Station Eleven (series, 2021)

 

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‘They Continue the Crisis’: parliamentary breakup in Bulgaria amidst war and inflation

https://www.marxist.com/they-continue-the-crisis-parliamentary-breakup-in-bulgaria-amidst-war-and-inflation.htm

Emily Wall 30 June 2022



Image: U.S. Secretary of Defense
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Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov and his party “We Continue the Change” (PP, Prodalzhavame Promyanata) – Pro-West darlings, self-proclaimed heroes in the fight against corruption and for liberal democratic values – lost a vote of no-confidence in the National Assembly on 22 June, with 123 in support to 116 against.

This party of Wall Street financiers, as well as US-and-UK-educated technocrats, emerged from the interim government that was hand-picked by President Rumen Radev, which ran the country from May to December 2021. This was during a period of repeat elections and parliamentary crisis in which a ruling majority could not be formed to govern. We described this parliamentary chaos here, and now we see that it continues.

PP, which in last year’s November elections garnered a narrow win over the right-wing GERB party, whose mafia-profiled leader Boiko Borisov had held power for some 12 years, did not take long to fall. Their election platform was based on promising to lead Bulgaria away from its perceived status as looted and ruled by oligarchs, putting it on the the path to a ‘European, modern, liberal future’. They played every pro-West and pro-NATO propaganda card in the book. Whatever illusions existed in their promises soon dissipated. Voter turnout for this third attempt at parliamentary elections was the lowest in 30 years.

The move to expel this fragile government from power by the opposition bloc in Parliament began on 8 June as some members left the ruling coalition, once again leaving the government short of the threshold of minimum seats needed to vote decisively as a majority. The stated reasons for this exodus was the Petkov government’s budget and their betrayal of Bulgaria on the question of relations with North Macedonia. Petkov used his last days after the loss of confidence and before his June 27 resignation to orchestrate a vote in Parliament to remove Bulgaria’s block on North Macedonia’s ascension to the EU, and to urge Macedonian Prime Minister Kovačevski to agree to France’s proposed terms to join the Union. 

What failed?

Hopes that PP offered for a facelift of democratic and judicial reform did not last long. Such appeals will increasingly lose their power to move the masses in the future. Liberal free-market rhetoric is completely out of touch with the underlying needs of society suffering the effects of capitalist crisis. Following the 30-year gutting of state resources, and depression brought about by the transition to capitalism, now we have the shock of 15 percent inflation, skyrocketing gas prices, and major problems in agriculture. There is a widening awareness that the country is on the brink of deeper economic fallout from failed and contradictory handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, costs and military aid related to the current war in Ukraine, and to top it off, a hurried switch of currencies to the Euro that is planned to happen at the end of next year.

The increased division in the bourgeoisie in recent years was signalled in the fall of Boiko Borisov's long-standing GERB regime, after it inevitably became too unpopular to be useful to Western imperialism / Image: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service

Consider the current wave of protest around the dissolution of the parliament. While some 5,000 protested in support of the Petkov government on 22 June, the day of the no-confidence vote in parliament, the mood rang hollow and lacked a unified or articulate political expression, despite the fact there were 12 different protests on multiple issues – rising electricity costs, pro and anti-government, etc. – planned that day.

This was for a few reasons. First, Petkov revealed his shallowness by again using cheap business-management-school propaganda to rally support for his continued governance. With the help of the corporate media in Bulgaria and abroad, the attempt by opposition parties to expel him from parliament was portrayed as an attack of “the mafia” against “democracy”; of the “barbaric East” against the “civilised West”. This rhetoric presented the situation as an attack by ugly and stupid Bulgarians against the “smart and beautiful” liberal elite Bulgarians (a trope coined by Borisov in the past to undermine his opposition). Such fairytales do not provide a means of resolving the massive contradictions in Bulgarian society.





The failure over the past decades of all brands of bourgeois political parties and ‘leaders’ has consolidated widespread scepticism towards the viability of the system, and the present regime as a whole. None of the capitalist state’s representatives in parliament are capable of raising mass support. This is evidenced by dwindling participation in elections, despite mounting discontent and will to throw out the establishment parties, the last manifestation of which peaked in the protests in the summer of 2020. Clearly, there is no solution to these issues on the basis of capitalism, despite all talk of “corruption” as the core problem plaguing the country, with the easy fix of replacing the “rotten” government with a more “honest” one.

Marxists understand that, in reality, the division we see playing out in parliament reflects a split in the ruling capitalist class. We have, on the pro-government side, the PP along with the (falsely named, and thoroughly pro-capitalist) “Bulgarian Socialist Party” (BSP) and right-wing “Democratic Bulgaria.” On the anti-government side is the opposition bloc composed of GERB, the “Movement for Rights and Freedoms” (DPS, the party representing the Turkish minority in Bulgaria), “There is Such a People” (Ima Takav Narod, ITN, a confused populist party led by singer Slavi Trifonov, who originally entered parliament as an anti-GERB party and surpassed them in votes in the July 2021 election), and Revival (Vazrazhdane, the fringe nationalist platform for anti-NATO and anti-EU sentiment). The capitalist class in Bulgaria is composed of competing interests. The local oligarchs would profit from economic ties with Russia, while western capital and its puppets are at present used to cut off all business to the East and punish Putin – exemplified by the role of PP.

The increased division in the bourgeoisie in recent years was signalled in the fall of the long-standing GERB regime, whom the Western imperialists wanted to dispense with in order to have a fresh tool of influence, after GERB inevitably became too unpopular to be useful. But now this conflict of interests has further worsened following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February, wherein two poles of capitalist power are now dragging Eastern Europe through war, piling pressure on the region to militarise and participate in sanctions on Russia, and to finance support for the Zelensky regime in Ukraine.
Petkov and the beloved war in Ukraine

The drastic drop in the popularity of PP leading up to the no-confidence vote occurred in part because their hard stance against corruption turned out to be a hard pro-West stance, as revealed by the question of war and support for Ukraine. Petkov has adopted the role of a wannabe Zelensky, a small dog barking at Russia in defiance, in war-escalating fashion. He did so to pose as a darling of the West, in spite of the heavy dependence of Bulgaria on Russian gas supplies, and exposing the country to predictable Russian retaliation.

