Message of solidarity to comrades of the 61st International Antiwar Assembly:

We at News and Letters Committees have been honored to participate with you in antiwar agitation since our founder Raya Dunayevskaya was able to speak in person with the youth in Zengakuren in 1964. We enthusiastically support your work to create this 61st International Antiwar Assembly. The past 17 months since Russia’s genocidal full-scale invasion of Ukraine have witnessed increasing solidarity from workers, activists and people around the world with Ukrainian resistance to the erasing of their lives and national identity.

At the same time, the voices from fascist elements in country after country—such as from Trump supporters in the U.S.—have gotten louder in enabling Putin’s tactics, even his constantly repeated threats to initiate nuclear war. The self-described Leftists who have joined with fascists in a so-called Red-Brown alliance to denounce Ukraine’s fight for self-determination have been exposed for their reactionary behavior much more publicly than for similar actions against Syrian revolutionaries.

Just as capitalist arms makers worked to maintain their bloated World War II profits by replacing the promise of peace with the permanent war economy, making the atomic bombs dropped on the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the opening nuclear threat that still looms over us all, the defense of Ukraine has exaggerated the indispensability and inflated the profits of military suppliers. The same goes for the petroleum companies, for whom Russia’s invasion not only multiplied profits but allowed them to sound patriotic in demanding that global dependence on carbon-based fuels be extended for decades, even as great rivers have been reduced to a trickle and deaths mount amidst the hottest days in 100,000 years.

Ukraine’s fight for freedom has made clearer than ever that capitalists see war as a business opportunity. While they remain in charge, propped up by the best politicians they can buy, issues of war and peace, of life and death, come with a price tag. We have seen too many attempts to topple capitalist power which did not end class society. All the more reason at this time to seek a basis for revolution in the liberatory struggles that Karl Marx hailed, of the ongoing fights of Irish and Poles for self-determination, of uprisings of enslaved Blacks in the U.S. and serfs in Russia, and workers’ control from every workshop to the 1871 Paris Commune. The solidarity in support of Ukrainians, and the solidarity at this conference, represent threads to a world without imperialist war, a world without capitalist war, a world without nuclear war.

For freedom,
Bob McGuire, for
The National Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees, July 31, 2023