The political turmoil in Ukraine
We publish below the text of a leaflet distributed recently by a group of sympathisers in the Ukraine
Workers, Today you can see on the streets and squares of Kiev the continuation of a sharp conflict between two bourgeois clans: President Leonid Kuchma, who is mainly oriented on Russian transnational corporations in close alliance with local oligarchs, and Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, the direct representative of the IMF and similar international financial organizations. The working class have no interest in this conflict, both groups of the bourgeois elite are equally alien to them. Only socialism is the solution of their problems, but what is real socialism?
Socialism means a global system of social organization based on:
Common Ownership – all the productive wealth of the world will belong to all the people of the world. No more transnational corporations or small businesses and therefore nobody will own the world. It will be possessed by all of its inhabitants.
Democratic Control By All – who will run socialist society? We all will. There will be no more government and governed. People will make decisions freely in their communities, in regions and globally. With the existing means of information technology and mass communication this is all possible.
Production For Use – instead of producing goods and services for sale and profit, the sole reason for production will be to satisfy needs and desires.
Free Access – a society in which everyone owns everything, decides everything and only produces anything because it is useful will be one in which all will have free access to what is produced. Money will cease to have any function. People will not work for wages or salaries, but to give what they can and take what they need.
Based on these definitions it is clear that the social system in the Soviet Union was state capitalism, not socialism. Moreover state capitalism is not a step to socialism. All of us know how much disasters state capitalism in USSR brought to workers. Therefore Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, Trotskyist, etc slogans like “Back to USSR”, “For vanguard Leninist-type party” are not socialist and have nothing common with tasks of real socialist movement in Ukraine and the entire world.
Workers don’t have to choose between two bourgeois clans. That’s not a solution. Only a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of society as a whole – socialism – is the solution of all our problems. Capitalism does not operate in the interest of the majority, and can never be reformed so that it does. Until we finally abolish wage labour, we workers will never be free. So, our common task is the consistent and resolute struggle to establish socialism.