On Contradiction: Mao’s Party-Substitutionist Revolution in Theory and Practice. Part 1

By: June 7, 2022
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“The Reddest Reddest Red Sun in Our Heart, Chairman Mao”
(Women xinzhong zuihong zuihongde hong taiyang Mao zhuxi he women xin lianxin)

This is the first part of a four-part article. The other parts can be found here:

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Socialist revolution in the third world countries depends on the existence or nonexistence in the population of a sizable element capable of playing the role assigned to the proletariat in classical Marxian theory—an element with essentially proletarian attitudes and values even though it may not be the product of a specifically proletarian experience. The history of the last few decades suggests that the most likely way for such a “substitute proletariat” to arise is through prolonged revolutionary warfare involving masses of people. Here men and women of various classes and strata are brought together under conditions contrasting sharply with their normal ways of life. They learn the value, indeed the necessity for survival, of discipline, organization, solidarity, cooperation, struggle. Culturally, politically, and even technologically they are raised to a new and higher level. They are, in a word, molded into a revolutionary force which has enormous significance not only for the overthrow of the old system but also for the building of the new.

— Paul Sweezy and Charles Bettelheim[1]

The great actions of the hero … are the expression of his motive power, lofty and cleansing, relying on no precedent. His force is like that of a powerful wind arising from a deep gorge, like the irresistible sexual drive for one’s lover, a force that will not stop, that cannot be stopped. All obstacles dissolve before him.”

— Mao Zedong, 1918[2]

The east is red, the sun is rising
China has brought forth Mao Zedong.
He seeks the people’s welfare.
He is the people’s great savior.”

— “The East is Red” lyrics [3]

As U.S.-China rivalry has intensified in recent years many Western Leftists have been confused and divided over how to respond. To date, discussion has mostly centered on whether China is still socialist or has become just another capitalist imperialist superpower in its own right. On the one hand, Maoists like the editors of Monthly Review and the Qiao Collective[4] ardently defend the former view and insist that the Left should support China against U.S. imperialism.[5] On the other, many around New Politics, Tempest, Spectre, Solidarity, and the Fourth International argue that China is capitalist or state capitalist, but either way this rivalry is just inter-imperialist competition and the left should, like Lenin vis-a-vis WWI, side with neither Beijing nor Washington. Looming behind the issue of imperialism is the question of the nature of Mao’s revolution and the social system his party installed. After all, if the left doesn’t have a clear understanding of the nature of the Chinese political economy, how can it take a position on China vis-a-vis the U.S.? Yet as Kevin Lin, Brian Hioe, and Dan La Botz have pointed out, the Maoist and neo-Maoist “anti-imperialist” Left[6] is perversely resistant to examining or even discussing China. Lin writes that “I’ve continually encountered a refusal to seriously discuss China…. Whenever I’ve tried to initiate these discussions, there are people who try to shut it down because they would say they don’t want to criticize China for fear of giving ammunition to the right wing in the U.S…. So that does make it difficult to advance the discussion on China and the U.S.-China rivalry within the U.S. left if the largest political group [the DSA] simply refuses to engage on this question.”[7] Political, theoretical and historical ignorance, though much in vogue these days on the right, is hardly the best basis for the left to develop a robust Marxist socialist position on China. The following essay aims to open up this discussion by interrogating the socialist credentials of the Chinese Communist Party through a re-examination of Maoist theory, the historical rise of Mao Zedong in the 1930s and 40s, and the system he installed in 1949.

 

I. THE CHINESE ENIGMA

How is the left to understand China today? How did a communist party that was once overwhelmingly comprised of proletarians (60% workers in 1926) and in the mid-1920s led the largest workers’ and peasants’ revolt in history, end up installing a Stalinist totalitarian police state?

Who would have imagined in 1949 that Mao Zedong, who based his entire revolution on the peasantry, would nine years later impose a stunningly brutal forced collectivization that worked and starved to death more than 30 million of the very peasants who powered his party to victory in 1949?

Who would have imagined that Deng Xiaoping — dedicated communist from the age of 17, proletarian pipe-fitter at Le Creusot Iron and Steel Plant near Paris, France in the 1920s, revolutionary veteran of the Long March, political commissar of the Red Army whose victory vanquished imperialism, landlordism, and capitalism in China — would as his penultimate testament, invite Western capitalists to exploit China’s police-state-enforced union-free, OSHA-free, EPA-free ultra-cheap labor, and then follow this up with his final testament, the massacre of hundreds if not thousands of students protesting in Tiananmen Square against the corruption that his marriage of capitalism and Stalinism wrought in China?

Or again, who would have imagined that Xi Jinping, son of Xi Zhongxun, political commissar and founder of the Shaanxi-Gansu Soviet base Area (Mao’s home base in the 1930s-40s) who was renowned for his moderate policies and use of non-military means to pacify Tibetans and Xinjiang Uyghurs, then lauded again in 1979 when as governor of Guangdong province he initiated economic liberalization, opening up Shenzhen, the first of China’s Special Economic Zones that powered China’s industrial rise, would reject his father’s easy-going approach to install militarized terror and torture police states in Tibet and Xinjiang, turn the whole country into an Orwellian surveillance state to monitor its 1.4 billion citizens 24/7 to control every moment of their waking lives, crush another student-led democracy movement in Hong Kong and suppress the private sector, expropriating and locking up many of the same Chinese capitalists who led China’s economic miracle?

But there you have it. Such contradictions have bedeviled western China scholars and Maoist leftists since the first days of the revolution. In 2018, after a visit to Xinjiang where he observed first-hand how the combination of crude Maoist concentration camp brainwashing (on which see below part VII) and Xiist digital totalitarianism are deployed to crush the Uyghurs and erase their culture, leftist University of Sydney professor David Brophy wrote in Jacobin magazine, “How did a revolutionary state, which came to power promising to end all forms of national discrimination, end up resorting to such horrific policies?”[8] Good question.

 

II. THE MAOIST MYTH OF CHINESE SOCIALISM

My approach rejects the orthodox theoretical framework and historical narrative that has shaped discourse about the nature of the Chinese revolution since the 1970s and is taken for granted by Maoist politicos and most China scholars regardless of their attitudes to Mao and the communists — namely that Mao’s revolution installed a socialism of sorts, and Deng Xiaoping “overthrew socialism and restored capitalism” such that China is more or less capitalist today. In Maoist theory there is no necessary connection between the proletariat and socialism and therefore no need for institutions of working class democratic self-rule so long as the “substitute proletariat,” the Communist Party, upholds the “correct line” — “proletarian politics.” Thus despite the fact that the working class played no role in Mao’s revolution or in the post-revolutionary dispensation, China was nevertheless socialist under Mao, they claim, because his revolution abolished capitalism and private property, nationalized the economy, replaced the market with central planning, liberated women, introduced the “iron rice bowl” job guarantees, cradle-to-grave state-provided social services including free medical care, free schooling, childcare and other welfare benefits. By contrast, Deng Xiaoping and his successors abandoned Mao’s “correct line,” re-introduced the market, broke the “iron rice bowl” job guarantees, privatized housing, medical care, schooling beyond middle school; invited foreign capitalists to exploit Chinese workers and promoted the development of domestic capitalists.

As a Marxist, this Maoist just-so story never made sense to me. In my experience the ideological framework of Maoism has posed an insuperable barrier to understanding the nature of the Chinese revolution and the regime it installed. First, it fails to grasp the theoretical originality and non-Marxist character of Mao’s party-substitutionist “new class” revolution. Second, Maoist theory has no capacity to explain the historical contradictions of the system Mao installed because if China was socialist then its horrors must be explained as aberrations, inexplicable in relation to Mao’s Thought. Thirdly belief in this theory has obliged Maoist China scholars and ideologues to defend (or ignore) indefensible, even criminal practices by the Chinese regime that are blindingly contrary to any common-sense definition of socialism. Fourthly, Maoist theory equally fails to explain why, if Deng Xiaoping and his market reformer successors were “restoring capitalism,” have they systematically subverted their own market reforms precisely to prevent the wholesale restoration of capitalism?[9] In short, the Maoist theoretical framework is not just useless, it’s led scholars and left ideologues to produce empirically untenable analyses, write shelves full of nonsensical books, and proffer morally indefensible apologetics for China that, like an earlier generation of Western apologists for Stalin’s crimes, have only further discredited the very idea of socialism.

How did Maoism come to dominate Western discourse and China studies despite its manifest contradictions and inadequacies? At least four reasons come to mind. Start with the fact that Marxism never had deep roots in China. Marxism was an import. China’s commercial and industrial proletariat in the early 20th century was miniscule, though learning fast, and China had no tradition of Social Democracy or revolutionary socialist politics. Early 20th century radicals were more attracted to anarchism than Marxism because Marx’ focus on the industrial working class seemed irrelevant in the Chinese context. Indeed, the founders of the Communist Party in 1921 were inspired by the Bolshevik revolution but most had little if any knowledge of Marxism when they founded the Party. They converted to communism before they had read Marx and most never became Marxists at all. They became Stalinists and Maoists or were driven out of the Party in the late 1920s and 30s.

Secondly, China’s totalitarian police state has been far more effective in completely crushing dissent and erasing virtually all historical memory of non-Maoist currents, the Tiananmen uprisings, the Charter ’08 movement, and so on, than Soviet and East European Stalinist rulers. Mao and his henchmen like Kang Sheng murdered hundreds of Chinese Trotskyists during the 1930s and 40s, and in 1952 locked up the last thousand or so of them for decades, extinguishing the last active alternative socialist political pole of attraction beyond Maoism. There was never space in China for dissidents, samizdat, or a Marxist underground such as the Workers Defense Committee KOR that developed in Poland from 1976 to promote worker self-organization and politicize their movement which ultimately gave rise to the Solidarnósc trade union in 1981.[10] China’s own would-be Marxist theoreticians, socialist labor organizers, and socialist revolutionaries such as 1970s-era Trotskyists and democracy activists Chen Erjin, Wang Xizhe, Wei Jingsheng, Tiananmen and Charter ‘08 democracy advocates including Liu Xiaobo, have all been ruthlessly crushed, murdered, locked away in prisons or labor camps for decades, driven into exile, and forgotten in China.[11] Today, Xi Jinping talks up Marxism all the time. But when Beijing University students took him seriously and initiated study groups to read Marx, they were arrested and disappeared.[12] As a result, since the 1940s all legitimate political discourse in China has been constrained within the Maoist framework.

Thirdly, there has been nothing in China studies to compare with the debate around the “new class” theories of Russia and the East European Stalinist regimes advanced by Bruno Rizzi, Milovan Djilas, Michael Voslensky, Maria Hirszowicz, Max Schachtman, Hal Draper, and others.[13] Since the 1970s, Marxist mode of production theory has been fruitfully developed to explain the transition (or failed transitions) from pre-capitalist to capitalist societies and to explain the ongoing dynamics of contemporary capitalist economies. But in western China studies, Maoism still rules.

Fourthly, and closely related to the last point, as Fabio Lanza recently recounts in his history of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, the left wing of U.S. China studies was founded by a cohort of young anti-war, Cultural Revolution-infatuated graduate students and young professors in the 1960s and 70s who idealized China and Vietnam in response to U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia.[14] I would add that they were liberal anti-imperialists, not Marxists. They learned their “Marxism” from Mao who learned his mostly from Stalin. They learned Chinese but could not visit China until after Mao and Nixon broke the ice in 1972. And when they did go in the seventies, as “friends of China” with pre-arranged itineraries and minders to keep them from speaking with ordinary citizens, most bought the Cultural Revolution Potemkin village scenes of “equality,” “mass line politics,” and so on without reservation. As Orville Schell recalls in Lanza’s book, “We were in love with China.” Some didn’t buy it. But most did because they were romantic third worldists who worshiped the Red Sun. As Maoist professors, they have misled generations of students with a delusional ahistorical fabulist vision of China.[15]

The net result of the foregoing is that, aside from important Trotskyist interpretations by Livio Maitan and Au-Loong Yu, and state capitalist expositions by Ygael Gluckstein and Nigel Harris, there are no other “new class” theorizations of China either in China or the West.[16] This essay and the book it’s drawn from aim to partially fill that gap by presenting a bureaucratic collectivist theorization of Mao’s party-substitutionist revolution, the system he installed, and the contradictions and historical tendencies of that system.

My argument in brief

This essay will explain why the contradictions and atrocities noted above cannot be understood as aberrations from socialism but are instead built into, rational, and indispensable to ruling class reproduction in China’s system. Mao’s revolution was the world’s first successful communist party-led peasant-based national liberation revolution and his example and writings provided the model and theory for the entire wave of third world revolutions from the end of WWII through the 1970s. But the strategy of socialism from above, led by self-styled omniscient “savior dictators” like Mao, was doomed from the start in China and everywhere else. Pace Paul Sweezy, for all their years of guerilla-war “plain living and hard struggle” nowhere did a single substitute proletariat install any kind of workers’ government, any kind of socialist government, or even any kind of democracy. In every case they installed “new class” societies of one kind or another, some worse than others. In Yugoslavia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia they installed Stalinist bureaucratic-collectivist class societies modeled on Stalin’s USSR. In Algeria, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Guinea Bissau they installed one-party (or even one-man) dictatorships and capitalist or state-capitalist regimes. In Cuba, although Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and their comrades weren’t fully Stalinists to begin with, after the imposition of the US blockade they turned to the USSR for support and soon adopted all the trappings of a one-party Stalinist state.

In China, the prototypical case, I will explain how over the course of Mao’s revolution, the petty bourgeois intelligentsia substitute proletariat developed its own “new-class” interests which were nationalist, bureaucratic, autocratic, anti-democratic, and anti-socialist. While Mao’s strategy of a communist party-led peasant revolution succeeded in overthrowing the old order, his vision of top-down socialism was doomed to fail because the overriding priority of the new national chauvinist ruling class was to “catch up and overtake the West” by means of forced-march self-industrialization, and this could only be financed by decades of coercive surplus extraction from China’s workers and peasants which in turn could only be enforced by a dictatorship that crushed worker struggles for trade unions and all struggles for democracy.

Thus my response to Professor Brophy’s question is that when Mao’s revolution is understood for what it really was — a revolution of, by and for the Stalinist “new-class” party-army-bureaucracy that seized power and installed a totalitarian police state and bureaucratic collectivist economy, then the apparent contradictions of the system vanish.

Let’s start with what socialism is not:

Nationalized property isn’t necessarily socialist. It all depends on who owns the state. In China from Mao to now, society owns and controls exactly nothing. All land and natural resources are owned by the state. Under Mao the economy was entirely owned and run by the state and the state was and is the exclusive property of the collective party-bureaucratic ruling class, a dictatorship beholden to no one. Since Deng’s market reforms, private capitalists have been reintroduced but they exist only at the pleasure of the CCP, as Xi Jinping has recently reminded them.

Economic planning isn’t necessarily socialist. It all depends. Planning by whom, for whom? In Mao’s China, as in Stalin’s Russia, the economy was planned from the top down by the party-bureaucracy for the interests of the party-bureaucracy while China’s workers, peasants, intellectuals and everyone else were shut out of decision-making about politics, the economy and everything else in China. Since Deng’s “market reform and opening,” central planning has been reduced but by no means abolished. State central planning still overwhelmingly rules China’s economy.

“Iron rice bowl” job guarantees weren’t necessarily socialist either. Under Mao, workers had the “right” to a state job not because China was socialist but because Mao sought to maximize economic growth by maximizing labor inputs so he needed all hands on deck. In fact they had no right not to work. Similarly, the Party liberated women to join the workforce but never helped them secure equality with men. Under Mao, the state provided industrial workers with jobs, housing, schooling, medical care, and modest retirement benefits because without a market there was no other way for people to access such services. But while the state dispensed those services, the workers lived their entire lives in conditions of unfreedom.

Nationalization, economic planning, job guarantees, state-provided schooling and healthcare would all be important components of a socialist economy and society but those are hardly sufficient. The key factor is missing: workers’ democracy, mass popular democracy. Without democracy there can be no socialism (and without socialism there can be no real democracy).

Conversely, Deng Xiaoping did not ditch socialism since there was no socialism to ditch. He threw open the economy to Western investment creating Special Economic Zones to exploit Chinese labor, broke up the rural communes to let peasants farm on their own account, broke the industrial workers’ iron rice bowl job guarantees, privatized schools, medical care, social services, and housing to discipline labor and open it up to deeper exploitation. But he never fully restored capitalism, never restored private property, never privatized significant state-owned industries. Instead, he and his successors introduced measured capitalism to rescue the CCP when Europe’s communists were collapsing, but contained it “as a bird in a cage” as a useful adjunct to the planned economy.[17]

 

III. THE SOCIALISM OF SAVIOR-DICTATORS

I contend that Mao Zedong was first and foremost an ethno-nationalist in the tradition of the “self-strengtheners” of 19th and early 20th century China. From Sun Yat-sen to Mao, Deng and Xi Jinping, China’s leaders have all been obsessed with one overarching goal: to overcome China’s “century of humiliation,” achieve “wealth and power,” “catch up with and overtake the US” in order to reclaim what they have imagined is China’s deserved pride of place as the premier civilization and culture of world history because, in Sun Yat’sen’s words, Chinese “are the finest and most intelligent people in the world,” thus the natural leader of humankind and, in Xi Jinping’s words, the rightful successor to “the declining West.”[18]

Yet Mao wasn’t just a Han nationalist like Sun Yat-sen. He was also a socialist. But he was not a Marxist. Aside from its versatile vocabulary, he had little use for Marxism with its focus on the industrial proletariat. Mao was, rather, a latter-day pre-Marxian utopian “socialism-from-above” kind of socialist. Mao’s socialism drew not from the working class, democratic, self-emancipation “socialism from below” ideas of Marx and Engels exemplified by the Paris Commune and the Russian Soviets, but from the pre-Marxian “socialism-from-above” ideas of the 18th and 19th century utopian socialists, anarchists, and agrarian populists.[19]

This was the socialism of self-appointed elites, self-styled “smart guys” convinced that they alone possessed the “correct ideas”: the necessary vision and strategy to create and run a socialist society, thus they should rule as beneficent dictators dispensing socialism to the benighted masses. Such would-be savior-dictators included the Babouvistes who wanted to set up a temporary albeit well-intentioned “educational dictatorship” over and above the people, abolish private property, and construct a society of “absolute economic equality.” And Joseph Proudhon who imagined himself a beneficent “manager-in-chief” ruling a society where trade unions, universal suffrage, constitutions and the like, were all banned (“All this democracy disgusts me” he said). And the fraudulent “anti-authoritarian” Mikhail Bakunin for whom the realm of “absolute freedom” was to be found in absolute conformity to Bakunin’s own “invisible dictatorship” — virtually the model for Mao’s own ultra-authoritarian “anti-bureaucratic” “Cultural Revolution.”[20] And the Russian agrarian populist Alexander Herzen and the Narodniks who claimed that “the advantages of backwardness” could enable agrarian nations to “skip over historical stages” and that “pure” peasants were harbingers of human redemption, a force that could lead Russia to an idyllic rural socialism bypassing the horrors of Western capitalism. Lenin fiercely criticized Herzen’s idealism and voluntarism but Mao appropriated Herzen’s idealist thesis as the basis for his doctrine of socialist construction by means of mind over matter, “red over expert,” the power of human will, etc. in the Great Leap Forward.[21] Mao was an intellectual descendent of utopian socialists, anarchists, and agrarian populists like these.

How, then, did the Chinese Communist Party, founded with the help of the Bolsheviks, born in the cauldron of workers’ strikes and uprisings in the industrial and commercial cities of Canton (Guangdong) and Shanghai in early 1920s, end up under the leadership of a pre-Marxian utopian socialist? An interesting question, which the rest of this essay will endeavor to explain.

[continued in part 2]

Notes

[1] On The Transition to Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 1971), 52-53.

[2] Maurice Meisner, Mao Zedong (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 1-9, 12.

[3] The East is Red, c. 1930s.

[4] For the purposes of this paper I group these all under the rubric of “Maoists” because even though some don’t defend Mao or the Cultural Revolution they still maintain that China today is somehow socialist, non-capitalist, or at least more progressive than Western capitalism, and they uphold the Maoist theory of party-substitutionism and look to substitutionist leaders like Mao, Ho Chi-minh, Fidel Castro and so on to lead the socialist revolution instead of socialism from below, workers self-emancipation, and socialist democracy.

[5] Monthly Review “New Cold War” issue; Qiao Collective, “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” undated. Cf. Brian Hioe, “Manichaeism with Chinese characteristics: a look back on the ‘China and the Left’ conference,” New Bloom, September 30, 2021.

[6] This paper is narrowly focused on the Chinese case. But the critique I present here of the theory of party substitutionist-led third world revolutions as summarized by Paul Sweezy in the epigraph above, applies generally to all the Maoist-inspired substutionist revolutions from North Korea and Vietnam to Africa and Latin America. See my “Cuba and the end of third worldism?,” Tempest, August 6, 2021.

[7] “China and the U.S. Left,” Spectre, July 17, 2021; Brian Hioe, “The Qiao Collective and left diaspora Chinese nationalism,” New Bloom, June 22, 2020; Dan La Botz, “Internationalism, Anti-Imperialism, and the origins of campism,” New Politics (Winter 2022), 64-74.

[8] “China’s Uyghur repression,” Jacobin, May 31, 2018.

[9] On this topic see my “The Chinese road to capitalism,” New Left Review 1/199 (May-June 1993), 55-99; and “Why China isn’t capitalist (despite the pink Ferraris),” Spectre, August 17, 2020.

[10] Jan Jósef Lipski, KOR: A History of the Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland, 1976-1981 (Berkeley: University of California, 1985).

[11] Louisa Lim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[12] Brian Williams, “Chinese government arrests Marxist Society for union organizing,” The Militant, October 29, 2018.

[13] Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World (New York: Free Press, 1939); Milovan Djilas, The New Class (New York: Praeger, 1957); Max Schachtman, The Bureaucratic Revolution (New York: Donald Press, 1962); Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: Anatomy of the Soviet Ruling Class (London: Bodley Head, 1984).

[14] Fabio Lanza, The End of Concern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 104; Kin-ming Liu (ed.), My First Trip to China (Hong Kong: Musemag, 2012).

[15] Lanza, Concern, 114-15.

[16] Ygael Gluckstein, Mao’s China (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957); Livio Maitan, Party, Army and Masses in China (London: Verso, 1969); Nigel Harris, The Mandate of Heaven (London: Quartet, 1978); Au Loong Yu, China’s Rise: Strength and Fragility (Pontypool: Merlin, 2012).

[17] “Why China isn’t capitalist,” op cit.

[18] Sun Yat-sen, San Min Chu I: The Three Principles of the People (New York: Putnam, 1922), chapter 1. For a current and comprehensive exposition of this ethno-nationalist thesis see Liu Mingfu, The China Dream (New York: CN Times Books, 2015). Xi Jinping borrowed this moniker for his own signature China Dream project.

[19] On this distinction, see Hal Draper’s Two Souls of Socialism (Berkeley: Bookmarks,1966), pp. 10-16. On anarchist influences on Mao, see Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 160-61, 195 and 294-97; and his The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 178-70. Also: Robert A. Scalapino, “The evolution of a young revolutionary – Mao Zedong in 1919-1921,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1 (November 1982), 29-61. On populist influences on Mao and his teacher Li Ta-chao, see Maurice Meisner, Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge: Harvard, 1967), 262-66.

[20] On Bakunin’s phony anti-authoritarianism, see besides Draper, Aileen Kelly’s reply to David T. Wieck, “Freedom and anarchy,” New York Review of Books, April 1, 1976. On Mao’s phony anti-authoritarian authoritarianism, see my “Mao and self-limiting ‘Cultural Revolution,’” Against the Current, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring 1992), richardanthonysmith.org/articles.

[21] On Herzen’s influence on Mao, see Maurice Meisner, Mao Zedong (Cambridge UK: Polity Press 2007), pp. 19-20. Lenin’s critique is to be found in “Democracy and Narodism in China,” July 15, 1912, Collected Works, vol. 18.

 

Planning for Prosperity?

A Livable Future in Simulation and Reality
By: May 30, 2022
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“People are ecstatic” as delegates from the world’s bioregions gather in Raqqa for 2065’s planning session. Although the social-ecological transition is far from over, celebration is understandable. Smokestacks, prisons, slaughterhouses, and warfare are all relics of the past. Leisure time is abundant, and living standards are universally high. The world’s air is fresher than it’s been in centuries, as is the food which is overwhelmingly local, organic, and, yes, vegan. The planet is cooling and will soon stabilize comfortably within 1 degree Celsius of pre-industrial levels. Biodiversity is flourishing, especially in the roughly three-quarters of habitable land that’s protected as wilderness under Indigenous and local communities’ guidance.

This is the future I achieved in the new digital card game based on Half-Earth Socialism by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass. Like the book–which I’ve reviewed for the upcoming New Politics issue–the game contains a healthy amount of whimsy and humor, with options to increase general happiness through “Champagne socialism” and with anti-vegan extremists forming a “Leather Underground.” When my sixth-grade students caught me playing the game, one described it as “Pokémon for adults.” Although it proved too technical to hold most of these twelve year-olds’ interest for long, one student played it through all the way. (He seemed to take equal delight in endings where the Earth was saved and endings where it was destroyed. Should I be worried?) I could easily see high-school and college instructors including this game in their lessons on climate science.

After all, the game incorporates serious climate modeling designed in large part by the ecologist and engineer Spencer Roberts who I interviewed last fall. Given his convincing critiques of animal agriculture and capitalist greenwashing, I’m not surprised that this game offers little incentive to adopt destructive regenerative-ranching, nuclear-fusion, ocean-fertilization, and cloud brightening technologies. However, I learned during the interview that Roberts is much less of a Luddite than I am. Perhaps that’s why it’s possible to get high scores by adopting techniques I’d oppose in real life, such as vertical farming, carbon-negative concrete, bioengineered-algae fuels, wooden skyscrapers, biochar, and direct air capture.

I wanted to see if it was possible to avoid these risky technologies and still achieve the game’s goals of stabilizing warming below 1 degree, ending biodiversity threats, and maximizing human happiness. Yes, it’s possible, although I haven’t been able to do so before 2080. (I’m not counting those few random times when the game supposes an unrealistically low climate sensitivity. You’ll know this happens when warming goes down to 1 degree or lower in 2025, instead of going up to 1.4 degrees.)

The main obstacles to achieving success decades earlier are political rather than technological. There are a limited number of “political capital” points you can spend on various solutions each round. Increasing the number of points would make the game less challenging but might more closely resemble a revolutionary situation where consciousness has been sufficiently transformed to render once “utopian” objectives feasible. It would definitely enable the player to unlock the crucial “Degrowth in developed areas” and “Global demilitarization” cards much earlier. 

Within the parameters of the game, I couldn’t implement anything as ambitious as the Total Liberation pathway I recently proposed in the Green Theory & Praxis Journal. But I tried my best to enact, as rapidly as the game would allow, a transition to degrowth, veganism, and 100% (locally-controlled, decentralized) wind-and-solar energy. This trajectory quickly won me the strong hostility of the game’s Accelerationists and Consumerists, and a cold reception from the Malthusians. On the other hand, I won the approval of the Animal Liberationists, Ecofeminists, Environmentalists, Fanonists, and Utopians.

Here’s are some highlights of what I was able to accomplish:

  • Abolish nuclear power (by 2025)
  • Restore Indigenous sovereignty (by 2030)
  • Phase out hydroelectricity (by 2040)
  • Achieve net-negative emissions (by 2045)
  • Phase out fossil fuels and bioenergy (by 2050)
  • Global demilitarization (by 2055)
  • Limit warming to 1 degree (by 2075)

The Animal Liberationists were thrilled that society abolished zoos, non-Indigenous hunting, exotic animal trading, and, by 2055, animal agriculture. Although the game seems to require a small amount of cellular meat production in order to eliminate the last vestiges of livestock farming, I don’t see why real-life populations couldn’t turn to lower-tech sources of protein, namely legumes. I’ve previously expressed doubts about the viability of lab-grown meat, especially if it’s going to be produced without fetal bovine serum (procured from slaughter). Indeed, the game’s cellular meat never became a large part of the solution, only producing 5 percent of the meat quantities that humanity consumes today. By the time the technology became available, the world’s animal consumption had already declined by 75 percent and was continuing to decrease even further. The “Vegetarian” and “Vegan” cards proved far more important than the “Cellular meat” card.

In the game as well as reality, it’s a solid principle to make reducing a greater priority than replacing. The “reduce-reuse-recycle” order of priorities is well known, and energy’s (less catchy) corollary is “conservation-efficiency-clean renewables.” Rather than building a fleet of private electric vehicles, my virtual society rapidly decreased the number of cars on the road and banned them outright by 2035. People didn’t seem to mind the ban, since we’d already been expanding walkways, bike paths, and bus routes for over a decade.

A rapid roll-out of green hydrogen, generated from wind- and solar-powered electrolysis, was indispensable for the energy transition in the 2030s. However, because green hydrogen requires a lot of energy to produce, it only served as a real solution in the context of drastically reducing fuel usage for heating and transportation. The “Mass electrification” card was essential, since producing combustion-free electricity is way easier than producing combustion-free fuel. Although next-generation solar panels helped increase the efficiency of renewable energy, they didn’t become available until well after fossil fuels had been phased out of electricity production. 

Since farmers already produce enough food to feed 12 to 14 billion people, eliminating hunger was mainly a matter of redirecting crops to local plates. Still, agroecology has proven remarkably effective at increasing yields, and non-biotech research has been able to produce perennial and drought-resistant crop varieties. As explained in Half-Earth Socialism’s appendix, Vettese and Pendergrass cautiously predict that soil-restoring methods of regenerative agriculture won’t become fully carbon-neutral, let alone carbon-negative. But regenerative farming nonetheless reduced the game’s agricultural emissions to managable levels.

Global warming hit a peak of 1.5 degrees in 2030, and declined to 1.4 within the decade. By 2080, with warming down to 0.9 degrees, only 22 of percent land was being used for infrastructure and agriculture. They don’t seem to include non-subsistence forestry, which I’ve elsewhere estimated would take up about 3 percent in a radical degrowth scenario. Still, that would leave some three quarters of the planet’s habitable land available for protection and rewilding. “This is probably the first time in centuries,” the game announced, “that we can confidently say we’re leaving a better planet for future generations.” According to the final screen, “Me and the Fanonists ushered the world into a prosperous future.”