Petkov has adopted the role of a wannabe Zelensky, a small dog barking at Russia, in order to pose as a darling of the West / Image: ZUMAPRESS.com

Despite basic economic logic, internal opposition and the grave misgivings, for example, of President Radev, Petkov refused to agree to Russian terms for natural gas payment in roubles, which led to Russia cutting off its gas, 90 percent of Bulgaria’s total supply, in late April. Within days of this event there was talk of limiting the public transit to a reduced schedule, decreasing the temperature of water over the summer, and shutting down elementary schools because electricity was too expensive. Then came unconvincing reassurances that Bulgaria has plenty of gas stored for now, and will transition, over the summer if not overnight, to other gas suppliers (with much help from the American ambassador).

Petkov has stopped short of providing a direct supply of weapons to Kiev, but is “very much for” the aid provided by Bulgarian weapons manufacturers, selling arms or parts through third countries (arms exports have reportedly increased by three times since the start of the war). He has also agreed to provide technical support to repair Ukrainian weapons, based on a deal made in Kiev in late April. To make sure everyone knows how much he supports Ukraine, he donated a month’s salary to the cause and made an appeal to Bulgarians to do the same! Then, on 28 June, the Petkov government suddenly decided to expel from the country the entire staff of the Russian Embassy, calling them “spies” working against Sofia’s interests, leading to a shut-down of all the consulates.

He has dramatised the ousting of his government as a Kremlin plot, with himself honoured to play such a noble role as target of the forces of evil, saying: “Russia really wants to take down this government because it will show that if you don’t play with them, then governments fall… It would be a great example of how the diversification strategy of gas does not work.” We are all grateful to Petkov for this lesson!
The opposition bloc and the ‘socialists’

Bulgarian society largely supports neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and has historical ties and affinity with Russian culture. At the fringe, this pro-Russia lean is expressed in hard pro-Kremlin nationalism. Such sentiment is mainly directed through Revival, a new party in Parliament (it won 13 of 240 seats in the last election) whose leader Kostadin Kostadinov radically opposes the Ukrainian regime and calls the pro-government protesters in Bulgaria “fascist scum.” This party has taken up various anti-government causes, organising anti-vaccination mandate protests and falling in line with anti-Macedonian chauvinism. For instance, there was the Bulgarian nationalist attempt to block North Macedonia from EU ascension on the basis of their allegedly falsifying the history of relations between Bulgaria and Macedonia, which they see as belonging to the Bulgarian nation. They also serve to channel much of the anti-Western-imperialism mood, demanding Bulgaria leave the EU and NATO and calling for a referendum on the introduction of the Euro.

Historically, since the transition, the misnamed Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) has similarly served as a tool for the Bulgarian bourgeoisie (as well as the western imperialists) while resting on support from their pro-Russia base. They too have refused support to Ukraine, and devote party time and resources to obsess over the contents of the North Macedonian constitution. Yet the BSP stood with the Petkov bloc, which is not surprising from the point of view of how irrelevant they are (their support hit a record low in the last election, as the discredited Ninova clings to authority within the party), and how opportunistic their policy is. As of 29 June, the BSP suspended its willingness to be in a block with PP until Petkov steps away from leadership, following his expulsion of Russian diplomats.

A week after the invasion of Ukraine began, the Petkov government forced the Minister of Defence, Stefan Yanev, to resign after he publicly came out in favour of neutrality in what he insisted on calling the Russian “special operation.” Yanev, who was given this position in Petkov’s PP, and who had been appointed acting Prime Minister in the caretaker government, and formerly served as a general in the Bulgarian Army, has now launched a new party called “Bulgaria Rise.” This party will run in the snap elections that are probably due this fall after the likely failure of reforming a government based on the current elected members of the National Assembly. In his conservative party, we again see nothing pro-working class and therefore nothing genuinely democratic or progressive. His campaign will appeal to “national interest” and ensuring “security” and the protection of family values, and will predictably fall into the category of parties heavily accused of corrupt and dishonest practices by opponents who do the same.
Which way forward?

The instability and dysfunction in parliament is a symptom, not just a cause, of the economic crisis and instability inherent in capitalism. It is a product of the selling out of the peoples’ interests, which has been the defining feature of Bulgaria’s incorporation into the capitalist world beginning more than 30 years ago. In a period of global capitalist decline, such contradictions are deepening.

The selling out of the peoples’ interests has been the defining feature of Bulgaria’s incorporation into the capitalist world / Image: Kevin Walsh

Here we find the actual basis of what could be a revolutionary movement, based on the very people who are now entering, or could soon enter en masse, into the political arena and class struggle in Bulgaria. Real solutions will not come about by way of reforms granted by the pro-capitalist, so-called anti-establishment parties of the kind spawned by the last large wave of protests in 2020. Rather, genuine progress will come by a strengthening of the class struggle, based on a programme of socialist political and economic demands.

Such a workers’ alternative is currently missing, but Bulgaria has a rich revolutionary tradition that can be revived as capitalism proves continuously incapable of solving the burning problems of the working class. If established on the right principles, it could grow quickly to lead a transformation of the situation in Bulgaria: to throw the ruling class out as a whole rather than in part, and to oppose imperialist war and plunder, defending national interests and security on the basis of international workers' revolution and cross-border solidarity.

Such a revolutionary party must boldly embrace an anti-capitalist and socialist programme, by confronting the bureaucratic degeneration of the so-called communist regime before 1989, while defending the idea of collective ownership of the means of production, the expropriation of the oligarchy and imperialist exploiters and the establishment of a planned economy democratically controlled by the working class.

In order to do so, it is necessary to sharply cut through the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois illusions that capitalism can provide for the wellbeing of the majority; and that the present regime can be reformed out of cronyism and corruption, which is endemic in capitalism itself. This is the factor needed to finally attain the goals of taking social services and previously-privatised sectors of the economy back into the hands of the people, and charting a future free from enslavement to capital.

American Gun Culture & Frontier Mythology

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/06/30/american-gun-culture-frontier-mythology/


June 30, 2022



Contrary to the imagery of the Wild West, Pierre M. Atlas says many towns in the real Old West had tougher restrictions on the carrying of guns than the one just invalidated by the Supreme Court.


