Two years ago Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a war against Ukraine to crush its independence and subjugate its people.
Eight years earlier workers across Ukraine rose up in massive protests for political rights that ousted the pro-Moscow regime of Viktor Yanukovych. Workers’ class consciousness and confidence grew.
Moscow’s invasion is the first major ground war in Europe since World War II. It is a watershed in world politics, sharpening conflicts between Washington and rival powers and shaking the alliances that shape the imperialist “world order.” A second turning point came Oct. 7 with Hamas’ massacre in Israel, the largest slaughter of Jews since the Nazis’ Holocaust. Like Ukraine’s war to defend its sovereignty, Israel’s war to defeat Hamas is in the interests of workers worldwide.
Days after Moscow’s invasion in 2022, the Socialist Workers Party National Committee issued a statement by Jack Barnes, the party’s national secretary, which remains available on the Militant ’s website.
It answered Putin’s lie that an independent Ukraine posed a threat to the people of Russia and refuted his outrageous claim, repeated to Tucker Carlson this month, that Ukraine isn’t a nation at all. Since then, members of the Socialist Workers Party and Communist Leagues have spread the word about the courageous fight of working people in Ukraine to defeat the invasion and return all of their country to Ukrainian sovereignty, and hailed efforts by workers in Russia to protest Putin’s war. Advancing these intertwined working-class struggles is the road forward.
Throughout the 2024 campaign, the Democratic and Republican parties will debate how to defend what they call “our” interests in Ukraine, the Middle East and worldwide. There is no such thing. Whenever they say “our” they mean the profits and political interests of the U.S. capitalist rulers. They deny workers have our own, sharply counterposed, class interests.
SWP candidates and members present “an independent working-class foreign policy,” the party’s statement said, one “that starts from the interests of the toilers at home and internationally — not from hypocritical chants about ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ behind which the capitalist rulers seek to mask their exploitation and oppression of billions the world over.
“The stakes are enormous. Working people must see the necessity of taking political power into our own hands — as toilers did in Cuba at the opening of the 1960s, following a popular, workers-and-farmers-based revolution — or we will face a future of social devastation, reaction, world war, and even nuclear catastrophe.”
We are living in an epoch of revolutionary struggles. Workers in the U.S. will have our chance to emulate what the leadership of Cuba’s socialist revolution showed is possible. That requires building a proletarian party tempered in class battles and capable of leading millions to take political power into our own hands. The Socialist Workers Party’s 2024 campaign presents this perspective. Join us!