The word “prosperous” seemed odd, since it typically implies material abundance. According to the game, energy usage in 2080 was slightly more than it was in 2022. By contrast, I envision energy usage rapidly declining worldwide and quite drastically in richer regions. Even though the game assumes money has been abolished (as explained on the back of the “Crack down on crypto-mining” card), the designers strangely chose to make a dollar sign the symbol for living standards. They also retain the language of economic “development,” introduced into policymaking by President Harry Truman. Doing so, and by linking world happiness with material wealth, the game’s designers ignore the strong critique that various Global South movements and intellectuals have launched against the development discourse and its generally implicit assumption that the whole world should conform to the obscene affluence of the North.

Moreso than the game’s designers, I see an urgent need to radically define our understanding of “living standards” (if we hold onto that term at all), abandoning the aspiration for private wealth and instead striving for strong communities, varied experiences, and forms of public affluence such as parks, museums, libraries, cafeterias, and theaters. The dollar sign is practically the antithesis of what we should strive for, and achieving a livable future would be more doable if we replaced the goal of “prosperity” with the South’s alternatives of buen vivir (living well), ubuntu (humanness), and swaraj (self-governance).

When I tried replaying the same steps in the game, I was consistently able to win by 2080, with warming lowering at that date to 0.9 degrees. Because the game includes a chance-based distribution of political-capital points, it wasn’t always possible to implement everything in the exact same order. But if there wasn’t enough points to implement a solution in one round, it usually didn’t make a difference if I waited to implement it in the next round.

Various playthroughs labeled me as all the tendencies I’d expect (Animal Liberationist, Ecofeminist, Environmentalist, Fanonist, Utopian). Although I don’t mind the support of the game’s fictitious political parties, I see any parliamentary focus as a dead end in real life. The state, inherently an elitist institution, brings out the most elitist tendencies of whatever parties take power. It’s invariably the moderate “realos” who win out over the radical “fundis” once real-life Green Parties assume state power. Fanon aptly warned about the colonized population’s national bourgeoisie which, after seizing power in a statist revolution, accepts a neocolonial role and “turns its back on the general population.” As I further argue in my upcoming review of the Half-Earth Socialism book, I can’t share the authors’ enthusiasm for state planning.

In fact, the greenest path would be to dismantle the state as quickly as possible. There’d likely be no need to “Restrict air travel” or “Mandate vegetarianism” (two of the game’s cards) if there weren’t a state that arrested eco-activists who blocked runways, slashed plane tires, rescued animals from farms, and helped Indigenous communities reclaim their territories from cattle ranchers. Without a state enabling capitalists to hoard the world’s wealth, it’s unlikely that there’d be enough desperate workers to keep industrial slaughterhouses in operation.

A prominent eco-Marxist was once trying to convince me of the necessity for a state, and he said something like “I can’t see anarchists running airports.” Though I can imagine an anarchist-run airport just fine (such as the one envisioned in Albert and Hahnel’s Looking Forward), I don’t see why we’d want such a thing. If an anarchist society couldn’t fly airplanes, that’s a good thing! Let’s shut the airports down. Maybe solar-powered aircraft will one day be a viable option. But until then, there’s no reason why people in an anti-capitalist world couldn’t travel slowly, relaxing and enjoying the scenery on buses, trains, and boats. After all, there would be no full-time jobs for which we’d need to urgently return. Ditto to David Harvey’s complaint that anarchists couldn’t run nuclear power stations. A Libcom article shows how anarchists could theoretically run nuclear power plants far more safely and effecitvely than capitalists do, but I honestly wouldn’t mind Harvey being right. If anarchists can’t run nuclear power plants, that’s all the more reason for anti-nuclear advocates like myself to call for anarchy.

When the Earth Liberation Front showed up in the game, I cheered at first. If I were a state planner (heaven forbid!), I would welcome the ELF as a radical flank and an ally in dismantling ecocidal infrastructure. But the game’s version of the ELF only slows down the ecological transition, by lowering “world contentedness” and thus impeding your ability to phase out polluting industries. When the ELF attacks in the game, there’s no corresponding decrease of species extinction or of greenhouse gas emissions. Seeing the ELF portrayed as a hindrance in Marxists’ video game couldn’t help but reinforce my conviction that states and central planning won’t protect the Earth. I thought of real-life examples of self-proclaimed socialists repressing ecologically-oriented movements: Bolsheviks attacking revolutionary peasants during Russia’s civil war, France’s Socialist government sinking Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior ship in 1985, Bolivia’s Socialist state cracking down on Guaraní land defenders in 2015, Cuba’s Communist state torturing and extraditing former ELF militant Joseph Dibee in 2018.

To the developers’ credit, they agreed to correct a mistake I pointed out to them. They had falsely attributed a Mexican ecofascistic group’s slogan “misanthropy and wild nature, always” to the ELF. Far from being misanthropic, the real-life ELF advocates “Animal, Human, and Earth Liberation” and supports anarchist and Indigenous struggles against capital. The image may already be corrected by now.

Maybe the game isn’t far off by associating me with followers of Frantz Fanon who saw anti-colonial violence as a psychological antidote to the “passive and despairing attitude” of the colonized. Although he wrote these words in the context of Algeria’s independence struggle, I think his insights can be applied to some extent even throughout the Global North. Capital has so thoroughly colonized everyday life that we tend to see commodification as inevitable and equality as unimaginable. In this context, I have to agree with those anarchists and critical theorists who say there’s a need for (joyful) militancy to break the spell of complacency.

I don’t wish to advocate violence unless it’s necessary (the key word in Fanon’s phrase later popularized by Malcolm X), but I do see a dire need for property destruction, monkeywrenching, house visits, and whatever else it might take to radicalize the population and give the Earth a fighting chance. As I conclude this essay, I’m getting ready to write and send letters to incarcerated eco-strugglers. I’d encourage you to do the same by following the instructions on the Earth First! Journal website. If we’re serious about advocating for an ecological revolution, we need to be willing to support the courageous folks who kickstarted the process.

I look forward to reading what results others receive in the Half-Earth Socialism video game. The game is a fun thought experiment that will get people thinking, dreaming, and envisioning. Here are the steps I took on May 25 that achieved the outcome I’ve been describing.

2022

1.1 degrees, 42.9 Gt, 48% land used, 108 PWh

Production

Electricity: 15 Hydropower, 5 Solar, 80 Wind

Fuel: 40 Biofuels, 20 Natural gas, 40 Petroleum (1 planning cycle to complete, decreases emissions by 6%).

Crops: 55 Industrial, 45 Smallholder

Policies

Utopian curriculum, Universal family planning, Marine protected areas, Factory farm reform, Ecofeminist curriculum, Animal liberationist curriculum

Infrastructure

1 to Compost, Electrify road transport, Energy conservation campaign, Expand public transit, Expand recycling, Indigenous sovereignty, Passive building mandate and retrofit, Pedestrian and bike-friendly city, Remediate and protect ecosystems

Research

2 to Green hydrogen

1 to High-density batteries

2025

1.4 degrees, 35.7 Gt, 54% land used, 112 PWh

Production

55 Industrial, 5 Organic ag, 40 Smallholder farms

Electricity is now 0% nuclear.

Policies

Vegetarian mandate, Feminist science and technology studies, Fanonist curriculum

Infrastructure

1 to Food waste campaign, Regenerative agriculture

Research

Ecosocialist video game

2030

1.5 degrees, 27.1 Gt, 29% land used, 115 PW

Fuel: 25 Biofuel, Green 75 Hydrogen (3 planning cycles to complete)

Crops: 55 Industrial, 10 Organic, 35 Smallholder

Policies

Masculinity de-tox

Infrastructure

1 to Battery storage network, Esperanto, Green roofs, Multistrata agroforestry, Reconcile town and country

Research

1 to Alternative refrigerants, Drought-resistance crops, Electric-arc furnace, Floating wind turbines

2 to High-density batteries, Perennial cereals

3 to Reintroduce apex predators, Cellular meat

6 to Next-gen solar PV

2035

1.5 degrees, 12.2 Gt, 29% land used, 139 PWh

Production

Electricity: 10 Solar, 90 Wind

Fuel: 100 Green Hydrogen

100 Cellular meat (4 planning cycles to take effect)

65 Organic ag, 35 Smallholder farms

Policies

Vegan mandate, Meatless Mondays, Environmentalist curriculum, Ban high-seas fishing, Ban cars, Abolish prisons

Infrastructure

1 to Continental smart grid, Expand nature preserves, Sewage treatment plants

2040

1.4 degrees, 1.4 Gt, 23% land used, 134 PWh

Production

Electricity: 15 Floating wind, 75 Solar, 10 Wind

Crops: 70 Organic, 30 Smallholder

All electricity is now from solar and wind.

Policies

Energy quotas, Ban outdoor cats, Abolish zoos

Infrastructure

1 to Coastal wetland protection and remediation, Mass electrification, Phase out commercial fishing

3 to Food waste campaign

2045

1.4 degrees, -9.8 Gt, 21% land used, 121 PWh

Policies

Degrowth in developed regions, Flexitarian, Restrict air travel, Rien faire comme une bete 

Infrastructure

5 to Global demilitarization

2050

1.4 degrees, -11.1 Gt, 21% land used, 89 PWh

Fuel is now 100% green hydrogen

Crops are 100% non-industrial

Policies

Crack down on crypto-mining, Champagne socialism, Ban non-Indigenous hunting, Ban exotic animal trade

Infrastructure

6 to Global demilitarization

Research

1 to Green container ships, Advances in ecosystem modelling, Long-range electric aviation

2055

1.3 degrees, -13.5 Gt, 21% land used, 106 PWh

Production

Animal protein is 100% from cellular meat.

Infrastructure

2 to Continental smart grid

Research

9 to Green container ships, Long-range electric aircraft

1 to Advances in ecosystem modelling

2060

1.2 degrees, -13.3 Gt,  22% land used, 116 PWh

2065

1.2 degrees, -13.3 Gt, 221% land used, 120 PWh

2070

1.1 degrees, -12.8 Gt, 21% land used, 124 PWh

2075

1 degrees, -14 Gt, 22% land used, 127 PWh

2080

0.9 degree, -14 Gt

The Ukraine War Will End, But How?

By: May 25, 2022
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine caught most observers by surprise. I, for one, didn’t think that the Russian government would be so foolish as to invade. If Ukraine resisted, the Russian military could destroy it with nuclear weapons but couldn’t conquer it with the conventional forces they had deployed to its borders. The Russian ruling class needed a deal, not a war. Ukraine in the European Union and out of NATO, like Finland or Sweden, would have suited it very well. The Russian people certainly didn’t want war.

The Russian government must have thought that Ukrainian resistance would collapse as soon as the tanks rolled in and the the bombs began falling. Instead, the Ukrainian military held Kyiv and the other major cities outside the south and launched mobile attacks on stalled Russian columns. The Ukrainian government kept its head, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy emerged as an effective media spokesperson. The Ukrainian people rallied around the government in the north and west. The US and NATO flooded Ukraine with arms and munitions.

The Russian military and government took several weeks to conclude that their blitz had failed and to move on to their plan B, seizing as much as they could of the territory that the Soviet Union had transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1922, the arc from Kharkiv in the north to Odesa in the south. As of May 15, Russian forces control all of Kherson Oblast, most of Zaporizhzhia and Luhansk Oblasts, two-thirds of Donetsk  Oblast, and part of Kharkiv Oblast. They are making slow progress in a pincer movement to force the Ukrainian troops out of western Donetsk.

Neither the Ukrainian government nor the Russian government is ready to accept a ceasefire yet, since they still hope to make gains on the battlefield. But as the military situation becomes clearer, so do the lines along which Ukraine is likely to be partitioned after the fighting ends. Revolutionary socialists, however much we might wish another outcome, should consider the one coming into being.

If the Russian forces drive the Ukrainian army out of western Donetsk, as seems likely, the war will have reached a decision point. Having seized a corridor from Donbas to Crimea, the Russian government could either propose a ceasefire or continue fighting to take Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, and the rest of the historically Russian parts of Ukraine. Having lost the corridor, the Ukrainian government could either propose a ceasefire or continue fighting to retake it.

Revolutionary socialists will have no say in the matter, of course, but we will have opinions. Mine is that a ceasefire would be better for Ukraine, Russia, Europe, and the world than prolonging the war. A ceasefire would not be just. Apart from Crimea and eastern Donbas, the populations of the contested areas would not have been consulted as to their wishes. The partition would have been militarily imposed on Ukraine. But prolonging the war would increase the destruction without breaking the impasse.

Hubris, heroism and the course of the war

The first days of the war were marked by hubris on the Russian side and heroism on the Ukrainian side. By the numbers, Russia was far more powerful. The Russian government made the mistake of thinking it could simply have its way. A common mistake among imperial powers. Since World War II the US military has lost wars it arrogantly expected to win in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Ukrainian military and government did well, but most of the credit goes to the Ukrainian people. Popular enthusiasm bolstered the morale of the troops. The government, having limited military and logistical capacity, distributed weapons and invited popular initiative. Workers took up arms and organized rescues, repairs, distribution of food and medicine, and more. The image of the Ukrainian people defending their country has been inspiring.

The image is not the whole story, however. Capitalist restoration left Ukraine impoverished, dominated by oligarchs, vastly unequal, and riddled with corruption. Ukrainian and Russian nationalists provoked conflicts between the Ukrainian majority, concentrated in the north and west, and the Russian minority, concentrated in the south and east. The conflict escalated into civil war in 2014, with fighting all across the arc now being contested.

The war in the north went badly for the invaders. They had come with too few troops to take Ukrainian cities in street-by-street fighting or to hold the countryside against guerrilla warfare. Russian artillery, bombs and missiles did great damage, but in the end the Russian military had to withdraw from the north and regroup for its plan B, the partition of Ukraine.

The war in the the south went better for the Russian forces. They moved north from Crimea, supported by their control of the Black Sea and air superiority. The population was more friendly. They took the cities of Kherson, Melitopol and Mariupol, but were stopped at Mykolaiv, on the way to Odesa. The battle of Mariupol was particularly bitter. The far-right Azov Battalion, in charge of the city’s defense, decided to fight to the death, rather than retreat when the military situation became hopeless.

The main fighting shifted to Donbas in the east, where separatists, supported by Russian troops, already held about a third of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts from the 2014 war. Since the invasion Russian forces have taken nearly all of Luhansk and all but a third of Donetsk. They are slowly closing a pincer from the north and south to envelop the Ukrainian troops in western Donetsk and force them to withdraw.

The battle of western Donetsk will likely conclude soon. Either side could collapse, but more likely they will fight to a standstill somewhere between the current front line and Donetsk’s western border. At that point, the Ukrainian and Russian governments would have a choice: propose a ceasefire, or escalate the war to try to break the impasse. Escalation is not a foregone conclusion, since Ukraine and Russia both have good reason to seek a ceasefire.

Just or not, war is hell

The war has been a disaster for Ukraine. The true numbers won’t be known until after the fighting ends, but some 10,000 soldiers and a similar number of civilians have been killed. Seven million have been internally displaced. Six million have fled the country. Many, having gained entry to the EU, will not return. Ukraine’s gross domestic product is expected to be halved this year. The Russian blockade has cut Ukraine off from the Black Sea, and the fighting has destroyed its capacity to export.

Russian bombs and missiles have targeted Ukrainian airfields, train depots, warehouses, bridges and other infrastructure, but not on the scale that military experts had expected. If the war continues, Russia will presumably intensify its efforts to stop the movement of weapons and munitions across Ukraine. The Russian government may be tempted to escalate the destruction, as the US and Britain did during World War II with the bombing of Dresden and other German cities, and the US did with the fire-bombing Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The war has been a disaster for Russia too. Its troop losses are similar to Ukraine’s. It has used or lost vast quantities of arms, munitions and supplies. Replacing them will require diverting production from civilian purposes. Russia’s GDP is expected to fall 10 percent this year, as a result of sanctions and the economic war the US government has initiated against it. The war has cut Russia off from the rest of Europe and motivated some of those abroad not to return.

The war has been a disaster for the rest of the world. In immediate terms, the cutoff of Ukrainian exports by the fighting and the reduction of Russian exports by sanctions has pushed up the prices of oil, gas, food, and other primary products. This has intensified general inflation, as the world economy, having not yet recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic, is about to plunge into the next recession. In the advanced capitalist countries, workers are suffering, and political tensions are rising. In poor countries millions face starvation.

US imperialism is using the Ukraine war to try to weaken Russia, threaten China, control its allies, and restore its global hegemony. Outsourcing fighting to Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Kurds, and now Ukraine is far cheaper than sending US forces. But the announcement by the Biden administration that it is sending troops back to Somalia shows that it feels emboldened to act directly, if it can’t find adequate proxies.

The US government is increasing its military spending and pressuring Germany, Japan, and the other advanced capitalist countries to increase theirs. It is also pressuring them to stop buying oil and gas from Russia, which would require more extraction in the US, Saudi Arabia, and other big producers, as well as reviving nuclear power and coal. The military and energy industries love it, but it’s the death knell for progress on poverty, inequality, or climate change.

How should socialists respond?

The Ukraine war is a convergence of three wars: 1) Ukraine defending itself against the Russian invasion, 2) the inter-imperialist cold war between the US-led bloc of the established powers and the Russia-China bloc challenging them, and 3) the civil war between the Ukrainian government and Russian separatists.

In the Ukraine war so far, the first aspect has dominated. Revolutionary socialists in all countries should support Ukraine against the Russian invasion, since Russia is an imperialist power attacking Ukraine, which is capitalist but not imperialist.

The best outcome would have been a Russian defeat leading to a ruling-class crisis and a working-class uprising. The scenario has occurred before in Russian history. Defeat in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War led to the 1905 Revolution. Defeat in World War I led to the 1917 Revolution.

A prolonged war could lead to political crisis in either Russia or Ukraine, especially on the losing side, and that could lead to demonstrations, strikes and other working-class action against the government that failed it. Revolutionary socialists would welcome such a development in either country, especially in Russia, where it would change the political dynamic worldwide. But we can’t wish for a prolonged war, hoping that it would lead to revolution.

After the battle of Donbas is over, there might be an opening for a ceasefire. The governments would not be eager for one, since they would not have achieved their objectives. The Ukrainian government would not have retaken the territory it lost to Russia, and the Russian government would not have taken the territory it sought. But the mutual destruction, military impasse, and popular disillusionment with the war might force them to accept a ceasefire.

If the Russian government rejected a ceasefire, the character of the war would remain what it is now: predominantly a defensive war by an oppressed nation against an imperialist invader. The destruction would continue with little chance of Ukrainian success until the next impasse.

If the Russian government proposed a ceasefire and the Ukrainian government rejected it, the character of the war would change. It would become a war to retake territory to which Ukraine has an ambiguous claim. With the deepening dependence of Ukraine on the US and NATO, it would increasingly become a proxy war between the imperialist blocs. Peace would be better than the victory of either side.

There’s no reason to change position yet, but we should recognize that the longer the war continues, the more destructive and futile it becomes.

However the fighting in Ukraine turns out, the main task of revolutionary socialists in the US is to defeat the intrigues of our own rulers. US imperialism is exploiting the Ukraine war to escalate its cold war with Russia and, indirectly, China and reassert its imperial hegemony. We need to expose that and help workers understand the connection between imperialist war and domestic reaction.

 

 

 

The Necessity of Organizing DSA Members as Workers

By: May 25, 2022
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Christian Smalls, founder of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), second left, and worker-organizers celebrate outside the National Labor Relations Board offices in the Brooklyn, New York on April 1, 2022.

Author’s note: This is a discussion piece about labor strategy in DSA but has value as part of the discussion that needs to take place in the labor left and the broader left in general regarding the labor movement, its very necessary revitalization, and the role of leftists. The author invites responses and hopes that this is merely the first in a more sustained, critical examination of the present labor movement and the left’s strategy within it.

With the elections of the third Steering Committee of the Democratic Socialists Labor Commission (DSLC) a few months ago, the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) national labor body has entered its fifth year with much on its plate. DSA’s most recent national convention in August 2021 passed Resolution #5, “Building Worker Power to Win Democratic Socialism: A Labor Strategy for DSA in 2021-2023,” committing the organization to a range of labor-oriented projects from passing the PRO Act and organizing Amazon to transforming unions and connecting members through worker networks. While the approach taken in the resolution leaves necessary space open for experimenting in implementation, and valid criticism notwithstanding about the lack of prioritization within it, what it shows is that the organization is still grappling with the best way to go forward with its labor strategy – that is, where to start, in what proportions, and why?

It is hardly a light assignment charged to this new generation of socialists who face the not insignificant task of helping to revitalize a moribund labor movement by overcoming the objective and subjective obstacles workers currently face in battling their bosses and the capitalist class. Currently, most of those debating DSA’s labor strategy seem to talk past each other, focusing on tactics removed from material organizational conditions, with little regard to how to tie them together and implement them in a unified actionable strategy. Other more formal elaborations of labor strategy by the organization such as the Rank-and-File Strategy pamphlet recently published by the DSLC also fail to connect the assortment of tactics put forward or to prioritize them. It should be said that the pamphlet is a positive development for DSA with many merits as an introduction to the strategy. But on accounts of the Rank-and-File Strategy itself, it omits the core element of why being in and orienting to the rank-and-file in unions is essential for socialists, eliding the distinction between union officers and rank-and-file leaders in the process.

Along with the paramount question of how to revitalize the labor movement, other key questions that must be answered are: Why revitalization? What is the role of socialists in that revitalization? How can we better connect the socialist movement to struggles in the workplace and the labor movement? And how do we better build a socialist base in the working class? Still, those questions sit on the level of the near-abstract. To answer those, we must also more concretely ask how we build members’ experience, capacity, and leadership in the labor movement: How do we recruit from it? How do we develop organized currents among both class struggle unionists and as socialists, in workplaces, unions, and industries? How do we develop material political analyses of those various realms so that we might address their particular problems from a socialist perspective; and how do we do this in a sustainable, reproducible, scalable way?

A primary vehicle for answering these questions and accomplishing these tasks are workers’ circles. These currently go by a variety of names in DSA such as “industry network,” “industry group,” or “labor circle,” their functions and activity varying, existing in chapters, whether Los Angeles, East Bay, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Detroit, New York City, or Boston. While the concept is still in its infancy in this organization, it is hardly new to the history of the Left. Work-based socialist organizations of the past allowed for socialists to form and cultivate concrete, collective material expressions of their politics by engaging in grounded day-to-day organizing in their own workplaces, which enabled the creation of a rooted base for those politics and the collectives based on those politics. At present, this type of organization allows for the development of both class struggle and socialist politics through the rebuilding of a militant minority which can merge the socialist and labor movements organically from within, spurring on and leading the drive for the revitalization of the labor movement. Moreover, such organization, when animated by bottom-up class struggle and socialist politics, creates the conditions and capacity for DSA to address several vital organizational issues it faces while tying together various tactics in its labor work into a cohesive strategic whole to carry out and refine.

Historical Work-Based Organization

Perhaps the most historically well-known occurrence of work-based organization is the Communist Party’s “shop units” and fractions from the 1920s through the early 1940s and it’s no accident that one of the influential guides for Amazon workers organizing in the Amazon Labor Union was written in that period by a Communist Party leader. Shop units were organizations of the party that consisted of three or more Communists (though usually around ten) working at the same worksite, engaged in spreading the program of the party, developing and broadening a group of coworkers sympathetic to Communist politics, and encouraging militant industrial unionism. Their base of activity was the workplace. They distributed the party’s national daily paper, recruited workers to the party, put on educationals, organized around particular workplace grievances, and put out short, simple, and direct workplace newspapers that focused on the working conditions they and their coworkers faced but also included larger political issues that went beyond the scope of the workers’ immediate grievances and unionism. In a time with intense political repression, shop units faced many difficulties such as isolation, demoralization, and inactivity, but also served as the scaffolding for organizing committees ready to spring to life in the upsurge of a union drive, and they developed credible, experienced organizers and leaders with answers to the pressing problems workers faced in the workplace and their unions.The skeletal organization and the developed leaders laid the groundwork for the networks that brought the CIO to life.

Fractions, though similar to shop units, were considered independent of the formal party organization and acted as caucuses of party members within unions and their various apparatuses (executive boards, committees, councils, etc). Their base of activity was the union, though it frequently carried over into the workplace. Fractions caucused before union meetings to work out objectives, strategy, and goals to be presented. They also discussed and decided how to apply party policies to the union, thereby developing Communist positions on concrete union issues such as officer elections, union structure, and union programs. In addition to this, fractions deliberated on how to improve the working conditions of union members, how to introduce party campaigns into the union, how to recruit workers from the union to the party, and how to increase the readership of the party’s national daily paper within the union. Oftentimes, the functions of the shop unit and the fraction merged with the unit effectively also operating as a fraction. Though both shop units and fractions attempted to popularize Communist ideas, their secrecy amongst their coworkers, sectarianism towards other Left groups, and substantive errors in political direction and methods often limited their gains.

In the late 1960s and 1970s with the New Left’s radicalization and “turn to industry,” socialist organizations like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and many with New Communist Movement and third-camp socialist roots further developed the shop unit and fraction, if not in name, then in practice, into the “struggle group.” The struggle group was an organization established in the workplace and union, guided by a program based on the circumstances of the particular site of organizing. The organization was active in the immediate struggles of both workplace and union, but went beyond the two to engage in, draw in, and attempt to link non- or less-directly related struggles, such as the antiwar and Black liberation movements, to their own work-based site of organizing. These groups were intended to be class organizations in the sense that those who were not from the parenting socialist organization could and should be a part of them. It was expected though that members of the parent socialist organization would play a key role in forming the struggle group and maintaining leadership positions in it. In practice, the struggle groups functioned along a spectrum from front groups to caucuses. Their goals were broader or narrower, changing over time, and the groups included sometimes more, sometimes fewer workers, according to the particular parenting socialist organization in question. Many groups that purported to be mass organizations were in reality narrow groups that didn’t collaborate with other socialist groups whose leftist members maintained control in an undemocratic fashion.

A complete accounting of these and other historical work-based organizations is beyond the scope of this article. However, strengths, weaknesses, and differences aside, what unites these three forms of work-based organization is that they allowed the socialists of the time to deal concretely and collectively with the particular, immediate issues of the spaces they organized in, enabling them to develop and spread concrete manifestations of their politics that were practical and felt by the community of interest in which they organized while also acquiring hard organizing skills, forming deep relationships with a diversity of workers, and cultivating their leadership capacities. By forming organization based on the workplace and union, these radicals recognized that the day-to-day conditions and needs of workers must be the basis of any socialist organizing and that the immediacy of these conditions and needs tends to be the only force galvanizing enough to get workers to push through apathy, fear, cynicism, and hopelessness to act, to take up collective struggle, engendering a sense of agency and power in their lives. At its core, this meant socialists as workers acting as primary agents of change in their own lives and in larger society, not simply active or passive supporters of the struggles of worker “others.” Furthermore, by creating organization based on where workers spend their daily lives, the socialist organization could be brought into the daily lives of the socialist organization’s own members, increasing their involvement and commitment to the organization by decreasing the gap between one’s daily individual activity and that of the organization. For unionists, if they were to be active socialists, this also meant overlapping the work required to organize in two different institutions – the workplace / union and the socialist organization – thereby decreasing the difficulty of involvement in both. While it’s easy to gloss over, work-based organization allowed the basic units of these socialist organizations to be defined through the work their members did in their workplaces. If the power of workers and the working class rests on our ability to stop the creation of surplus value at the point of production, then this is something socialists should not lightly pass over.

From the Bottom Up and Inside Out

A workers’ circle, then, is a group of DSA members organized on the basis of the work they do for a living, or in other words, based on their potential power as workers. Workers’ circles can be organized according to workplace, employer, union, industry, or sector, organizing in and across workplaces and unions. Though the particular scope and content of a workers’ circle is dependent on the unique circumstances its participants find themselves in, we can see that organization based on work is essential to socialist organizing, especially if we want to organize as socialists at work.

Underlying the organizational concept is an analysis of the history of the labor movement in the U.S., which, with the exception of the brief resurgence of the Left in labor in the 1960s and 1970s, has been mostly separated since the post-World War II due to the McCarthy era purges and organized labor’s integration into the Democratic Party, accompanied by the overall decline of socialist organization over the past 50 years. This analysis recognizes that in the past, a key element that has made unions into fighting, democratic organizations able to push past the limits and pressures imposed by capitalism was the presence of organized, experienced, politically developed militant radicals organizing, as part of a larger militant minority, on the shopfloor and extending outward. If one of our chief goals as socialists advancing the socialist project is to revitalize the labor movement – not only to aid in the improvement of workers’ immediate conditions but to midwife working class formation that can effectively fight capitalist exploitation and oppression, serving as a catalyst and base to develop a comprehensive, explicit class political movement that fights for working-class political, economic, and social transformation – then socialists must seek to reunite the socialist and labor movements by helping to rebuild a militant minority within the latter that can develop a class struggle current and a socialist pole of attraction within it.

For this reunification to occur organically and effectively, it must occur primarily in a bottom-up manner, from the inside out with socialists, either existing or newly-won, as active first-person participants in organized labor and the labor movement, not from the outside in. To do that means encouraging worker-members to organize in their workplaces and unions, and supporting them in doing so by providing them tools and resources including organizational space for political, strategic, and tactical discussions, training, and education as well as facilitating worker-member to worker-member connections.

The reason it must occur from the bottom up and inside out is that there are strong forces and pressures on unions as institutions and their leaderships that, without a strong organized rank-and-file to exert a more dominant counterpressure, inhibit the union leadership’s ability to develop the consciousness, combativity, and confidence of the workers they represent and without which transformative gains are not possible. These pressures stem not just from the employers themselves, but from capital’s controlling influence on the government, the political parties, the courts, and the economy, all of which are channeled onto the union leadership and the staff they hire, as the representatives of the union, or what’s often called the union officialdom. The potential and real punitive measures these entities dispense range from anti-labor legislation, fines, injunctions, and jailing to backdoor political horse trading, capital flight, and economic depression. Generally, these measures  keep the union and its leadership in line. However, pressures and incentives also arise from the distinct material interests that provide the basis for the distinct social layer of the union officialdom. Though leadership in lots of instances comes from the ranks (and should), once in leadership the worker is no longer in the same social position. The worker, now a union official, becomes responsible for the maintenance and reproduction of the union as an institution – their life, livelihood, and a sustainable career attached to its continued life – often succumbing to institutional conservatism which puts the interests of the union organization above the interests of the workers it represents. In addition to this, the extent to which the leadership no longer work in the workplace, no longer depend on wages directly from the employer for their survival, no longer are directly in touch with (and hence pressured by) the rank-and-file members, and no longer have the same standard of living, social status, and social relations as those of the average member, rising above them, is the extent to which the leadership’s material incentives and interests tend to separate from the workers they represent. Of course, union officials must deliver some minimal conditions, wages, and benefits in order to retain their positions – and this does not discount the commitment and dedication of many hardworking officers and staff to their members’ betterment – but it is all of these immense pressures which make the rank-and-file of any union, new or old, the fundamental driver of change and which make a base in it a necessity for socialists.