Reenactments of Old West gunfights, like this one at a tourist attraction in Texas in 2014, are part of the mythology underpinning the United States’ gun culture. (Carol M. Highsmith via Library of Congress)

By Pierre M. Atlas
Indiana University

In the wake of the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings, 70 percent of Republicans said it is more important to protect gun rights than to control gun violence, while 92 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of independents expressed the opposite view.


Just weeks after those mass shootings, Republicans and gun rights advocates hailed the Supreme Court ruling that invalidated New York state’s gun permit law and declared that the Second Amendment guarantees a right to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense.

Mayor Eric Adams, expressing his opposition to the ruling, suggested that the court’s decision would turn New York City into the “Wild West.” Contrary to the imagery of the Wild West, however, many towns in the real Old West had restrictions on the carrying of guns that were, I would suggest, stricter than the one just invalidated by the Supreme Court.

Support for gun rights among Republicans played an important role in determining the contents of the the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first new gun reform bill in three decades. President Joe Biden signed it into law just two days after the Supreme Court’s decision was released.


In order to attract Republican support, the new law does not include gun control proposals such as an assault weapons ban, universal background checks or raising the purchasing age to 21 for certain types of rifles.


Nevertheless, the bill was denounced by other Republicans in Congress and was opposed by the National Rifle Association.

I have found that for those Americans who see the gun as both symbolizing and guaranteeing individual liberty, gun control laws are perceived as fundamentally un-American and a threat to their freedom. For the most ardent gun rights advocates, gun violence – as horrible as it is – is an acceptable price of that freedom.

My analysis finds that gun culture in the U.S. derives largely from its frontier past and the mythology of the “Wild West,” which romanticizes guns, outlaws, rugged individualism and the inevitability of gun violence. This culture ignores the fact that gun control was widespread and common in the Old West.


Although hard to read, the sign to the right of this view of Dodge City, Kansas, from 1878 reads “The carrying of firearms strictly prohibited.” (Ben Wittick via Kansas Historical Society)

The Prevalence of Guns

Guns are part of a deep political divide in American society. The more guns a person owns, the more likely they are to oppose gun control legislation, and the more likely they are to vote for Republican candidates.

In 2020, 44 percent of American households reported owning at least one firearm. According to the 2018 international study Small Arms Survey, there were approximately 393 million firearms in civilian hands in the U.S., or 120.5 firearms per 100 people. That number is likely higher now, given increases in gun sales in 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Americans have owned guns since colonial times, but American gun culture really took off after the Civil War with the imagery, icons and tales – or mythology – of the lawless frontier and the Wild West.


Frontier mythology, which celebrates and exaggerates the amount and significance of gunfights and vigilantism, began with 19th-century Western paintings, popular dime novels and traveling Wild West shows by Buffalo Bill Cody and others. It continues to this day with Western-themed shows on streaming networks such as “Yellowstone” and “Walker.”


A gunfight in the TV show “Yellowstone.”

Marketing Move

Historian Pamela Haag attributes much of the country’s gun culture to that Western theme. Before the middle of the 19th century, she writes, guns were common in U.S. society, but were unremarkable tools used by a wide range of people in a growing nation.

But then gun manufacturers Colt and Winchester started marketing their firearms by appealing to customers’ sense of adventure and the romance of the frontier.

In the mid-19th century, the gun manufacturers began advertising their guns as a way people all around the country could connect with the excitement of the West, with its Indian wars, cattle drives, cowboys and gold and silver boomtowns. Winchester’s slogan was “The Gun That Won the West,” but Haag argues that it was really “the West that won the gun.”

By 1878, this theme was so successful that Colt’s New York City distributor recommended the company market the .44-40 caliber version of its Model 1873 single-action revolver as the “Frontier Six Shooter” to appeal to the public’s growing fascination with the Wild West.


Colt’s Frontier Six Shooter was marketed to take advantage of people’s romantic ideas of the Wild West. (Cabelas)

Different Reality

Gun ownership was commonplace in the post-Civil War Old West, but actual gunfights were rare. One reason was that, contrary to the mythology, many frontier towns had strict gun laws, especially against carrying concealed weapons.

As UCLA constitutional law professor Adam Winkler puts it, “Guns were widespread on the frontier, but so was gun regulation. … Wild West lawmen took gun control seriously and frequently arrested people who violated their town’s gun control laws.”

“Gunsmoke,” the iconic TV show that ran from the 1950s through the 1970s, would have seen far fewer gunfights had its fictional marshal, Matt Dillon, enforced Dodge City’s real laws banning the carrying of any firearms within city limits.

The appeal of this mythology extends to the present day. In August 2021, a Colt Frontier Six Shooter became the world’s most expensive firearm when the auction house Bonhams sold “the gun that killed Billy the Kid” at auction for over $6 million. As a mere antique firearm, that revolver would be worth a few thousand dollars. Its astronomic selling price was due to its Wild West provenance.

The historical reality of the American frontier was more complex and nuanced than its popular mythology. But it’s the mythology that fuels American gun culture today, which rejects the types of laws that were commonplace in the Old West.

Particular View of Safety & Freedom

Hardcore gun owners, their lobbyists and many members of the Republican Party refuse to allow the thousands of annual gun deaths and the additional thousands of nonfatal shootings to be used as justifications for restricting their rights as law-abiding citizens.

They are willing to accept gun violence as an inevitable side effect of a free and armed but violent society.

Their opposition to new gun reforms as well as the current trends in gun rights legislation – such as permitless carry and the arming of teachers – are but the latest manifestations of American gun culture’s deep roots in frontier mythology.

Wayne LaPierre, executive director of the National Rifle Association, the country’s largest gun rights group, tapped into imagery from frontier mythology and American gun culture following the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012. In his call to arm school resource officers and teachers, LaPierre adopted language that could have come from a classic Western film: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

This view of a lone, armed person who can stand up and save the day has persisted ever since, and provides an answer of its own to mass shootings: Guns are not the problem – they’re the solution.



Pierre M. Atlas is senior lecturer at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University.

Lithuania’s Brinkmanship

Scott Ritter



https://consortiumnews.com/2022/06/30/scott-ritter-lithuanias-brinkmanship/



The restoration of Russia’s rail connection with Kaliningrad is urgently needed to avoid a conflict in the Baltics that has worried NATO for a long time.




