People's Inquiry into 'Our future beyond capitalism'

The Ukraine-Russia crisis is just one expression of dramatic changes that are taking diverse forms in different countries. Nevertheless, there is an essential unity to a fast-moving global crisis that embraces economy and finance, ecosystems, democracy and politics, culture and ideology.

There is undoubtedly an eco-social impasse on a global scale. The old order cannot manage the contradictions within the existing system or meet the aspirations of countless millions in countries from Brazil to Ukraine, from the UK to the United States, from France to Greece.

Hierarchical political-state systems which are superficially democratic are compromised by their collusion with corporate and financial power and their subordination to market forces. Climate change is one consequence. So too is resurgent nationalism, creeping authoritarianism and mass state surveillance.

There is worldwide opposition and resistance, but as yet no shared strategy for getting beyond capitalism socially, politically and economically. That should surely be our goal and we assert that another world is not only possible but entirely necessarily for all our futures!

So after more than six years and 1,700 blogs, usually at the rate of five a week, A World to Win is proposing a switch of emphasis. There is a genuine need to deeper our understanding of the connected parts of the dramatically altered world and to use this knowledge to change what goes on in favour of the 99%.

We’re suggesting that this takes the form of a People’s Inquiry, with “Our Future beyond Capitalism” as the subject to be investigated. It will be open to individuals, campaign groups, trade unions, academics and students and anyone interested in working on solutions in a collaborative way. We have suggested six areas for the inquiry:

1. The ecosystem, including climate change and species loss
2. Global economy and finance, where the 1% rule over the 99%
3. The state, democracy and social rights (like health and housing)
4. Ideology and philosophy – dialectics of liberation   
5. Culture, education and sport – how they can help set us free
6. Networks/organisations/strategies for revolutionary change

When the People’s Inquiry is launched next week, you will find links from this site to these different areas. In each area, we have suggested some questions to focus our initial work. A World to Win is proposing a three-stage process:

1. Gathering evidence through papers, web references and contributions from individuals and groups. People can bear witness about their own situation or campaign, through text or by sending video or audio files. 

2. Face-to-face meetings in different locations, and on-line meetings, to assess and discuss the evidence, draw conclusions and make proposals.

3. A working group, which contributors will be invited to join, will discuss the results and collaborate on the contents of a draft final report that maps out a way forward.

This will be a simple registration process that will enable you to post to the inquiry, which is hosted on our network platform. This is your invite to take part. Please accept and use it.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Defend Ukraine's right to self-determination

Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the threat to invade other parts of Ukraine on a trumped up pretext, is a reactionary response to a popular uprising for democracy in Kiev and a diversion from serious economic problems confronting the Putin regime.

As leaders East and West seek to blame one another, the key issue – Ukraine’s right to self-determination is being swept under the carpet. The excuse for the invasion of Crimea – that the Russian-speaking majority had to be saved from “fascists” – is part of a fake narrative dreamt up in Moscow and one used down the ages.

Moscow claims that the Maidan uprising in Kiev has been run and financed by Western reactionary forces and is aimed at suppressing Ukraine’s Russian speakers. Yet the Maidan uprising which began in November 2013 was first and foremost a popular revolution, which included many elements in Ukrainian society, amongst them – but not led by – right wing nationalists against a corrupt, autocratic regime. 

Many Jews took part in the uprising, for example. An ex-Israeli special forces soldier led a Kiev fighting unit against the Yanukovych government. Volodymyr Groysman, a former mayor of the city of Vinnytsia and the newly appointed deputy prime minister for regional policy, is a Jew.  

 

A language law introduced last week by Kiev’s parliament to reverse a provocative act by ex-president Yanukovych was yesterday vetoed by Ukraine’s caretaker president Turchynov. He acknowledged it had been a mistake.

While Putin’s provocative actions are a blatant infringement of Ukrainian sovereignty, the Russian bear has found some allies in strange places. British media commentators including Jonathan Steele and former British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite are calling for NATO and John Kerry to “back off”. As Timothy Snyder writes in the New York Review of Books:

"Interestingly, the message from authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Kiev was not so different from some of what was written during the uprising in the English-speaking world, especially in publications of the far left and the far right. From Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review through Ron Paul’s newsletter through The Nation and The Guardian, the story was essentially the same: little of the factual history of the protests, but instead a play on the idea of a nationalist, fascist, or even Nazi coup d’état.”

The first time Ukraine saw even a glimpse of nationhood in modern times was in 1919 when the Zluty unity agreement was signed and the Ukrainian People’s Republic came into existence. Areas of the country were, however, ceded to Poland.