All of this means there need to be strong, organized rank-and-file forces within the union that can mobilize for the workers’ needs and that can keep their leadership accountable, able to push leaders out of the way if need be to act independently, if workers wish to counteract the pressure and influence of the employer and capital on their leadership, and diminish the latter’s institutional conservatism. In this sense, the union officialdom as a social group is wedged between labor and capital, acting consciously or not as mediators between the two with whichever influence is stronger winning out. With organized labor heavily bureaucratized, heavily constricted by capitalist material pressures and ideology, unable to turn the tide of decades of degrading working and living conditions, workers’ struggles against their bosses for better lives inevitably come into conflict with the operation of union officialdom which tends to preserve the status quo. It is the rank-and-file workers who bear the daily brunt of work intensification, short staffing, long hours, insecure scheduling, dehumanizing disciplinary measures, and declining real wages, and it is these conditions that eventually compel them to organize. As such, any socialist organization, or grouping of its members, whose main entry point or organizing position in organized labor is within union leadership and its staff will then be positioning itself in the same social layer that is most affected and conservatized by capitalist pressure, and therefore the least capable of revitalizing the labor movement. Without a healthy base of rank-and-file workers, the fate of the grouping of socialist workers then becomes tied to the fate of the union leaders and staff with which it is associated. As soon as the socialist workers fall out of favor with the union leadership, as soon as union leaders fall out of favor with their rank-and-file members, or as soon as the union leaders lose their formal leadership positions, so will the organizing of the socialist workers lose its influence or fall into disarray.

Insofar as the Rank-and-File Strategy concerns closing the physical-social gap between the socialist and labor movements as a means to close the breach in class and political consciousness between the two movements, existing socialists must be socially positioned primarily where the logic of class struggle has the most potential to be carried through and where the struggle will occur the most acutely. For the same reason that rank-and-file workers are the main drivers of change in unions and that rank-and-file workers need independent internal organization in their union to keep their union true to the aggressive pursuit of worker and working class interests, socialist workers must keep their socialist organization likewise in the ranks and independent from the union apparatus and leadership if they are to help create a vibrant class struggle unionism. Crucially, by organizing as workers, the workers’ circle allows for the possibility of the growth of a rooted working-class base in workplaces and unions best positioned to navigate and counteract the contradictory, conservatizing, and restraining pressures put on unions as institutions that undercut the advancement of working class struggle, organization, and consciousness – something necessary for any chance at labor revitalization.

Developing Class Struggle Practices and Socialist Politics

For socialist workers to find the workers’ circle useful enough to allocate valuable hours of their life to its activity, it must be able to address the practical needs of organizing as socialists. The circle then is based on the understanding that being a unionist by itself does not equate to being a socialist and that being a socialist doesn’t necessarily mean that one is well-equipped to organize in the workplace. If the latter were true, socialists would have a much wider base than they currently have within workplaces and unions. If the former were true, the labor movement and the AFL-CIO would look a lot different today.

While working in organizing committees and rank-and-file groupings is an essential condition of any work socialists undertake in workplaces and unions, that work by itself tells us little about what we should be doing as socialist unionists and how we should be doing it. How do we as socialists make the organizing committee or rank-and-file grouping as fully class struggle as possible? How should socialists relate to the NLRB in non-union and union workplaces? What are the conditions and preparations necessary to run a successful insurgent campaign that can transform a union? What are the unusual circumstances in which one would want to run as an isolated reform candidate without having built up some culture of rank-and-file initiative or a widely-backed platform to organize around? How should socialists pursue industrial unionism in the age of general unionism? What strategies and tactics do we use? What are the goals that we push for? How do we link to other movements and larger political struggles that may overlap with but that transcend the workplace and the union? Functionally and almost inevitably, there is also the question of how socialists in one group should relate to those in another when organizing in a workplace or union. There’s a necessity to work out a developed socialist orientation to be able to answer these questions both in general and in particular circumstances which just working as a scattering of individuals doesn’t tell us and that non-political worker organization can’t provide by itself.

The other side to this is that workers’ circles also present a potential ballast for DSA members as they make their way into the difficult world of workplace and union organizing. Without such a ballast in the specific contexts of our particular workplaces and unions, a higher potential danger exists of capsizing or unanchored drifting of our socialist politics, especially since the dominant ideology in any society is the ruling class’ ideology, and business unionism and labor liberalism still reign supreme within organized labor. The issues of Covid safety measures and vaccines, the undemocratic nature of the US political system, the red- and race-baiting of the far right via Critical Race Theory hysteria and law-and-order politics, and the abolition or restriction of abortion rights have to be thought about and dealt with. Being a militant unionist does not inherently provide the basis for socialist solutions to those questions, and application of those solutions to particular arenas of organizing. Furthermore, in this political moment, with the threat to bourgeois democratic institutions from the conspiracy-driven Trumpist right, we leave the larger political terrain of contestation within the unions and the workplace open and susceptible to far right politics if we ignore developing and articulating a socialist politics in these settings while engaged in our unionist work. Undoubtedly, while the basis for an articulation of such a socialist politics, and the creation of a base for them, should take place within a class struggle method of organizing focused on the immediate issues of the the workplace and union, that method does not automatically translate to the creation of those politics and their longer term goals, but must be consciously undertaken. Workers’ circles thus have the potential to keep us grounded in our socialist principles and politics, balancing them with the immediate needs and struggles of unionism.

Practically, the concept of the workers’ circle acknowledges that to organize effectively, one must organize collectively as a group. Organizing as an individual or a collection of individuals can be a very isolating endeavor, prone to frustration and burnout. The development of organizing skills, the development of a socialist political perspective and strategy for any given domain of activity, the sharing of experiences, the providing of material and non-material aid, and the community of support that comes from all of that, and which is necessary to sustain long-term struggle, must actively be created. It cannot be done by organizing ourselves as socialists based on geography and residence, though those may be suitable characteristics for other non-work-based domains of organizing.

Hence, the workers’ circle is a stimulant, a vehicle, and an aid for organizing as socialists in workplaces and unions, not a substitute or replacement for that work. Its overall purpose is to organically reconnect current socialists with organized labor and the labor movement, develop them as capable workplace organizers while also attracting new or burgeoning socialist workers to its sphere of activity and DSA as a larger organization, thereby helping to rebuild local militant minorities that can develop local class struggle currents, and socialist poles of attraction within them, within local labor movements that can eventually be connected regionally and nationally, and which can spur on the revitalization of that movement as a whole.

Addressing Working Class Diversity and Other Organizational Hurdles

 As a part of DSA, workers’ circles would allow the organization to address and remedy, at least partially, several concrete problems it faces generally, and also specifically, in its labor work: organizational composition, capacity, leadership development, and siloing.

Though both workplaces and unions still struggle with the discrimination of racism, sexism, transphobia, and xenophobia, they are some of the most diverse settings in the U.S., consisting of workers as a class, with union workplaces in particular being more materially equal for workers of color than non-union workplaces. In unions, Black workers are more likely to be union members than white workers and nearly four in ten union members are workers of color. Educationally, slightly more than half of union members have no bachelor’s degree. By being organized around and anchored in work, DSA can better take steps to fix its lack of diversity within the working class, in regards to race and ethnicity, but also in regards to industry and job type. Being able to engage in organizing around the immediate conditions and needs of workers means engaging the vast majority of workers who are rightly cynical and alienated from elections and have a large number of competing demands for their time. Individuals are less likely to be motivated to spend time in activities they see as futile and out of their control, but they can be compelled and motivated to join in activities that can directly address their immediate needs and improve their immediate conditions. Work-based organization and activity thereby allows us to expand outward from the layers of the working class in which we have disproportionate representation and which tend to be better educated, better-off, and whiter. By expanding the diversity in one sphere of our activity, we can then be better positioned to expand diversity within our membership as a whole.

As mentioned above, those who want to be active in DSA and active in their workplaces and unions have double duty in terms of work and meetings. Organization based on work, while not eradicating the difference between the two sites of activity, overlaps them significantly, making it easier to sustain worker-member involvement in DSA by increasing the incentive to remain involved since their involvement will be directly linked to the improvement of their immediate needs and conditions. The proximity between DSA organization and workplace-union organization also has the potential then to increase our capacity in specific ways such as the ability to conduct organizer trainings, political education, socials, solidarity support, and jobs programs. Worker-members have a direct self-interest and motivation to do these things because they are linked to the desire to better working terms and conditions in one’s own field, and increase the democracy, and hence effectiveness, of one’s union. What this means is that, while our overall experience and knowledge as an organization is generally low and undeveloped in the workplace, organized labor, and the labor movement, workers’ circles offer the long-term organizational basis for developing those in a systematic, self-perpetuating manner. That also means more developed concrete bases in the workplace, strengthening our ties to workers and the working class while at the same time encouraging as wide a swath as possible of our members to think of themselves as workers. This last part bears emphasizing because many DSA members do not think of themselves as a worker or as part of the working class. Though a majority are working class as identified in organizational surveys and therefore part of the working class-in-itself, they have not yet become a part of the self-conscious class-for-itself that socialists strive to form.

Lastly, the synthesis of skills, experience, and political perspective required in the labor movement, and thereby in DSA’s labor work, are all ultimately based on the experience of organizing in the workplace and in the union. With the long-term development of workers’ circles whose activity is based on organizing in the workplace and union, an engine of leadership development with an active leadership pipeline, grounded in the labor movement, can better be created for DSA in this crucial terrain of struggle. Contributing to this leadership development, because the type of organization is based on and mirrors part of the structure of workers’ daily lives, a more holistic approach to the whole complex of issues workers face – racism, sexism, immigration, environmental degradation to name a few – can be undertaken. Instead of DSA conducting its work primarily based on organization formed around issues abstracted from real life organic structures, it can take up each issue as it manifests itself concretely within the organic everyday institutions of the workplace and the union, grounding and tying together its various strains of work in a comprehensive manner.

Tying Tactics Together

Both on the national and local levels in DSA, core areas of DSA’s labor work have included political labor education, strike and solidarity support, electoral and legislative campaigns, organizer development, jobs programs, and connecting DSA members through work-based networks. Each one of these is often listed next to each other on a laundry list of projects to implement with little to nothing yet written on how they might connect with each other and in which order they might be undertaken or prioritized, leaving it up to the smarts and discretion of individual members, chapters, or leadership bodies to figure out what they want to do. The unrecognized potential keystone that can hold together these core areas in a cogent whole, connecting into a political and organizational strategy, are the aforementioned work-based networks, or in other words, workers’ circles.

Electoral and legislative campaigns (referred to hereafter as “parliamentary campaigns” for short) are the predominant form of DSA activity. Within a workplace and union context, these campaigns tend to do little to immediately address and solve workers’ needs and problems, do little to build workplace organizing skills – skills motivated by a categorically different logic than electoral organizing – and are typically not able to address the political, organizational, and cultural obstacles within unions that create member apathy and cynicism, disrupt solidarity, and encourage top-down business unionist modes of functioning. Leaving aside the question of the desirability of taking up these parliamentary campaigns as socialists within the labor movement (there are times where these would make sense), on both the national and the chapter level, our organization has little or no means to effectively and systematically push these within workplaces and unions. This leaves initiative up to isolated individuals in union locals, perhaps in the best circumstances an uncoordinated handful, with little support in assessing the viability of a particular campaign within their union or in applying the campaign to their union. Unmoored from a rank-and-file organizational expression, DSA, if it wishes to pursue such campaigns, cannot then push for the campaign organically via the needs and will of its dual members – those who are both members of DSA and of a given union – but must push for it artificially from the outside as an institution itself seeking the institution of the union via the latter’s leadership, in short, orienting this activity towards influencing union officialdom, the status quo historical orientation of DSA before its 2016 rebirth. Workers’ circles would allow parliamentary campaigns, when they do make sense, to be carried out in a more systematic, organized, bottom-up fashion.

Similarly, workers’ circles can add stability to jobs programs that chapters and their local labor formations may decide to take up. While there is still much confusion in DSA about the rank-and-file strategy, demonstrated by the conflation of a single tactic – getting jobs with the purpose of workplace organizing – with the strategy as a whole, proponents of jobs programs should recognize that this tactic is not effective as the central tactic of a labor strategy. It is important that as socialists we’re where there’s the most strategic potential for organizing and this tactic can help with that and has the potential to help address our compositional imbalance as an organization, but it can only do the latter if the worker-transplants stay organizationally linked to DSA in their organizing and the DSA-linked organizing they do is useful in addressing the needs of the worker-transplant, the needs of of the greater workforce at a given employer, and the needs of the the greater membership in a given union. More significant than this though is that, based on this author’s experience in actively developing a jobs program in their own chapter, the tactic of the jobs program only tends to involve the 1% to 2% of DSA membership that wants or needs a new job, has skills and interest in jobs at one of the designated targets, wants to take the leap, potentially lifelong, into workplace and union organizing, and has all other obligations and everything else in their life align. If DSA helps members get jobs, the organization must also create support, training, and development structures for them, otherwise it runs the risk of isolating, overwhelming, and burning them out – a dominant critique featured in the “Socialists on the Job” panels that the DSLC put on last year of New Left industrializers reflecting on their socialist organizations’ experiences in the 1970s and 80s. Political education, organizer trainings, mentorship, a sense of community – the means of support that a worker dedicated to organizing in a new job would want – all of these are things that workers-members in a workers’ circle would provide out of their own collective self-interest in organizing and therefore would not have to be created from scratch. In situations where DSA doesn’t have an existing concentration of members in the employer, union, industry, or sector as the jobs program target, those with the new jobs there will likewise tend to be driven by their own individual and collective self-interest to create these support and organizing structures, first in smaller informal means and then, if the group grows, in a larger more formal manner. Non-union jobs program targets have to operate slightly differently, but the principle remains the same for them too. The organic endpoint if DSA wishes to keep its organizational ties to those who get new jobs and not see them wander off into the distance or burnout is workers’ circles.

All of the above organizing and support endeavors involved in workers’ circles also serve as a beacon of attraction for non-DSA militant worker reformers and socialists with whom we establish relationships through our strike and solidarity support, making possible the long-term consolidation of relationships formed in those activities and serving as a home for workers-as-workers within DSA. The question we must be asking ourselves is, “why would a worker want to be involved in DSA activity or join DSA – what do we have to offer them?” The answer that most would recognize is that a worker would get involved in or join DSA if they knew it could help them in their struggles, but we must specify further what this means.

If it just means showing up to support struggles from the outside, then the relationship the worker has with the organization will tend to be a more shallow, transactional one: you come out to support me, I’ll come out for things to support you. In this relationship, DSA is viewed as an institution and as an “other,” separate from the struggles of the worker with little organic connection between the two. If DSA can only provide support for the irregular, big explosions of struggle and the like – which is of course a crucial and important activity – then that is what workers will seek it out for once every three to five years for the duration of their contract-related action before retreating back to their union. If, however, on the other hand, helping workers in their fights means being involved in the daily struggles of the worker, acting as a vehicle and aid for the waging and winning of those struggles, then the relationship the worker has with the organization will be a more personal, transformational one. In this relationship, DSA is viewed from the bottom-up through its worker-members and as a critical, organic part of the worker’s struggles. If DSA can provide support, resources, and community for the day-to-day struggle, acting as an instrument for its development, then workers will seek it out for exactly this, for it is that day-to-day struggle that is the most immediate and the most difficult to navigate as it involves hundreds of concrete mundane actions, events, and decisions that add up to and shape the course of the larger manifestations of struggle as seen in strikes.

Through workers’ circles, DSA can be a vehicle for the development of workers’ daily struggles. With the same motivation that underscores the drive to get support in these struggles is the drive to connect with others like one’s self in the same employer, industry, or union who are also in struggle or want to be. Once again, the motivation is self-interest: workers want to meet those who they can organize with to better their job and union; they want to meet others who are in the same boat from whom they can get ideas, information, resources, and the support of comradeship; they want to meet those who have already been through battles so they can get advice on maneuvering, tactics, and strategy. Through direct, material self-interest, there’s a motivation to support other workers in one’s industry, union, and employer, not only because individuals are more likely to help those with whom they identify, but because of how the supported workers do in their struggle against their employer determines what sort of pressure, upward or downward, is imposed on their own working terms and conditions, and shapes the strength and quality of the politics and practices of their shared union, adjacent unions, and the local labor movement,

The workers’ circle is thus the organizational basis for uniting jobs programs, solidarity support, new member recruitment, political labor education, organizer development, and parliamentary campaigns while developing experience, leadership, and class struggle politics as organic actors in the struggle with skin in the game, affected first-hand by both victories and losses. Through involvement in workers’ immediate everyday struggles from the first-hand perspective as workers and animated by a bottom-up, rank-and-file, class struggle politics, it is also the organizational basis on which DSA can fix its compositional imbalance and artificial siloing, and develop its capacity and member leadership. Workers’ circles even present the potential, albeit in embryonic form, for moving towards developing a basic unit of organization within DSA based on work. With its activity driven by the desire for help and support in the striving of its worker participants to improve their working conditions and unions, it has the material basis on which to sustain, reproduce, develop, and expand itself, a class struggle current, and a socialist pole of attraction within the labor movement.

If workers’ circles are not undertaken in a systematic, collective manner across the organization, DSA can still play a valuable role as a basic entry point to socialist ideas and the progressive wing of the labor movement which includes a tiny minority that are endeavoring to put into practice class struggle unionism toward the ends of working class emancipation. However, its role will end there as it will be unable to develop and provide the masses of workers – not from the outside and top-down but from the inside and bottom-up – with the particular, concrete ideas, strategies, methods, and support they need to overcome the problems and stagnancy of current worker organization in surmounting capitalist influence of unions through labor officialdom, state regulation, legalism, ideological hegemony, political parties, and the organization of labor processes that favor capital. These must be addressed in order for workers to have collective rank-and-file control over their unions, to have unions that will unflaggingly fight for their members and workers everywhere, and to create new unions where none exists that can win transformative changes in the lives of its members and other workers. Workers’ circles with class struggle and socialist politics allow us the opportunity to develop responses to the tough questions of the labor movement in our time. We have a long, steep path before us, and we can start to climb it, but only if we take up as a priority with full support and full resources the project of workers’ circles in and across every chapter of DSA.

DSA and the Russian War on Ukraine: Political Paralysis

By: May 24, 2022
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Ukrainian American protest against Russian invasion of Ukraine, New York City, February 2022. No DSA presence.

This article was written for L’Anticapitaliste, the weekly newspaper of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) of France.

The Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the United States, with about 75,000 members (down from 94,000) in more than 200 chapters, has been unable to play any significant role regarding Russia’s war on Ukraine. Politically divided on the war, unable and uninterested in organizing debates on the issue in the organization, it has made no substantive analysis, published virtually no literature on the subject, and has neither organized nor participated in the few demonstrations about the war.

The short statements DSA has produced over the past nearly three months of the war have condemned the Russian invasion but placed almost equal responsibility for the war on NATO. DSA has not called for support for Ukraine nor for its victory in the war. Instead, it has said, very abstractly, that it stands with the working classes of both Ukraine and Russia and with the anti-war protestors in both countries and around the world. This position would place DSA in the pacifist anti-war camp that opposes giving weapons to Ukraine and calls for diplomacy, but it has played no important part in that small movement. DSA has not joined in the large Ukrainian American protests in several cities.

Why is DSA in this anomalous position: A political organization with no useful position on the central foreign policy question of the day? When Senator Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2015 as a democratic socialist, he inspired hundreds of thousands of young people, tens of thousands of whom joined DSA. Becoming political, some DSAers, wanting to be anti-imperialist, were attracted to campist ideas, the view that the United States is the main or only imperialist power and that leftists should support states that oppose it—such as Iran, Syria, China, and Russia, Venezuela and Nicaragua, even if they were authoritarian.

Having grown to tens of thousands of members, DSA also became a target for infiltration by other left groups, from the Communist Party USA, to several orthodox Trotskyist organizations, and others. The Party of Socialism and Liberation, for example, brought Stalinist ideas into DSA. PSL looks back with regret on the fall of the Soviet Union, it expresses support for North Korea, and in the current Russian war on Ukraine, PSL leans toward Russia. Several such campists or Stalinists won election to DSA’s top leadership body, the National Political Committee, where they faced opposition from an equal number of internationalists, making it impossible for DSA to pass a meaningful position on the Russian war on Ukraine.

Unfortunately, DSA has neither the political will nor the ability to organize political debates on the Russian war on Ukraine, so discussion then tends to take place in left journals, through the DSA caucuses’ publications or on social media. I and other DSA comrades have written articles arguing for DSA to support Ukraine. A couple of caucuses have published articles supporting Ukraine or sponsored debates in their pages. Others see this becoming a proxy war. On social media—such as DSA’s own discussion board, Facebook, Twitter, and others—the debates are snarky at best and often vicious. It has been suggested that those who criticize China, Russia, Syria, or support Ukraine are State Department agents. Some DSA members have called for “ice-picking” other DSA members who oppose campism. (Ice-picking is an allusion to the murder of Leon Trotsky.)

A few DSA branches have sponsored Zoom webinars with Ukrainian speakers, including people invited from Sotsіalniy Rukh or Social Movement (SR), a democratic socialist organization in Ukraine that opposes Zelensky’s neoliberal policies even while joining the Ukrainian territorial defense battalions to fight Vladimir Putin’s Russian invasion. We in DSA will continue to push the organization to hold discussions and debates on the war and to support Ukraine and the Ukrainian left in every way possible.

The War in Ukraine, International Security, and the Left

By: May 24, 2022
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Update: The 2024 Daniel Singer Prize has been awarded to Taras Bilous for this essay. New Politics is proud to have been one of the original publishers.

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine has no justification, but NATO…” It is difficult to describe the emotions I and other Ukrainian socialists feel about this “but” in the statements and articles of many Western leftists. Unfortunately, it is often followed by attempts to present the Russian invasion as a defensive reaction to the “aggressive expansion of NATO” and thus to shift much of the responsibility for the invasion to the West.

One example of this is Susan Watkins’ editorial in New Left Review. In it, the author calls the Russian invasion of a country that is not now and is unlikely to ever become a member of NATO a “war of Russia against NATO,” effectively denying Ukraine’s subjectivity. In addition, Watkins argues that Biden “could no doubt have prevented an invasion had he been willing to negotiate a serious agreement on military frontiers.”

Such a position has been met with criticism from Eastern European leftist authors, in particular Jan Smolenski and Jan Dutkiewicz. They pointed out that the Eastern European states joined NATO voluntarily, with the support of the majority of their populations, and did so given their own concerns, usually ignored by critics of NATO enlargement.

Since these issues are often a stumbling block in leftist discussions of the war in Ukraine, let’s examine them in more detail – especially since, in my view, they are also important for shaping leftist strategy on international security issues.

Finlandization

Could this war have been avoided by agreeing that Ukraine would not join NATO? Any serious answer to this question must take into account the fact that in the run-up to the war, the Kremlin demanded far more than that. In particular, the draft treaty between Russia and the United States, published by the Russian Foreign Ministry on December 17, included a clause stating that the US would not develop bilateral military cooperation with states that were formerly part of the Soviet Union and not members of NATO (Article 4) – Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova.

Some readers may assume that this clause appeared in the draft treaties so that later there would be something to concede during negotiations, but there are good reasons to doubt it. Shortly before the draft treaties appeared, Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, and Alexander Baunov, a fellow at the same center, wrote that for Moscow’s elites, close military cooperation between Ukraine and the United States had become as unacceptable as Ukraine’s accession to NATO.

Therefore, although the media often reduced Russia’s demands to Ukraine’s neutrality, they were in fact more serious. The European neutral states, in particular Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, and Finland, are not prevented by their status from developing cooperation with the United States in the field of armaments. All these states also take part in NATO’s Partnership for Peace program. Military cooperation between Ukraine and the United States also began when Ukraine declared its non-bloc status. Ukraine and the USA signed a treaty on military cooperation in 1993, Ukraine and the USA have been organizing the international military exercise Sea Breeze since 1997, and Russia took part in it in 1998.

After 2014, military cooperation with the United States and NATO was an important factor in the modernization of the Ukrainian army. Without it, Ukrainian resistance to Russian invasion would have been significantly less effective. Had this cooperation ceased at Russia’s request, Ukraine would have been less secure, and therefore the Ukrainian government might have been forced to comply with other Russian demands. In this regard, the term “Finlandization,” used by many authors, better describes the essence of Russian demands. During the Cold War, Finland not only did not join NATO, but also took into account numerous “wishes” of the Soviet leadership, in particular, it rejected the Marshall Plan and extradited all fugitives from the USSR. (In addition, the Finno-Soviet Treaty of 1948 provided for military cooperation between Finland and the USSR in the event of an attack on the USSR through Finland.)

Finland pursued this policy after its defeat in the war, in which it was allied with Nazi Germany. Realizing that the Soviet leadership could turn Finland into another satellite if it so desired, agreeing to certain restrictions in exchange for maintaining its political system and sovereignty was a rational solution for the Finns. At the same time, Ukraine was not in such a predicament before the current war, and most did not agree to Russian demands.

Here the difference between the original “Finlandization” and the situation on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is obvious. The Finnish policy of neutrality and consideration of Soviet interests was based on agreements between Finland and the USSR, while in Ukraine the Kremlin wanted to negotiate with the United States and NATO. At the time, the Kremlin had apparently lost hope that it would be possible to force the Ukrainian authorities to comply with Russian demands, or that pro-Russian forces would come to power in Ukraine. Therefore, the Kremlin decided, against the wishes of Ukraine’s people, to negotiate the future of Ukraine with those whom it viewed as the “masters” of that power.

It should be noted that the Kremlin may have needed the draft treaties not as a last attempt to negotiate, but to legitimize its invasion. We don’t know exactly when Putin made the decision to invade, and we will only be able to say for sure once the Kremlin archives are opened. But we can assess the information that is available to us. The essence of the Russian proposals was practically a division of Europe into spheres of influence between Russia and the US. I do not know if Susan Watkins understands this, but that is what she actually supported in her New Left Review essay, writing “In calling for a stable settlement of military borders, the Kremlin has a good case.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis

Imagine: A nationalist revolution takes place in a country near an imperialist state that regards the territory as its sphere of influence. The imperialist state attempts to prevent the ultimate loss of influence over the politics of the first country using  brute force and in league with opponents of the revolution. A post-revolutionary government regards an alliance with a rival superpower as a guarantee of security. The threat of nuclear war arises. This is a story not only about Ukraine, but also about another country with which many authors, including the aforementioned Dmitri Trenin, have compared Ukraine – Cuba.

Of course, there are many differences between those two cases. The class and ideological nature of the revolutions and superpowers were very different. But as far as international security is concerned, these differences are not decisive. The Cuban Missile Crisis is indeed a good analogy for Russian aggression against Ukraine, so let’s look at it a little more closely.

The Cuban Missile Crisis arose from the deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and ended with their dismantling in exchange for US guarantees of non-aggression against Cuba and the withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey. Did military cooperation between Cuba and the USSR cease after that? No. Were Soviet troops (which the Cuban government viewed as a guarantee of its security) withdrawn from Cuba? No.

In Ukraine, on the other hand, there are no US missiles with nuclear warheads. Even participation in NATO does not necessarily imply the deployment of missiles – in this regard, the example of Norway, which was the only NATO country that shared a border with the USSR during the Cold War and therefore was wary of placing missiles on its territory, is quite telling.

Moreover, the US, while rejecting Russia’s opposition to NATO’s enlargement, has at the same time offered new arms control arrangements. According to Alexei Arbatov, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a leading Russian expert on security and disarmament issues, until recently these proposals were put forward by Russia as well and were of serious interest in terms of easing tensions and strengthening European security. However, this time, the Russian leadership dismissed them as “secondary.”

U.S. President John f. Kennedy gave guarantees of non-aggression against Cuba and agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey. In this way, he showed that his primary concern in this case was security. Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, rejected the US offer and went to war. In doing so, he showed that his primary concern was not security, but his desire for the return of Ukraine to Russian control, or at least the conquest of new Ukrainian territories. Indeed, the caution Western states have shown toward Russia even after the full-scale invasion began shows the hollowness of Russian security concerns. Russia has the best security guarantee – nuclear weapons. The Kremlin itself never tires of reminding us of this.

With regard to Ukraine, what if the US had made big concessions to Russia? What would they be? In the run-up to the invasion, there were numerous statements that Ukraine’s accession to NATO was not on the agenda. The most outspoken was former NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer: “Everyone, including Putin, knows that Ukraine will not become a NATO member in the foreseeable and unforeseeable future. It’s already a buffer country. It’s something you’ll never hear NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg say; his position won’t allow it. But I can say that now.” Nevertheless, the Kremlin demanded a guarantee. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov first responded to the idea of a temporary moratorium on NATO expansion by saying that it was unacceptable for Russia, and Putin himself spoke critically about it a few days before the invasion.

Most likely, the Kremlin would only have been satisfied with the complete fulfillment of its demands. But what would that mean for Ukraine? On the eve of the invasion, things were not going well for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, now a political superstar. His popularity ratings were falling, while those of his main rival, former President Petro Poroshenko, were rising. US agreement to Russia’s demands would have greatly exacerbated the situation. And if the Ukrainian government, having lost US support, had met any of the Kremlin’s demands, it would have been guaranteed to lead to a political crisis and an escalation of violence. It is quite possible that this would have created better conditions for the invasion of Russian troops as “peacekeepers.” In this case, Ukrainian realities would have been much worse than they are now.

I am not claiming that in the last months before the invasion, the West and/or Ukraine could not have prevented war. But a serious examination of this possibility requires deeper analysis and access to the Kremlin archives. I think this will be an interesting question for future historians. In the meantime, those Western leftists, so eager to criticize the US for what Russia did, should refrain from claiming that Washington should have simply complied with Russian demands. After all, it could very easily have been the decision of one man – Vladimir Putin – to prevent the war. All he had to do was not give the order to start the invasion.

NATO expansion

Fortunately, on the question of NATO expansion historians have already provided a convincing answer. One of the best analyses published so far is Mary Elise Sarotte’s book Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate. Sarotte does a good job of showing that NATO’s open-door policy has indeed undermined US-Russian cooperation on arms control and the formation of a broader international security system. NATO expansion gave trump cards to Russian revanchists and hawks and buried the political prospects of liberals who advocated closer cooperation with the West, like Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev.

In this sense, the growth of NATO did create favorable conditions for the outbreak of war. But how and why it happened is also important. Tony Wood, in an article in the same New Left Review, writes that the “emergence of an increasingly assertive and militarized Russian nationalism is inextricable from that process [NATO expansion], because it was in large part propelled and reinforced by it.” But what Wood fails to ask is why NATO expansion has caused such a reaction. In my opinion, the answer can easily be found in Sarotte’s book, to which Wood repeatedly refers.

