worst of Laclau and Mouffe. However, the opaque and contorted language of the document is a cover for the openly pro-Banderist and social-imperialist line being put forward by Duncan Chapel, a leading member of the British section, who tries to claim there are no Nazis in the Ukrainian government, whose legitimacy he enthusiastically endorses. When confronted by a full list of Svoboda members of the cabinet, he claims that not everybody in Svoboda is a Nazi - as if anybody joins a rabidly anti-Semitic organisation that openly uses swastikas and Celtic crosses and regards Stepan Bandera - the murderously anti- Semitic leader of Ukrainian forces who collaborated with Hitler against the USSR during World War II - as its great hero, under the misapprehension it is some version of the Lib Dems. Toby Abse email Jim ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
