International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Labour, protests, and state capitalism in Belarus, three years on

Volodymyr Artiukh — 2023-09-02T10:24:00Z

Last week, two labour activists from Naftan oil refinery were detained by Belarusian security service KGB on charges of undermining national security. The detained Volha Britikava and Aliaksandr Kukharonak have already spent short stints in jail for criticising Lukashenka's government and participating in anti-government protests. They are among the latest victims of the ongoing repressions against labour organisations and activists who joined the country-wide protests three years ago, in (…)

- IV584 - September 2023 / Belarus, Trade unions/workplace organizing

No, the West Didn't Halt Ukraine's Peace Talks With Russia

Taras Fedirko, Volodymyr Artiukh — 2022-10-18T21:48:01Z

“We therefore shouldn't fetishize peace talks, but ground a leftwing vision of the war and the opportunities for ending it in a realistic analysis of the interests, resources and strategies of the parties involved. With this vision, we need to ask: what kind of peace would be progressive and serve the interests of the people of Ukraine?”

- IV573 - October 2022 / Russia, Ukraine

In Belarus, the Left Is Fighting to Put Social Demands at the Heart of the Protests

Volodymyr Artiukh — 2020-08-21T07:00:55Z

The protests in Belarus have widely been painted as a pro-Western “color revolution” or “Minsk Maidan,” ignoring the deeper reasons for popular discontent with president Alexander Lukashenko. Volodymyr Artiukh for Jacobin spoke to left-wingers in Belarus about the forces behind the protests and the prospects of organized labor asserting its own agenda.

- IV547 - August 2020 / Belarus

Partisans or Workers? Figures of Belarusian Protest and Their Prospects

Volodymyr Artiukh — 2020-08-16T13:04:00Z

These week's protests in Belarus have clearly overcome their initial electoral focus and morphed into an expanding dissident movement of urban middle class and workers. In a recent (August 4) article for Open Democracy platform on the presidential campaign in Belarus, I tried to explain why the opposition candidates from the ruling elite and the “creative class” attracted a record number of supporters, which led to mass demonstrations unseen in this country for decades. I argued that these were the culmination of a protest sentiment simmering in Belarusian society since the economic crisis of 2009, that found expression in 2017 in the form of grassroots populist protests challenging Lukashenka's degrading populist rhetoric. Before the most recent elections, his main opponent, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, began to articulate an anti-authoritarian populist discourse that appealed to a cross-classalliance of entrepreneurs, young professionals, and workers. In this article I reflect on the questions I asked two weeks ago, about the role of the leadership and the masses in the current protests, the forms of their organization and the reaction of the Belarusian state. My reflections are based on a six-day marathon of digesting shreds of information coming through the fog of censorship, Internet disruptions and propaganda, as well as from communications with my comrades in Belarus. I am also building on my fieldwork experience among Belarusian workers and trade union activists in 2015-2017, which I conducted as a social anthropologist.

- IV547 - August 2020 / Belarus

The Western Left Should Not Repeat the Mistake Ukrainian Protesters Did on Maidan

Volodymyr Artiukh — 2015-04-24T08:43:00Z

The protesters that started gathering on Kyiv's main square (â€˜maidan') almost ten months ago were driven by a certain kind of â€˜occidentalism' (if I may introduce this term by analogy with orientalism). Europe, which stood as an epitome of Occident for them, presented a generalized image of Ukraine relieved from all evils: corruption, poverty, economic backwardness. However, this vacuous image formed by the desires of the protesting masses, was filled by the content provided by political passions of groups, organizations and parties that struggled to dominate the protest. For liberals it was the Europe of bourgeois democracy, free trade and developed financial markets, for national democrats it was the Europe of elusive â€˜European values' opposed to â€˜the Asian horde', for the far right it was the â€˜Fortress of Europe' and for the few left-wing groups it was the Europe of social struggle. While the brightest dreams of the Maidan coalesced in the image of Europe, the worst nightmares were projected towards Ukraine's East: Ukraine's own eastern regions, the stronghold of the then ruling elite, and its eastern neighbor, Russia. [1]

- 2022 - Ukraine / Ukraine, Ukraine debate