Was it a reaction to the fact that legitimate Russian security concerns were neglected, as many authors have claimed? I don’t think so. Seriously, how could the accession of the Czech Republic and Hungary to NATO create a threatening situation for Russia? It’s enough to look at the map to give the obvious answer: no way. Then why was their accession to NATO perceived negatively in the Kremlin? Because they recently belonged to the Soviet zone of influence. And also because their accession was part of the formation of a new international order in which Russia no longer had the status of a superpower equal to the United States.

It was the pain of a lost empire that provoked revanchist sentiments. In Sarotte’s book this is repeatedly seen as, for example, when Yeltsin demanded special status for Russia under the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, on the grounds that Russia was a “great country with a great army and nuclear weapons” (p. 190). And, Eastern Europeans, after all, could observe these emotions of the Russians with their own eyes. Therefore, instead of talking about the emergence of Russian nationalism, as Tony Wood does, in my opinion it is more appropriate to talk about the transformation of Russian great-power chauvinism as a reaction to NATO’s growth. When it became clear that Russia would not occupy as privileged a position in the new international order as Russian elites wanted, there was a growing desire among them to reconsider this order.

Sarotte’s book also shows that, up to a certain point, the US tried to accommodate Russian sentiments so as not to obstruct the formation of a more secure international order. In particular, this manifested itself in the PfP program, which was designed to ensure that accessions to NATO would not happen too quickly, but would develop into something more. And characteristically, in President Bill Clinton’s words, “Ukraine is the linchpin of the whole [PfP] idea” (p. 188). In the 1990s, it was obvious to everyone that Ukraine could not join NATO. Ukraine’s accession to NATO was a red line for Moscow primarily because of the same great-power chauvinism, because of the special role Ukraine plays in Russian national mythology.

According to Sarotte, it was through Ukraine that Eastern European governments who wanted their countries to join NATO agreed to participate in the PfP as a compromise. But events in Russia, such as Yeltsin’s anti-parliamentary coup in 1993 and the war in Chechnya, increasingly pushed Eastern European states to pressure the US to allow them to join NATO. They managed to get Article 5 extended to them to shield themselves from possible armed aggression from Russia. But the result was a new dividing line in Europe that separated Ukraine from its Western neighbors. Countries that were less threatened by Russian aggression became better protected, while Ukraine, for which the threat was greater, found itself in a “grey zone.” This is why in December 1994, after the publication of the communiqué on NATO’s open-door policy, Kyiv became nervous, while Moscow was furious (p. 201).

Another negative consequence of NATO enlargement was that the process of transforming the CSCE/OSCE, a conference for East-West dialogue created in the 1970s[1] into an international organization was never actually completed. The US decision to make NATO the bedrock of security in Eu­rope has made the  strengthening of the OSCE irrelevant. Had NATO’s open-door policy started at least a few years later, it would have provided an opportunity to turn the OSCE into a more effective organization.

After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the OSCE became a completely irrelevant and most likely dead organization. But this should not prevent us from seeing alternatives to the development of the international security system. The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission had played an important role in resolving the war in Donbas. But its influence could have been much greater if its mandate had been expanded. Ukraine constantly demanded this, but thanks to consensus decision-making in the OSCE, Russia constantly blocked this decision. Thus, the Kremlin sabotaged implementation of point 4 of the Minsk Protocol, which provided for monitoring by the OSCE mission of the entire section of the Ukrainian-Russian border in the combat zone (and not just at the two border checkpoints that Russia allowed until fall 2021).

NATO and the CSTO

Before turning to the results, let’s look some more at attitudes toward military alliances. It might help to compare NATO to its Russian counterpart, the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization established in 1992).

First, it is possible to argue that NATO is a contradictory phenomenon, which on the one hand serves as a cover for US imperialism, and on the other hand is an instrument of protection for many smaller countries. In the same way the CSTO is a cover for Russian imperialism and was recently used to suppress a popular uprising in Kazakhstan, but serves as protection for a relatively democratic Armenia. Acknowledging this fact does not make you a fan of either American or Russian imperialism.

Second, Susan Watkins writes that NATO proved “dispensable” to invade Iraq, but she does not say that this was the case because of French and German resistance. It is also telling that Kazakhstan refused to send its troops to Ukraine, even though the invasion began a month and a half after the Kremlin helped suppress the uprising in Kazakhstan. But just as this was not an insurmountable obstacle for the United States – it created a Multi-National Force, bypassing NATO – so for Russia, Kazakhstan’s refusal did not prevent it from launching the invasion of Ukraine. It should not be forgotten that the key problem in both cases is imperialism (American or Russian), not NATO and the CSTO.

Third, we should stop identifying all military actions of member countries of military alliances with the actions of these military alliances. It is not NATO as an organization that is now conducting a military operation in northern Syria, it is Turkey. And the problem here is Turkish hostility to the Kurds, not NATO. Likewise, if Turkey attacks Greece, it is not NATO attacking one of its members. Also, it is not the CSTO that is now at war against Ukraine, but Russia with the help of Belarus. Fortunately, Kazakhstan and Armenia are not involved in the war.

In addition, one should not identify NATO and “the West” as Susan Watkins did in her statement “NATO won the Cold War without firing a single shot.” But it wasn’t NATO that won the Cold War, it was the West that fired many shots. NATO is only one of the tools. It is not surprising that a group of states, some of which had an aggressive neo-colonial policy, also had among their many instruments a defensive alliance, whose functions changed only after this group of states won the Cold War.

Fourthly, the US and Russia can do without NATO and the CSTO for their imperialist policies, but there is no defense alternative for the Eastern European states and Armenia yet. And if you cannot offer an alternative to the people of countries that seek protection in such structures, it is better not to urge them to give up such protection.

An outline of a leftist strategy for international security

The decisions made in the 1990s–2000s have already become history, and the past cannot be brought back. Focusing on these mistakes now is the same as criticizing in 1939 the Treaty of Versailles, when it had already lost relevance. What are needed now are concrete solutions that can hasten Russia’s defeat and make today’s world a safer place. On the other hand, as with the Treaty of Versailles, old mistakes can provide lessons for shaping postwar policy.

Did the expansion of NATO have an impact on the outbreak of this war? Yes. But there are very different ways of talking about this. When leftists and “realists” say that NATO expansion “provoked” Russia, they are thereby saying that to some extent the Russian invasion was at least partially justified, even if they deny it. Watkins does the same, arguing that the Russian invasion “was not unprovoked.” It is the same as saying that the Cuban Revolution and the cooperation of Fidel Castro’s government with the USSR provoked the United States. Of course, it is not a problem for “realists” to say so, but who on the Left would justify the aggressive US policy towards Cuba in this way?

The fact that the Cuban Revolution was more progressive than the Ukrainian Maidan is no excuse for such a double standard. If any imperialist state saw a revolution in its sphere of influence as a threat to itself and a “bad example” for other countries in its sphere, socialists should not use the fact that this revolution was supported by a rival superpower to condemn the revolution. It should also be noted that this applies not only to the Maidan of 2013–2014, but also to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004. It was after the latter event, a few years before the NATO Bucharest Summit, whose declaration proclaimed that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO,” that there was a noticeable landslide in Russian politics, indicating that the Russian elite viewed the events in Ukraine as a threat to itself.

The comparison with Cuba also tells us that we must treat different concerns differently. The deployment of nuclear missiles near a country’s borders and the entry of a neighboring country into a military bloc or military cooperation with a rival state are of a different order. We should support and call for mutual restrictions on the deployment of nuclear weapons (and for global nuclear disarmament in general). But sometimes the only real alternative to military cooperation with one imperialist state against another is the total subjugation by an aggressive imperial power. Privileged inhabitants of Western countries, who do not have to worry that their country might be conquered by Russia, have no moral right to criticize those who seek protection in cooperation with those Western states. And if one criticizes any military cooperation, then criticism should not turn into support for the division of Europe or the world into spheres of influence.

Does this mean that the Left should have supported NATO expansion? No. Jan Smolenski and Jan Dutkiewicz argued that an intellectually honest critique of NATO expansion would lead to a critique of Eastern European politicians and voters who have embraced the ideals of democracy and national self-determination. But it did not. Eastern European democracies had the sovereign right to make the choice they considered best for their security. But a country’s entry into an international organization depends on the decision of both sides. And the US had to make a choice that would better ensure the security of not only those states that joined NATO, but also those that were not joining NATO. The addition of countries to NATO may have increased their security, while harming Ukraine’s. From this perspective, the rapid transition to NATO’s open-door policy was wrong.

As Mary Sarotte and Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy pointed out in a joint article, in the 1990s the US had a much better and much less costly chance to solve the security issue for Ukraine than it did. First, they could have prioritized the development of the Partnership for Peace program over the rapid expansion of NATO. Second, they could have given Ukraine effective security guarantees in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine demanded this at the time, but under general pressure from the United States and Russia, the Ukrainian government was then forced to agree to a worthless piece of paper. Not giving such guarantees in exchange for nuclear weapons was a terrible mistake that, in the long run, dealt an even greater blow to nuclear disarmament than NATO expansion.

However, that was more about the past. What conclusions can be drawn for the Left’s approach to international security for the future? For the Western European Left of recent decades, if there was any alternative to NATO, it was the idea of a common international security system that would encompass “West” and “East” after the end of the Cold War. But if it made sense in the 1990s, it already looked unrealistic after 2008 and more so after 2014. For some reason, however, these leftists stubbornly ignored the fact that Russia, which in the early 1990s advocated an enhanced role for OSCE, subsequently  became the main opponent of OSCE reform and strengthening. Another part of the European Left, particularly the Polish left-wing alliance Lewica, proposes a European security system as an alternative to NATO – a common army, a missile defense shield, an energy policy, etc. Such a system would help EU members but not those outside the EU. On the contrary, this project carries with it threats of “Fortress Europe” (the same could be said of the previous idea). Therefore, priority must be given to a global security system.

In the recent Athens Declaration, Jeremy Corbin, Yanis Varoufakis, and Ece Temelkuran said that “lasting peace can be achieved only by replacing all military blocs with an inclusive international security framework.” It’s difficult to disagree with this, but they didn’t offer ways to create such a framework. At the same time, there is already a system that fits their description, although it performs its functions inefficiently: it is the UN. I know that many are skeptical of the idea of the United Nations. But so far, I have not seen any of the critics suggest a better alternative. And instead of looking for excuses for inaction, we should look for possible ways to push through changes. What is more utopian — to reform the UN, or to create from scratch a similar system that would unite the countries of the Global South and the Global North, but would be more effective?

Unfortunately, even after Zelenskyy’s statement at the Security Council meeting about the need for UN reform, the only response I have seen in the left-wing media is an explanation of why this is impossible. But this article by Jon Schwarz is revealing for what it never mentions: the “Uniting for Peace” resolution as an alternative to Security Council unanimity. This resolution shows that reform is not so impossible. If the Council really cannot be reformed, its role must be marginalized. In fact, while I was writing this article, a step was taken in this direction: The General Assembly, at the initiative of Liechtenstein, adopted a resolution that provides for an emergency session of the General Assembly when a member of the Security Council uses its right of veto.

We have the prospect of an escalating confrontation between the US and China ahead of us. And in this conflict, the international Left must not repeat the mistakes many of them have made against Russia. China may not mind sharing spheres of influence with the US, but this is not something the Left should support. Instead of worrying about considering China’s interests, as many leftists have worried about considering Russia’s interests, we should think about how to protect small states from domination by all imperialist states. In particular, the international Left should be thinking about how to protect Taiwan without allowing war, not about how to force Taiwan into submission to the PRC. (The fact that Taiwan is not a member of the UN is a problem to be solved, not a reason not to defend Taiwan.)

Some leftist authors have pointed out that the population of states that abstained during the UN General Assembly vote on Russian aggression against Ukraine combined is nearly half the world’s population. But to suggest that this represents the position of half of humanity is to ignore Chinese imperialism and the Indian far-right government. In my view, more important was Barbara Crossette’s observation that small states, in particular India’s neighbors, have predominantly supported Ukraine. Obviously, they were feeling threatened by neighboring great powers.

We do not need to idealize the UN at all. So far, it really is an ineffective instrument. And even without the problem of the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council, there are other serious problems with the UN Charter. As Darrel Moellendorf has rightly pointed out, the principle of the sovereign equality of states under the UN Charter means not opposing armed incursions into the territory of other states at the invitation of the official government of that state to suppress revolution, but opposing states’ support for revolutionary movements in other states. This contradicts the ideas of socialist internationalism. And in this respect, those leftists who justified the Russian invasion of Syria by referring to the legitimacy of this invasion have actually betrayed socialist principles.

But despite all its shortcomings, for now the UN is the only real alternative to military alliances to protect weaker countries from subjugation by stronger neighbors and the most promising instrument for democratizing the international order and increasing the influence of small and poorer states.

As I wrote in another article, perhaps it is now because Russia is invading Ukraine that for the first time in all the years of the UN’s existence there is a real chance for reform. In past decades, this was almost impossible, and in a few years, the confrontation between China and the United States may become so acute that it will be impossible again. Therefore, we need to act on this now. And the greatest responsibility lies with the Left that resides in the countries that are permanent members of the Security Council.

 

P.S. Methodological remark. In her article, Susan Watkins accused the press of “casuistic contortions.” In using the word in this sense, she follows the tradition established by Blaise Pascal’s Lettres provinciales, which sharply criticized Jesuit casuistry. But in fact, Catholic casuistry as a method of practical reasoning was not such a negative phenomenon. Incidentally, this year Verso Books published a work by Carlo Ginzburg on Pascal, Machiavelli, and casuistry. In a broader sense, casuistry is inherent in many cultural traditions. And in the past few decades casuistry has experienced rehabilitation and revival in moral philosophy. So, to forestall accusations of casuistry, I will write at once that my approach in this article was casuistic, in a good sense.

[1] Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) which became the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in January 1995. Eds.

Putin’s conquest of southeast Ukraine

Vexed questions of ‘negotiations’, gotcha moments and real imperial interests
By: May 24, 2022
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As Ukraine continues to resist Russia’s horrific aggression and attempt to conquer and annex the south and east of the country, the quantity of arms being supplied to Ukraine by the United States and other western countries has steadily increased. As the country and people suffering from this naked imperialist aggression, the Ukrainians have every right to receive weapons from whoever wants to send them, regardless of the aims of those countries doing so, or the extraordinary hypocrisy of these imperialist powers.

However, much leftist commentary has increasingly seen this supply of arms as evidence of the war becoming a “proxy” war in which Ukraine, rather than fighting for its very existence, is essentially just acting as cat’s paw for an alleged US imperialist aim of waging “war against Russia,” perhaps even aiming to “Balkanise” Russia. A quick review of some left media just the last couple of days brings up an article that labels the Russian invasion of Ukraine a “U.S. war against Russia” which “threatens world peace;” while even in Socialist Worker, which strongly condemns the Russian invasion and certainly cannot be accused of softness on Putinism, we can read that “today any element of a war of liberation against Russian imperialism is wholly subsumed by, and subordinated to, Nato’s war on Russia.”

An important part of this discourse is the claim that supplying arms goes against the importance of “negotiations,”, which allegedly the US and western states are vetoing, along with the assertion that the US aim is to “weaken” Russia rather than just help Ukraine. Some of this is based on a number of ‘gotcha’ moments when one or another representative of the US ruling class said something a little out of line. Yet a serious analysis will demonstrate that these assumptions and alleged dichotomies have no basis in reality, and the more serious US imperial analysts highlight interests and fears that not only show the ‘gotcha’ moments have little to do with western policy, but ultimately state very similar fears to many of these leftist analysts regarding the potential for a dangerously destabilised Russia resulting from a loss of Russian ‘credibility’, and therefore advocate rather similar limits to US support and stress on negotiations.

‘Negotiations’ versus war?

Writing in Counterpunch on April 29, Richard Rubenstein asks: “If Putin now offered a ceasefire in order to negotiate the status of the Donbass republics and to assert other Russian needs and interests, would the U.S. and Ukraine be justified in refusing to talk in order to punish or “weaken” him?” And answers: “Of course not!”

There is just so much unreality in all these discussions that begin with such statements. “Would the US and Ukraine be justified”? The US and Ukraine are two different countries. What the US does is one thing, but Ukraine is under invasion and occupation. Ukraine is fighting for its existence. If it decides it wants to fight on in order to get as much of its country back as it can and to thus have a stronger position at the bargaining table, that is up to Ukraine, not the US or western leftists. If Ukraine decides it cannot handle the superior Russian firepower any longer and is forced to sign a ceasefire with humiliating conditions, that is up to Ukraine, not up to the US or western leftists. Ukraine’s decisions, in other words, should not be subject to the approval of either western imperialism or the western imperial left. Either way, we should simply demand Russia get out.

Now the first assumption in these endless articles spouting the wisdom of “ceasefire and negotiations” and of Rubenstein’s question above is that Russia is dying to negotiate, and has “reasonable” concerns, or as Rubenstein puts it, “other Russian needs and interests,” which apparently exist inside another sovereign state. I wonder if Rubenstein would seek to justify the ongoing US occupation of part of Cuba’s sovereign territory as due to “US needs and interests.” The related assumption is either that Ukraine is opposed to negotiating, or that many in Ukraine, perhaps Zelensky, would be ready to negotiate, but the US is opposed to negotiations or to any concessions to Russia, and is “banning” Ukraine from negotiating or compromising, or by pumping in arms, it is “encouraging” Ukraine to fight and not negotiate.

This scenario, however, is entirely fictional. No-one making these endless statements has ever presented any evidence whatsoever. They just make it up, because it fits their schema that this is a “proxy war” being waged by US imperialism, which is apparently using Ukraine and Ukrainian lives for its (the US’s) “war on Russia,” as opposed to the actual war of conquest being waged by Russian imperialism against its former colony that stares anyone in the face who wants to look.

It is a remarkably western-centric view, even for the always western-centric Manichean “anti-imperialist” left, to imagine that the millions of Ukrainians who have risen up at the grass-roots level in an extraordinary mobilisation to defend Ukraine’s right to exist as a state and nation are not doing so in their own interests but are merely being fooled into being “proxies” for US imperialism’s schemes.

Ukraine has been either negotiating, or offering to re-start negotiations, more or less continually. It should not be obliged to; Ukraine would be in its full rights to simply say Russian troops need to leave Ukraine and there is nothing to negotiate except the pace and logistics of that withdrawal. But it negotiates anyway because of the position it is in. So when western leftists demand Ukraine do something it is already doing, what they really mean is that Ukraine should surrender to Russia’s “reasonable” demands.

So they should come clean – what do these wise western sages demand that Ukraine do to satisfy Russia so that it will allegedly agree to a ceasefire and negotiations? For the most part, they demand Ukraine accepts Russia’s full program of Ukrainian surrender.

Even on paper, Russia’s demands for Ukrainian surrender – no right to join a security alliance of its choice, demilitarisation, recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and of Donbas – look remarkably like Israel’s “reasonable” demands for Palestinian surrender, including recognition of annexation by force and the whole package. In both cases, justification for calling such maximum demands “reasonable” derives easily from the view that “there is no such thing as Palestine/Ukraine.” Just as western imperialist leaders reject one and support the other, the western imperial left do exactly the same but merely reverse them. In contrast, the Russian and Israeli leaders of small-scale imperialist states engaged in old-style conquest-imperialism have long had a healthy respect for each other’s projects.

Ukraine’s negotiating proposal: No NATO, no military solutions to occupied regions

But are these “reasonable” Russian demands even what Russia is really waging this war for?

Let’s take the NATO demand. It is hard to understand why anyone can still think that Russia launched this war due to its alleged “security concerns” about “NATO enlargement.” NATO enlargement took place in 1999-2004, when 10 countries joined, including the only three “on Russia’s borders,” ie, the three tiny Baltic states. The four that have been allowed into NATO at different moments in the last 18 years were small Balkan states nowhere near Russia, often after long and difficult processes.

Ukraine applied to join in 2008, and the accusation that the US is pushing to “expand” into Ukraine is based on the fact that NATO did not say “no” that year, as its charter prevents it saying no to any European country. Yet 14 years later, Ukraine has still not even been given a Membership Action Plan (MAP), to allow it to begin attempting to meet the conditions of membership. No serious observer thinks Ukraine has any chance of being admitted for many years or decades.

But in any case, Zelensky made the major concession on NATO in negotiations just a few weeks into the war. It’s full elaboration as a written proposal was on March 30. The first few points of the 10-point plan are as follows:

Proposal 1: Ukraine proclaims itself a neutral state, promising to remain nonaligned with any blocs and refrain from developing nuclear weapons — in exchange for international legal guarantees. Possible guarantor states include Russia, Great Britain, China, the United States, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland, and Israel, and other states would also be welcome to join the treaty.

Proposal 2: These international security guarantees for Ukraine would not extend to Crimea, Sevastopol, or certain areas of the Donbas [ie, the areas currently controlled by Kremlin stooges]. The parties to the agreement would need to define the boundaries of these regions or agree that each party understands these boundaries differently.

Proposal 3: Ukraine vows not to join any military coalitions or host any foreign military bases or troop contingents. Any international military exercises would be possible only with the consent of the guarantor-states. For their part, these guarantors confirm their intention to promote Ukraine’s membership in the European Union.

Note the second point also touches on Russia’s other surrender conditions. One of them, the Crimea issue, is further elaborated on in point 8:

Proposal 8: The parties’ desire to resolve issues related to Crimea and Sevastopol shall be committed to bilateral negotiations between Ukraine and Russia for a period of 15 years. Ukraine and Russia also pledge not to resolve these issues by military means and to continue diplomatic resolution efforts.

If anybody can find any evidence of US “rejection” of Ukraine’s plan, any attempt to “ban” Ukraine from making these concessions, please provide sources. Such evidence will not be forthcoming. In late April, during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, far-right Republican Senator Rand Paul accused the Biden administration of provoking the war by “beating the drums to admit Ukraine to NATO.” In his response, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that the White House would be open to an agreement that resulted in Ukraine becoming “an unaligned, neutral nation.” “We, Senator, are not going to be more Ukrainian than the Ukrainians. These are decisions for them to make,” Blinken told Paul. “Our purpose is to make sure that they have within their hands the ability to repel the Russian aggression and indeed to strengthen their hand at an eventual negotiating table,” he added. While he saw no sign Putin was ready to negotiate, he said “If he is and if the Ukrainians engage, we’ll support that.”

That is not because Biden or Blinken are great peaceniks or not imperialists. It is simply that the “no negotiations” position imputed to them by many excitable leftists is simply not a position that interests the main body of US imperialism (the odd talking head or armchair warrior notwithstanding).

As opposed to the imaginary and evidence-free view that Ukraine may want to negotiate but the West will not allow it to, others claim (just as wrongly) that Ukraine refuses to negotiate, but the US and the West must negotiate anyway. This is a rather odd demand – since Russia is not invading the US or western Europe, and they are not invading Russia, what exactly is the US supposed to negotiate about?

The point being, of course, that these “anti-imperialists” here reveal themselves as super-imperialists: they are demanding that the US and the West negotiate “on behalf of” Ukraine! So presumably, if the US or France “negotiates” with Putin for Ukraine to cede Crimea and Donbas to Russia, Ukraine should happily accept being divided up by imperialist powers, and this Kissingerian chessboard ‘realist’ geopolitics is now supposedly the essence of an emancipatory leftist position!

Is there a new US aim to “weaken Russia”?  

On a related track, the statement by US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin on April 25 that the US aims to “see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do these kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine” created great excitement. This is supposedly a declaration either of real, or new, US aims in this war. Now, even if interpreted this way, this would prove nothing about the war of resistance waged by the Ukrainian people against imperial Russia’s attempt to wipe them off the map. Obviously, US imperialism has its own reasons for aiding this resistance (indeed, providing large numbers of the very weapons that it not only did not provide to the anti-Assad Syrian rebellion, but actively blocked others from providing). But if the US aims to weaken Russia via supporting this Ukrainian resistance, that is not a choice made by Ukraine; Ukraine did not invade Russia to give the US an avenue to weaken Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine; if Ukraine’s resistance allows the US to weaken Russia by aiding it, Russia can thank Putin for that.

But in any case, the statement can mean virtually anything; Ukraine simply maintaining its right to existence, or to exist without suffering large territorial losses – a defeat of the aims of the Russian invasion – will weaken Russia. So anyone not advocating a Russian victory over Ukraine could also be considered to be in agreement with Austin. By providing any aid at all since Day 1, the US was helping “weaken Russia.”

Some proclaim that this was not the original US aim, but Austin’s statement heralded a “new” strategic turn in US policy. But if so, they need to explain what has changed in practice. Previously, they claim, the US was aiding the Ukrainian resistance with the aim of helping Ukraine resist the Russian invasion – for its own reasons, of course, but within these confines. Now the US is doing the same thing, aiding the Ukrainian resistance, but with the aim of weakening Russia. Pardon me for being confused about what has changed in practice.

A common claim is that by supplying arms to Ukraine, the US aims to drag out the war, so as to bog down and wear out Russia, the weakening of Russia being paid for by Ukrainian death and suffering. Social media is full of western leftist wits proclaiming “the US will fight Russia to the last drop of Ukrainian blood.” Apparently, the reason millions of Ukrainians are resisting the Russian invasion is not because they don’t want to be overrun by a brutal imperialist power, but because they are unconsciously acting against their own interests, dying for a US aim of weakening Russia. If only they knew what these brave and smart western lefties knew, that their real interests lie in accepting colonial oppression, occupation, massacre and dispossession.

The obvious question arising from this assertion that the US wants to drag out the war to weaken Russia is ‘how can the war end more quickly?’ On the one hand, the assertion could mean that by allowing Ukrainians to better resist Russian conquest, these western arms prevent the rapid end of the war via total Russian victory, with its attendant massacres and war crimes, imposition of a fascistic regime of repression, and annexation of a large part of Ukraine. If these leftists advocate a rapid end of the war via this conclusion, so it is not “dragged out,” they should say so openly and stop beating around the bush.

But if they do not mean this, the only other way for the war to end more quickly and not bog Russia down would be for a dramatic increase in the quantity and quality of arms deliveries to Ukraine, so that it could convincingly and quickly evict Russia from its territory; while Russia would still be somewhat weakened by defeat, at least the war would not drag on, and hence the alleged aim of getting Russia stuck there and drained would not be fulfilled. In that case they should be denouncing the US for not supplying Ukraine arms of sufficient quantity and quality to do this, but only enough to fight on but not win. But it is unlikely they mean this either.

So if the idea is not a rapid end to the war via crushing Russian victory, nor via Ukraine swiftly driving out the invader, then the statement has no meaning, it is merely a piece of cheap rhetoric.

But of course, as tankies become pacifists, it is back to demanding “ceasefire and negotiations.” No rapid Russian victory, no total Ukrainian victory, but also no dragging out the war, because as we know, “negotiations” can end the war. That always works, and no-one ever thought of it before.

All Ukraine has to do is surrender to Russia’s “reasonable demands,” leading to a satisfied Russia calling a ceasefire; or if not, the US must negotiate this surrender “on Ukraine’s behalf.” Leaving aside how much this Imperial Left stance contradicts leftist stances in virtually every other struggle by a nation and people against imperialist aggression, occupation and conquest, how realistic is this ‘strategy’ on its own terms?

Russia engaged in a war of old-style conquest imperialism

To answer this, how has Russia responded to Ukraine’s proposals in March, discussed above, for no NATO, for neutrality with security guarantees, no joining any military blocs, a 15-year negotiation on Crimea with no military solutions? With what we have seen since – the complete destruction of Mariupol, the Bucha massacre, all the rest of the horror since. The last thing Russia wanted was for Ukraine to call its bluff.

The problem is that this “anti-imperialist” left do not understand the nature of imperialism; or by claiming that Russia is not an imperialist power, but rather just a large capitalist power with average expansionist tendencies, they imagine the same imperialist logic does not apply.

Russia is engaged in a war of late 19th century style imperialist conquest. Obviously, it is not unique in the world as western media claims, we’ve had Israel, Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey and others engage in wars of conquest and annexation in recent decades, greeted by either western indifference, or avid western and especially US support. Pointing out western hypocrisy is politically important as we confront the onslaught of self-serving and laughable propaganda about the world being divided between “democracy and autocracy,” about there allegedly being a “rules-based international order” that no-one ever violated before Putin did, and so on. But fighting hypocrisy does not inform analysis of a concrete situation. These other cases are all of relatively small countries; the largest, Indonesia, was eventually defeated in East Timor (with the aid of a change in imperialist policy, indeed imperialist intervention in defence of east Timor), though not in West Papua. Turkey held back from formal annexation of northern Cyprus which it still occupies; and although it never faced western sanctions, its puppet ‘republic’ is not recognised by any country in the world. Obviously Israel/Palestine is the most globally consequential of these cases.

But this is the first time a major global imperialist power has engaged in 19th century-style ‘direct conquest’ imperialism since 1945. This is not a morality contest here, obviously the US invasion of Iraq was extraordinarily brutal and criminal, but the aim was not conquest as such; and of course both the US and Russia and others have engaged in massive and brutal “interventions” after being “invited in,” but once again this has not been about conquest as such. We need to wrap our heads around this fact.

In late April, Rustam Minnekayev, deputy commander of Russia’s central military district, stated that Russia planned to forge a land corridor between Crimea and Donbas in eastern Ukraine; this is rather obvious anyway – that is why Mariupol had to be conquered and destroyed, being right in the middle and a key port. These are of course Russian-speaking regions, where the ‘liberator of Russians’ slaughtered them. But he went on, noting that “control over the south of Ukraine is another way to Transdniestria, where there is also evidence that the Russian-speaking population is being oppressed.”

In other words, the entire south of Ukraine, its entire Black Sea coast, is Russian imperialism’s aim. Not only linking Donbas to Crimea, but also seizing Odessa and linking Crimea to the Russian-controlled fake ‘republic’ of Transdniestria, which Russia seized from Moldova decades ago (how amazing that a region under effective Russian control is also “oppressing” Russians now!). And if we take the more extreme ‘Eurasianist’ views into account, Moldova – a neutral state, like Ukraine, outside NATO – should probably also be worrying about its existence.

Of course, the enormous mobilisation of Ukrainian resistance has probably put the brakes on the more extreme Russian geographic aims – at this stage it looks like Russia will consolidate the Donbas to Crimea link conquest and will not have the capacity to venture beyond to Odessa – but that doesn’t alter the fact that these are Russia’s aims. And even just consolidating this part of the conquest locks Ukraine out from most of the Black Sea.