Lithuanian government building in Vilnius. (Pofka, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News

On June 18 the government of Lithuania acted on a decision by the European Commission that goods and cargo subject to European Union sanctions could be prohibited from transiting between one part of Russia to another, so long as they passed through E.U. territory.

Almost immediately Lithuania moved to block Russia from shipping certain categories of goods and materials by rail to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, encompassing the former East Prussian Baltic port city of Konigsberg and its surrounding environs. They were absorbed into Russia proper as a form of war reparations at the end of the Second World War.

Lithuania cited its legal obligation as an E.U. member to enforce E.U. sanctions targeting Russia. Russia, citing a 2002 treaty with Lithuania which ostensibly prohibits such an action, has called the Lithuanian move a blockade and has threatened a military response.

Lithuania, as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, is afforded the collective security guarantees spelled out in Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which stipulate that an attack against one member is an attack against all. Through its actions, Lithuania risked bringing Russia and NATO to the brink of armed conflict, the consequences of which could be dire for the entire world given the respective nuclear arsenals of the two sides.

From the moment Russia initiated its so-called “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine, the nations that comprise NATO have been engaged in a delicate dance around the issue of how to support Ukraine and punish Russia without crossing the line of committing an overt act of war that could prompt Russia to respond militarily, thereby triggering a series of cause-effect actions that could lead to a general European conflict, and perhaps World War III.


A formation of NATO fighter jets flying over Lithuania in 2015. (NATO)

In retrospect, the early debates in the European halls of power about whether to provide Ukraine with heavy weaponry seem almost innocent when compared to the massive infusion of weaponry that is taking place today.

Even Russia has softened its hardline stance going in, where it had threatened unimaginable consequences for any nation that interfered with its military operation in Ukraine.


Today the situation has evolved to the point where NATO is engaged in a de facto proxy conflict with Russia on Ukrainian soil which is designed, frankly speaking, to kill as many Russian soldiers as possible.

Russian Objectives

Russia, for its part, has adapted its posture into one that is designed to absorb these NATO-linked blows while pursuing its stated military and political objectives in Ukraine with a single-minded purpose.

Ukraine has used NATO-provided weapons and NATO-provided intelligence to lethal effect on the battlefield, killing several Russian generals, sinking the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and killing and wounding thousands of Russian soldiers while destroying hundreds, if not thousands, of vehicles and pieces of military equipment.

The relative restraint of the Russian approach is evident when contrasted with the hysteria of the United States during its two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


Qassem Suleimani, an Iranian general who oversaw an Iraqi resistance against the U.S. occupation of Iraq in the mid-2000’s that was purportedly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. servicemen, was assassinated by the U.S. government more than a decade after his alleged activities. And it was only a year ago that the U.S. media was in an uproar over allegations (subsequently proven false) that Russia was offering bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan.

The latter claim best illustrates the hypocrisy of the U.S. today. The “bounty” claim was premised on a single attack that left three U.S. servicemen dead. The U.S. today openly brags about killing hundreds of Russians in Ukraine.

Red Lines

Russia’s red lines in Ukraine have evolved to encompass two basic principles — no direct military intervention by NATO forces on Ukrainian soil/airspace and no attack against Russia proper.

Even here, Russia has displayed great patience, tolerating the presence of U.S. special operations forces in Ukraine and holding back when Ukrainian forces, most likely supported by NATO-provided intelligence, engage in limited attacks on targets inside Russia.

Rather than respond by attacking the “decision making centers” outside Ukraine responsible for supporting these actions, Russia has engaged in a graduated campaign of escalation inside Ukraine, striking the very weapons being delivered under the oversight of U.S. commandos and the Ukrainian forces who use them.

It is in this context that the Lithuanian decision to impose a rail blockade on Russia seems to be a stark departure from current NATO and E.U. policy.

Russia immediately made its ire known, indicating that it viewed the Lithuanian actions as an overt act of war which, if not reversed, would result in “practical” measures outside the realm of diplomacy to rectify the situation.


The rhetoric was ratcheted up to high, however, when Andrey Klimov, a Russian senator who chairs the Commission for the Defense of State Sovereignty, called the Lithuanian action “an act of aggression” which would result in Russia seeking to “solve the problem of the Kaliningrad transit created by Lithuania by ANY means chosen by us.”

The Suwalki Gap


Close-up at the Suwalki Gap. (Jakub Luczak, Wikimedia Commons)

For years, NATO has worried about the possibility of a war with Russia in the Baltics. Much of NATO’s attention has been focused on defending the “Suwalki Gap,” a 60-mile-long stretch of border between Poland and Lithuania that separates Belarus from Kaliningrad. Western military experts have long speculated that, in the event of any conflict between Russia and NATO, Russian forces would seek to advance on the Suwalki Gap, joining Kaliningrad with Belarus and severing the three Baltic nations from the rest of Europe.

But while NATO has focused on defending the Sulwaki Gap, a Russian lawmaker has suggested that any Russian military attack in the Baltics would avoid involving Belarus. Instead, it would focus on securing a land bridge between Kaliningrad and Russia by driving north, along the Baltic coastline, to Saint Petersburg.

A series of wargames conducted by RAND around 2014 showed that NATO was, at the time, not able to adequately defend the Baltics from a concerted Russian attack. According to the wargame results, Russian forces were able to overrun the Baltics in about 60 hours.

Similar projections of Russian offensive prowess against Ukraine — where some military officials, including U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Miley, predicted that Russian forces would take Kiev within 72 hours — proved wrong. But the reality is that the militaries of the three Baltic nations are not on par with those of Ukraine, either in quality or quantity, and there is little doubt Russia, even distracted in Ukraine, could deliver a fatal blow to the militaries of the three Baltic nations.

Escalating Rhetoric


Vladimir Dzhabarov in 2021. (Council.gov.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The rhetoric out of Russia continues to escalate. Vladimir Dzhabarov, a deputy head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the lower house of Russia’s Parliament, has threatened that any continued blockade of Kaliningrad “could lead to an armed conflict,” noting that “the Russian state must protect its territory and ensure its security. If we see that a threat to our security that is fraught with a loss of territory, we will certainly take extreme measures, and nothing will stop us.”