Early Bolshevik policy strongly asserted the right of all nations to self-determination in the former Tsarist empire and elsewhere. During the 1920s, under Mykola Skrypnyk’s Ukrainization policy, the Soviet leadership encouraged a national renaissance in the Ukrainian language, literature and the arts.

Crimea became an autonomous part of Ukraine in 1954 after being gifted by Nikita Khrushchev. It was his effort to make up for Stalinist oppression, when 7.5 million people – mostly Ukrainians – died in the Holodomar, a terror-famine deliberately imposed by Stalin in the early 1930s. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and several other countries as an act of genocide.

The Stalinist policy of starvation and repression was followed up from 1944 by ethnic cleansing with the forcible deportation of over 200,000 Crimean Tartars. Even Tartars fighting in the ranks of the Red Army were demobilised and sent to labour camps.  

Not too surprisingly, Stalinist repression had led some Ukrainians to welcome German forces after the invasion of the USSR in 1941. Nonetheless, the vast majority of Ukrainians fought with the Soviet Red Army and Moscow named Kiev as a hero city.

Ukraine’s longing for nationhood re-emerged as a powerful force encouraged by Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policy and, finally, the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union. It inspired the human chain of 300,000 Ukrainians which led to independence of today’s Ukraine.

         

After Ukraine declared its state sovereignty in 1990 and its independence in August 1991, a dispute flared up over the status of the Crimea. It was settled by an agreement in 1992, by which Crimea was granted autonomous status within Ukraine.

But Vladimir Putin – following in Stalin’s footsteps, has never accepted Ukraine’s right to exist. In 2008, he said to George Bush that if Ukraine joined NATO, Russia would annex Crimea and eastern Ukraine: “Don’t you understand, George — Ukraine is not even a nation! What is Ukraine? Part of her territory is Eastern Europe, and part, a considerable part, was given by us!”

A succession of leaders representing either a Western-leaning bourgeois or oligarchs looking to Russia have failed to develop Ukraine and played one community off against another. Corruption became endemic with Tymoshenko and then Yanukovych enriching themselves. Now Ukraine is bankrupt. The European Union, for all its mouthing about democracy, has no intention of bailing out any leader in Kiev.

Underlying Putin’s aggressive nationalism is his deep fear of a people’s uprising within Russia itself. The superficial success of the Sochi games was accompanied by a contempt for the corrupt abuse of public funds, disdain for local people’s rights and ecological devastation.

Russia of course has huge oil and other natural resources. But the recent growth of some sectors, which saw the enrichment of oligarchs and parts of the middle classes in the 1990s and noughties, is in crisis. Interest rates have shot up, the stock market fell 9% this morning and the rouble is at an all-time low. A massive capital flight has been under way for years. Much of it has ended up in luxury homes in Knightsbridge, laundered by Western banks or in the shape of football clubs.

Putin has quickly reversed the pre-Sochi cosmetic release of opponents, like Pussy Riot. He closed down one of the few remaining television stations that criticised the monstrous Sochi Olympics. Protests by anti-invasion activists in St Petersburg and Moscow were quickly suppressed by riot police.  He remains what he has always been: an autocrat presiding over a corrupt capitalist oligarchy who brutally suppresses and kills his opponents.

It is indeed rich of Kerry, Hague and other Western leaders to mouth criticisms of Russia’s military intervention – bearing in mind the US-UK-NATO invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and bombing of Libya along with remote killing by drones in Pakistan.

Opposing Putin’s act of aggression in no way, therefore, implies support for NATO and the EU. They can no more represent the aspirations of Ukrainians than Yanukovych or Putin can, while the new government in Kiev has no solutions either. All the people of Ukraine, whatever their mother tongue, have the right decide their own future free of interference from outside forces. That principle is an absolute.

A World to Win editors

Vultures circle Ukraine as economy collapses

The formation of an acceptable new government in Ukraine reflecting the multi-dimensional aspirations of the popular uprising that saw off the Yanukovych kleptocracy is proving difficult enough. Dealing with its collapsing economy is an even bigger problem.  

Ukraine’s economy is relatively small – at around $7,000, its annual gross domestic product for each of its 45 million people is around one fifth of the UK’s – but the country’s potential is being sized up by external forces.

All the actors on the global political and economic stage – including the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, Russia, China and not least the global corporations are eying up the prospects for collapse. They are weighing the advantages that can be gained from an intervention and studying the likely impact on themselves.  