The evidence that Russia aims to annex its new conquests can be seen wherein “Russian officials have already moved to introduce the ruble currency, install proxy politicians in local governments, impose new school curriculums, reroute internet servers through Russia and cut the population off from Ukrainian broadcasts” in these conquered regions. Marat Khusnullin, Russia’s deputy prime minister for infrastructure, also stated that Russia intends “to charge Ukraine for electricity generated by the Ukrainian nuclear plant that Russian forces commandeered in the early weeks of the invasion.”

The Black Sea, of course is full of hydrocarbons. Let’s not make things too complicated. Russian imperialism wants them. It certainly doesn’t want its former colony to share any of them, and by cutting it off from most of its sea coast, can effectively blockade it into submission.

Where to now for US policy?

The opinions on where US policy is heading in response to this situation range from ‘the US will continue to escalate until it leads to war with Russia’ to ‘the US will cut a deal with Russia and sell out Ukraine’. The scenario involving the US pressuring Ukraine into making a compromise that is not fully just once it feels Russia has been weakened enough, rather than pushing for full victory, is just as possible, if not more, than the projections of it drifting into war with Russia. Whatever the case, it is clear that the US and other imperialist powers are supporting Ukraine for their own reasons and their interests are not identical.

What then are the US interests involved? Obviously, US imperialism has already ‘won’ due to Putin’s invasion: US ‘security’ hegemony over Europe is now stronger than at any time since the end of the Cold War, NATO is now adding new members, the many years of the Russian-German gas pipeline development have suddenly come to nothing. Obviously, US and western imperialism more generally does not want a Russian conquest of the entire Black Sea; and allowing Russia conquer much beyond where it already held in Ukraine before the invasion would not be good for US or NATO “credibility.” But once that drive is defeated, there may be little appetite to keep backing Ukraine.

The simple fact is that US imperialism has not been in any “war drive” against Russia, and has no interest in one. There were no signs of any US build-up against Russia before the war, and while relations have been tense since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, they have been relatively normal, including a great deal of cooperation in places like Syria. While a certain amount of anti-Russian rhetoric may have characterised some US statements in comparison to the more accommodating Franco-German approach, this can be understood as part of keeping NATO – its tool for hegemony in Europe – “relevant”, in particular among some of the more anti-Russian eastern European ruling elites (and even this had been wearing thin before Putin saved NATO – just a few months ago, a string of east European right-wing populist rulers were increasingly close to Moscow).

But it is important to not confuse this symbolic US-Russia “rivalry” – related to credibility, the size of the countries, military power, Cold War hangovers – to actual inter-imperialist competition. Their economies are just too different in both character and size for the US to see Putin’s hydro-carbon-based economic fiefdom as a serious global competitor – that award goes to rising, hyper-dynamic Chinese imperialism. And getting bogged down in Ukraine is not conducive to the US ‘pivot to Asia’ where its Chinese rival is based, though for this very reason it may be very much in China’s interests.

Yes, massive quantities of arms have gone to Ukraine, but there have also been clear limits: the US blocking of Poland from delivering warplanes for instance; and a no-fly zone has been placed off-limits by the US and the West from the outset.

One problem with confusing some rhetorical flourishes with US imperialist policy is that each of these ‘gotcha’ moments has been walked back by other US government figures. After Austin mentioned weakening Russia, Press Secretary Jen Psaki explained this simply meant “our objective to prevent that [Russia taking over Ukraine] from happening … but, yes, we are also looking to prevent them from expanding their efforts and President Putin’s objectives beyond that, too.” When Biden said that Putin shouldn’t remain in power, this was immediately hosed down by others in the US government. And when Rep. Seth Moulton stated “We’re not just at war to support the Ukrainians. We’re fundamentally at war, although somewhat through a proxy, with Russia,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates responded “President Biden has been clear that U.S. forces are not and will not engage in a conflict with Russia. We are supporting the Ukrainian people as they defend their country.” Finally, in early May, the US government imposed new limits on the intelligence it shares with Ukraine.

Richard Haas, Thomas Friedman, Eliot Cohen: Voices from the US ruling class

Indeed, we can also find ‘gotcha’ moments of a different kind. On May 9, Biden expressed concern that Putin “doesn’t have a way out right now, and I’m trying to figure out what we do about that.”

This concern – to give Putin some “way out” to avoid the kind of destabilisation that could result from an outright defeat for Russia – is likely much closer to real US imperial interests that the imaginary spectre of the US aiming to “Balkanise Russia”, more likely the very thing everyone wants to avoid. Such concerns are consistent with those expressed in several pieces by leading US ruling class strategists in the serious media. While these strategists do not create US policy, the explanations they give for what US policy should be are not only logical, but also coincide with the very limits of Biden’s approach, and express a number of similar concerns.

The first of these is an article in Foreign Affairs by Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, who has served in various US governments since the late 1970s, including for Secretary of State Colin Powell in the Bush administration, as Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department from 2001 to 2003 during the lead-up to the Iraq war. So no lightweight. Haas begins:

“In principle, success from the West’s perspective can be defined as ending the war sooner rather than later, and on terms that Ukraine’s democratic government is prepared to accept. But just what are those terms? Will Ukraine seek to recover all the territory it has lost in the past two months? Will it require that Russian forces withdraw completely from the Donbas and Crimea? Will it demand the right to join the EU and NATO? Will it insist that all this be set forth in a formal document signed by Russia?

“The United States, the EU, and NATO need to discuss such questions with one another and with Ukraine now. … To be sure, the Ukrainians have every right to define their war aims. But so do the United States and Europe. Although Western interests overlap with Ukraine’s, they are broader, including nuclear stability with Russia and the ability to influence the trajectory of the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs.

“It is also essential to take into account that Russia gets a vote. Although Putin initiated this war of choice, it will take more than just him to end it. He and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will both have to consider what they require in the way of territory and terms to halt hostilities. They will also have to decide if they are prepared not only to order an end to the fighting but also to enter into and honor a peace agreement. Another complexity is that some aspects of any peace, such as the lifting of sanctions against Russia, would not be determined by Ukraine alone but would require the consent of others.”

Discussing several scenarios, Haas sees the scenario in which Ukrainian success reaches the point that it attempts to take back all territory seized since 2014, rather than only territory seized in 2022, as a destabilising outcome:

“… it is near impossible to imagine Putin accepting such an outcome, since it would surely threaten his political survival, and possibly even his physical survival. In desperation, he might try to widen the war through cyberattacks or attacks on one or more NATO countries. He might even resort to chemical or nuclear weapons. … Arguably, these aims are better left for a postconflict, or even a post-Putin, period in which the West could condition sanctions relief on Russia’s signing of a formal peace agreement. Such a pact might allow Ukraine to enjoy formal ties to the EU and security guarantees, even as it remained officially neutral and outside NATO. Russia, for its part, might agree to withdraw its forces from the entirety of the Donbas in exchange for international protections for the ethnic Russians living there. Crimea might gain some special status, with Moscow and Kyiv agreeing that its final status would be determined down the road.”

Discussing the lessons learned from the Cold War and the balance achieved which guaranteed peace (between the superpowers that is), Haas notes that these are consistent with the very limitations of Biden’s strategy:

“From the outset of the crisis, the United States made it clear that it would not place boots on the ground or establish a no-fly zone, since doing so could bring U.S. and Russian forces into direct contact and raise the risk of escalation. Instead, Washington and its NATO partners opted for an indirect strategy of providing arms, intelligence, and training to Ukraine while pressuring Russia with economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation.”

From here on “ … success for now could consist of a winding down of hostilities, with Russia possessing no more territory than it held before the recent invasion and continuing to refrain from using weapons of mass destruction. Over time, the West could employ a mix of sanctions and diplomacy in an effort to achieve a full Russian military withdrawal from Ukraine. Such success would be far from perfect, just preferable to the alternatives.”

The second piece was by long-term imperial columnist Thomas L Friedman in the May 6 New York Times. Like Haas, Friedman is no stranger to being hawkish when he believes such a stance is in US interests, but takes a similar view to what actual US interests are in this case.

He also warned that certain US actions “could be creating an opening for Putin to respond in ways that could dangerously widen this conflict — and drag the U.S. in deeper than it wants to be,” which is all the more dangerous given Putin’s unpredictability, and the fact that “Putin is running out of options for some kind of face-saving success on the ground — or even a face-saving off ramp.”

Moreover, for Friedman, the problem is not only Russia, as “President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has been trying to do the same thing from the start — to make Ukraine an immediate member of NATO or get Washington to forge a bilateral security pact with Kyiv” something Friedman clearly sees as against US interests.

Like Haas, he ultimately thinks that Biden has the right balance:

But my sense is that the Biden team is walking much more of a tightrope with Zelensky than it would appear to the eye — wanting to do everything possible to make sure he wins this war but doing so in a way that still keeps some distance between us and Ukraine’s leadership. That’s so Kyiv is not calling the shots and so we’ll not be embarrassed by messy Ukrainian politics in the war’s aftermath. The view of Biden and his team, according to my reporting, is that America needs to help Ukraine restore its sovereignty and beat the Russians back — but not let Ukraine turn itself into an American protectorate on the border of Russia. We need to stay laser-focused on what is our national interest and not stray in ways that lead to exposures and risks we don’t want.”

While much of the western left sees the US making Ukraine its ‘protectorate’, Friedman sees this as an evil Ukrainian plot which the US must be, and is, on guard against. “But we are dealing with some incredibly unstable elements, particularly a politically wounded Putin. Boasting about killing his generals and sinking his ships, or falling in love with Ukraine in ways that will get us enmeshed there forever, is the height of folly.”

Before moving to the third, more hawkish, piece, it is worth noting that the editorial in the May 19 New York Times makes similar points to Haas and Friedman. While stating that the US goal to help Ukraine rebuff Russian aggression “cannot shift,” nevertheless “in the end, it is still not in America’s best interest to plunge into an all-out war with Russia, even if a negotiated peace may require Ukraine to make some hard decisions.” The editorial warns that “a decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal. Though Russia’s planning and fighting have been surprisingly sloppy, Russia remains too strong, and Mr. Putin has invested too much personal prestige in the invasion to back down.” Therefore, “as the war continues, Mr. Biden should also make clear to President Volodymyr Zelensky and his people that there is a limit to how far the United States and NATO will confront Russia, and limits to the arms, money and political support they can muster.”

So, apart from the odd gaffe, it seems difficult to find serious US ruling class opinion saying what much of the left is claiming it is saying. Actually, they appear to saying remarkably similar things to each other! Perhaps we can find the evidence in a more serious hawk?

The third piece by Eliot A. Cohen, writing in The Atlantic on May 11, may be such an example. A professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, former Counselor of the Department of State, former editor of The National Interest, the title of his book The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Forcetells us his views on the use military power. Not surprisingly, therefore, this article is more hawkish in tone than those of Haas and Friedman.

Cohen does not necessarily insist Ukraine must take back all territory lost, but he argues that Ukraine must define what its objectives are and that US policy should recognise “it will be up to Ukraine to decide what it wishes to accomplish.” Having borne “the burdens of blood and sacrifice on a scale not seen since World War II” and with a cause “indisputably just,” Ukraine “has every right to decide what it can and cannot accept and strive for.” This is combined with the fact that Russia “has acted with unspeakable barbarity” and these “moral facts” should therefore “modify or even outweigh coolly geopolitical calculations of the European balance of power.” And when the war ends, western objectives should include helping to put Ukraine “in a condition to defeat further Russian aggression.”

Cohen is an unalloyed partisan of US imperialism, but, from this, obviously hypocritical, perspective, we can at least say there appears to be more respect for Ukraine’s self-determination than the more geopolitically-oriented views of Haas and Friedman, with their insistence on distinguishing the US from the Ukrainian interest.

Therefore, it is here we may expect to see some evidence of the alleged US imperialist desire to wage war on, to humiliate, or even ‘Balkanise’ Russia.

In reality, Cohen warns precisely about the dangers involved in Russia’s defeat. He does not want Russia defeated in Ukraine in order to bring it to its knees and humiliate or ‘Balkanise’ it; on the contrary, he argues that while Ukrainian victory is necessary for other reasons, the negative side-effects of this are nevertheless very much against US and western interests.

“But all of this leaves the problem of Russia. … If it is convulsed from within, it is less likely to be dominated by liberals (many of whom have fled the country) than by disgruntled nationalists. Putin may go, but his replacements are likely to come from similar backgrounds in the secret police or, possibly, the military.” And it will be “more than usually difficult to bring it back into a Eurasian order that it, and no one else, has attempted to destroy” with its “utterly unjustified” attack on Ukraine with “its exceptional brutality, the shamelessness of Russia’s lies and threats, and the grotesqueness of its claims to hegemony in the former Soviet states.”

The result will be “the hardest task of American statecraft going forward: dealing with a Russia reeling from defeat and humiliation, weakened but still dangerous.” Indeed, the old Cold Warrior even sees the old Soviet Union as a more “rationalist” enemy, whereas a defeat for Putinist Russia “will be much more like dealing with a rabid, wounded beast that claws and bites at itself as much as it does at others, in the grip not of a millennial ideology but a bizarre combination of nationalism and nihilism.”

Far from wanting to make “war on Russia”, Cohen thinks that apart from strengthening states on Russia’s borders, all the West will be able to do is “hope against hope that the new “sick man of Europe” will, somehow and against the odds, recover something like moral sanity.”

All US and western imperialist wars since 1945 have been against countries in regions of the former colonial world that they aimed to maintain domination of – from Indochina to Iraq and Afghanistan to Panama and Grenada and Nicaragua, and the current drone wars – and the list goes on. Quite simply, there has been no US “war drive” against Russia, not because the US does not engage in war drives, but because post-Soviet Russia has neither been an ideological enemy – quite the opposite – nor powerful enough to be a genuine imperialist rival.

On the contrary, it is Putin’s sudden resort to primitive conquest-imperialism that has thrown the established imperialist modus vivendi between the US, Europe and Russia to the woods, and the western reaction has been crisis management on the run. While the US has, naturally enough, taken full advantage of what Putin has offered them up on a plate by restoring unchallenged US hegemony in Europe via a strengthened NATO, the point is that this is the US goal in itself; there is no US or western interest in massive destabilisation, a huge black hole, in a gigantic country like Russia which, just a few months ago, was plenty lucrative for western capital, and was an integral part of the world capitalist economy.

This article originally appeared in: Syrian Revolution Commentary and Analysis

Report: International conference of European Solidarity with Ukraine

By: May 20, 2022
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On May 5 and 6, 2022, a two-day international conference of the European Solidarity Network with Ukraine with the support of the NGO “Social Movement” was held in Lviv, Ukraine. The international delegation included left-wing politicians, parliamentarians, trade unionists, journalists from Austria, Argentina, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Spain, Germany, Poland, Finland, France, and Switzerland. Published here is a report by Tom Harris an activist of the Public and Commercial Services Union who attended.

On 3rd May, I travelled with other British trade unionists on a delegation to Ukraine. We did this to show solidarity with the Ukrainian people against Russia’s vicious imperialist assault, and to try and learn from and make practical solidarity with the Ukrainian left and trade union movement. The delegation was organized by the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine, and was made up of trade unionists, left-wing parliamentarians, journalists and social activists from Europe and South America. At the conference, we met with Ukrainian trade unionists, leftists, and activists from a broad range of feminist, ecologist, and human rights organizations.

Before reporting on the conference, I imagine readers will be interested in how Lviv feels and looks at this stage in the war. In Ukraine’s far west, the city is less than 50 miles from the Polish border and many hundreds of miles from the battlefronts in the east and south. As a result, Lviv feels eerily peaceful and ‘normal,’ especially compared with the horrific images of destruction from elsewhere in the country. If you didn’t know otherwise, you might suppose you were in any other elegant old Austro-Hungarian city with its pretty cathedrals, Renaissance architecture and streets lined with restaurants and cafes doing a decent trade.

A deeper look reveals the truth, though: the military roadblocks here and there, the enlistment points, the soldiers in uniform waiting for trains and buses, the sandbags built up around monuments and sheets of metal bolted over churches’ stained glass to protect them from bomb damage.

And then there’s the air raid sirens, which sound several times a day. We’d been told in advance what the protocol was (get two walls between yourself and the outdoors, head for a basement if possible) but we’d also been told that virtually everyone in Lviv ignores it. This isn’t quite as reckless as it sounds: whenever a missile is detected heading for Ukraine, alarms sound in every city it could potentially hit. The vast majority of times the sirens go off, nothing is heading for Lviv. “Reassuring!,” we thought, until we learnt that missiles had hit the electricity and rail infrastructure on the outskirts of town the day before we arrived. Two were injured and electricity was cut off to part of the city.

The disconnection between how we visitors felt we should react to an air raid warning and how the locals reacted was almost funny at times. On our first night at the hotel, we heard the sirens and dutifully made our way to the basement. No one else was there, and eventually some faintly amused security guards turned up to investigate. We reckon they thought we were up to mischief down there.

Many Ukrainians we interviewed told us that this surreal contrast between Lviv’s relative normality and the horror elsewhere is a terrible thing to endure psychologically, especially if you have recently lived through a siege, or if, as was true of many we spoke to, your friends and relatives are still being shelled or living under occupation. Lviv’s population has been swelled greatly by refugees looking for safety, many of them now living in awful, cramped conditions in cellars or small rooms.

The conference began by hearing from Ukrainian trade unionists. Oleksandr Skyba, a railworker from Kyiv’s Darnitsya depot and activist in the Free Trade Union of Railway Workers and Transport Builders, described the incredibly dangerous conditions that he and his colleagues had been working under when Russian forces attempted to besiege the capital. The railways are essential for supplying the Ukrainian war effort and consequently were targeted by the Russians, with trains and tracks bombed and rail workers fired upon by Russian troops. Many rail workers have died. In a theme that would crop up again and again at the conference, Skyba described how the work of the union had become centered on keeping its members alive – moving humanitarian supplies, rescuing workers in peril, providing food and support for the many railway workers now fighting in the territorial defense units and the armed forces.

Oleksandr later told us how he and the union had been visiting members now enlisted in the armed forces to try and make sure they had basic training in first aid and military skills, including identifying mines. Many older Ukrainians have experience of the army, but the war has thrown many less experienced younger workers into army life for the first time, and their old trade union networks are proving crucial sources of support. This was echoed by Yurii Samoilov, a miners’ leader who joined us via Zoom from the industrial city of Kryvi Rih, not far from the front line. He described his union’s efforts to relay information and supplies to their members engaged in combat.

Other themes emerged from the speeches by trade unionists. Many pointed out how clear it was to workers that their independent organizations stood little chance of survival under Russian occupation. The comrade from Kryvi Rih alluded to the total crushing of trade unionism and all other forms of independent civil society in the Russian puppet-regimes in Donetsk and Luhansk. Serhii and Oksana, trade unionists in the health sector, reported that health workers in the occupied zones had been forced to leave their unions and ordered to join Russian ones instead. This piece of coercion was tied up with the occupiers’ demand that the workers sign new, worse employment contracts. Some of these workers managed to contact their old union. They asked what they should do: risk their lives by refusing, or end up looking like collaborators when Ukrainian forces returned? The comrades from the health unions called on the international union movement to condemn Russian trade unions for their complicity in this.

Before the war, health workers were already suffering low pay and poor conditions. These workers – four in five of whom are women – are struggling on salaries below the Ukrainian average, and austerity policies had depleted the capacity of the health service to cope with Covid-19. Volodymyr Zelenskiy issued a presidential decree to increase health workers’ wages but cuts to the sector’s budget meant this never materialized. The outbreak of war, and the subsequent ban on health workers leaving the country, has left them caught in a perfect storm of poverty, danger, and the struggle to meet the dire need for medical treatment in a system buckling under pressure.

The conference also heard from various unions in the energy sector. Vasyl Semkanich from the Independent Trade Union of Miners in the city of Chervonohrad told us how decades of Russian political intervention had made the Ukrainian economy dangerously reliant on imported fossil fuels from Russia. But he didn’t want to absolve Ukraine’s native ruling class. He also pinned blame on the Ukrainian oligarchs, who drag the country’s energy sector further and further from public interest and scrutiny and use it to line their own pockets. He talked about his union’s demands for the industry to be brought into democratic public ownership.

Pavlo Oleshchuk from the atomic workers union gave an alarming speech about the nuclear industry during the war. The Russian army has repeatedly fired explosives around nuclear power stations, and in the early days of the war the Zhaporizhzhia plant complex, Europe’s biggest, actually caught fire. The plant is now under Russian occupation. Pavlo said that he had worked at the Zhaporizhzhia plant for 17 years and was familiar with the meticulous and careful safety measures that had been developed, many on the union’s insistence, to keep the station and its workers safe. He shuddered to think how many of those measures were still in place. As he understands it, the Russians have imported their own managers to oversee the plant, but the original Ukrainian staff are still operating it and are resisting some of their orders. We were also shown slides of the damage the Russians inflicted on the briefly occupied Chernobyl site. Not only were workers’ facilities completely trashed, but important safety infrastructure like laboratories, health and safety records and computer databases had been destroyed. Pavlo said he couldn’t believe how recklessly the occupiers were behaving, as if “they don’t understand where they are or how dangerous it is.”

We also heard from feminist activists and campaigns for women’s rights. The war has had a profound effect on women’s lives. Sexual violence has been used as a weapon of war by the invading Russian forces, creating enormous suffering and trauma. The ability for women to access abortion is far from guaranteed. Though abortion is legal in Ukraine, those trying to get one can face social stigma and religious prejudice. Shamefully, many traumatized Ukrainian women who succeed in escaping to Poland discover that they are now in a country where abortion is effectively banned.

According to Yana Wolf, an activist from the feminist group Bilkis, the militarization of society has also emboldened some men to abuse women. ‘When men join the army, they don’t just get a uniform,’ she explained. ‘They get a sense of power, including over women.’ She explained that women and children often face the fall out when traumatized men get back from the front. ‘That trauma turns to rage when they return,’ she explained, ‘and violence provokes more violence.’

The Ukrainian women’s movement has achieved much in recent decades, but the infrastructure it has built has been imperiled by war. Marta Chumalo of the group Women’s Perspectives described how some women’s refuges had to close in the face of the invasion. The conditions of many refugee women, including those who have fled to Lviv, are a perfect breeding ground for domestic violence. Marta’s organization had been helping women, one of whom who’d been living 17-to-a-basement, with scant ability to feed and provide for themselves or their children and little recourse to escape violent partners.

But while women face grave challenges, they have also fought back, both against the invasion and against the oppression of men on their ‘own’ side. Many women have volunteered to fight the Russians, and the percentage of women in the armed forces has shot up to over 15%. A lot of women have demanded they be allowed to take the fight to the enemy, resisting the army’s attempts to allocate them to roles far from combat. Meanwhile, the exodus of refugees to the safer towns of Ukraine’s west has allowed previously disparate campaigners to forge new connections, with Lviv becoming an impromptu center for feminist and LGBT activism. In Kyiv, a feminist collective fighting for LGBT rights votes each month on which military unit they want to donate to.

Ethnic minorities, too, have been drawn into a common struggle against the occupiers. We heard from human right’s activist Yulian Kondur about the high numbers of Roma people volunteering in the armed forces. The participation of so many Roma soldiers in the war is a big source of pride for the community, he said. And yet the Roma are one of the most marginalized and oppressed groups in Ukrainian society, a systematic disadvantage that has by no means disappeared during war. The collective struggle of the war, Kondur said, has presented new opportunities to combat prejudice, but the difficulties are harsh. Roma continue to find it harder to migrate, including internally, and often struggle to access social provision designed to help the victims of war. Roma have also been the victims of vigilante justice amid the chaos of the conflict, and the speaker drew our attention to a particularly horrible incident in Lviv where Roma girls from Eastern Ukraine were tied up, painted, and humiliated for the alleged crime of petty theft.

To get a sense of where the socialist left finds itself in Ukraine, we spoke to activists from Sotsialniy Rukh (Social Movement). On the one hand, the war has presented enormous challenges. When the government introduced martial law, the right to strike or organize demonstrations was closed off. The Zelenskiy administration also cut taxes on corporations and diluted workers right’s in what it described as an attempt to stabilize the economy. Social Movement are calling for the restitution of the rights that have been suspended, and positively demanding an expansion and deepening of labor and social legislation, levelled up to the standard of those enjoyed in the EU.

For some years, Ukrainian governments have implemented ‘de-Communization’ measures aimed at preventing political parties from positively invoking the Soviet past. Earlier in the war, Zelenskyy also banned a series of pro-Russian parties, some of them nominally leftist. We asked Social Movement for their view on this legislation. The problem, they said, is not so much that any of the banned parties were seriously struggling for socialism or workers’ rights (on the whole they were thoroughly rotten bodies of Putin-sympathetic, USSR-nostalgic conservatives, broadening their appeal through Orthodox Christian chauvinism and a few gestures of opposition to benefit cuts). Nevertheless, Social Movement oppose the legislation that banned them. This is partially because of a general interest in democracy and freedom of association, but also because crude bans on leftist iconography and terminology can also be used to crack down on genuine socialists and fighters for workers’ rights.

Social Movement activist Denys Pilash told us that, in general, it can be difficult to talk about socialism or anti-capitalism in a country which suffered so terribly under a regime that claimed to be a ‘Socialist Soviet Republic’. And yet, most people in Ukraine are keenly aware of the big social inequalities, the hoarding of wealth by the rich, the robbing of society by the oligarchs. Disgust at the rich is so common that anti-oligarch rhetoric is employed even by the oligarch’s parties themselves!

That sentiment hasn’t disappeared in time of war, either. Social Movement have been able to make progress by pointing out the unfairness with which some aspects of the war are being managed and by telling workers how to invoke their rights. They highlight how the bosses’ selfishness and disregard for workers’ living conditions will weaken Ukraine’s chances in the war. Pilash said that while Zelenskyy’s popularity is very high because of his role as commander-in-chief, many ordinary Ukrainians view the meaner and more unjust policies of his government as somehow unconnected. In this way, popular opinion can be both very pro-Zelenskyy and simultaneously critical of the government.

In enormously difficult conditions, Social Movement and other genuine leftists are struggling to outline an egalitarian and democratic alternative that the Ukrainian public can grasp, clear and distinct from both the corrupt present and from the dictatorial Soviet past.

I spoke briefly at the conference, along with Ruth Cashman from UNISON. We outlined the aims we felt needed to be taken up by the trade union movement and left internationally: for arms for Ukraine, for the abolition of the country’s international debt, for the opening of borders to refugees, for our unions to make meaningful and practical links with the Ukrainian labor movement. Some aid convoys are coming from European unions, but more needs to be done. We also discussed the challenges that face us. These include the sluggishness and bureaucratism of a union movement that has been badly demoralized by decades of defeat. We also need to confront the legacy of the Stalinist politics, still present in our movement, that is only capable of seeing imperialism when it comes from NATO, and which turns a blind eye to the imperialism of Russia or China.

That will be a difficult task, but a necessary one. We talk a lot in the labor movement about international solidarity and mutual aid. If any of that is real and sincere, we need to act on it now. The Ukrainian left is in a life-or-death struggle. We owe them any help we can give.

 

STATEMENT of solidarity with Ukraine as adopted at the end of the Lviv conference.

On February 24, 2022, Russian imperialism launched an open aggression against Ukraine. For more than two months, the people of Ukraine have been fighting an unequal battle with the occupying forces, losing thousands of lives and enduring massive destruction. While a lot of politicians in the west as well as in Russia argued that Ukraine will fall in a few days, great mobilization of Ukrainian people in all spheres of life and heroic fight of the Ukrainian resistance show how misguided this take. Many European countries continue to finance the Russian war machine buying Russian oil and gas.

At the same time, the people of Ukraine are harmed by reforms adopted in the interests of the richest, before and even during the war. These political decisions result in shifting the burden of war to the majority of the population. Examples are the reduction of labor rights guarantees for employees and the reduction of taxes for business owners. These changes are accompanied by an increasing  reduction in the social sphere, which creates unbearable conditions for the people of Ukraine affected by the war. In such circumstances Ukraine continues to meet its debt obligations to the IMF and other creditors. Instead of enriching creditors and world bankers, this money should go to the defense of the country  and the fulfillment of the basic needs of the population. Through its policy, the IMF continues to promote anti-people reforms in Ukraine and is increasingly dragging Ukraine into bondage, undermining its independence, and making it difficult to rebuild the country.

The destruction of infrastructure, production, and residential neighborhoods raises the task of rebuilding Ukraine, under what conditions and at what cost rebuilding will take place after the war is an urgent question. Reconstruction based on the primacy of neoliberal politics will lead to even greater poverty and oligarchization. Comprehensive restoration of Ukraine and its role in providing basic goods for the world’s most disadvantaged populations is impossible without changing the course of socio-economic policy at the national and world levels.

The response to Russian aggression must be the solidarity of the peoples of the world. Ukraine’s victory in the war will weaken authoritarian regimes in Syria, Belarus, and other countries, and this will give the world a real opportunity to move towards democratic development with social and environmental justice.

Writing off Ukraine’s foreign debt will be a step against the dominance of neoliberalism, built on inequality and exploitation. The precedent of such a policy will pave the way for other countries to have stable development policies that will not punish the poorest people  in favor of the richest through unfair lending.

Our left, trade union, feminist, and human rights communities, fight to promote Ukraine’s victory and its post-war prosperity, including:

  • Withdrawal of Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine, in particular, from the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.
  • Military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, as well as the imposition of tough sanctions against Russia.
  • Introduction of a socially-oriented program for the reconstruction of Ukraine, aimed at helping the country’s population, rather than enriching business elites.
  • A Renouncing the purchase of Russian fossil fuels, entering a real energy transition in order to replace fossil fuels without replacing them with purchases from other sources.
  • Abolition of Ukraine’s foreign debt and impossibility of withdrawing funds offshore.
  • Support for all refugees, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, religion, etc. Abolition of all discriminatory laws and practices.
  • Stopping anti-social reforms in Ukraine and abolishing high administrative fees that hinder the participation of the working class in political life.

Fighting for Our Lives in the Draft Aftermath of Roe

By: May 19, 2022
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I have not (yet) been raped. Unlike most women my age (not quite 50), unlike nearly every adult woman I know, I have never experienced unwanted sexual touch from a man.

I’ve never had a pregnancy scare. I don’t date men—I’m a lesbian who has been in the same committed relationship since 1996—and the one boyfriend I had in high school was a committed feminist who was ridiculously patient with my sexual confusion and astonishingly respectful about the mixed messages emerging from my adolescent curiosity about desire.

I’ve been pregnant once and have one child. I’ve never had an abortion. I’ve never even had a miscarriage.

But I have spent many hours outside the doors of abortion clinics, starting with my senior year of high school, when I woke up early every Saturday and drove downtown to the nonprofit abortion clinic to stand between protestors and the patients they were haranguing.