If there is one take away from the Russian military operation in Ukraine, it is that Russia doesn’t bluff. NATO and the rest of Europe can rest assured that unless a solution is found that brings an end to Lithuania’s blockade of Kaliningrad, there will be a war between NATO and Russia.

With this reality in mind, the E.U. is working on a compromise arrangement with Lithuania that seeks to have the Russian rail connection with Kaliningrad returned to normal in the near future. This deal, however, must work to Russia’s satisfaction, an outcome which is yet uncertain.


Unlike the Ukrainian conflict, a war in the Baltics will have existential aspects for both sides which brings the possibility — indeed probability — of nuclear weapons being used. This is an outcome that benefits no one and threatens everyone.

Dissolving implantable device relieves pain without drugs

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220630142129.htm


New device has the potential to provide an alternative to opioids and other highly addictive drugs 

Date: June 30, 2022

Source: Northwestern University

Summary: Researchers have developed a small, soft, flexible implant that relieves pain on demand and without the use of drugs. The first-of-its-kind device could provide a much-needed alternative to opioids and other highly addictive medications. It works by softly wrapping around nerves to deliver precise, targeted cooling, which numbs nerves and blocks pain signals to the brain. After the device is no longer needed, it naturally absorbs into the body -- bypassing the need for surgical extraction.



FULL STORY


A Northwestern University-led team of researchers has developed a small, soft, flexible implant that relieves pain on demand and without the use of drugs. The first-of-its-kind device could provide a much-needed alternative to opioids and other highly addictive medications.


The biocompatible, water-soluble device works by softly wrapping around nerves to deliver precise, targeted cooling, which numbs nerves and blocks pain signals to the brain. An external pump enables the user to remotely activate the device and then increase or decrease its intensity. After the device is no longer needed, it naturally absorbs into the body -- bypassing the need for surgical extraction.

The researchers believe the device has the potential to be most valuable for patients who undergo routine surgeries or even amputations that commonly require post-operative medications. Surgeons could implant the device during the procedure to help manage the patient's post-operative pain.

The study will be published in the July 1 issue of the journal Science. The paper describes the device's design and demonstrates its efficacy in an animal model.

"Although opioids are extremely effective, they also are extremely addictive," said Northwestern's John A. Rogers, who led the device's development. "As engineers, we are motivated by the idea of treating pain without drugs -- in ways that can be turned on and off instantly, with user control over the intensity of relief. The technology reported here exploits mechanisms that have some similarities to those that cause your fingers to feel numb when cold. Our implant allows that effect to be produced in a programmable way, directly and locally to targeted nerves, even those deep within surrounding soft tissues."

A bioelectronics pioneer, Rogers is the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Neurological Surgery in the McCormick School of Engineeringand Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He also is the founding director of the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics. Jonathan Reeder, a former Ph.D. candidate in Rogers' laboratory, is the paper's first author.

How it works

Although the new device might sound like science fiction, it leverages a simple, common concept that everyone knows: evaporation. Similar to how evaporating sweat cools the body, the device contains a liquid coolant that is induced to evaporate at the specific location of a sensory nerve.

"As you cool down a nerve, the signals that travel through the nerve become slower and slower -- eventually stopping completely," said study coauthor Dr. Matthew MacEwan of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "We are specifically targeting peripheral nerves, which connect your brain and your spinal cord to the rest of your body. These are the nerves that communicate sensory stimuli, including pain. By delivering a cooling effect to just one or two targeted nerves, we can effectively modulate pain signals in one specific region of the body."

To induce the cooling effect, the device contains tiny microfluidic channels. One channel contains the liquid coolant (perfluoropentane), which is already clinically approved as an ultrasound contrast agent and for pressurized inhalers. A second channel contains dry nitrogen, an inert gas. When the liquid and gas flow into a shared chamber, a reaction occurs that causes the liquid to promptly evaporate. Simultaneously, a tiny integrated sensor monitors the temperature of the nerve to ensure that it's not getting too cold, which could cause tissue damage.

"Excessive cooling can damage the nerve and the fragile tissues around it," Rogers said. "The duration and temperature of the cooling must therefore be controlled precisely. By monitoring the temperature at the nerve, the flow rates can be adjusted automatically to set a point that blocks pain in a reversible, safe manner. On-going work seeks to define the full set of time and temperature thresholds below which the process remains fully reversible."

Precision power

While other cooling therapies and nerve blockers have been tested experimentally, all have limitations that the new device overcomes. Previously researchers have explored cryotherapies, for example, which are injected with a needle. Instead of targeting specific nerves, these imprecise approaches cool large areas of tissue, potentially leading to unwanted effects such as tissue damage and inflammation.

At its widest point, Northwestern's tiny device is just 5 millimeters wide. One end is curled into a cuff that softly wraps around a single nerve, bypassing the need for sutures. By precisely targeting only the affected nerve, the device spares surrounding regions from unnecessary cooling, which could lead to side effects.

"You don't want to inadvertently cool other nerves or the tissues that are unrelated to the nerve transmitting the painful stimuli," MacEwan said. "We want to block the pain signals, not the nerves that control motor function and enables you to use your hand, for example."

Previous researchers also have explored nerve blockers that use electrical stimulation to silence painful stimuli. These, too, have limitations.

"You can't shut down a nerve with electrical stimulation without activating it first," MacEwan said. "That can cause additional pain or muscle contractions and is not ideal, from a patient's perspective."

Disappearing act

This new technology is the third example of bioresorbable electronic devices from the Rogers lab, which introduced the concept of transient electronics in 2012, published in Science. In 2018, Rogers, MacEwan and colleagues demonstrated the world's first bioresorbable electronic device -- a biodegradable implant that speeds nerve regeneration, published in Nature Medicine. Then, in 2021, Rogers and colleagues introduced atransient pacemaker, published in Nature Biotechnology.

All components of the devices are biocompatible and naturally absorb into the body's biofluids over the course of days or weeks, without needing surgical extraction. The bioresorbable devices are completely harmless -- similar to absorbable stitches.

At the thickness of a sheet of paper, the soft, elastic nerve cooling device is ideal for treating highly sensitive nerves.

"If you think about soft tissues, fragile nerves and a body that's in constant motion, any interfacing device must have the ability to flex, bend, twist and stretch easily and naturally," Rogers said. "Furthermore, you would like the device to simply disappear after it is no longer needed, to avoid delicate and risky procedures for surgical removal."

