Maidan or anti-Maidan? The Ukraine situation requires more nuance

SOME NUANCE FOR CONSIDERATION

The genuine emancipation of the Ukrainian people is inconceivable without a revolution or a series of revolutions in the West which must lead in the end to the creation of the Soviet United States of Europe. An independent Ukraine could and undoubtedly will join this federation as an equal member. The proletarian revolution in Europe, in turn, would not leave one stone standing of the revolting structure of Stalinist [today Putinist –SV] Bonapartism.
Leon Trotsky 1939.

Ishchenko’s idea to ” support progressive wings of both Maidan and anti-Maidan, and try to unite them against the Ukrainian ruling class and against all nationalisms and imperialisms on shared demands for social justice makes logical ideological sense. It may also be considered desirable in it own right. It does not however tell us what to do in the here and now when a de facto neo-colonized country is being parceled by force by its former imperial ruler. Ischenko fails to consider that it is preferable and easier to struggle for social issues in national states than in empires.
Leaving aside the issue that there is no critical mass that supports the kind of socialist alternative he proposes, Ukraine’s geographical position means that it can only choose which great power to ally with and whether it will integrate into the world market via the European Union or Putin’s Eurasian Union. After 200 years as a Russian colony, no one should be surprised that the mass of Ukrainians and a majority of Russians and Russian-speakers, with the exception of the Crimea, regard the EU as the only alternative to the neo-soviet Russophile oligarchic order in which they live. They desire integration into EU looking to Poland Slovakia and Hungary as models. Polls taken in early 2014 show that had presidential elections occurred then, no more than 15% would have voted for clearly neo soviet Russophile candidates. 12% supported full integration with Russia. In the most heavily colonized and Russified provinces where most of the population tune-in to Russian rather than Ukrainian media, 24 percent in Luhansk and Odessa, 33 percent in Donetsk, and 41 percent in Crimea, supported political union with Russia. http://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=eng&cat=reports&id=236&page=1.

All leftists realistically detail future problems stemming from EU association. Ukrainian leftists, oddly enough, whom one should expect to be trying to organize a left-led anti Russian national-liberation struggle, in the tradition of the Ukrainian left SDs and UKP-isty in 1919-1920, however, are not even discussing such a plan. THey correctly do not consider the Euromaidan a revolution in so far as its socioeconomic demands have been replaced with the neoliberal capitalist agenda of the new government. However, they do not consider the new government progressive or revolutionary in so far as it is anti- imperialist or anti coloinalist, or, that it arguably represents the national bourgeois anti-colonialist revolution that Ukraine never had. It declares the need for “unpopular decisions” on prices and tariffs and readiness to fulfil all the conditions of the International Monetary Fund. It has appointed oligarchs as provincial governors. It will probably thereby, as the leftists note, generate disappointment, impoverishment, an unacceptable encroachment of private interests in public administration, de-industrialization and the proletarization of government employees.

Ukraine’s Euromaidan national movement and new government, are politically liberal-conservative and have chosen EU membership with its neo liberal capitalism over Putin’s Eurasian neo liberal capitalism. But, regardless of the adverse socio-economic consequences of EU neoliberal capitalist policies in every country in which they have been adopted, the bourgeois national government in Kyiv presents a lesser threat to Ukrainians and Ukrainian independence than Russian imperialism.

