Marx's last stand: Eastern Ukraine - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
The "Ukrainian
Spring" has been a popular subject for all people. Various perspectives
have been exhibited: US and Russian, Ukrainian and European. When not
viewed as the manifestation of Vladimir Putin's megalomania, or US
overreach, the conflict has been interpreted as the rebirth of the Cold
War, as Russia's belated attempt at empire restoration, or as Western
expansion.
Some basic
categories were invoked, be they of national character, or morality,
good and evil, Nazi vs democratic. Some saw the events as the clash
between a corrupt political system that is failing to stop the march of
liberal democracy; others as US-driven globalism hitting against the
rock of some backward particularism, informed by Orthodoxy and an
outdated political system. More sophisticated and informed concepts such
as historical development or complex make-up of the Ukrainian nation
were also invoked.
However, what
is mostly missing is old-style class analysis of the type I thought I
left behind when I emigrated from Russia some 30 years ago. The West has
generally entered the post-industrial stage; it tends to find the
category of proletariat-bourgeoisie conflict as outdated and less useful
than, say, ethnicity or religion. But what is unfolding in Eastern
Ukraine has all the makings of a classic Marxist drama.
Corrupt, Kiev-based oligarchs have entered into alliance
with ultraconservative forces of the western Ukrainian region, a region
which is agricultural, pre-modern and is extremely hostile to all
things Russian, including modernisation. The rather obvious purpose of
this alliance is to impose a Western version of shock-therapy upon a country that has so far resisted it, because its economy is heavily intertwined with Russian resources and consumption.
Pro-Russian activists guard a regional administration building that they had seized earlier in Donetsk, Ukraine [AP]