The study, "Soft, bioresorbable coolers for reversible conduction block of peripheral nerves," was supported by the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics, and the National Science Foundation (award number CMM1635443).







Story Source:

Materials provided by Northwestern University. Original written by Amanda Morris. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference: Jonathan T. Reeder, Zhaoqian Xie, Quansan Yang, Min-Ho Seo, Ying Yan, Yujun Deng, Katherine R. Jinkins, Siddharth R. Krishnan, Claire Liu, Shannon McKay, Emily Patnaude, Alexandra Johnson, Zichen Zhao, Moon Joo Kim, Yameng Xu, Ivy Huang, Raudel Avila, Christopher Felicelli, Emily Ray, Xu Guo, Wilson Z. Ray, Yonggang Huang, Matthew R. MacEwan, John A. Rogers. Soft, bioresorbable coolers for reversible conduction block of peripheral nerves. Science, 2022; 377 (6601): 109 DOI: 10.1126/science.abl8532

Will Lehman, Mack Trucks worker, announces campaign for UAW president

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/30/lehm-j30.html




Our reporters


14 hours ago



For more information on the campaign of Will Lehman, visit WillForUAWPresident.org.

Will Lehman, who works at Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania, submitted his declaration of candidacy to run for president of the United Auto Workers on Thursday. Lehman, 34, has worked at Mack Trucks for just under five years.

“My campaign is different from every other because I insist that replacing one bureaucrat with another will not change anything about the character of the bureaucracy at the ‘international’ or local level of the UAW,” Lehman said a video statement announcing his candidacy. “Change will only take place to the extent that we organize our independent strength, through the formation of rank-and-file committees composed of and controlled by workers, not bureaucrats.”


Lehman’s video outlines four planks of his campaign: Not the reform of the existing bureaucracy, but its abolition;
An end to all UAW-corporate bodies that serve as a slush fund for the apparatus;
Full rank-and-file control and oversight, including over all bargaining, vote-counting and safety;
A program to fight for what workers need, including massive wage increases, a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) to meet soaring inflation, the abolition of all tiers, and full health care and pensions for workers and retirees.

“My campaign,” he said, “is aimed at encouraging the growth of a rank-and-file movement of autoworkers, other manufacturing workers, graduate students and professional workers in the UAW in unity with a growing movement of workers throughout the US and internationally. In the coming months, tens of thousands of dockworkers, health care workers, educators and service workers will enter into struggle over the same issues that we confront.”

He pointed to the enormous growth of social inequality, as corporations profit off of the labor of workers, and the renewed spread of COVID-19 throughout the plants, after two and a half years in which the pandemic has killed more than 1 million people in the United States.

“We cannot allow ourselves to forgive the companies and the UAW bureaucracy that are indifferent to these deaths and other injuries,” referring in particular to the deaths of autoworkers Catherine Pace and Wille Dee, who died of COVID-19, and Steven Dierkes and Danny Walters, who died from poor working conditions. “It is up to us to ensure that solidarity means we prevent deaths like these, that we have our own backs.”

Lehman declared his support for the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, which he said was a “growing movement to unify workers across plants, industries and countries.” He stressed that his campaign would be directed to workers throughout the world, not just in the United States:


Despite the misnamed ‘international’ UAW headquarters, the bureaucracy is thoroughly nationalist, claiming that workers here in the US can secure our interests by opposing workers in other countries. This is a lie. Corporations fight globally, constantly seeking out workers to take less than what it offers the ones it currently employs. As the sellers of our labor, we must unite internationally and not be undersold anywhere, and to raise all of our economic conditions through this unity. We must see ourselves as part of an international movement if we are to win.

Lehman also explained that he is a socialist. “Workers have a lot of mistaken ideas about socialism,” he said, “because there have been so many lies about what it is. Socialism means a society based on the principle of equality, where production is controlled democratically by the workers, not an elite layer of multi-billionaires and shareholders.”

He added that workers do not need to be socialists to support his campaign. “If you are tired of being sold out, split into tiers, forced to accept one concessions contract after the next, join and build this movement,” he said.

Speaking to the World Socialist Web Site, Lehman explained that “in order to achieve its aims, my campaign will establish lines of communication between rank-and-file workers at different plants and even in different countries, so that we can break through the lies and isolation of the UAW bureaucracy.

“Autoworkers everywhere should go to my website now and sign up for my text list. Let’s get this campaign moving!”



For more information on the campaign of Will Lehman, visit WillForUAWPresident.org.

Letter to a Young Trotskyist in Russia

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/30/oqgd-j30.html


David North
@davidnorthwsws


15 hours ago















30 June 2022

Dear Comrade:

Thank you for your letter of 28 June and its enthusiastic response to the establishment of a new section of the International Committee in Turkey. The formal expansion of the work of the ICFI is, whatever the country or region, an important political milestone. But it is a source of special satisfaction that it has become possible to make this advance in the country where Trotsky, having been exiled from the Soviet Union, so decisively developed the struggle against the Stalinist regime on a world scale and initiated the founding of the Fourth International. During the visit with the comrades of Sosyalist Eşitlik Grubu to the island of Prinkipo, one could not help but be deeply moved by the awareness of Trotsky’s monumental historical achievement. But we could also draw satisfaction from the fact that we are continuing the work that Trotsky initiated on Prinkipo, and that Trotsky would have been in complete solidarity with the political principles and program of the International Committee.
Leon Trotsky at his desk in Prinkipo

The experience of our comrades in Turkey is certainly, as you write, of great significance for the development of a section of the International Committee in Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. We worked patiently to create, on the basis of a unified conception of the entire historical experience of the Fourth International, a firm foundation for the establishment of a new section.