Transnational corporations through their various “trade agreements” destroy what Marxists term “bourgeois” freedoms in the countries where they were won, often by force of arms and bloodshed. Marx considered these the great achievements of the eighteenth and nineteenth century revolutions: freedom of the press, elected representative assemblies, constitutions, the rule of law, and strong legal trade unions. In Ukraine, which never had a successful bourgeois anti-colonial revolution, these freedoms were never enacted and enforced. These freedoms never existed in Stalin’s USSR and, after 1991, despite their formal adaptation in a written constitution, Ukraine’s 1% and their hired politicians ignored them whenever they pleased. Re-establishing closer ties with Putin’s Russia would only re-establish and reinforce the criminalized neo-feudal soviet-style order that Ukrainians rose agаіnst en masse in November 2013. For this reason, even in truncated form, today’s EU member countries remain as beacons of these freedoms and liberties to people living in a corrupt neo-feudal authoritarian post-soviet republic.
The average Ukrainian, even if such a person is aware of the neo-liberal corporatist destruction of the post-war order in Greece or Ireland or Portugal, also sees the EU corporate neo-liberal capitalist order as one that still provides better conditions of life than the post-soviet Russian-style robber state-corporatist capitalist order they live under in Ukraine – as their protest has shown. Because between 75-80% of Russian government revenue derives from gas and oil exports, Putin’s government can pay employees, and finance services and pensions. It thus ranks ahead of Ukraine in the Human Development Index. Poland, however, with no finite resources to export, ranks ahead of Russia, while it is doubtful that Russians who do not live in either Moscow or St Petersburg are better off than Ukrainians who live outside Kyiv. Since 2000, moreover, Ukrainian migration to Russia has been steadily falling while migration westwards as been steadily increasing. http://www.migrationpolicycentre.eu/docs/migration_profiles/Ukraine.pdf
For Ukrainians EU membership also promises the final end of two centuries of cultural russification and the threat Ukrainians will disappear as an ethnos – or be reduced to the level of an “aboriginal people.” A comparison of the evolution during the last 100 years of the Ukrainian diaspora in North America with that of the diaspora in Russia adds little weight to any argument in favour of joining Putin’s Eurasian Union. It is also inconceivable that Ukraine’s political Russophiles, if any remained in the country after EU accession, would try defend their old soviet right there of not having to learn or use under any circumstances Ukrainian, or, to use Russian as administrative language INSTEAD of Ukrainian in Ukraine. Russians in Germany or Poland or any other European country make no such absurd claims , let alone feel second rate because they can’t speak to non- Russians in Russian. Nor would Ukrainian in the EU disappear as a living language as Belarusian has in Belarus. It would no more be displaced by English than have Polish or Czech or Dutch.

EU membership for Ukraine would arguably make the introduction of a Keynesian Social Democratic order there more likely than if it belonged to Putin’s Eurasian Union. The excesses of the neoliberal corporate order have now led some US and EU leaders to realize that it has to be restricted. Such people realise that aiming to produce the greatest amount of goods at the lowest price will ultimately turn the entire planet into a desert. World Bank executives fired Joseph Stiglitz for his opposition to neo liberal capitalist policies, while IMF board members fired Dominique Strauss-Kahn as chairman on the basis of a phony sex-scandal for trying to introduce regulations and controls on capital and corporations. Nonetheless, U.S. and Britain, have now nationalized major financial institutions, reversing the privatization trend of the last two decades. French President Sarkozy proclaimed, “Laissez-faire is finished.” There are, in short, reformists within the ruling class calling for renewed government regulation, protection of citizens from foreign monopolies, and equalization and redistribution through more taxation on capital flows and the 1%. http://www.sagepub.com/cleggstrategy/Kotz%20D%20M.pdf. Argentina unilaterally reduced its debt in 2003 and channeled its money into domestic development not foreign bankers’ pockets. In Venezuela and other Latin American countries, neoliberalism has been reversed as a result of mass political mobilization.
Against this background, it should be remembered that Tymoshenko in her time promised policies to regulate capital flows and Ukraine’s 1%. Should Ukraine’s new government follow her lead they would have the support of EU reformists for regulation, re- nationalization and, most important, a write-off of all debt – something EU bankers did for Poland. Ukrainian leaders are also likely to follow Polish advice — in particular keep the national currency and severely restrict inflow of foreign speculative capital. All of which would bring living standards public services and infrastructure up to Polish, if not western European levels. Should this not happen, if their new government, Brussels, the IMF the World Bank, the WTO and Washington, blindly impose neoliberal capitalist policies rather enacting legislation to regulate and control Ukraine’s 1%, they will turn Ukraine into another Ireland or Greece. Under such conditions it is not inconceivable that a new Euromaidan by Ukrainians in the EU joining a renewed Occupy movement would shake the EU to its foundations.