In the 20 years or so following the break up of the Soviet Union, most of the former state industries were “privatised”, or rather handed over to oligarchs, including Yanukovych’s family members.  After years of their self-enrichment, and recent economic decline intensified by the effects of the global crash, the country is now dangerously close to bankrupt.

World prices for steel, Ukraine’s biggest export, have fallen by half since the Chinese economy began to slow in 2011. At the same time the country’s cash balance has been declining and its external debt – including overdue payments due to the IMF and Russia’s Gazprom - soaring.

As is well-known, due to its geographical location Ukraine plays host to a network of pipelines that carry gas and oil from Russia, and a number of the other former Soviet states to Western  Europe. But the global oil corporations are eager for action.

Shell and Chevron signed agreements last year to drill unexplored shale formations in Ukraine, offering the chance to upgrade the country’s energy infrastructure and boost domestic production, thus reducing the amount of gas imported from Russia. Before the crisis erupted last year, Exxon, the largest US oil company, was also close to signing a pact to explore the Black Sea.

The country is the fourth largest of the world’s arms exporters, and has become increasingly dependent on sales to China’s rapid build-up of military equipment. Last year, Ukraine agreed to lease 5% of its extremely fertile, but relatively undeveloped land to China to grow crops and raise pigs for sale to Chinese state-owned companies. As part of that deal China promised to build highways and bridges in the country.

A new report from the Institute of International Finance sets the immediate context. It says that budget financing “has become virtually unavailable”. The acting president, it noted, says that Ukraine’s pension fund does not have enough money to meet pension obligations. The report warns:

“On the other hand, tax revenues appear to have collapsed along with economic activity during the weeks of the political standoff. With no access to foreign markets, and domestic banks under intense liquidity pressure, the central bank has become the sole financier of the government.”

Estimates of Ukraine’s’ need for emergency funding vary from $12- $30 billion this year. On the world scale these are relatively small sums – the bailout for Greece amounts to 237 billion euros - and small change in relation to the trillions pumped into the financial system in the wake of the 2007-8 crash.

Some have even suggested that the emerging Ukrainian government should approach former citizen Jan Koum for help. He has just sold his instant mobile messaging application WhatsApp to Facebook for $19bn. More seriously, the IMF will only lend to a stable government, one that is prepared to impose a severe programme of austerity on its restive population.

That is certain to lead to further social upheaval. Ukraine’s struggle for political and economic self-determination has only just begun.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Ukraine revolt up against the oligarchs

The tremendous popular movement that has taken control of the centre of Kiev to demand the departure of the government represents a wide spectrum of forces. They range from workers tired of falling living standards to rabid nationalists who hate everything Russian.

Ukraine’s debts are overwhelming the country’s economy and it’s reckoned it needs to find $60 billion to make interest payments on its loans next year. A paralysed regime reluctant to sign up to stringent International Monetary Fund conditions has found itself caught between Moscow and Brussels.

President Putin fears that if Ukraine is drawn into the European Union it will open the door to imports into Russia itself. So Russia, which has a stranglehold over Ukraine’s energy supplies, wants the country instead to become part of a Moscow-sponsored customs union.

Having won their independence in the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, it seems that the majority of Ukraine’s people do not want to be driven back into the arms of Moscow again. Their uprising is the second in the country’s brief period of independence, having taken to the streets in November 2004 in protest against rigged presidential elections.

There is material support (food and power supplies) for the current street action from president Viktor Yanukovich’s political opponents. Many of them helped organise the “Orange Revolution” which forced out Yanukovich nine years ago – only to see him back in power today.

Barricades are being reinforced in Kiev’s Independence Square, and people are settling in, despite sub-zero temperatures. They have seen off repeated efforts by security forces to remove them from the square over the last 22 days. Demonstrators and journalists have defied brutal assaults by the Berkut riot police. Morale is being boosted by popular singer Ruslana and bands like Mad Heads and Haydamaky.

There are a wide range of forces involved in the protests, including the far right nationalist Svoboda (freedom) party. Yanukovich’s support lies in the largely Russian-speaking eastern part of Ukraine, and its steel and coal tycoons, while his opponents include other oligarchs from “The Family”, the corrupt super-rich who hold the reins of economic and political power.

Behind the protests lies Ukraine’s impossible economic situation. Its woes deepened after the global financial crash of 2008, because of its reliance on exports of steel and raw materials from the heavily industrialised east and south of the country. Ukraine has been in recession for 18 months.

