You missed the conference where the west just bought Ukraine then
It's worth reading what Karmina from Slovakia have to say about that in
Insurgent Notes from their piece here
Response to John Garvey’s “Against the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, for the Successful Resistance of the Ukrainian People” | Insurgent Notes
"Unlike some comrades, we are not too concerned about “Western capital” coming to Ukraine to “plunder its resources” and “exploit its cheap labor power.” For one, Ukraine has had its share of experience with a nationally-oriented model of capitalist development which not only plundered and exploited it, but also did very little to develop the economy in a purely “rational capitalist” sense, such as by investing in fixed capital. The years since 2014 were at best a slight improvement. Also due to the ongoing war in the Donbass, Ukraine could not benefit from the economic boom of those years (unlike, say, neighboring Slovakia, where unemployment fell to 5 percent for the first time since 1990).
Other Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, including our own, have also seen experiments, albeit much shorter, with models of “national capitalism” in the early 1990s. When this came crashing down, the countries opened up to Western FDIs, implementing EU-accession-related or other “neoliberal” reforms. This period brought a lot of suffering, especially to some strata of the working class (sections of the public sector, “post-socialist” legacy industries, the unemployed, and the racially excluded). On the other hand, the process was not completely unambiguous. Since then, there have been stretches of continually rising real wages and declining unemployment, reflected in improving living standards (comparisons across the former Eastern bloc using indicators like life expectancy are also telling). In other words, Western-oriented integration brought about “normal,” contradictory capitalist development. This is a slightly different trajectory than, say, in Germany, where real wages have been largely stagnant for the past two decades. Perhaps the us is similar. This should also be taken into account when thinking about what the working class in our region can hope for and what stakes it has in continued capitalist development.
Those who warn that the same is about to happen to Ukraine should also clearly list the alternatives: (a) world revolution and full communism (not on the cards for 2023 if you ask us), (b) continued “development to nowhere,” i.e., a fantasy of a strong, independent national economy acting as a “bridge between the East and the West” etc., or (c) an orientation toward Russia in the position of a subservient client state. Mixes of (b) and (c) have already been tried in Ukraine with little success in terms of standard indicators of capitalist development, even when compared to other post-Soviet countries. It is no wonder that many working-class Ukrainians want a “Poland at home,” so that they do not have to become migrant workers and only see their family every few months. Of course, whether a “Ukrainian Poland” is really possible, even with eu membership, is another matter. It is not 2004, the year of many cee countries’ accession, and the eu faces a plethora of its own issues. But those who are up in arms about the circa 1,000 state-owned enterprises still operating in Ukraine being privatized should reassure us (and the Ukrainians) about a path to (a), hopefully one where the working people of Ukraine are not expected to do all the work, including stopping a war by confronting both belligerent states head-on and at once. Alternatively, they should describe how (b) will be made to work this time—given all the world market constraints—and secure some actual capitalist development. Where is the capital going to come from that is needed for dealing not just with the decayed industrial base of the Ukrainian economy pre-2022, but even more so with all the destruction brought about by the war?
Again, none of this means we have to become cheerleaders for EU-accession or start organizing investment for Western corporations interested in Ukraine as the next frontier. But if our analysis is to be not even appealing but at least understandable and realistic-looking to people in the region, these conditions, possibilities and hopes have to be taken into account. It is arrogant and patronizing to preach about the dangers of “colonization” by the EU from a position of EU living standards and freedoms, either in the core countries or in the more recently added states."
