We repost Frieda Afary’s interview with Ella Rossman, a feminist from Russia, a member of the coordinating group of Feminist Anti-War Resistance and a doctoral student at the University College London, who writes about gender and Soviet history. She talks about the feminist anti-war solidarity with the resistance of Ukrainian people against Putin’s invasion, and […]
Tag: Russia
We repost Frieda Afary’s interview with Oksana Dutchak, who is a Ukrainian sociologist and co-editor of Commons, a Leftist journal in Ukraine. She talks about the courageous popular resistance to Putin’s brutal invasion, as well as the needed solidarity with regional and global struggles against authoritarianism, racism and misogyny. It originally appeared here on March 19, 2022.
As Russian aggression continues in Ukraine, the media and Western leaders continue to downplay the danger posed by the very real existence of the country’s well-organized and armed Far Right.
Every protest needs a fund – striking workers and people on barricades have to eat, or they won’t be able to last long enough. These people need reassurance that if they get fired, they will get the necessary support and will be able to feed their children. Neither the well-known Russian opposition nor foreign organizations […]
Note of LeftEast editors: we reprint the English version of the original (also below) manifesto of an informal group in Russia called ‘Socialists Against the War.’ This power was based on the promises of peace and stability, and eventually led the country to war and economic catastrophe. Like any other war in history, the current […]
After a long winter of the covid-19 pandemic, the first glimpses of a coming spring offer a vision of new bloodshed. We have now witnessed more than a week of Russian invasion and war on Ukraine, a stretch of time that will be seen as an undeniable rupture in international relations. Things are moving at […]
Oksana Dutchak is a researcher based in Ukraine and an activist of E.A.S.T. – Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational. She tells about the current ever-changing situation in Ukraine and local attempts of self-organization to cope with the war. The question of how to create a transnational politics of peace has no easy answer. Continuing to mobilize […]
Cihan Tuğal on the implications of US and Russian wars of aggression since the end of the Cold War, and their meaning for the rights of nations to self-determination.
The inter-imperialist conflicts we see between NATO and Russia (or the US and China, as well as many smaller conflicts) are ultimately rooted in national economic competition, which itself is an outgrowth of the competition inherent to capitalism. To finally wipe out the drive to war means ending capitalism altogether. But that is no excuse for an abstract position that the only thing we can do now is call for revolution, as some on the far left are doing. War enflames national divisions and is most damaging to working people. It needs to be resisted and ended immediately. It is the end of wars, especially when opposed from below, that can open space for continued class conflict and the further struggle for socialism in Ukraine and beyond.
Based on all this, the ongoing conflict is between
– a richer (and of course very considerably larger) Russia that turns its economic performance into life spans of its population with relatively low efficiency (sort of like a state afflicted with what I would call a quasi-resource-curse), and
– a poorer (and, obviously, less gigantic–although by no means “small”–) Ukraine whose Life Expectancy figures are considerably higher than those of Russia, reflecting a less terrible linkage structure turning the country’s moderate per capita GDP into life spans for its population.