It was Yanukovich’s failure to sign an agreement at the November 28-30 EU “Eastern Partnership” summit in Vilnius which initially sparked the protests. In any case, it is clear that the EU states cannot bail out Ukraine, no matter how much they want to out-manoeuvre Putin.

Humiliation in Vilnius was quickly followed by Yanukovich’s failure last week to secure a deal in China where he hoped to negotiate a $3bn loan for irrigation. And the strength of the pro-EU protests makes the signing of a deal with the much-hated Putin impossible.

Last Sunday around a million people besieged the capital’s streets and nationalists toppled a statue of Lenin. Somewhat ironically Ukraine’s last period of true independence was during and just after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

As the founder of the young Soviet state, Bolshevik leader Lenin defended the principle of national self-determination and strongly opposed any forcible integration of nations into a Russian-dominated state. Rather than wanting a statue to himself, he would have been on the streets supporting the demonstrators.

But Lenin’s legacy was trampled by the greatest nationalist of them all – Stalin. His regime’s reactionary policies led to famine in Ukraine and starvation for millions. Many Ukrainians, with some justification, see Putin continuing in Stalin’s great-Russian footsteps and reject dictatorial rule from the east.

The mass of Ukrainians rightly want to free themselves from the shadow of power-hunger oligarchs and political dictators of all varieties. Becoming part of the European Union, which is imposing savage austerity measures on member states, will not help them, however.

At the same time, the main political parties – whether they are headed up by  Yanukovich, Timoshenko, Klitschko or Yatseniuk – are fronts for the corrupt, oligarchic tycoons and mafias who own the country’s immense agricultural and mineral resources. These are the barriers which Ukrainians have still to remove.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

'Walking blind into a minefield'

The impending collapse of so-called “emerging” economies from Ukraine to Turkey illustrates dramatically the domino-effect of the global financial crash, with the weakest countries going to the wall first. Rising political tensions at national and regional level are also dangerous signals that the crisis is destabilising international relations.

Countries like Ukraine have relied on external funding to develop their economies; now the same banks are themselves in deep trouble and are pulling their money out where they can in a desperate bid to reduce their massive exposure. Ukraine has seen its currency crash by 20% and its stock market reduced by 80%. The $20 billion it is seeking from the International Monetary Fund will soon be swallowed up; Iceland is already asking for more from the IMF.

The conflict between Ukraine’s prime minister and president ahead of scheduled elections is mirrored in Turkey, where the military and the courts are undermining the elected Islamic-based government. In Russia, stock markets have crashed by over two-thirds since May and the fall in the price of oil is reducing state revenues sharply. Russia’s already soured relations with the United States and Britain are certain to worsen.

Meanwhile, as even the Bank of England belatedly acknowledges, the financial crisis has a lot further to run, with insurers and hedge funds next in line in the meltdown. Some estimates suggest that up to 30% of the world’s 8,000 hedge funds could disappear shortly.

At a conference in London last week, Professor Nouriel Roubini, a former US Treasury and presidential adviser known for his accurate prediction of financial crises, said he would not be surprised if the US and other countries soon had to close their stock markets for more than a week to halt descent into "sheer panic".

He added that turmoil over world trade, currency markets and debt is likely to cause tensions between the Western world and emerging superpowers such as Russia, China and "a bunch of unstable oil states". Roubini warned: "It's the beginning of the decline of the US financial empire. The Great Depression ended in a massive war. I hope that's not going to happen but it's pretty ugly now."

Roubini, who does not mince his words, summed up the predicament facing capitalist governments and states. "The bail-outs have not worked because the markets are no longer rallying, and the policy-makers have run out of options. It's like we're walking blind in a minefield. Every situation has become risky and no one can trust each other. The banks are too big to be allowed to fail, but they're also too big to be saved."

Roubini’s remarks are no exaggeration of the dangers we face as a result of the crisis. History has demonstrated how economic recession and slump fuels militarism, nationalism, protectionism and, ultimately, war. Prime minister Brown’s plan to bring forward a few public-private infrastructure projects are meaningless in this situation (his suggestion came on the day that the government launched its draconian attack on people with disabilities, trying to force them to take non-existent jobs).

Nothing less than a root-and-branch reorganisation of the economy and financial system will suffice. As our Charter for Democracy says, we need to “eliminate speculation and profit as the basis for society, ensuring that both ecological care and basic human needs shape production, consumption and lifestyles”. We urge readers to back the Charter and work to establish local and national Conventions for Democracy to build support for the transfer of political and economic power to the majority. It’s time to plan to put capitalism out of its misery before it can inflict unimaginable pain on the working people of the world.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor