Anarchists in the Ukrainian Revolution - Translation of an article by Unity

[YS: The following is a translation of an article by Israeli Anarchist group Unity on the actions of Ukrainian Anarchists during and since the uprising there against Russian imperialism. Many on the left have treated the uprising as a uniformly reactionary movement due to its admittedly rotten leadership, thus committing the usual falsehood of all middle-class Marxist groups with regards to anti-imperialist struggles. Among those who have taken this position is the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency, including my comrades in its local section, the Internationalist Socialist League. 

Thus, due to the importance of this issue, I have decided to translate and share this article. In the past, I have condemned Unity's support of the imperialist attack on Iraq, under the excuse of defending the Yazidis and Christian minorities from ISIS pogroms. I stand by what I said, but while I have disagreements with Unity and with the positions expressed in the article (for instance, I hardly think it would be correct to characterize the uprising as a "bourgeois revolution"), the importance of this article is in my opinion rather obvious. 

You can find the Autonomous Workers' Union's website here, and the original article on Unity's website here. Out of respect, I would like to stress again that I have only translated the article, and took no part in researching or writing it. I have endeavored to translate the article as literally as possible, without altering formulations.]

The Anarchists During the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution / Yigal Levin

What do we know about the revolution which took place in Ukraine during the winter of 2013-14? Do we know that a bourgeois-democratic revolution took place? We do. That the twisted government of the pro-Russian oligarchy was toppled? Also true. That Ukraine is now being smothered by a brutal, bloody civil war? Without question. But what do we know about the Ukrainian revolutionaries? Did they accomplish anything in the midst of the struggle between thousands of hostile forces? We will answer these questions in the following paragraphs.

The Autonomous Workers' Union

In Ukraine, there is an Anarcho-Syndicalist organization called the Autonomous Workers' Union (ACT in Ukrainian). The organization is a small workers' union (a syndicate) with about 50 members across Ukraine. The organization takes parts in a variety of struggles, including workplace struggles, creating workers' co-ops, running an informal school, as well as writing and distributing original articles. During the revolution, the organization supported the uprising of the Ukrainian people, with its members often joining first aid groups which took care of the injured (of whom there were quite a few due to the struggle against regime forces - the "Barkut"), but the organization's most meaningful accomplishment was the occupation (or liberation, depends on how you look at it) of a building complex which used to be a factory (closed down due to the breakdown of Ukraine's economy) and its socialization* into a community center and a home for civil war refugees.

The "Autonomy" Community Center

During the revolution, the Kharkov local took advantage of the crumbling government's weakness and the helplessness of the municipal authorities and took over (due in no small part to the help of the organization's students and youth) over a factory complex, where most of the buildings used to serve as offices and workers' housing. In the factory's large halls, the organization set up a movie theater which screens movies dealing with social issues several times a week, a public dining hall, bike repair shops, laundry rooms, public showers and rooms for entire families. Today the center is home for twelve families which fled from the civil war raging in East Ukraine (between the new pro-Western regime and the pro-Russian separatists who wish to secede from Ukraine and join Russia). Many refugees come to the center every week to receive food or medical care, and the showers are also widely used. Every day, dozens of social activists (mostly anarchists) work there to expand the center and prepare it for new families (there are all in all around half a million refugees from the war zones, thousands of them in the city Kharkov), with the potential to make the place into a truly liberated zone (including creating a tent city and taking over several buildings). With winter approaching, this means a wide and thorough preparation, including ovens, water heating instruments, clothing and warm sheets. But not all is perfect in the Anarchist utopia in Kharkov, as the forces of reaction are not sitting idly by either.

The Battle Over "Autonomy"

It did not take long for reaction to show its ugly face, and after a few months of the center's activities, the new government in the city opened up a campaign against the anarchists. At first gangs of pro-Russian neo-Nazis were sent to the center to try and take over it. However, after a few fights from which the anarchists came out on top, the gangs were expelled. At that point, city hall decided the send in the police (which was re-organized after the revolution) to put an end to the center and jail the revolutionary anarchists. But the anarchists were prepared. Together with locals and refugee families, they made the center into a fortress. After a failed attempt at a takeover by police, and in light of the anarchists' local supporters' rage, the police stopped trying to disperse and close down the center. The revolutionaries and the rest of the center's residents learned their lesson, and organized a guard for the center, always ready to make it into a fortress once more.

Theory and Practice

The Ukrainian experience shows us that only organizing within a given structure can be of use. It shows that anarchists have their place in a revolution, even if it is a bourgeois revolution. It shows that a violent struggle and self-defense do lead to important results in practice (and not just in theoretical blabbering). Without a strong organization, without the ability to concentrate the effort, Ukrainian anarchists would never have been successful in any of the initiatives which we have recounted here. As disorganized individuals, they would have been cast to the sidelines, and any activity would at best amount to Facebook "activity" in the vein of "ah... the Nazis are taking over our revolution again, this isn't our revolution". The Ukrainian experience shows us that even a small organization, if it is consolidated and united, can accomplish a lot during a revolution. We must learn for them and adopt only the positive.

*The alternative economic organization put forward by anarchism. The property (factory, workshop, house, school etc.) will belong to the local collective (workers, craftsmen, tenants, students...) as opposed to private property (privatization) or state property (nationalization).

How the Zionist state funds the Israeli extreme-right. Also: Leftists support US aggression in Iraq, revisited.

Every revolutionary has had this debate at some point in his life: some liberal or leftist reacts to something terrible that an extreme-right groups did, and talks about the need the fight the extreme-right by any means necessary, which usually amounts to voting for the slightly-less-extreme right. Democrats against Bush in the US; Labor and Meretz against Sharon and then Nethanyahu in Israel; Chirac against Le Pen in France; there are many examples. Then one has to go and say or write the usual Marxist spiel about how the extreme-right's actions are only an expression of the policies of the more mainstream bourgeois parties, and how to really fight the extreme-right one must fight against capitalism as a whole, etc. The truly dedicated activist already has a response of the sort saved in his draft folder in gmail, ready to be copy-pasted as needed. (Or am I the only one who does that?)

That's all good and well. But I am writing to you from the belly of the beast, from within the Zionist state, where everything that's bad about other imperialist countries finds a way to be slightly worse. And here, not only does incitement against Palestinians, African immigrants and leftists begin from the state, but the hate groups who dance to the tune of the capitalist masters are in many cases actually funded by it.* An Israeli reporter by the name of Shahar Ginosar revealed two years ago that the so-called "price tag" pogroms are funded by the political arm of the West Bank settlers, the Yesha Council, which in turn is funded by the government. This means that the Zionist state is the direct source of all organized violence employed against Palestinians, whether by the army or by settler thugs.

Another example comes to mind, which is more relevant due to recent events. One of the most vile and active racist organizations in Israel today is the Kahanist group Lehava, a Hebrew acronym for "For the Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land." As the name suggests, its efforts are dedicated to ensuring that Jewish-Israeli women think of their bodies as nothing more than machines for bringing more Jewish children into this world. This in practice means trying to scare Jewish women with fabricated horror stories about other Jewish women who married Palestinians and were terribly abused. Given that it is much more common for Jewish women to be abused by Jewish men, I have half a mind to start on organization encouraging Jewish women not to marry Jews, but I'm no good at organization-building, so forget about that.

Lehava is funded  by an organization called "Khemla" (Compassion), a so-called "welfare association" which provides shelter for young orthodox Jewish women, and in this capacity - or rather, under this pretense - is funded by the welfare ministry. What's a welfare association? Beats me! But according to its own description of itself, it gives food to needy families, provides aid to orphans, and uh... fights against Jewish assimilation and provides aid to the hilltop youth. So, in short: through the welfare ministry and Khemla, the Zionist state funds an organization which spreads the most heinous racist incitement against Palestinians and non-Jews in general, while also finding an additional way to fund Zionist pogromists.

But there's more to the state's support for Lehava than just money. Even today, most Israelis would not vote for a Kahanist party, and the Kahanists have been forced to be a bit more sneaky to get into the Knesset in recent years. This did not stop Zionist politicians from inviting Lehava members to speak in Knesset discussions on various occasions. One was a meeting on how to prevent Jewish assimilation in the Knesset's committee for - get this - the advancement of women. The other, more notorious one, was a meeting to discuss a curious phenomenon: according to the people who called up the meeting, there have been cases of underprivileged Jewish girls who were convinced to marry Arabs, taken to Arab villages, and were then forced to convert to Islam and cut their ties with their families and Jewish friends. I'm saying this phenomenon is curious because according to the police representative at the meeting, this never happened. Not once. When the rest of the members of the committee were questioned about this by the one (!) member of the committee who does not belong to a right-wing party, he was silenced and the police was condemned for not having invented cases of Palestinian men kidnapping Jewish women.

So far, Lehava's attitude to violence against Palestinians was pretty sneaky: it encouraged pogroms against Palestinians, under the excuse that violence is needed to discourage them from courting Jewish women (whether or not Jewish women are actually anywhere near them is beside the point), and supported these attacks in public statements, but it did not have the guts to carry out attacks on its own. However, after the recent massacre in Gaza and the resulting campaign against Palestinians and leftists, the little fascists now feel big and strong, and so, they have called on their gutter-slime followers to try and break up a Palestinian-Jewish wedding in Rishon LeZion.

It should be noted that the couple has no public record of political activity - not that such activity would justify violence, but it does underline the viciousness of the attack by Lehava. All it took was for a Palestinian-Jewish couple to announce their wedding - or rather, a wedding party, seeing as by Israel's racist law system, Jews and non-Jews cannot marry in the country - for Lehava to call for violence.

In case you're wondering, the police has yet to arrest anyone for incitement; if anything, they're more likely to arrest those who want to defend the couple from the Lehava pogromists. This particular action may just be insane enough for the police to do something about it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. There are now people waiting for the couple to decide if they want to call for any outside help, to see if some sort of solidarity event should be organized. As of right now, I have not heard anything either way; what's clear is that the more the left fails to stand up to the fascists, the more it helps embolden them and encourage more violence.

*Although in this regard, the Zionist state still has nothing on the Stalinist regime in the USSR, which actually created its own fascist party, Pamyat, from scratch.

Update: Massive pressure has forced Facebook to take down a few extreme-right pages, including the Lehava page which originally called the protest against the wedding. That's good, but it's still not clear what this means for the wedding or the protest against it. Either way, one should always keep in mind that censorship will always eventually be used against the working class and oppressed: indeed, Facebook has already taken down the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades' page, also for "racist incitement" - another good reason why revolutionaries should only recognize racism against oppressed groups.

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I am allowed one Marxist cliche per post, so this time we'll do the one about the tragedy and the farce. Trotskyist organizations have actually been rather good in condemning the US bombing in Iraq, under the thin excuse of protectign Yazidi and Christian minorities from the ISIS scum. However, outside of Trotskyist circles, many are again calling for US intervention. Luckily, unlike 2003, US imperialism finds itself in a world where its influence has been significantly weakened and its own population is increasingly opposed to wide-scale military adventures in the third-world. As such, a full-blown invasion is probably off the table.

Anti-imperialism isn't just an opposition to occupation or pro-imperialist regimes. It is the basic understanding that imperialism is humanity's most dangerous enemy, that it will always act against the interests of the working class and oppressed, and that for that reason, every time the imperialists are beaten, we win, and every time they win, we lose.

This fact is completely lost on the Israeli anarchist group Unity. I had taken an interest in this group because of its courage in speaing out against racism as well as its willingness - in contrast to almost every other left-wing organization in the country - to organize self-defense for left-wing activists against right-wing thugs. However, they have recently published several articles on their facebook page, including posting an article which calls for Western intervention against ISIS, without mentioning the US bombing or criticizing that part of the article.

This shows the emptiness of the misconception that "the left" has learned any lessons from the Iraq War, or that it even has the capacity to learn any lessons from it. The middle-class left will function now, as it has then, as it always has and always will: a left flank of imperialism. The only way to stop imperialist war is by overthrowing imperialism altogether, and for that a new left must be built - a revolutionary communist party, led by the vanguard of the working class. This as opposed to the dominant revolutionary organizations today, whose leaderships are drawn almost exclusively from the petit-bourgeois intelligentsia.

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Today's read: I wanted to write more about negotiations with Israel, but this post is long enough and I should probably organize my thoughts a bit more before I write about that. For now, it is important to understand that despite all the horrors inflicted on Gaza - and also on the West Bank, where murder of protesters and bystanders by Zionist soldiers is as common as ever - Israel lost to Hamas. True, Israel murdered almost 2000 Palestinians, and caused untold destruction and suffering. But the ceasefire can only be interpreted as a sign that Israel could not keep going. Again, this is not a defeat in the sense of casualties, or in the sense that Israel is under any sort of risk of having its army crippled or losing territory, but in the sense of being unable to achieve its goals and of further cementing mass, worldwide opposition to its policies. Here, Ali Abunimah said it best.