The clinic was on a busy city street; there was no shielded entrance. Whether they came by bus or by car, patients had to use the city sidewalk to get to the door. That meant walking through a cluster of protestors who were begging people not to go in, chanting at the patients to change their minds, telling them they were murderers, harlots, fools who were making the biggest mistake of their lives.

The term “clinic defense” evokes walls or weapons or medieval barricades, but of course showing up in support of the patients and the clinic involved none of those things. What did it involve? We stood so that our bodies blocked the view of the protestors’ graphic signs (you’ve probably seen the ones I mean, those vastly enlarged images of a late-term fetus, with heart-wrenching captions written from the fetus’s imagined point of view). We stepped between the protestors and the patients. We told the patients good morning and hello. We made eye contact. We smiled. If anyone looked particularly freaked out, we offered to walk them to the door.

Every week, there were stretches of time when no one was walking in or out. We’d stand around on the sidewalk, the clinic defense team chatting, the protestors praying and singing. It was pretty much the same core group of people on both sides who came out every weekend; over time we got to know each other’s faces. Sometimes, with no patients available, the protestors would work on us. They would walk up to us, ask us to justify our positions, explain to us why we had it all wrong.

One time, an older white man approached me and two other teen girls who were weekend regulars to lecture us about the dangers of getting drawn into Satanic lesbianism. “I know you’re here because you’re lesbians,” he told us, and then five minutes later told us that he knew we were pro-choice because we wanted license to be promiscuous. None of us bothered to point out to him that promiscuous lesbians are unlikely to need abortions to support their sexual license.

Other protestors approached us because we were the youngest there, the most easily swayed, near-children who must have been misled. They witnessed to us with a deep earnestness that was matched only by the depths of our teenage sarcasm. I remember one woman handing us cartoon Chick tracts, which we took so as not to be rude. “We’re Jewish,” two of us told her. Undeterred, she told us to just look at the tract. In a tone somewhere between a dare and a plea, she urged us to turn to the back and read aloud the words printed there. “If you just say those words out loud, you will be saved.” One of the girls took her up on it, pronounced aloud the pledge to accept Jesus as her savior, and then said, flat as Morales in A Chorus Line, “Nope. I felt nothing. Still Jewish. Still pro-choice.”

Coming of age in the early 1990s, when one Supreme Court decision after another narrowed access to abortion each year I was in high school, from Webster (viability), to Hodgson (parental notification), to Rust v. Sullivan (gag rule) to Planned Parenthood v. Casey (undue burden), when fundamentalist Christian protestors besieged abortion clinics and called it mercy, while their fringe terrorist vanguard assassinated doctors, my experience of the abortion issue was so deeply political, and the motivations of the abortion opponents I’d encountered so clearly religious, that it was initially surprising to me to learn, decades later, that abortion opposition did not start out as a Republican issue, and that opposition to abortion itself was not even the motivating factor behind the anti-abortion politics of either the Republican Party or the organized evangelical movement.

What was the initial cause that drove the evangelical Christian movement into using abortion as a springboard for enshrining their religion in national politics? Racial segregation. Specifically, major figures in the white evangelical movement wanted to maintain the ability to run educational institutions that prohibited admission to Black people—and to get tax exemptions for it, civil rights laws be damned. But even in the late 1970s, rallying around segregation academies wasn’t a good look.

So, as historian Randall Balmer and documentarians Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern have demonstrated, the white religious right seized on abortion (previously seen as morally neutral among even the most conservative Protestant denominations) as a moral wrong that could drive people to the polls. Defense of segregation academies, not of the “preborn,” was what first caused the religious right to throw their political weight behind the governor from California, instead of the evangelical incumbent president from the Bible Belt. Abortion was just the slingshot they used to throw it.

Now, with Roe v. Wade on the brink of being overturned, it’s easier to unwind these tangled threads and track more clearly where they’ve been leading all along. Christian theocracy is at the doorstep. Reversing Roe will produce even more Black and Brown death and more poverty, conditions that benefit the very corporate interests that sold us the modern idea of the Christian nation as a way to oppose the godless socialism of the New Deal. (Hat tip to historian Kevin M. Kruse for exploding that mythos.)

It’s not just the right to an abortion that is under attack. Supreme Court Justices and conservative lawmakers and strategists have signaled that birth control, same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, non-heterosexual sex, and universal public education are all fair game for re-evaluation by a right-wing court. Revanchist white Christian nationalist politics threaten bodily autonomy for women, trans people of all ages, and children of all genders, along with assailing voting rights and the living conditions of workers, poor people, immigrants, and, as always, Indigenous people, Black people, and other people of color. The white Christian right is targeting public schools as sites of “grooming,” “critical race theory,” and social emotional learning—or, put another way, as sites of critical inquiry and empathy, those twin nemeses of authoritarianism.

We can see the end game: Freedom to discriminate for the few and powerful, self-determination curtailed for the rest of us, public schools eroded, more money for vouchers (neatly restoring public funding for private religious institutions). In sum, a vast dismantling of the social and civil underpinnings needed to build a multiracial democracy free from a hierarchy of human worth.

Abortion has been considered a single-issue fight for decades. Political parties have used abortion as a wedge issue and courted what the media and strategists alike have termed “single-issue voters” to solidify power. But the truth is, the political struggle over abortion has never actually been a single-issue fight. As much as it’s been about patriarchy and the domination of certain child-bearing bodies, the anti-abortion movement has been fueled by the drive to use the abortion issue to achieve a slew of right-wing goals that run the gamut from cultural to economic.

In the week after the leak of Alito’s draft opinion striking down Roe, my social media feeds, like those of many on the left, were filled with a back-and-forth about whether it’s appropriate to jump into the implications of which rights are on the chopping block next, or whether it’s essential to take the time to focus on the imminent threat to Roe. But acknowledging the big picture is not the same as moving on from the battle around the end of Roe “too soon.” It’s a matter of paying attention to what’s always been happening with the threat to abortion justice.

We are in a fight against a white Christian nationalist vision of this country. It’s important to name it—and to act like it. This is a fight against a powerful partnership between religious extremists and the perpetrators of a class war that threatens all but the very richest (and ultimately even the very richest, too, as the climate encompasses us all). It’s a fight for the sovereignty of every person who may ever have an abortion, yes. But it’s also a much bigger fight for the value inherent in every single one of our lives.

I find myself wondering about the people who stood out on that sidewalk every Saturday over thirty years ago, with their protest signs and gospel tracts. It’s been a long time; some of them were already elderly. But those who are still here, I wonder what they’re feeling these days. Is it triumph? Is it fear of a world changing too fast under their feet? Are they still out in front of clinics or are they at school board meetings now, shouting down librarians?

There’s a part of me that longs to turn the tables, to be the one who walks right up to them and says, I wasn’t being fooled out there, but you were. To be the one with the set of magic words that could make them see how a force much bigger than themselves took their private religious convictions and exploited them, cynically and skillfully, to build a multigenerational campaign for a sweeping political agenda that is fundamentally disrespectful of life.

But they’d never listen to me. So instead, I’m talking to you. Because the solidarity required to bring us into the next moment will need to be as broad and as steadfast as the ambitions of the opposition that brought us to this one.

 

Passing the Baton

Socialism from Below, Women’s Emancipation, and New Politics

By: May 13, 2022
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Shortly after I arrived at UC Berkeley as a freshman in 1966, I learned about and was entirely won over to the idea(l)s of “socialism from below.” Still I was unsure of what these political ideas meant for my life choices – until I met the newly-burgeoning women’s liberation movement. I felt and saw  the shackles of sexism’s permeation of capitalism,  how this had shaped my being. Unpacking how the “personal is political” illuminated and articulated so much of my lived-experience as a woman who had qualities dismissed as “unfeminine” and definitely not sexy. My life as a political activist was decided.

My first demonstration for free, safe, abortion on demand was in Fall 1969 . The small group of us that marched through Berkeley streets and to the campus, was as I recall, almost entirely women, mostly White, some but not all youthful. Several of the older women (meaning not undergraduates) had experienced dangerous, illegal abortions.  The ad hoc group asked for and received no permission for the march. It was organized through informal networks so as to evade detection until we massed and marched, arms locked.

I was reminded of this personal history when I saw a picture of demonstrations against Supreme Court Justice Alito at his home. Critics who have been silent about abortion clinic bombings, physical threats to doctors and women seeking abortions deride this modest escalation of protest dangerously undemocratic and personally invasive.  But rather than delve into their predictable, hypocritical opposition to any way we act on our demand to win control of our bodies, I want to point to an aspect of resistance to overturning Roe vs. Wade  that has greatly inspired me as a woman who came of age in a world in which we struggled for and won  the legal right to abortion and birth control.

My generation, for all its faults and mistakes which we must scrutinize and acknowledge, did something(s) right, visible in these protests. We see male faces in these demonstrations! That was not the case when we first demanded reproductive freedom, childcare, and equal pay for equal work. In fact, members of Berkeley Women’s Liberation were booed and heckled by male students as we marched through the UC Berkeley campus in Fall 1969.  Male comrades were mostly MIA in the demonstration.  Not every face is White in the photo of protests at Alito’s home.  Acknowledging this shift doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for scrutinizing why and how the movement is still crippled by its longstanding complicity with systemic racism.  Despite our failures, it is exhilarating for me to see angry young women taking to the streets, being naughty. We have never won the fight for our rights against oppression by being nice. We win by violating the patriarchal, xenophobic, racist, sexist, classist norms of capitalism, and we should transgress these cultural, economic, and political restrictions proudly.  The current struggle shows, again, our fight is not just for us but for future generations. I am hopeful we can win, and  we must persist and fight smart.

On another personal note,  although I intend to continue to write for the New Politics print journal and website (and support NP with a subscription and donations – as I hope readers will also do), this is the final piece I will post as a member of the editorial board. I am retiring from the editorial board on June 15, to work on my new book and other political projects. A “perk” of being on the all-volunteer board is those of us who want to can post directly, without review or oversight, as long as we sign the pieces and so use the website as a blog.   I wanted my final post as an editorial board member of NP, a journal that has conveyed my political ideas since its founding sixty years ago, by Julie and Phyllis Jacobson, whom I knew and adored, to be about passing the baton to new movements and new activists, especially those in the streets now fighting for women’s emancipation.

Here’s to defeating our oppressors.

When should we stop excusing the Russian invasion?

Ukraine, Self-determination, and the National Question
By: , , May 11, 2022
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been met with strange responses on the part of segments of the USA Left and among many progressives.  While, generally speaking, there has been a strong condemnation of the Russian invasion, there has simultaneously been a tendency to excuse the Russian invasion and place the responsibility for the aggression solely on the US government (and NATO).  Not only is such an analysis factually inaccurate, but it arises from an analytical error rooted in a downplaying of the entire issue of the right of nations to self-determination.

As two African Americans and one Chicano, we have concluded that it is time to speak out against a misconstruing of what has been unfolding in Ukraine and an inclination to either excuse Russian aggression or to advance a position of neutrality.  As individuals who are socialists and have been integrally involved in our respective people’s struggles for democracy and self-determination, we simply cannot remain silent, even though this puts us at odds with some comrades we have known, respected, and loved for years.

We submit this paper in order to promote more extensive discussion and debate.  By no means do we assume our views to be the final words on this question.  We do believe, however, that the failure to address the national question has led to errors in analysis, strategy, and response by many on the broad Left and progressive movements in the USA.

Which side are you on?

The actions of the Russian government cannot be construed as a “special military operation.”  They represented an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country.  It is critical that we understand this and not waver.  Russian troops, and not NATO troops, crossed the border into the sovereign territory of Ukraine.  Ukraine never threatened Russia.

There is no question but that NATO expansionism has been uncalled for.  In fact, we would argue that NATO, which was never a defensive alliance, should have been dissolved as soon as the Cold War ended.  NATO expansion was opposed by various Russian regimes and was unnecessarily provocative.

Yet what is rarely discussed in US Left circles was the desire of countries in the former Soviet bloc to link to NATO out of fear of post-USSR Russian intentions.  We, on the U.S. Left, can and should be critical of NATO, but we must understand what the underlying fears and concerns were on the part of former Soviet bloc countries.

It is additionally the case that there was opposition within NATO to the inclusion of Ukraine.  Not only had there been little support within Ukraine—prior to 2014—to entrance into NATO, but preceding the Russian invasion of 2022, there was opposition within NATO to the inclusion of Ukraine.  Since NATO inclusion had to be unanimous, it was unlikely that any steps would have been taken.  The Putin regime knew this.

The Putin regime claims that it was coming to the aid of the secessionist regions of the eastern Ukraine.  There are a few problems with this assertion, beginning with the fact that in 2014 Russia invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea, and in addition provoked secessionist revolts in the eastern region, including the supplying of unmarked military personnel.

Some of our friends have argued that the Russians seized Crimea in response to an alleged US-sponsored coup in Ukraine, i.e., the Maiden uprising.  They also say that the revolts in the eastern region were entirely self-motivated.

First things first.  There is little evidence that Maiden 2014 was a US-sponsored uprising.  This was not Chile in 1973.  There was a mass movement that included a variety of forces ranging from the far Right to the Left—and many in between—engaged in a revolt against the oligarchs, corruption, and the reversal of the administration’s decision to build a relationship with the European Union.  This was an internal matter of Ukraine.  One can have an opinion on the causes and outcomes, but the suggestion that this was primarily driven by the machinations of the USA turns the Ukrainian people into simple puppets of outsiders which flies in the face of reality.  While the USA may have supported a particular outcome of the Maiden uprising, such support is not the same as being the source of the revolt.

Second, the seizure of Crimea was a blatant violation of the Budapest Accords (1994) whereby Ukraine turned over its nuclear weapons—to Russia—in exchange for a commitment that Russia would NEVER attack Ukraine.  The notion that Russia had a right to seize Crimea disregarded the fact that the territory had been part of Ukraine since 1954.  There has also been a very strange silence by segments of the USA Left on another part of the Crimea question:  the ignoring or the disregard of the question of the Crimean Tatars—the indigenous population—and their replacement/removal by the Russian settlers (going back to the days of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin). Yes, prior to 1954 Crimea was part of Russia.  But it is also the case that Russian settlers displaced the relocated Crimean Tatars, thereby further complicating how one must understand the ‘Crimean Question.’

As a side note, it has been suggested that the referendum held in the aftermath of the Russian seizure of Crimea somehow made the seizure legitimate.  This, we find to be an interesting position.  To believe that a referendum on the future relationship of Crimea to Russia could be held freely while Russian troops are deployed in full force is, quite literally, incredible.

Third, the secessionist movements in the Donbas region are reflective of internal challenges of Ukraine.  There have been clear regional and linguistic challenges within Ukraine for quite some time (in the post-Soviet era).  Rightwing forces in Ukraine attempted to suppress the use of the Russian language.  In the so-called People’s Republics (in the eastern region), efforts were undertaken to erase the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian history.  But there is no evidence that these so-called “People’s Republics,” established in 2014 with the assistance of Russia, have anything to do with a legitimate, popular demand for separation; in fact, their level of popular support is highly questionable.  It should be noted that it was only Russia that recognized these so-called People’s Republics, and that recognition came on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine.  This reminds one of the Bantustan/independent “republics” established by apartheid South Africa as a means of legitimating population relocation and total control over South Africa.

Fourth, according to international law (and the Budapest Accords) there was no right for the Russians to invade Ukraine in either 2014 or 2022.  The rationale used by the Putin regime of neutralization and de-nazification is nothing more than sophistry.  The internal political situation in Ukraine was and is a matter to be faced by the Ukrainian people, not by any outsider.  The US Left should be clear on that, particularly considering its opposition to the USA aggression against Afghanistan and, later, Iraq.

Fifth, Putin gave away his hole card on the night of the invasion when he described Ukraine as “national fiction” and went on to dispute the very right of Ukraine to exist (including by polemicizing against the theories on national self-determination elaborated by Lenin and Stalin).

Finally, the appeal to a defense or legitimation of Russia’s alleged regional strategic interests is almost comical on at least two grounds.  First and foremost, the last time that we checked, the Left was not supposed to be proponents of spheres of influence by countries or empires.  When the USA described the Cuban Revolution, the Nicaraguan Revolution, and other Latin American and Caribbean (e.g., Grenada) radical movements and governments as a threat to USA interests, we laughed uncontrollably and fought the various Democratic and Republican administration who articulated such nonsense, tooth and nail.  Yet, in the case of Ukraine, there are respectable leftists who suggests that Russia’s alleged geographic interests should be respected when there has been no threat to them from Ukraine.

There is a second component to this point, however.  The issue of borders carried militarily strategic implications in the pre-nuclear era when massive land-based military operations were being conducted, e.g., Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the USSR in 1941).  Today, a massive land-based invasion of a nuclear power is highly unlikely.  Rather, the greater danger rests in tactical and strategic nuclear weaponry and their delivery systems, along with the threat of chemical and biological warfare.  Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet and a delivery system to reinforce the point.  For nuclear powers, borders are next to irrelevant, at least at the military level.  When it comes to politics and economics, however, borders can be very relevant, pointing us in the direction of some of the real motivations of the Russian aggression.

There are no defenses of the Russian invasion that pass the straight-face test.  Efforts to justify the invasion based on criticisms of the post-1991 Ukrainian regimes ignore international law prohibition on such invasions.  Only a United Nations sanctioned invasion would have been justified, as anyone familiar with the debates in the lead up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq would well know.

What about the National Question?

Lost on many US leftists was the significance of Putin’s tirade against Lenin and Stalin on the matter of national self-determination.  Unless one was up on the history of early communist movement, it could sound like an exploration of medieval Christian theology.

The pre-1917 Russian communist movement found itself facing several dilemmas, one of the most critical being the Russian Empire itself, what was once described as a “prison house of nations.”  The Russian Empire had grown through the forced absorption of myriad nationalities stretching from what is now Poland to the Pacific Ocean.  This empire was not a federation but was a formation dominated by the so-called “Great Russians,” i.e., the Russian ethnicity and their monarchical/capitalist ruling class.

Lenin commissioned Stalin to elaborate a theory on what was called the “national question,” i.e., understanding the exceptional circumstances of nations of people who had suffered a special oppression and domination, in this case by Russia.  The complexities and issues contained in Stalin’s conclusions go way beyond the scope of this paper except in one particular arena:  the notion that nations and peoples who had suffered oppression and domination as nations (including language discrimination; terror; subordination in all spheres compared with the Russian ethnicity; lack of political power) were entitled to the right to national self-determination.  To put it another way, whether they were Finns, Ukrainians, or the peoples of the former Turkestan, amongst others, they had a right to determine their own future without the interference of outside forces.

The initial Soviet approach to the right of national self-determination was innovative; indeed, revolutionary.  It was crystalized in the notion that the post-revolutionary society needed to be a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Putin was correct that the Stalin regime was inconsistent—at best—in its approach to the national question and there is no doubt that there was Russian domination of the Soviet state, but that domination was periodically challenged.  Once in power, Stalin evidenced little interest in consistent national self-determination.  The Stalin regime’s implementation of national question policy ranged from innovative— “national territorial delimitation” (the creation of nation-states where peoples had previously lived in semi-feudal conditions, though no practical right to secession)—to outright criminal, e.g., relocating and removing the nationhood (or autonomous) status of fifteen nationalities during World War II (including the Crimean Tatars!) for alleged anti-Soviet behavior.  This latter behavior contradicted the stated intent of Lenin for a voluntary union of equal republics.

Putin’s tirade demonstrated several things which are worth mentioning in this context.  First, NATO was not the main issue.  Even an incompetent communications consultant would have known to have recommended that Putin focus entirely on NATO as his justification for the invasion as a way of winning, or at least neutralizing global public opinion.  Instead, Putin chose, at the most inopportune of moments, to challenge the national legitimacy of an internationally recognized nation-state.  One must ask, why?

Second, Putin articulated his vision of the Russian future.  This is a future of the Russian ethnicity united in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.  This is not a multi-ethnic Russia, but rather the articulation of an ethno-nationalist Russia.  This vision is completely consistent with the thoroughly reactionary politics of the Putin regime.

Third, Putin himself is a product of the former Soviet apparatus.  He was not a Marxist, however, but someone who always wanted to be in the KGB.  He used the training and experience of the KGB in order to build the sort of network and political platform necessary for the rise to power.  His tirade against Lenin and Stalin demonstrates his abhorrence for the political project that Lenin was attempting to put into place in order to remedy the reality of the ‘prison house of nations.’  The tirade demonstrated something else, i.e., the revanchism of the Putin regime.  That is, the fury of the Putin regime in response to the USSR’s defeat in the Cold War, on top of which Russia not being fully accepted into the global capitalist bloc.  Putin’s revanchism is analogous to that which dominated rightwing circles in post-World War I Germany where, in the aftermath of the war, the loss of colonies, and the reparations it was compelled to pay, there was a demand for scapegoats and a desire for Germany to retrieve what rightwing circles believed to have been stolen from them.

Thus, the Russian aggression seems to have derived from specific geo-political ambitions of the Putin regime (fueled by revanchism) combined with an ethno-nationalist critical image of the future, a critical image that shares more in common with that of the Russian “White” forces,” i.e., the counter-revolutionary, restorationist movement after the Russian Revolution, than with the socialist experiment that was attempted.

The relevance of this analysis is that it focuses on the forces internal to Russia that have driven this aggression rather than viewing Russia as a clumsy minor imperialist power subject to the whims and machinations of the USA and NATO.  Additionally, in reviewing what the Putin regime has written and said, it becomes clear that its ambitions have little to do with neutralizing Ukraine; they concern the neutralizing of Ukrainians.  As such, it appears the Ukrainians have no rights that the Putin regime is bound to respect.

Two camps vs. opposition to national oppression?

Much of the debate within the USA Left begins—and ends—by looking at the USA.  The framework is simple:  the USA is the main enemy of the world’s people; the USA permitted/encouraged the expansion of NATO; the Russians opposed NATO expansion; therefore, the USA/NATO provoked the Russian invasion.

The essence of this analysis is that because the USA is the main enemy of the world’s people this must mean that it is the only significant enemy and further, that in each circumstance, should the USA be involved, it must be the main perpetrator of nefarious activities.

This is not an analysis.  It is sophistry.  And a particular sort of sophistry that views the struggles on planet Earth as being between the USA and its allies, on the one hand, and those who oppose USA imperialism on the other.  All other issues are subordinate to this contradiction.  Implicit in this analysis is the notion that anyone opposing—verbally or practically—US imperialism must be a friend of the oppressed and, therefore, should be supported.

This framework does not look at the particularities of any one situation and does not look at the internal factors in any one country (or in countries in conflict), instead it privileges the external factors.  At the philosophical level this is a violation of dialectics which always seeks first an understanding of the internal contradictions and then looks at the broader context.

In the case of Ukraine, sections of the USA Left have sought answers only through the activities of the USA but have failed to analyze the potential (or actual) motivations of the Putin regime.  Interestingly, most of the Left was entirely wrong about Putin’s preparations for an invasion of Ukraine, suggesting for months that Putin was only hard-bargaining and that the USA and Britain were attempting to provoke the situation by suggesting that a Russian invasion was pending.  Comrades really got that wrong.

The internal contradictions would also involve looking at the particular and historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine.  Therefore, listening carefully to Putin’s words and those of his propagandists becomes so important.  The Putin regime has gone to great measure to reconfigure the history of the relationship of Russia and Ukraine.  Its was in this context that Putin polemicized against Lenin and Stalin.  Putin does not believe that Ukraine is and ever has been a nation; for him it is part of a Greater Russia.

Those who ignore Putin’s words are, in effect, complicit in calling for the elimination of Ukraine.  They are also ignoring a long-running debate within Russia and Ukraine regarding Ukrainian nationhood and self-determination.  More perilously, segments of the Left are approaching a point of embracing ethno-nationalism or failing to distinguish it from revolutionary nationalism.

Ethno-nationalism is an important current within rightwing populism and its subset, fascism.  It identifies nationhood with ethnicity rather than territory, culture, and history.  Hitler used ethno-nationalism to orchestrate the Anschluss (annexation of Austria) in 1938, as well as the demands for the cession of Sudetenland to Germany by Czechoslovakia (also in 1938).  More recently, ethno-nationalism ripped apart the former multinational socialist republic of Yugoslavia and was instrumental in the Rwanda genocide conducted against the Tutsis and their allies among the Hutus.

The Putin regime articulates ethno-nationalism and has displayed expansionist ambitions.  It seeks to unite the Great Russian ethnicity, as well as reestablish the borders of the former Russian Empire.  It has a name for this:  Eurasian-ism.  This centers on the notion of the development of a pole independent of the “Atlantic” bloc of USA, Canada, and Britain.  While this is a multi-polar notion, it is a multi-polar proposal for a rightwing authoritarian future, not vastly different than that described in George Orwell’s 1984.

The fight for a multi-polar world has been inherent in capitalism and particularly once it reached its imperialist stage.  While at various moments one or another imperialist state held hegemony, there has always been cooperation and contention among capitalist states, much as there is between capitalist corporations.  Putin’s repositioning Russia is completely consistent with this.

Thus, the question that immediately emerges is whether the contention between imperialist states, and specifically, the emergence of anti-US imperialist states ipso facto imply that the rising contentious forces are somehow progressive and anti-imperialist?  This is not a new question and there is an historical analogue worth noting, which we shall address in a moment.

It is worth adding that one of the responses to the Russian invasion, offered by many sincere leftists, is that while the Russian invasion was wrong, we should focus on the role of the USA/NATO since there is little that can be done to influence the Putin regime, but we can influence the US government.

Regardless of intent, this is effectively an isolationist argument draped as internationalism.  Leftists have historically opposed imperialist adventures by the USA, but also those of other countries where there was no direct US involvement.  The Italian invasion of Ethiopia, in 1935, had nothing to do with the USA, yet leftists (of various stripes and ethnicities), Pan Africanists and Black nationalists responded.  The 1936-39 Spanish Civil War also brought forward global leftist demands for the USA, Britain, and France—each a colonial power—to provide military assistance to the Spanish government in its fight not only against domestic fascists, but against the illegal intervention of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.  This call was made even though each of these imperialist powers was conducting its own forms of colonial rule.  Indeed, one could have made an argument that nothing should have been demanded or asked of these governments precisely because of their character.  Yet, the demands were made based on an assessment of the Fascist/Nazi intervention and the broader implications of both the intervention and the resistance to it.

Japanese Imperialism and the “Pacific Movement of the Eastern World”

In the aftermath of the Japanese victory over the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) a reverberation was felt within the politics of the colonial and semi-colonial world.  A “non-white” people had decisively defeated a European imperialist power with a sophisticated use of strategy and modern military technology.

Despite the fact that the emerging Japanese empire had ironically accepted its designation as ‘Asian Aryans’ (a designation encouraged by US President Theodore Roosevelt and later adopted by Hitler), ‘colored peoples’ around the world, i.e., those colonized or semi-colonized, in what we think of today as the global South, by Western imperialism (including but not limited to the USA), saw in Japan a source of inspiration.  One did not need to dig too deeply, however, to understand that the Japanese were constructing their own empire.  This became clearer with the Japanese annexation of Taiwan, Korea, their role in World War I—supporting the Western allies against the Germans, thereby obtaining island bases in the Pacific—and later, with the invasion and annexation of Manchuria, followed by the invasion of the rest of China.

Despite Japan’s aggressiveness, there remained an appeal that they offered not only in Asia, but also in the United States.  Within Black America pro-Japanese sentiment emerged influencing various forces including, and surprisingly, the great W.E.B. Dubois.  Many apologists for Japan saw it as a strong state standing up to Western imperialism and were prepared to dismiss Japanese oppression and what can only be described as Japanese racism against other Asian populations, despite the Japanese call for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Within the United States, the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World became an organizing center for pro-Japanese sentiment.  A frequently overlooked movement largely based in Missouri, it was studied and explored by Dr. Ernest Allen of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.  Though this movement collapsed in the context of World War II, its ideological legacy has surpassed its organizational existence.  Interestingly, it was Asian communists in countries such as China, the Philippines, Korea, and Indochina who unmasked the imperialist objectives of the upstart Japanese Empire, pointing out that Japanese imperialism did not represent a path to liberation.  In the USA, the Communist Party was also among those who challenged this pro-Japanese sentiment.

The underlying notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend led to unfortunate acts of collaboration in various countries that the Japanese occupied beginning in 1931.  And the blindness to Japanese atrocities, e.g., the rape of Nanjing, is strangely reminiscent of the manner in which a segment of the US Left has been prepared to turn a blind eye to Russian imperialism, whether in the atrocities in Chechnya, atrocities committed through the Russian intervention on the side of the tyrannical Assad regime in the Syrian democratic uprising, or most recently, in the context of the invasion of Ukraine.  The failure to understand the objectives of the Putin regime is drawing segments of the Left dangerously close to the position taken by those who saw in the Japanese empire the salvation of the colonial and semi-colonial world.

The ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ view need not be as extreme as that held by those who would have collaborated with and/or justified Japanese imperialism.  In the post-World War II environment, national liberation movements and national populist projects (to borrow the term from the late Samir Amin) in the global South were often deeply influenced by the international communist movement and by leftist politics more generally.  Many leaders of these movements received training from the USSR, China, and later Cuba, among others.

Frequently these nationalist movements in the global South sought independence from both the USA—and its allies—and the USSR—and its allies.  The movements asserted the need for independence and freedom, but in all too many of these countries the social movements for liberation failed to enact a fully transformative platform.

Leaders in some of these states, e.g., Qaddafi in Libya; Mugabe in Zimbabwe, chose to walk a tightrope in the Cold War, alternating their allegiances and interests between the US-led bloc; the USSR; and, in some cases, the Chinese, all the while proclaiming “non-alignment.”  Internally, their projects were a very mixed bag.  An over reliance on the export of natural materials, e.g., oil, was able to sustain, for a period, some of the national populist projects.  Given uneven national economic investments, a failure to redistribute the wealth, and a lack of economic diversity, not to mention an ambivalence—at best—to people power, this proved to be very risky.

Thus, there were regimes that had leftist or left-leaning rhetoric, particularly on international issues, but domestically were following a different and frequently non-revolutionary/non-radical course.  In fact, they could be outright repressive.  Zimbabwe is a case in point where the Mugabe government accepted structural adjustment, even though structural adjustment was anathema to the stated politics of the government and its ruling political party.   In the face of protest, there was repression.  More recently a similar phenomenon came on display in Nicaragua with the shell of the former FSLN (Sandinistas) leading the country and following a very conservative approach to social issues and the economy, not to mention, the carrying out of repression of dissent.

Much of the US Left has been influenced by the rhetoric of alleged anti-imperialist regimes in a manner comparable to that of so many political forces in the pre-1941 period who were influenced by the “anti-imperialist” rhetoric of Japanese imperialism.  It was only when one dug beneath the surface that one could begin to get a better sense of reality.

It is unclear how many times the US Left must re-learn this lesson.  In the 1970s, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) presented itself to US Left audiences as a Marxist-Leninist-led national liberation movement.  When the Portuguese withdrew from Angola, in 1975, UNITA demonstrated that they were instead allies of the apartheid South African regime and an enemy of progress.  Yet they had been successful in influencing many Black leftists until that point.  The lack of a concrete analysis resulted in erroneous conclusions.

Looking at Ukraine; looking at the world

The conclusions from this are straight forward. First and foremost, begin with the facts on the basis of a concrete analysis.  Look, specifically, at the factors on the ground that are key to understanding a situation.  This means examining the state of the class struggle and the other struggles against oppression.

A second conclusion is that external forces cannot bring about liberation even with the best of intentions.  This conclusion was reached by the then Russian Bolsheviks in 1921 when they sought to spread the Russian Revolution by invading Poland.  Specifically, the conditions for a revolution did not exist in Poland and the Red Army would not be able to do anything about that other than—had it been successful—imposing its will.  Indeed, after World War II that is precisely what happened in those East European countries that had not liberated themselves (Yugoslavia and Albania had, however).

The third is that an invasion immediately should call attention to international law and the national question.  International law, particularly after World War II, is clear about wars of aggression, which is precisely why the response by the USA to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is hypocritical when contrasted with their stand on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the imposition of apartheid, as well as the Moroccan occupation of two-thirds of the Western Sahara.

A fourth conclusion is that Putin has done more than any leader in the recent past to strengthen NATO.   As of this writing, Sweden and Finland are entertaining the possibility of entering NATO. NATO was, itself, the target of various social movements in Europe who, correctly, saw it as both unnecessary and belligerent. We now have a situation where NATO is being heralded and military budgets in the Western World are being expanded—rather than contracting—with the result being that resources that are desperately needed for social concerns are being slighted in order to favor the ‘gun’.  Further, the Russian invasion has been a setback to efforts to address the climate catastrophe with greater calls for fossil fuels rather than efforts to eliminate the use of fossil fuels (and eliminate the fossil fuel industry!).

A fifth conclusion is that the Putin regime is expanding the threat of nuclear war.  Through oblique references to major retaliatory actions, and through displays of intercontinental threats, the Putin regime is articulating what can only be viewed as an insane game of ‘chicken’ with NATO, asserting directly and indirectly, what it might do under the right conditions. This may be analogous to Richard Nixon’s famous reference that it was in the interest of the United States that the USSR and China thought him to be a little crazy.  The problem is that when perceived as ‘crazy’ there are many potential responses.  One response is a renewed nuclear weapons race, the conditions for which exist particularly in light of the various treaties from which former President Trump withdrew.

In addition to matters of international law and the threats of further escalation, it remains vitally important to identify the historical relationship between belligerents.  Given the long history of Russian domination over Ukraine, including what can only be described as a settler-colonial relationship at certain junctures, the Russian invasion cannot be viewed as a benevolent step by an otherwise disinterested party.  Rather, it is the act of aggression by a power which has historically occupied and oppressed the people of Ukraine.

In that sense, the Left must stand with the Ukrainian people against aggression and occupation.  This is not encouraging a supposed ‘fight to the last Ukrainian’—as if the Ukrainians are simply stupid puppets of outsiders—but, instead, supporting the Ukrainian struggle against aggression and for self-determination, including the right to self-defense.  Solidarity with Ukrainians is not standing with the West and its hypocritical posture on when an occupation is an occupation.  Standing with Ukrainians is an act of international solidarity of the oppressed.  And that solidarity must also include solidarity with those in Russia who are opposing the Putin regime’s repression and aggression.

 

To paraphrase Bishop Tutu, there is no room for neutrality in the face of oppression.   Or to put it in a different, though equally familiar way, workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!

 

Bill Fletcher, Jr. was a cofounder of the Black Radical Congress, a past president of TransAfrica Forum, writer & trade unionist.

Bill Gallegos is a longtime Chicano Liberation activist and the author of “The Struggle For Chicano Liberation,” and “The Sunbelt Strategy and Chicano Liberation.”

Jamala Rogers is a fem socialist with deep ties in the Black Liberation Movement as an organizer, strategist, and writer.

Ukrainian Feminists under Western Eyes

By: May 9, 2022
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“I define solidarity in terms of mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships among diverse communities. Rather than assuming an enforced commonality of oppression, the practice of solidarity foregrounds communities of people who have chosen to work and fight together. Diversity and difference are central values here—to be acknowledged and respected, not erased in the building of alliances. Jodi Dean (1996) develops a notion of ‘reflective solidarity’ that I find particularly useful. She argues that reflective solidarity is crafted by an interaction involving three persons: ‘I ask you to stand by me over and against a third.’ This involves thematizing the third voice ‘to reconstruct solidarity as an inclusive ideal,’ rather than as an ‘us vs. them’ notion. Dean’s notion of a communicative, in-process understanding of the ‘we’ is useful, given that solidarity is always an achievement, the result of active struggle to construct the universal on the basis of particulars/differences. It is the praxis-oriented, active political struggle embodied in this notion of solidarity that is important to my thinking—and the reason I prefer to focus attention on solidarity rather than on the concept of ‘sisterhood.’”[1]

— Chandra Tapade Mohanty

When Kurdish feminists challenge Western pacifist feminists

Several feminist scholars (Dirik, Tank, Şimşek and Jongerden, etc.) have denounced the Western media’s orientalist fascination with Kurdish women fighters. These authors show how the Western media portray Kurdish women as symbols of Western liberation in the East, which is in turn portrayed as barbaric. This Western-centric portrait has the purpose and effect of silencing Kurdish women whose political ideas[2] are never relayed. And for good reason, for if they were, the narrative carried by the Western media would be challenged and invalidated.

Kurdish feminist Dilar Dirik has also questioned the role of Western feminism in this orientalist discursive construction of Kurdish women fighters:

“Some western feminists questioned its legitimacy and dismissed it as militarism or co-optation by political groups. Western media narratives have portrayed this struggle in a de-politisized, exotic way, or by making generalized assumptions about women’s ‘natural’ disinclination to violence.  The media reporting was dominated by a male gaze, but this was partly due to feminists’ refusal to engage with this relevant topic. One cannot help but think that one of the reasons for this hostility may be the fact that militant women are taking matters into their own hands impairs western feminists’ ability to speak on behalf of women in the Middle East, projected as helpless victims.”

In her article “Feminist pacifism or passive-ism?,” she denounces the inability of a naively pacifist feminism to distinguish between violence as oppression and violence as an act of resistance or self-defense:

“Unlike violence which aims to subjugate the ‘other,’ self-defense is a complete dedication and responsibility to life. To exist means to resist. And in order to exist meaningfully and freely, one must be politically autonomous. Put bluntly, in an international system of sexual and racial violence, legitimized by capitalist nation-states, the cry for non-violence is a luxury for those in privileged positions of relative safety, believing that they will never end up in a situation where violence will become necessary to survive. While theoretically sound, pacifism does not speak to the reality of masses of women and thus assumes a rather elitist first world character.”

Indeed, it seems to me that the experience of Kurdish feminists challenges — at least partially — the canonical feminist antimilitarist theory. Feminist antimilitarism has emerged from the experience of many women and feminist activists in a wide range of peace movements around the world. However, feminist antimilitarism cannot ignore the experiences of those women and feminists advocating for armed struggle. When these experiences challenge the feminist antimilitarist theoretical framework, this framework needs to be updated by these experiences.  It is not about invalidating the contributions of antimilitarist feminism, but rather about enriching them with new experiences coming from different positionalities.

In 2015, one of the leading thinkers of Feminist antimilitarism, Cyhthia Cockburn, interviewed two anti-militarist feminists, members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) who had lived under Nazism. She confronted them with what she calls the ‘pacifist dilemma’ by asking them whether they would invite Kurdish women fighters to lay down their arms in the name of pacifism. The interviewees replied:

“‘I don’t think so. Sitting here safely outside the war zone, we should understand them, not condemn them. To resist is a human right. However, in the long run we should not accept that militarism is the only response. We should seriously begin to build peacemaking mechanisms.’

“As a Wilpfer I would like to speak with the peshmerga[3] women, hear what they say. Fascism is so dirty. It’s like an octopus, getting its tentacles into society, its racist idea of the superiority of one kind of person over another. I might well agree, and say to the Kurdish women, ‘Yes, you have to fight.’ But, perhaps when it’s over, they themselves might look back on their campaign and say, ‘That was not the way to do it’.”

I share with these women the following ideas:

  1. our role from outside the war zone is to support, not condemn, women and feminist fighters;
  2. we must always listen to what the people concerned have to say;
  3. supporting women around the world in their struggles, including military struggles, is not incompatible with fighting, in a broader and longer-term context, for the demilitarization of the world.

Can the Ukrainian feminists speak?

I recently had a discussion with a Ukrainian feminist who has been involved for a long time in feminist activism and is now a refugee in a Western European country. She told me that she finds it difficult to speak openly about political — and particularly gender — issues existing in Ukraine because she is under the impression that the support of the western feminists and leftists is conditional. In their view, Ukrainian society would have to be perfect — and thus free of contradictions — in order to deserve the full right to fight against the Russian invasion. Faced with this Western injunction, she, like many other women, feels obliged to choose between speaking out on gender issues in Ukraine and seeking support for the Ukrainian resistance from leftists and feminists worldwide. Indeed, feminist injunctions that force women to choose between feminism and their other struggles often result in driving women away from feminism. This is a recurring problem of Western feminism that counter-hegemonic feminists have repeatedly pointed out.

Yet feminist analysis and activism remain necessary in Ukraine, as everywhere else. In the feminist Collective of the European Network of Solidarity with Ukraine, I have the pleasure to work with feminists involved in grassroots activism in Ukraine. They report that most of Ukrainian society — including many Ukrainian women — is either oblivious or suspicious of feminism, and this situation has worsened with the war. Feminist grassroots initiatives are facing financial difficulties as well as the hostility of landlords when trying to find a space for carrying out their activism. Viktoriia Pigul, a Ukrainian anticapitalist feminist comrade, drawing on several testimonies from Ukrainian women and children, has reported on the multiple forms of violence they are suffering. As is widely known by now, over the past few weeks, a lot of women and children have been brutalized and raped by Russian soldiers. Many of them are helpless. Many of them escape the war by fleeing to Poland, unaware that abortion in Poland — unlike in Ukraine — is banned by the law. In Poland, they are often exposed to new kinds of abuse by men. In this context, feminist activism in Ukraine is more essential now than ever.

Olena Lyubchenko has recently published a very rich analysis, essential reading, in which she shows  how the militarization of Ukraine in recent years has been linked to austerity measures that have shifted the burden of resistance against Russian aggression onto women at the household level, while at the same time preparing the state for a highly unequal process of ‘Euro-Atlantic’ integration:

“Militarization, austerity, and aggression in this context act as processes of dispossession and primitive accumulation. They ‘generate global reserves of labor-power whose cross-border movements are at the heart of the worldwide production and reproduction of capital and labor.’ In this way, racialized citizenship reproduces precarity and exclusion for some and security and inclusion for others, just as the Ukrainian working class’s historical differentiation within global capitalism is being rewritten and instrumentalized.”

Just as Dilar Dirik has denounced the instrumentalization of Kurdish women fighters in the Western media, Olena Lyubchenko denounces in this article the instrumentalization of Ukrainian resistance in Western media and institutional discourses that portray Ukrainians as heroes fighting a war “for Europe.”[4] In this context, and still in continuity with Dilar Dirik’s critique, it seems essential to question the role of Western feminism (and more broadly of the Western left) in this instrumentalization.

A transnational pacifist feminist manifesto was signed a few weeks ago by 150 prominent feminists from Europe and the Americas, without a single Ukrainian or post-Soviet European feminist among the signatories. Indeed, some Western feminists, close to Ukrainian feminists, refused to sign it. This manifesto reproduces the dominant geopolitical approach according to which the great imperialist powers are the only actors of history. It thus ignores the multi-scale reality and the agency of multiple actors highlighted by the feminist critique of geopolitics. It reduces Putin’s war against Ukraine to a simple inter-imperialist conflict, thus erasing the agency of all Ukrainians. Only one line out of more than thirty is devoted to Ukrainians:

“We are with the people of Ukraine who want to restore peace in their lives and demand a ceasefire.”

This is a good example of how, in one sentence, to reduce 44 million people to the cliché of a passive victim who needs, once again, to be rescued by the West. Ukrainians, women and men who are actively and militarily resisting the aggression that has been imposed upon them, are of no interest to Western feminist pacifists, just as they are of no interest to their male Western leftist friends. It seems that Ukrainians deserve our solidarity as victims, but not as resistance fighters. This caricaturing of Ukrainians as passive victims of NATO or European instrumentalization is similar to the Western media portrayal of Ukrainians as “European heroes.” Both discourses erase the political voices and wills of Ukrainians. In fact, many Ukrainian men and women are determined to resist, including by armed struggle. This determination is not imposed by Zelensky or NATO, as shown by the strong involvement of all sectors of Ukrainian society in the resistance.

While the positions of Western feminists and leftists on issues such as arm supply are unlikely to have an impact on the decisions of Western policy makers, they do have a real impact on Ukrainian feminists and leftists. Indeed, abandoning (in some cases opposing) the Ukrainian resistance has the effect of weakening our Ukrainian comrades within the resistance, and undermining their ability to carry forward an emancipatory political project for all the people of Ukraine.

For a dialogical internationalist feminist practice

The Ukrainian resistance is far from perfect and is not free of contradictions. It is riven by conflicts of class, gender, and race, as are all our societies. Ukrainian women are experiencing war, aggression, torture, and mass rape by Russian troops, as well as continuing to suffer the violence they suffered before the war from Ukrainian men and the state. Moreover, the war context reinforces state authoritarianism as well as the sexual division of labor (things like male-only military conscription, reassignment of women to social reproduction work, etc.). The reinforcement of gender relations gives power over women to men and the State while women in turn are disempowered and become more vulnerable and exposed to all kinds of violence. In this context, anti-capitalist feminists, caught up in this intricate multi-scale reality, are struggling with their fellow Ukrainians against the Russian invader while continuing to struggle against part of their own fellow Ukrainians: against Government’s neoliberal policies and employers’ attacks, against sexist, racist or LGBTphobic violence, etc.

Struggling simultaneously ‘with and against’ can only be incomprehensible to the minority of people who have the privilege of having only one enemy, or engaging only on one front. Counter-hegemonic feminists have taught us that positionality is central to any feminist politics. To take but one example, the Combahee River Collective, one of the most important Black lesbian feminist collectives in feminist history, rejected lesbian separatism as being both analytically and strategically inoperative for Black women who cannot afford the luxury of disassociating themselves from Black men in their common struggle against racism. Barbara Smith goes so far as to say:

“So seldom is separatism involved in making real political change, affecting the institutions in the society in any direct way. […] We have noticed how separatists in our area, instead of doing political organizing, often do zap acts. For example, they might come to a meeting or series of meetings then move on their way. It is not clear what they’re actually trying to change. We sometimes think of separatism as the politics without a practice.”[5]

In the current context it is quite consistent for Russian feminists to claim pacifism and categorically disassociate themselves from Putin, from the war he is waging, and from the whole part of Russian society that supports this war. In their anti-war manifesto, Russian pacifist feminists characterize the war as a war of aggression, and Putin as solely responsible. This pacifist position on the part of the Russian feminists is thus perfectly compatible with supporting the armed resistance in Ukraine. On the other hand, it would seem impossible for many Ukrainian feminists to dissociate themselves from their own community (however sexist it may be), if only for the sake of survival. Yet, at the same time, Ukrainian feminists have no choice but to keep leading the feminist struggle within their own society if they do not want to see gender/sexism further reinforced. While lesbian separatism was the privilege of those who experienced oppression only on the basis of gender and sexuality, abstract pacifism is the privilege of those who do not live under bombardment and feel no need to take up arms to defend themselves. Doing feminist politics away from the battlefield is as easy as it is sterile.

Internationalist feminist politics must take as its starting point the voices of the people concerned. Any feminist politics that is done without these voices will ultimately be done against them, and will thus be detrimental to the construction of global feminist solidarity. How could a position that turns its back on Ukrainian feminists and has the effect of silencing them on gender issues be qualified as feminist or internationalist? The only political actors capable of carrying out an emancipatory political project in Ukraine are those who are on the spot. We should better start listening to them and supporting them, despite any possible disagreements, because it will be them, as they are and with their own contradictions, who will lead the struggle. Or it will be nobody.

 

NB: If you want to financially support feminist activism in Ukraine, you can make your donations to the feminist collectives Bilkis and Feminist Workshop or to the anti-capitalist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh, in which feminists carry out specifically feminist political work.

 

Notes

[1]    Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham & London: Duke. University Press. p.7.

[2]    For an overview on the ideological and organizational principles of the Kurdish Women’s Movement: Dirik, Dilar (2017) “Self-Defense Means Political Autonomy! The Women’s Movement of Kurdistan Envisioning and Pursuing New Paths for Radical Democratic Autonomy”. Development 60, 74–79. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41301-017-0136-3

[3]    The use of the word peshmerga to designate Kurdish women fighters is problematic. Peshmerga refers to the Kurdish fighters in Iraq. As Dilar Dirik and Bahar Munzir explain, Kurdish women fighters in Iraq are in a very small minority within the combat units where there is a rigid sexual division of labor, as the two parties leading Iraqi Kurdistan are patriarchal. Yet women fighters in the YPJ and YJA-Star are often mistakenly referred to as peshmerga by the Western media. Cynthia Cockburn reproduces this error in her article, which in turn is taken up by the interviewees.

[4]    Where the word ‘Europe’ is mostly identified with the European Union as a marker of ‘civilization’ against those considered ‘barbarians’ who don’t belong in it or refuse its discipline.

[5]    Smith, Barbara and Beverly (2015) “Across the Kitchen Table: A Sister-to-Sister Dialogue”. in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds.) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. SUNY Press: New York. p.119.

The US Supreme Court is Now a Front for Christian Nationalist Minority Rule

Striking down Roe will just be a starting point
By: May 9, 2022
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[Editors’ note: The Women’s March has called for demonstrations on May 14th in Washington DC and nationwide in support of abortion rights, saying BANS OFF OUR BODIES, and demanding that elected officials take action before the Court gets the chance to overturn Roe v. Wade.]

The leaked draft majority opinion published by Politico on March 2nd suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. This is proof of what the court has become – an institution through which an extremist minority of Christian nationalists seek to rule America through the back door.

The above statement might seem incendiary, but it is time to be real. Yet still some centrist Democrats seem just as likely to attack Bernie Sanders supporters or Jill Stein’s 2016 voters than face up to their own failures. Conservative positions on abortion and LGBT rights are unpopular: moderates will be better served by attacking them rather than progressives.

The Supreme Court has become a farce. Last year, Justice Amy Coney Barrett had the gall the suggest in a speech that the Supreme Court was not “politically driven.” Barrett was speaking at an event hosted by Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell at the McConnell Centre of all places. The veil has well and truly slipped – there is not even a creditable attempt to pretend to protect the legitimacy of the Supreme Court’s reputation.

Barrett is a good example. She was nominated by a President who lost the popular vote by almost three million votes. She was confirmed by Republican senators who represented 14.8 million less Americans than those opposed to her confirmation. She seems set to join a judicial majority enacting a decision recent polls suggest only 30% of Americans support.

People will talk about voting as a solution to what is an attack on the rights of women, ongoing attacks on the LGBTQ+ community and children’s education, and likely will continue to attack the rights of more and more people. But Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were all nominated by either President Trump or Bush Jr – two presidents who were elected in the first place despite losing the popular vote. It would be foolish to pretend that voting will automatically change the direction of travel. After all, this is happening under a Democratic trifecta.

Justice Alito’s draft opinion contains his typical inflammatory rhetorical flourishes. My humble academic opinion is that it is one of the most self-indulgent, poorly argued, judicial opinions I have read in my career. If this is how the court ultimately rules, the decision in all likelihood will in time join a list of the Court’s gravest aberrations, alongside Plessy v. Ferguson which established the “separate but equal” doctrine and Hammer v. Dagenhart which struck down a Congressional ban on the worst horrific excesses of child labor.

In the draft opinion, Alito contends that some non-constitutionally guaranteed rights can be protected in an exceptional circumstance where they have historically proven non-controversial and have in essence become part of the nation’s fabric, identity, and culture. This means there is an open door to strike down almost anything where a vocal minority set their mind and money to it. Alito in practice asserts that if something was not recognized as a fundamental right beforehand it cannot become one, and that no history has happened since 1972. This is utterly ludicrous, even if it can be argued with a certain amount of selective interpretation and legal gymnastics.

The vital question now is where will this Supreme Court stop? It is a partisan institution, with a majority of Christian nationalists committed to imposing their will on America. If Roe falls, what could fall next? Same sex marriage, the right to contraception, and the federal minimum wage could very quickly land on this Court’s chopping block as could protection from racial segregation. Like abortion rights, all those have had their vociferous opponents in recent history and are thus susceptible to Alito’s reasoning.

There is a very real prospect that this generation of American children will have fewer rights than their parents. Democratic leaders need to use the powers they have, act now and act decisively. Centrism and appeasement are not viable options.

Irresponsible braggadocio won’t help Ukrainians

By: May 7, 2022
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The Ukrainians are fighting a just war against an imperialist invasion and they therefore deserve to be supported. Their right to self-determination is not only relevant against Russia. It is also relevant to their decision to fight. They alone should decide whether to carry on fighting or accept whatever compromise is put on the table. They don’t have a right to involve others directly in their national defense though: no right to get NATO powers to impose a no-fly zone over their country or to send them weapons and equipment that could widen the war’s scope. They deserve to be supported, but it is only a moral obligation.

NATO countries, for their part, have no right to dictate to them the terms of a peace deal with Russia and compel them to surrender, or conversely to sabotage the prospect of a compromise and pressure them to continue to fight until exhaustion, thus turning them into a disposable NATO proxy. The statement made by U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in Poland on 25 April that “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine” expectedly drew a lot of attention.

Was it “carefully orchestrated … to set up President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine with what one senior State Department official called ‘the strongest possible hand’ for what they expect will be some kind of cease-fire negotiations in coming months,” as David Sanger explained in the New York Times? Or was it the expression of a shift in U.S. goals towards cynically pressuring the Ukrainians to fight until Washington deems Russia weakened enough? We’ll know from Washington’s attitude over the next few weeks if it is exerting maximum pressure in order to bring the war to a close more rapidly, thus shortening the Ukrainians’ suffering and limiting the damage caused by the war to the U.S. and global economy, or if it is continuing to dangerously play with fire.

The matter is much less open to question in the case of British warmongering. Beyond Boris Johnson’s obvious headlong rush into the war in the hope that its blast would cover the noise of the many scandals that he provoked, the prime minister and his cabinet have been engaging in a highly dangerous game of one-upmanship. Unlike discreet purveyors of weapons to Ukraine like the French or the German governments, they have publicly boasted about every item they have delivered and every form of military assistance they have provided to the embattled nation. Boris Johnson even brought upon himself a scathing rebuke from a former head of the Polish army who accused him of “tempting evil” after he bragged that “we are currently training Ukrainians in Poland in the use of anti-aircraft defence”.

More recklessly still, statements by members of the British governments have been quite more provocative than those made in Washington, let alone those of EU member states. Speaking on BBC Radio 4 on 25 April, the UK minister for the armed forces, James Heappey, made a flabbergasting response to the question of whether it is acceptable for British weapons to be used by the Ukrainians against military targets inside Russian territory. The minister asserted that “it is entirely legitimate to go after military targets in the depth of your opponents to disrupt their logistics and supply lines, just as, to be frank, provided the Russians don’t target civilians, which unfortunately they’ve not taken too much regard for thus far, it is perfectly legitimate for them to be striking targets in Western Ukraine to disrupt Ukrainian supply lines.”

It is of course “perfectly legitimate” for a country whose territory is invaded to strike at military targets inside the invader’s territory, but is it wise for it to do so and, especially, is it wise for a British minister to encourage it to do so? Of course, not – not least because that may incite the Russian aggressor to escalate its bombing across the depth of Ukraine’s territory. Probably realizing that he had blundered, the minister tried to make up for his initial assertion by magnanimously granting the invader an equally “perfectly legitimate” right to do precisely what is to be feared by the Ukrainians if they were to follow his advice!

In a solemn speech pompously titled “The Return of Geopolitics” delivered on 27 April, British foreign secretary Liz Truss, whose role model is Margaret Thatcher and who seems to confuse the Ukraine war with the Falklands war, declared,: “The war in Ukraine is our war – it is everyone’s war because Ukraine’s victory is a strategic imperative for all of us. Heavy weapons, tanks, aeroplanes – digging deep into our inventories, ramping up production. We need to do all of this. … We are doubling down. We will keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine.”

Unless the British government decided to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the secretary is thus pledging to partake in prolonging the war, not only until the Ukrainians have repelled Russia’s forces beyond the territories in Donbas where they were deployed prior to 24 February, i.e. beyond the status quo ante, which is in itself reckless enough, but even until they forced Russia out of Crimea, which is utterly irresponsible for both Ukraine and Britain itself. The prime minister must have realized how dangerous the foreign secretary’s words were, for he took special care in his 3 May address to Ukraine’s parliament to amend the impression that her statement had created by emphasizing that “no outsider like me can speak lightly about how the conflict could be settled … no one can or should impose anything on Ukrainians.”

Noticeably, Boris Johnson bragged a lot in that address about British military aid to Ukraine but did not utter a single word about humanitarian aid, although he did mention that today “at least one Ukrainian in every four has been driven from their homes, and it is a horrifying fact that two thirds of all Ukrainian children are now refugees, whether inside the country or elsewhere.” About those refugees, the prime minister had nothing to boast. The day before his speech, The Guardian had revealed that his crueler-than-thou anti-immigrant home minister Priti Patel is “facing mass legal action over delays that have left thousands of Ukrainians at risk of trauma and Russian bombs, or in limbo in eastern Europe.”

Meanwhile, the leader of the Labour Party, “Sir” Keir Starmer, whose main obsession is to project himself as anti-Corbyn thus reneging on the pledge of programmatic continuity that he had made in order to be elected head of the party, has kept approvingly silent on the Johnson cabinet’s braggadocio. Ever since he got elected, Starmer has been indeed mostly busy outbidding the Conservatives in pro-NATO and pro-Israel stances. A climate of sacred pro-NATO unity hence prevails in the British parliament, allowing Johnson to carry on outbidding everybody else in perilous warmongering.

Voting Ends Soon in UFT Elections: A Referendum on Leadership the Past Two Years

By: April 28, 2022
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, the largest teachers’ union local in the country consistently left members unsafe, confused, ill, and even dead. In March 2020, the United Federation of Teachers delayed, and ultimately failed at, securing the safety and health of educators, students, and families in NYC schools. By the beginning of the week of March 16, the schools had finally started to go remote, but only after rank-and-file school workers staged widespread safety sick outs that both the city and the union leadership define as illegal. The deadly virus had spread in schools and communities. The UFT, meanwhile, had been negotiating in private with the mayor and Department of Ed, and eventually – too late – threatened to file an injunction in court to close school buildings.

If that was the end of the story, then the UFT – representing over 125,000 in-service and retired city educators – wouldn’t have to answer for the rest of its missteps the past two years: negotiating fruitlessly behind closed doors with the city during the spring and summer of 2020, then briefly threatening a strike in the late summer, then failing to organize members credibly for such an action (after decades of telling the membership not to get involved), then consenting to in-person re-opening for the fall semester, and then approving new contract (“Memorandum of Agreement”) behind closed doors without member input or approval, all while the contractual grievance process was still frozen, a favor done by the UFT for the city at the start of the pandemic as educators were sick and dying from COVID-19.

The biggest blow of 2021 for the UFT leadership was the revolt of retired members upset with the strong possibility of increasing costs and difficult health plan choices as a result of the UFT leadership’s newly proposed, semi-private Medicare Advantage healthcare plan. The majority of retirees demanded out of the plan and the UFT leadership backtracked their support for it, using a successful retiree suit in court against the plan as a convenient cover to hide their affiliation with it during election season, when retirees have an opportunity to vote, usually as a supportive bloc for the ruling caucus.

After almost 19 months of refusing to allow deliberation and debate for the UFT’s Delegate Assembly – which consists of representatives from each school in the city – at the November DA, UFT President Michael Mulgrew allowed a decent amount of questions, debate, and voting on resolutions. Mulgrew and his “Unity” caucus lost 2 key measures being voted on, including a resolution to class size reductions as a demand in contract negotiations, and nearly lost another resolution that would have required the union leadership to directly get member approval for any changes to healthcare, such as the recent moves to privatize newer and older members’ healthcare and leave them at the whims of the profit-motivated marketplace. Mulgrew and Unity won this latter vote but lost the other two votes. This had not happened in his entire tenure as UFT president even once. The next month, he and his party filibustered the entire time and have not allowed any substantive democratic decision-making since.

In this spring’s election campaign, all of the major opposition caucuses and groups within the UFT have organized together for the first time in recent decades to oppose the one-party rule that has seen givebacks and setbacks. The history of the UFT shows why the UFT “Unity” leadership group’s strategy won’t be changing anytime soon, and why members need to vote for a new direction in the election happening right now.

What Is Most Important to the UFT Leadership?

The United Federation of Teachers was founded in 1960 and within several years established itself as the dominant collective bargaining unit for public school teachers in New York City. In a series of strikes in the 1960s, the UFT solidified not only collective bargaining power but also more decent conditions and benefits for educators. This culminated in the 1968 strike, which pitted the UFT against the communities of the Ocean Hill and Brownsville in Brooklyn. Predominantly black, these neighborhoods wanted community control. They wanted to be able to hire their own teachers. They wanted to be able to control the curriculum to allow ideas and cultures that had previously been overlooked.

When Rhody McCoy was hired as superintendent of the Ocean Hill and Brownsville district, he implemented these ideals. Handfuls of teachers were transferred, interpreted by union leaders as equivalent to termination. Almost all of the teachers were white and Jewish. For McCoy, it wasn’t about race but about their inability to buy into his and the community’s project. He saw them as aloof, elitist, and unprepared for the work of liberating pedagogy.

