This message of solidarity was sent by the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists to an antiwar meeting held in Toronto, Canada, by the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE). The meeting took place despite a vicious campaign aimed at cancelling it led by the far-right Ukrainian Canadian Congress and supported by the Ontario government.

***

Dear meeting participants, 

We express solidarity and support for your struggle both against imperialism and war and against the attack of the far-right seeking to stifle our struggle. A great task such as the one that our movement is undertaking must inevitably meet with serious obstacles. If imperialism is willing to shed blood in war and attack all the basic democratic rights won by the revolutionary struggles of the past, we have an obligation to resist. Such resistance can create the best impetus for launching a broader international struggle of the working class. 

This is not the first time that the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists and their imperialist masters have tried to sabotage our meetings, which advance a political line independent of the capitalist elites. But each time they try to sabotage our events, the IYSSE gives them a worthy rebuff. This is a sign of the serious strength of our movement. If today we are able to offer such resistance to the ultra-right, what will our movement be able to show when it reaches an even more mass character? The answer to this question is very frightening to our political opponents. 

In Russia and Ukraine, there is a special layer of privileged lackeys who seek to subordinate the working class to the framework of the nation-state. In the case of Ukrainian nationalists, this takes the form of their support for a proxy war against Russia and the Putin regime. In the case of Russian nationalists, this takes the form of support for a supposedly “anti-imperialist” Putin. These nationalists are certainly heterogeneous and have one or another disagreement, but this does not prevent them from being equally hateful towards an international and independent movement of the working class. 

What do these “gentlemen” have to offer us? To submit our will to the capitalist machine of profit and death. What are they capable of offering to solve the issue of the war that has broken out in Eastern Europe? To support the institution of their respective capitalist states. This is a reactionary political line that contradicts the whole essence of the world economy today. Following their line can only lead to the destruction of all that society has previously achieved. And the first steps of this destruction are manifested in the suppression of the most basic democratic rights. 

We from the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists have faced various slanderous accusations. Our opponents among the Russian nationalists accuse us of defending imperialism.  Our opponents among the Ukrainian nationalists accuse us of being “accomplices of Putin’s regime,” “Rashists,” [a a pejorative term for “Russophiles” in Ukraine] and other pejorative labels. Slander is a typical weapon of our political opponents. Recognizing that we do not fit into their world of “evil capitalism and good capitalism,” they come up with this weapon to place us in the narrow confines of confrontation between capitalist elites. 

Our commitment to internationalism is like another planet to them, which has nothing to do with “reality.” They strongly dislike the fact that our movement stands outside their “reality” of immutable private property, high profits, inequality, poverty, perpetual war, and pandemics. To maintain their “reality,” they dare to take the craziest steps, from a simple ban on assemblies to a real war against the living conditions of the working class. Every war has to be paid for, but our goal must be that this time, not the working class, but capitalism is made to pay for it, and abolished once and for all.

Our movement seeks to make the working class internalize a very important truth that has been hard won in bloody struggles: in the age of imperialism, the defense of democratic rights is impossible without a healthy socialist movement throughout the world, based on the defense of working class interests and not those of the bourgeois state, the corporations and the trade union bureaucracy. The strength of the working class lies not only in its unity, but also in its understanding of its role in the struggle against capitalism and war.

To quote Vladimir Lenin, “He who wants to serve the proletariat must fight to unite workers of all countries, in an uncompromising struggle against bourgeois nationalism, both that of his ‘own’ country and that of ‘foreign’ countries.” 

With best wishes, 

The Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists in Russia and Ukraine