The resolution of the Sosyalist Eşitlik Grubu deserves the most careful study. The SEG’s recognition of the political authority of the ICFI should not be understood in a merely organizational sense. The political authority of the ICFI is based on its historical association with the defense of the foundational principles and program of Trotskyism. The SEG resolution identified the essential historical content of the continuity of Trotskyism:


4. Only the ICFI represents the political continuity of the world Marxist/Trotskyist movement. This continuity goes back to the founding of the Left Opposition under the leadership of Leon Trotsky in 1923 to defend the strategy and program of the world socialist revolution against nationalist Stalinist degeneration. It was this strategy and program that guided the October Revolution in 1917 led by the Bolshevik Party in Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

5. The founding of the Fourth International in 1938 under the leadership of Trotsky after the collapse of the Communist International paving the way for the Nazis to come to power in Germany in 1933; the founding of the International Committee in 1953 by orthodox Trotskyists led by James P. Cannon of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the US against the revisionist-liquidationist tendency led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel; the political struggle by the British Trotskyists led by Gerry Healy against the unprincipled reunification with the Pabloites in 1963; and the struggle of the American Trotskyists led by David North in 1982-86 against the national-opportunist degeneration of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in Britain and the regaining the control of the IC by orthodox Trotskyists, constitute critical turning points in this political continuity.

Continuity is not conferred upon an organization through some sort of formal proclamation, let alone in the manner of a British knighthood. A young organization must establish its continuity with the antecedent history of the Trotskyist movement by taking up the fight, in the present, against the opponents—Stalinist, Pabloite, state capitalist, social democratic, labor, petty-bourgeois radical, anarchist, bourgeois nationalist, and liberal reformist—of revolutionary Marxism. This fight is conducted on a theoretical, political, and organizational plane, and is always directed toward establishing the complete and unconditional political independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie. However difficult and contradictory the process, the political movement that conducts this struggle expresses with ever increasing clarity the continuity of Trotskyism and, thereby, moves into alignment with the objective trajectory of the world socialist revolution.

Great historical events, such as those through which we are now passing, reveal the essential class nature of a political organization and the interests that it serves. Of course, the response of an organization to a great crisis is conditioned by its antecedent history. The outbreak of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia has rapidly exposed the state-capitalist and Pabloite organizations as contemptible agents of American and European imperialism. Their theory of “Russian imperialism”—closely associated with Shachtmanism and related varieties of state capitalist conceptions—now serves as an ideological justification for support to US and European imperialism and their lackeys in the Ukrainian regime.

In an attack on the International Committee, Oleg Vernyk of the Ukrainian Socialist League (USL) (an affiliate of the International Socialist League-ISL) writes:


We are well aware that in this confrontation with two imperialisms, Western imperialism and Russian imperialism, Ukraine only plays one role: the role of victim.

It is difficult to imagine a more absurd and deceitful statement. The Ukrainian “victim” is a regime that was brought to power by a coup in 2014 that was financed and organized by the United States, using local fascist organizations to provide the necessary military force. During the last eight years, the US and NATO have carried out the training and arming of the Kiev regime in preparation for war against Russia. Thousands of Ukrainian soldiers were directly trained by the United States in the years leading up to the war. In a report posted on June 25, the New York Times wrote:


Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat on the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, said in an interview that the relationships Ukrainian commandos developed with American and other counterparts over the past several years had proved invaluable in the fight against Russia.

The scale of US/NATO support for Ukraine—already measuring in the many tens of billions of dollars—is without historic precedent. According to the Times:


The commandos are not on the front lines with Ukrainian troops and instead advise from headquarters in other parts of the country or remotely by encrypted communications, according to American and other Western officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. But the signs of their stealthy logistics, training and intelligence support are tangible on the battlefield.

Several lower-level Ukrainian commanders recently expressed appreciation to the United States for intelligence gleaned from satellite imagery, which they can call up on tablet computers provided by the allies. The tablets run a battlefield mapping app that the Ukrainians use to target and attack Russian troops.

On a street in Bakhmut, a town in the hotly contested Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, a group of Ukrainian special operations forces had American flag patches on their gear and were equipped with new portable surface-to-air missiles as well as Belgian and American assault rifles.

“What is an untold story is the international partnership with the special operations forces of a multitude of different countries,” Lt. Gen. Jonathan P. Braga, the commander of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, told senators in April in describing the planning cell. “They have absolutely banded together in a much outsized impact” to support Ukraine’s military and special forces.

To claim, in the face of these facts, that “Ukraine plays only one role: the role of victim” is a blatant and contemptible falsification of reality in the interests of imperialism.

The political basis of Vernyk’s endorsement of the imperialist war follows:


However, we members of the USL/ISL have as our basic principle the defense of Ukraine as a political subject, the defense of its working people, the defense of the unconditional right to self-determination of the Ukrainian people and the struggle for the preservation of the integrity of the state.

This one paragraph exposes the USL (and its ISL sponsors) as reactionary nationalists and bitter opponents of the Marxist theory of the state. It is an ABC of Marxism that the state is an instrument of class rule. How, then, can “the struggle for the integrity of the state” be reconciled with “the defense of its [Ukraine’s] working people”? Of course, Vernyk makes no mention of the fact that the Ukrainian capitalist regime is utilizing the opportunity provided by the war to abolish laws and regulations protecting workers that date back to the Soviet era. Nor does Vernyk ever explain why the alleged “unconditional right to self-determination” applies only to Ukraine as defined by the Kiev regime, but not to the predominantly Russian-speaking populations in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

The reactionary basis of Vernyk’s defense of the Ukrainian regime is most starkly revealed in his attempt to rebrand the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, as a politically heterogeneous movement that included progressive tendencies. Vernyk writes that


in the history of the right-wing political formation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, there were endless transformations, cracks, radical changes in its slogans, certain inclinations to the left and to the right, cooperation with Hitler and the war on two fronts, among many other events. To this we must add the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1943 and the massive entry to that organization in 1939 of the communists of western Ukraine that miraculously escaped total extermination by the Stalinist regime. All of this forms part of Ukraine's history that is often characterized as extremely complex, controversial and ambiguous.

Vernyk leaves out of his discussion of this “complex, controversial and ambiguous” history any mention of the central role played by the OUN and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as collaborators of the Nazis in the genocidal extermination of Ukrainian Jews and the mass murder of Poles. Seeking to sow political confusion, Vernyk promotes the anti-Marxist national chauvinist tract written in 1948 by Petró Poltava, who was then a leading ideologist of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. In a reprehensible attempt to politically rehabilitate the OUN as an organization that included genuinely left-wing tendencies that espoused a form of socialist-tinged nationalism, Vernyk claims that Poltava represented “a tendency towards democratization” that “was beginning to emerge within the ranks of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), toward the ideas of the left and the incitement to a simultaneous war against German national socialism and against Stalinism.”

