it's good to see Jacobin catching up with what Marxists predicted in 2022 now that it keeps unfolding irl: Ukraine is being looted by foreign capital, while the workers interests are being ignored
More than two hundred businesses were present at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdańsk, Poland, at the end of June, eighty-two of them from Ukraine. But out of Ukraine’s eighty-three sectoral trade unions, none had so much as a stall, let alone a seat on a main panel. That asymmetry is telling; and for Ukrainian activists, taking part in the conference was something of a cold shower.
shocking nobody, except maybe the article's author, during the latest investment conference workers were talked about almost exclusively as a resource for capital
Throughout the agenda, Ukrainians “who keep the country running” were discussed primarily as a workforce, as “human capital,” as the population that needs to be lured back from exile.
These workers were talked about by donors, politicians, and businesspeople, without representation of their own. To get the idea: more than 5,000 out of 7,500 participants came from the business sector, compared with a handful of Ukrainian trade unionists, uninvited to the stage, for whom the conference corridors became the only place to make their case.
meanwhile, the Ukrainian parliament looks ready to strip more rights from workers, to benefit capital
Kyiv’s new labor code draft tilts bargaining toward individual contracts over collective ones, gives employers greater flexibility over dismissals and working hours, and makes industrial action more difficult.
and privatise vital infrastructure:
Typically, these are enterprises that were never designed to turn a profit. Forcing them into a commercial model risks the kind of tariff hikes that hit ordinary households hardest, and rushed concessions risk something more than money, a real loss of state control over the systems that keep the country running.
maybe now some demsocs can face the reality that the Ukrainian government isn't some great defender of the people, the 2014 coup wasn't for the benefit of the masses, and neither has Zelensky's government been. the Ukrainian state represents the competing interests of domestic and foreign capital, and is an enemy of its exploited masses. this is completely in line with what we'd expect from the state in a capitalist country
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