Vernyk goes so far as to claim that Poltava’s pamphlet “annuls all the arguments of Russian propaganda and its ICFI lackeys regarding the assertion that any nationalist liberation movement in Ukraine should be considered, without exception, a far-right current and Nazi.”

Let us review the text by Poltava that has inspired Vernyk and the USL/ISL. It is titled, “Our Teaching about the National State.” The pamphlet begins with an explicit denunciation of the Marxist theory of the state and nation as “wrong and tendentious.” Poltava wrote:


Their [The Marxists’] view that nations will be able to manage without states in the future is utopian, fantastic, and lacking any basis in reality. In all Marxist theory about the state there is a clear effort to deny that the state has any significance for the people and for humanity in general, as well as any attempt to present history as nothing more than a class struggle—which, as we have already stated, is totally incorrect.

Insisting on the essentially ethnic basis of the state, Poltava inveighed against the existence of multinational states. He declared: “Obviously states of this type should not exist; they should be restructured as soon as possible.” The practical implications of this argument were demonstrated by the OUN in its genocidal attacks on Jews and Poles.

Poltava’s text is suffused with reactionary nationalist mysticism:


We nationalists believe in this eternal truth—that an independent national state is the only form of political organization that guarantees a people the best conditions for all-round development of its spiritual and material resources. Without its own national state, that is, without a state extending over all its ethnic territory, a people cannot fully develop.

At the conclusion of the text, Poltava declared that “the Bolshevik USSR is an implacable enemy of individual subject people and humanity in general.”

Why does Vernyk draw inspiration from this reactionary anti-Marxist ideologue? Clearly, his aim is to create an ideological and political bridge to the present-day Ukrainian nationalists, falsely attributing a progressive content to the war being waged by the Kiev regime in alliance with US and European imperialism.

Toward this end, Vernyk dishonestly attempts to portray Trotsky as an ally of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. Vernyk cites a brief passage from Trotsky’s 1939 essay, “Problem of the Ukraine,” in which he defended the slogan, in opposition to the Stalinist regime, of “A united, free and independent workers’ and peasants’ Ukraine.” [Italics in the original].

Vernyk conveniently and duplicitously leaves out of his discussion of Trotsky’s 1939 article any reference to passages in which Trotsky vehemently condemned any collaboration with and concession to the organizations and parties of reactionary Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. Trotsky wrote:


The Ukraine is especially rich and experienced in false paths of struggle for national emancipation. Here everything has been tried: the petty-bourgeois Rada, and Skoropadski, and Petlura, and “alliance” with the Hohenzollerns and combinations with the Entente. After all these experiments, only political cadavers can continue to place hope in one of the fractions of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie as the leader of the national struggle for emancipation. The Ukrainian proletariat alone is capable not only of solving the task—which is revolutionary in its very essence—but also of taking the initiative for its solution. The proletariat and only the proletariat can rally around itself the peasant masses and the genuinely revolutionary national intelligentsia.

Trotsky concluded his essay with the following timely warning:


At the beginning of the last imperialist war the Ukrainians, Melenevski (“Basok”) and Skoropis-Yeltukhovski, attempted to place the Ukrainian liberation movement under the wing of the Hohenzollern general, Ludendorff. They covered themselves in so doing with left phrases. With one kick the revolutionary Marxists booted these people out. That is how revolutionists must continue to behave in the future. The impending war will create a favorable atmosphere for all sorts of adventurers, miracle-hunters and seekers of the golden fleece. These gentlemen, who especially love to warm their hands in the vicinity of the national question, must not be allowed within artillery range of the labor movement. Not the slightest compromise with imperialism, either fascist or democratic! Not the slightest concession to the Ukrainian nationalists, either clerical-reactionary or liberal-pacifist! No “People’s Fronts”! The complete independence of the proletarian party as the vanguard of the toilers!

As is to be expected from this politically bankrupt opportunist, Vernyk attempts to cover up his capitulation to the Ukrainian bourgeoisie with pathetic slanders against the International Committee. He writes that “a United States citizen, Mr. David North, has been defending the interests of Russian imperialism and its propaganda apparatus on issues related to Ukraine.” According to Vernyk, I accepted this assignment “when it became clear that official Russian propaganda no longer has sufficient informational space within the American media or any other country in the western orbit.” Does Vernyk actually imagine that such nonsense will be believed by anyone?

But I must note that his accusation has an ironic character, inasmuch as the “primal sin” of which the International Committee and I personally are guilty, in the eyes of the Pabloites, has been our relentless exposure of the counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism. This included the ICFI’s work on Security and the Fourth International, which unmasked the agents of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Trotskyist movement. Moreover, at a time when the Pabloites were singing the praises of Gorbachev, the International Committee was warning that his policies would result in the culmination of the Stalinist betrayal of the October Revolution, that is, the restoration of capitalism.

The Putin regime is the reactionary resurrection of a bourgeois state that emerged out of the 1991 dissolution of the USSR. But the opposition of the International Committee to this regime, including its invasion of Ukraine, is from the socialist left, not the imperialist right.

Precisely because its opposition to the Putin regime is rooted in its antecedent struggle of the Fourth International against Stalinism and the various revisions of the Trotskyist analysis of the Soviet Union (both Pabloite and “state capitalist”), the International Committee analyzes the current war in the historical context of the dissolution of the USSR, which proved a political disaster for the Ukrainian, Russian and international working class.

The way out of this disaster, from which the present war emerged, is to be found not in alliance with US-NATO imperialism or with Putin’s capitalist regime; but only through the unified struggle of the Ukrainian, Russian and international working class against all the warring states. The working class in Russia as well as in Ukraine must uphold the principle: The main enemy is at home.

These comments on Vernyk might serve, perhaps, as an illustration of how the International Committee upholds the defense of Trotskyism. In the relentless exposure of the enemies of Marxism, the International Committee continues the great historical work of the Fourth International and, on this basis, educates the working class and prepares it for the fulfillment of its revolutionary tasks.

It is our hope that the initiative of our comrades in Turkey will serve as inspiration for the efforts of socialists in Russia and Ukraine to expand the work of the International Committee and raise the banner of Trotskyism in their countries and throughout the former Soviet Union.

With Trotskyist greetings,

David North