UFT founder and president Albert Shanker mobilized the union against McCoy. Shanker called a strike to shut down NYC schools. Both sides were aggressive and defensive: the local community was accused of anti-semitism, the UFT was accused of racism. It was the longest strike in the history of American schools and the UFT won, at least on the bargaining table. Public opinion on the strike was divisive. Reflecting on the strike years later, author James Baldwin wrote:

   Superintendent McCoy’s] dismissal of the teachers meant that he thought he had the right to dismiss them…That he had no such right had to be made immediately and abundantly clear, not only to protect the power of the United Federation of Teachers, but also to prevent any of the billions of dollars involved in the Education business from being controlled by Black and Puerto Rican communities. Therefore, the head of the United Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, called a city-wide strike. This was to put McCoy in his place and to make certain that his exercise of authority would not constitute a precedent.

For Baldwin, the strike was clearly and classically American in its character: The teachers’ union believed that margainzaled groups, such as African-Americans, could not rise up too far, or too fast, and those making any perceived attempts to do so had to be subdued and neutralized.

Educator and activist (and HS Executive Board candidate for the opposition slate United For Change in this spring’s UFT election) Ronnie Almonte argues that Baldwin’s critique is sound:

             The view that the strikes served to protect a system of white privilege was reasonable. Teachers and principals in           New York City were hired off an eligibility list from which Black people were largely absent. The examination  system that determined eligibility was clearly discriminatory. Most of the new principals appointed by the local board of Ocean Hill-Brownsville were, therefore, deliberately selected outside of the list. But the board’s  appointments were opposed by the union. In an unprecedented move, the UFT reached across class lines to join the principals’ union in a lawsuit against the local board’s choice of “ineligible” principals, all of whom were either Black or Puerto Rican. In the lawsuit McCoy’s selection as superintendent was also challenged.

It is here that we begin to see one of the issues with the UFT’s origin and its approach then and now. It focused on business unionism, meaning larger social dynamics were a secondary concern to helping drive economic production and profit and thereby using that profit to leverage for more benefits and wages exclusively for members, ignoring other common benefits to be gained by organizing with communities (smaller classes, more counselors and support staff, more resources and safer facilities, food and housing security for families, quality healthcare for all, etc.).

The reverberations of this dark history in Shanker’s UFT are clear. The UFT took the morally incorrect position, and yet the UFT headquarters is still adorned with portraits of Shanker. The consequences were devastating: charter schools, often run by corporate interests, and so-called philanthropists, such as former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have taken and distorted the idea of community control that the union was unwilling to claim and support.

 

Historian Jerald Podair, the author of The Strike That Changed New York , described Shanker and the UFT’s choice between business unionism and social justice unionism as follows in an interview conducted in December 2019:

The UFT higher ups would say “we are for social justice” and “you know we supported Martin Luther King and all of his campaigns.” He did address the UFT on many occasions, he supported them when they were establishing their own union, and they supported him at the March on Washington, at Freedom Summer. So they thought they had the social justice bona fide. What Shanker and other union higher ups would probably say in 1968 is “you don’t know what it was like to be a teacher in the New York City public schools in the forties and fifties, but we do and what we know is that teachers had no control, no power, no dignity.” So the UFT was founded to change that. As for social justice, at Ocean Hill-Brownsville they were asked to make a choice between the two and the UFT leaders ended up choosing the power of the union and the power of the teacher over ideals of social justice. In other words, they were for social justice but not at their own expense.

In the Jim Crow South, the UFT was willing to stand up for justice. However, in its own backyard, the UFT rejected the burgeoning civil rights movement in NYC. In exchange, says Podair, the political establishment rewarded the UFT after the 1968 with its biggest prize for bargaining and working conditions:

The UFT established itself as co-manager of the New York City public school system through the strike, which it was not before 1968. Most of the strikes before had been about money, but Ocean Hill-Brownsville was not about money, it was about control. Before Shanker and the union leaders’ goal was to get money, but control in many ways was more important than money; in other words, if [Mayor] Lindsay tried buy him with money during this trial, if he allowed for everyone in the system to get a check but go back to work in non-teaching roles or reassigned positions, Shanker would have turned that down, because he understood that that would have been a short-term victory but the long-term goal would have been lost: control.

The UFT’s position as not only a bargaining unit but also a weakly positioned co-manager of the public school system has remained until today. Unfortunately for UFT members and for New York, it hasn’t necessarily been advantageous for communities or educators. And New York is considered to have the most segregated school system in the country.

The Present UFT Leadership’s Role As Co-Manager of NYC Schools

So attached to this co-manager role allowed by city governments, the UFT has not used the strike since 1976. In the 2020 school reopening, the union leadership worked in secret throughout the summer with the city, only to acquiesce to rank-and-file pressure and begin half-heartedly threatening a strike as the fall approached. The press conference where the UFT President Michael Mulgrew announced strike preparations featured some of the most powerful Democratic Party figures in the city aside from Mayor DeBlasio: City Council President Cory Johnson and Comptroller Scott Stringer. Evidently, the UFT leaders were only able to stand up to the political establishment with the help of the political establishment itself. No current public school educators, parents, or students were present.

Since 1968, the UFT leadership has continued nominal support of civil rights struggles and other fights against injustice, but it has relied on functioning as a de facto co-manager of the public school system, which also prevented and prevents it from acting too harshly (strike, etc.) to oppose city governments, corporate power, or even the draconian strike penalties that the union itself uses to dissuade members from taking action. Podair said the following regarding UFT leadership after Shanker (who served for a quarter of a century, setting the tenor for the UFT’s one-party Unity Caucus autocracy):

They really [have] had the same agenda as Shanker. In other words, they’re all tough union bosses who put the interests of their membership above all. The conceit for the UFT, all through the years, is to say the interests of their members coincide with the interests of social justice and you don’t have to make the choice between one or the other, but of course that’s not always the case as we saw in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. When push comes to shove they’re going to protect members… The social justice component is important but when it collides with the interests of the union members, they come first and I think most union leaders, even the public sector union leaders who say they’re for social justice, they’re going to make that calculation.

The stridency towards business unionism is apparent from its earliest days to its most recent past. In 1964, the UFT was a growing power in city labor and politics, and it could have lent support to the largest student boycott in the history of the city. The boycott, supported by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, was against the de facto segregation of New York City schools. Almonte provides the following critique:

The UFT’s record on civil rights in the city also left much to be desired. The UFT was on the sidelines when in  February 1964 the largest civil rights demonstration in the country occurred. Over 400,000 students boycotted the public schools, demanding that they be integrated. Shanker refused to endorse the boycott, claiming that doing so would constitute violation of the UFT contract’s no-strike clause. To the boycotters, the UFT’s abstention spoke volumes. If the UFT was a bystander in the early 1960s, by 1966 it appeared to have become an antagonist to civil rights. That year Harlem families demanded a Black principal for the newly constructed school I.S. 201. They also demanded community control. When the white principal voluntarily rescinded the job offer, the UFT, without regard to the desires of the Black community, demanded his reinstatement and won.

The following year, the union seemed to have renewed its attack on the Black community. The UFT tried to negotiate in its contract a “disruptive child” provision, which would have allowed teachers to more easily  remove students from their classrooms. The provision was criticized by the African-American Teachers Association (ATA) for granting police powers to white teachers to remove Black students.

Again, we return  to the present: From 2017-2019, , at the Delegate Assembly, the UFT’s leadership caucus, Unity, which was founded by Shanker and is currently headed by Mulgrew, fought tooth and nail against the national Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools. Then, in 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd uprising, the Unity Caucus surprisingly (or opportunistically) decided to endorse the Week of Action, offering to collaborate with other groups, such as the Movement for Rank-and-File Educators, on a resolution to endorse it at the DA. The DA was allowed to vote to endorse, and it did with over 90% of members. Apparently, the delegates were ready for change.

The False Dilemma of Community Control vs. Worker Control

The UFT’s silence in the 1964 student boycott is eerily reminiscent of similar silence in the aforementioned struggles over segregation in New York, which expanded greatly during the mayoral tenures of Guiliani and Bloomberg and was allowed to fester during that of De Blasio. For Black and Latino students, the dilemma is often between attending a subpar local community school versus traveling around the city to another school that may or may not have better resources. Further, adolescent students have to undergo difficult testing and admissions processes that favor white and affluent students.

My former student Tiffani Torres of Brownsville, Brooklyn, described the horrific high school application process for her just a few years ago:

Applying to high school was a very stressful time for me. My family was not well-versed in the high school application process, and all I knew was what the 500+ page directory told me. What I noticed during this time was the vast difference in resources available at each school I researched. Some had a plethora of sports and AP classes, while others had a handful. During my time in high school, I witnessed these disparities in practice. A lack of funding for sports and AP classes, and a less than ideal space were issues that all of my peers had to deal with. Students are made to believe that what they are being offered is all that is available, when in reality their more affluent and white counterparts are handed opportunities that my peers aren’t made aware of.

When I asked Torres, who did organizing work with the student activist group Teens Take Charge, what she would say to those who claim the admissions process is merit-based, she said

The system of screens under which our school system currently operates can only be merit-based when every student is afforded the same opportunities to prevail. Segregation and inequality begin at the elementary level. While schools in more affluent neighborhoods have loads of PTA funding, extra-curriculars, various guidance counselors and staff available to them, other schools are faced with a revolving door of teachers and staff and a severe lack of funding. The worst part is that students are made unaware of the fact that they are receiving less, believing instead that they are the problem. We are the change that we wish to see. Being submissive to the inequities that continue to plague NYC students will only exacerbate its effects.

And as for how the UFT is a collaborator with corporate and government forces that maintain segregation, she is clear:

  All of these figures come into play. Anyone who is not actively fighting against a system that perpetuates  inequality is contributing to its development. Unfortunately, students are made to believe that their place in  our society or their school’s insufficiency is a reflection of their own actions when in reality, it has nothing to do  with them, but with privilege. Those in positions of power will not give up that power on their own, and we see  this in parents who fight against the elimination of screens and G&T programs under the guise of meritocracy.

It’s possible Torres was too soft on the UFT leadership, who did not actively support the protests, demonstrations, and other actions of various student groups during the 2017-18 and 2019-20 school years. The UFT has only really spoken out in vague statements against segregation in general and for integration and equity in general. They propose more committees and task forces, reserving more concrete shifts to only the most clearly objectionable injustices. And yet, as we look at similar unions in Chicago, LA, and Minneapolis, we see that they have fought hard for their most marginalized communities and even worked in coalition with communities to bargain for the common good and win victories for not just the union members but the school system as a whole: smaller classes, more counselors and support staff, and a variety of other improvements in school and city infrastructures.

Where is the UFT Leadership Today?

The UFT is consistently soft or silent on inequality issues affecting too many NYC students. Across the country, workers are going on strikes at an increasing rate and teachers’ unions have been tying community struggles to union demands. This spring, there is a united front of opposition groups that is running to support the expansion of community control and bring communities together with teachers and other union members to fight to transform the schools and city itself. Today, The United For Change coalition in the current UFT election wants to bargain openly with community input, which they hope will also allow more leniency for hard bargaining tactics such as strike readiness that the current UFT leadership balks at.

The Albert Shanker leadership in the late 1960s saw members crossing the UFT’s picket line, in doing so supporting anti-racism and opposing the ill-conceived strike against community control and the “disruptive student.” But these members who crossed the racist picket line weren’t anti-union. Many even had been members in the pre-UFT group known simply as the Teachers Union union group, which represented NYC educators from the 30s to the 50s, until McCarthyites purged and neutralized much of its socialist-leaning leadership and membership. Most who crossed the 1968 picket lines were of such left traditions or of the new 60s culture and were following their own philosophy of how best to be school workers, labor activists, and student advocates. They were called union traitors and sacrificed their own physical safety and job security so that they could stand with communities.

 

Nowadays, the union leadership is pretending like it never lost Delegate Assembly votes in the Fall to opposition members and has filibustered recent Delegate Assemblies. If members speak out, they are similarly branded as anti-union and as against the esteemed traditions of the union. And while our union has done many great things and won many great rights and benefits for members, it also has never dealt with its past. Were those teachers who crossed the picket line anti-union? Did they lack solidarity? Most today would probably argue they were justified to oppose their union leadership.

UFT rank-and-file members have a choice this month. The choice is between union, city, and corporate bosses controlling schools versus workers, educators, and communities controlling schools. The choice is between whether principals should be handpicked by the Department of Education versus whether they should be chosen by workers and communities. The choice is between performatively opposing segregation and inequality in our city versus actually organizing members and their school communities to create schools that are integrated, safe, fair, and democratic. The choice is between whether the union should continue to dig deeper into alliances with corrupt politicians versus whether it should stake its future on members and communities fighting together for stronger contracts for educators and better schools for everyone.

Turnout was about 24% in 2019 UFT elections, but chances are it won’t be as low this time. The UFT leadership has been on the defensive, with increasing complaints circulating that union resources and positions have been used inappropriately and even in violation of labor law. UFT Secretary Leroy Barr and the Unity-Controlled Executive Board even conceded several violations connected to their use of official union media resources.

But the election is just part of a larger situation within which the opposition can unite to change the single party control of the UFT in favor of a truly progressive, grassroots approach. A new contract is due to be negotiated this fall. NYC needs a new union leadership to hold the line on elements of the contract that intersect with issues of inequality, such as class sizes and health standards. If the union cannot win the battle against segregation, it can speak out and show where it stands. If desegregation is stalled or slowed, then the push needs to be for more quality and healthy school buildings, which requires funding and staffing, which requires the UFT leadership to speak out more clearly and organize members more aggressively for wealth redistribution from the ultra wealthy, and which all requires working in coalition with communities during bargaining, instead of bargaining against communities.

All of these fights are intertwined and all of them are urgent. A new union is possible, no matter what any establishment says about being practical. What’s not practical is business as usual in the most segregated school system in the country that just went through a pandemic. NYC’s schools deserve better. The election is almost over. Ballots are due by May 9. When ballots are counted on May 10, and if turnout increases substantially as many expect it will, we will know more precisely how much change UFT members actually want in their union and schools.

[Editor’s note: Readers may want to read Steve Zeluck’s article, “The UFT Strike: A Blow Against Teacher Unionism,” in New Politics, Winter 1968. We are working to bring the archives to our site but in the meantime, Zeluck’s article can be found here.]

The Political Consensus of Extractivism in Bolivia

By: , April 27, 2022
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Franklin Molina, Bolivia’s Minister of Hydrocarbons and Energy

Extractivism is the only economic horizon of the Bolivian state, even as narratives shift depending on who is in power

Text by Huascar Salazar Lohman, originally published by ZUR on April 5, 2022.

Translation by Devin Beaulieu.

Since 2019, Bolivia has been submerged in a profund political crisis. Evo Morales, of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), was president for 14 years (2006-2019), during which time important alliances were re-established among dominant sectors in the country, and the government became increasingly authoritarian. Within Bolivia, the November 2019 elections were questioned due to a lack of transparency and a series of other issues.

The entrenched, traditional right took advantage of the political instability linked to the climate of conflict and uncertainty following the elections to assume the presidency. While in power, Janine Añez oversaw brutal political repression and a corrupt and inefficient management of the pandemic. A year later, following the terrible Añez administration, the MAS returned to power with Luis Arce Catacora, Morales’ chosen successor, as the head of government.

This political crisis accentuated already existing polarization within Bolivian society. The narratives of coup d’état and electoral fraud dominated public debate, but neither was enough to describe the depth of the crisis or the violence that was meted out against the people of Bolivia during October and November of 2019, and during the first months of the pandemic. These narratives have since been converted into discourses of victimization and legitimation by those responsible for the crisis.

These narratives have also invisibilized the problems inside Bolivian society, problems which—paradoxically and regardless of the positions taken by members of both extremes—have been approached in very similar ways by the MAS government and the old right. One of these problems is the accumulation model, which has been and continues to be sustained by predatory extractivism.

Since 2005 and, with greater intensity since 2010, the Bolivian economy has been primarily driven by the sharp increase in international commodity prices, raw materials – such as oil, minerals, soybeans – that are traded on, or in reference to, international financial markets.

Bolivia is an important supplier of natural gas in South America, although less and less so, especially with regards to Brazil and Argentina. When international commodity prices increased in the early aughts the value of gas exports rose from $619 million in 2004 to $6.1 billion in 2013. In other words, the value of Bolivian fuel exports multiplied by ten, though the amount exported only doubled in the same period.

These fiscal dynamics can be examined to gauge the importance of this price increase on Bolivia’s economy. By 2013 – the climax of the commodities boom – half of Bolivia’s public revenue depended on gas exports. It was during those years that the government, then headed by Morales, began to place much emphasis on a leftist discourse legitimizing extractivism, which sought to discredit and reduce any criticism or questioning of extractivist processes of depredation and dispossession to a simplistic environmentalist position sponsored by imperialism.

The other problem is that extractivism is addictive. The promise from the left is that extractivism will make it possible to generate a significant fiscal surplus that will then be made available for the common good. They argue that this will lead to the transformation of the country’s productive matrix, which will in turn allow extractivism to be left behind. But experience shows us otherwise.

An illustrative example is the “Investment Projection of the Bolivian State 2010-2015,” which was presented in 2010 by then Minister of Economy and current President Arce. In the midst of the commodity boom, this plan concentrated 81 percent of public investment in extractive sectors or activities linked to extractivism. Meanwhile, health, education, small scale rural development, science and technology, among many other sectors essential to improve social welfare, did not exceed one percent of total public investment each.

Thus, when raw materials had higher prices, the objective seems to have been –in the words of a dear friend– “to fill the country with holes, take everything possible, and sell it off.” This logic is not very different from neoliberalism. Both share the notion of uninterrupted economic growth with a short-term vision, without considering the multiple forms of dispossession that are set in motion when growth becomes an end in itself.

Left-wing and right-wing governments in the region rely on increases in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a central indicator to demonstrate the effectiveness of their policies. And not one among them seems to care about the consequences.

Continuity in Times of Crisis

International commodity prices have plummeted since 2016. Due to the policies described above, this had a negative impact on Bolivia’s trade balance: exports decreased dramatically and the balance became a deficit. Trade imbalance began to reduce international reserves and gave rise to greater indebtedness.

The dollars had to come from somewhere to maintain import levels. By 2019, the signs of an economic recession were evident. Subsequently, the post-election political crisis and the coronavirus pandemic pushed the country towards an economic crisis that has not yet hit bottom.

As in most countries in the world, GDP growth in Bolivia was negative in 2020. However, the previous deterioration of economic indicators, which not only included a decrease in exports, but also an increase in unemployment and a high fiscal deficit meant that the country had to take on new debt to face the crisis.

Bolivia’s external debt, mainly with multilateral organizations, has been systematically increasing in recent years, so much so that between 2014 and 2021 it doubled, reaching historic records. On the other hand, the internal debt –of which the Central Bank is the main lender– also doubled between 2019 and 2021, going from US$6 billion to more than US$13 billion, according to the latest data published by the Fundación Jubilee.

All in all, the impacts of the crises in Bolivia are wide-ranging. But there are two dimensions that are worth highlighting: the one that has to do with the decrease in fiscal revenue and the other, which has to do with the increase in unemployment and informality. Both dimensions are accompanied by the reiteration of justifications to give continuity to economic processes related to extractivism.

Falling fiscal revenue is no small problem for a corporatist state. Over the last year, the Bolivian state has increased resources to finance gas exploration by hundreds of millions of dollars. At this time, the government in La Paz is considering modifying hydrocarbon regulations to encourage the entry of transnational capital.

Apart from its well-known environmental impacts, the expansion of the gas frontier leads to attacks on Indigenous and peasant community organizations, as is the case in Tariquía, in the south of the country; in the North Amazon, in the department of Pando and in other regions rich in natural gas.

But the Bolivian state is not only concerned with revenues. It also has to manage social unrest derived from the economic crisis and the increase in unemployment. Bolivia is a country characterized by a high level of informality, however in recent years, informal activities linked to extractive processes have increased substantially. The Bolivian state encourages and allows irregular extractive activities that generate income for social sectors that would otherwise have difficulty obtaining economic income.

Cooperative mining provides a very clear example. Mining cooperatives, which use socialist symbols and discourses of struggle, have transformed into true extraction companies –mining mainly gold– in different parts of the country. In contravention of mining regulations, they fill Bolivian rivers with mercury, and have been linked with the introduction of non-state armed groups into nature reserves, such as the Madidi National Park.

Hundreds of thousands of workers are employed by mining cooperatives (an exact number is not known), in addition to upper leadership, that takes home millions in profit, an amount that has increased in recent years as a result of the economic crisis.

Agribusiness, understood as a neo-extractive activity, has also increased its footprint in recent years and the consequences have become even more wide spread. The expansion of the agricultural frontier for the production of transgenic oilseeds is now the main cause of the forest fires that ravage the Amazon region of Bolivia every year. In recent years, different governments have had a fairly similar policy in this regard: promote the expansion of the agricultural frontier through lenient regulations and economic support, including with funds that should have been used to alleviate the health emergency.

Extractivism and its attendant socioeconomic effects are becoming a means of managing the economic crisis and consequent social unrest. In its productive and redistributive matrix of capital surplus, Bolivia today does not display significant differences from the country inherited from the colony, from the republic or from the neoliberal state.

Political narratives can vary depending on the circumstances, emphasizing elements of liberalism or progressivism, depending on who is in power. But no matter who is in the presidency, extractivism is the only economic horizon of the Bolivian state. Questioning extractivism is urgent and necessary: it is not an environmentalist cliché, but rather a profound critique of the way inequalities and hierarchies are built and reproduced on a planet in crisis.

This extractive horizon doesn’t appear to be negotiable in the short or medium term in Bolvia. Neither the Arce government, nor the left articulated around the MÁS, much less the right, which is trying to take over regional and local governments, have an economic vision sustained in anything other than vulgar extractivism. The most concerning is that this horizon has permeated and become normalized in society as a whole, including among popular sectors. This has been aggravated by intense political polarization, which ends up making the deepest and most serious problems invisible. There are but a handful of renewed struggles, like land defense and feminist organizing, that have the capacity and willingness to incorporate more complex discussions about these issues into their organizing practice.

 

NO to NATO, or the identity crisis of the Spanish left

By: April 25, 2022
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The terrible images reaching us after the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Kyiv region reveal the scope of the Russian offensive. These images force political leaders to unanimously condemn Putin’s attack on Ukraine, including Putin’s natural allies (the far-right). In this context, some of the most radical among us feel the need to express -if only through an aesthetic gesture- their aversion to national unanimity. For example, Members of Parliament (MPs) from the CUP (Catalan pro-independence radical left) and the BNG (Galician nationalist left) as well as the Secretary General of the PCE (Communist Party) refused to applaud Ukrainian President Zelensky when he addressed the Spanish Parliament.

This aesthetic gesture is hardly surprising. Rather, it is the logical consequence of the analysis and positions of the Spanish left on the Ukrainian situation. Albert Botrán (CUP MP) explains the meaning of his gesture in his article “Applauding Zelensky,” in which he begins by stating that “Only Putin is responsible for the Russian occupation of Ukraine,” only to contradict himself in the following paragraph by denouncing the “responsibilities” of the other powers and the Ukrainian state. While only four MPs pushed their logic to its conclusion by refusing to applaud Zelensky, the logic of “Well yes, but actually no” is practically unanimous within the Spanish radical left, which (1) designates the NATO as (at least) co-responsible for the conflict, and therefore (2) opposes any concrete material support to the Ukrainian armed resistance in order to “prevent escalation” and (3) systematically points out (and often exaggerates) all the flaws of the Ukrainian government/state. This then serves in practice as a pretext for these leftists keeping their distance from all sections of the Ukrainian population, and leaving them alone in the face of the Russian imperialist attack.

The inconsistency of this position is striking. The obsession with the responsibility of NATO is not justified by concrete analysis of the concrete situation, as our Syrian and Ukrainian comrades have repeatedly pointed out.

Although this position is neither unique nor exclusive to the Spanish left — it exists widely throughout Western Europe — the peculiarity of Spain and of other countries in southern Europe is that this position is hegemonic and leaves little or no room for contradiction.

The analysis that the Spanish left makes of the situation in Ukraine is far from reality. The left does not seek to understand the situation, but rather responds to its own internal interests: the need for a “radical” identity affirmation of an increasingly institutionalised left, combined with a lack of interest in our neighbours on the periphery of Europe that makes them the ideal means of this self-affirmation.

NO TO NATO: An identity statement

Opposition to NATO is an identity mark of the “true” left in the Spanish state. Spain’s membership in NATO, which was ratified in a referendum held in 1986, is a major symbol of the institutionalization of the PSOE and its betrayal of the left and the working classes in the country. Indeed, the PSOE came to power in 1982 with the slogan “NATO, no entry yet,” only to lead, in 1986, the “Yes” campaign, which narrowly won in the referendum, despite the massive opposition of the left, which grouped in the Civic Platform for Spain’s Exit from NATO. This left rejection was consolidated shortly after into the electoral coalition Izquierda Unida (United Left).

Over the past decade, important sectors of the Spanish radical left have moved from a disruptive strategy to a strategy of “governability,” facing numerous contradictions and internal tensions in this process. The trajectories of the CUP since 2011 and of Podemos since 2014 are illustrative of this process of institutionalization of the left, with all its contradictions. Needless to say, CUP and Podemos are very different in terms of their functioning, organization and positioning on the political spectrum. The Catalan and Spanish state contexts are very different, and Podemos is a much more vertical and institutionalized formation than the CUP.

Despite these notable differences, both formations have gone through a process of institutionalization. As a result, both have suffered moments of internal rupture in the last two years. Both formations constantly strive to distinguish themselves from their institutional allies (from their PSOE partners inside the Spanish government in the case of Podemos). The reality faced by CUP and Podemos is that institutionalization is incompatible with rupture and that, while both might be necessary in any process of social transformation, they can hardly be embodied by the same political agent. The crisis between Yolanda Díaz, Minister of Labour and Social Economy from Unidas Podemos, who supported Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (PSOE) in supplying arms to Ukraine- and the rest of the Unidas Podemos team who accuse the PSOE of being “the party of war” perfectly illustrates this tension.

Where do the Ukrainians fit in all this?

In this context, the war in Ukraine presents itself as an ideal opportunity for demarcation and identity reaffirmation by the radical anti-Atlanticist left, contrasting itself to the institutional, monarchist, Atlanticist “left,” sold to the system and to the US interests, and ultimately embodied by the PSOE. But what allows this in Spain — as in the rest of Western Europe — is that, basically, whatever happens in Ukraine only matters to us to the extent that it can affect us directly: Ukrainians themselves matter little to us. As Oriental “others,” they can be instrumentalized at will to fit the logic of our own narratives.

This narrative of the Spanish radical left deliberately obscures the participation of socialist, anarchist and feminist comrades in the Ukrainian resistance, while magnifying the weight of Ukraine’s far-right and the authoritarianism of the Ukrainian government. For example, suspicion towards Zelensky and certain sectors of the Ukrainian resistance is repeatedly used by the radical left to justify distancing from the Ukrainian resistance as a whole, and refusing any concrete solidarity. This trend is well illustrated by a recent tweet by Álvaro Aguilera, coordinator of Izquierda Unida (IU) in Madrid, accusing Zelensky of being a “danger to peace” as well as “heir to a coup that outlawed the Communist Party and 11 others.” CUP MP Albert Botrán has also denounced the outlawing of the Ukrainian Communist Party (which actually took place in 2015, before Zelensky came to power in 2019) as well as the recent banning of several parties accused of being pro-Russian. Álvaro Aguilera, Albert Botrán and their respective organizations, of course, do not have -nor have they ever had- any connection with the conservative, racist and anti-feminist Ukrainian Communist Party, which defended the death penalty, the traditional family, opposed the reproductive rights of women and persecuted lgtbqi+ people, despite keeping the “communist party” name for historical reasons.

There is, however, a feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist left in Ukraine that is resisting the Russian invasion with and without arms, while continuing to oppose Zelensky’s policies. Izquierda Unida and the CUP do not have direct relations with this left, because they do not want to. If they wanted, it would be easy, since their partner organizations from countries such as France, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany work closely with this Ukrainian left and other organizations from Eastern Europe in the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU). The representatives of the CUP and IU prefer to pretend that this Ukrainian left and this internationalist space do not exist, and set themselves up as defenders of a fantasized and non-existent left which would not be part of the Ukrainian resistance, but would be squashed by it.

This logic is not exclusive to IU or the CUP. Podemos participated in the European Forum against the war, held in Rome at the initiative of the Italian coalition Potere al Popolo, with the stated objective to articulate a European anti-war movement but with its first two principles being opposition to supplying arms to Ukraine and opposition to sanctions against Russia. The movement, needless to say, does not have any Ukrainian representatives, and ignores their demands.

Spanish feminists also launched a transnational feminist manifesto with 150 signatures from prominent feminists from Europe and the Americas. Among them, not a single feminist from post-Soviet Europe. Their absence is obvious in the content, which contradicts the demands of Ukrainian feminists. Indeed, some western feminists who are in close contact with Ukrainian and Polish feminists have refused to sign this manifesto.

If what was really at stake for the Spanish left was the internal balance of forces of the Ukrainian resistance, wouldn’t it be more logical to establish close ties with the anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal and  anti-racist left in Ukraine to strengthen it as much as possible? The problem for the Spanish left is that this particular Ukrainian left, the real one, is of no use to them, because it does not fit into their demarcation strategy. In order for them to be able to keep telling the same story, it is necessary to silence and make invisible the progressive sectors of the Ukrainian resistance, denying them any concrete solidarity, which has the consequence of weakening the left in Ukraine. Meanwhile, of course, Ukrainian left activists, however, do not stop challenging us: they participate in the internationalist networks, they write to us from under the bombs and in English, they translate their work into Spanish and they would welcome you with open arms in the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU).

The confusionist drift and the political responsibility of the left

The problem with clinging to an identity position is that it locks us into a biased interpretation of reality that runs the risk of entering dangerous waters. By the time the Spanish left finally understands that this one time the problem is not NATO, that Putin poses a real danger to Ukrainians, to Russians, and potentially to the rest of Europe, the conspiracist and denialist narrative will have already taken hold. Actually, it is already in place. The editor of El Diario, Ignacio Escolar recently explained that many readers are unsubscribing, accusing El Diario of being funded by NATO.

The Spanish and the Western European left’s obsession with NATO has turned many activists into the useful idiots of Russian imperialism, and the main relays of Kremlin propaganda. The made-in-Kremlin rhetoric of “NATO expansion” and “the denazification of Ukraine” is only too reminiscent of the neo-Francoist revisionism which delegitimizes the Second Spanish Republic to justify the fascist coup. Ukraine is far from being a perfect or contradiction-free country, but it is (or at least was before the invasion) preferable to Russia in all areas: democratic participation, civil and political rights, freedom of expression, etc.

By insisting on this biased reading, the Spanish left contributes to sowing confusion in a historical context marked by political disaffection and distrust of institutions, all of which is conducive to the propagation of conspiracy theories. After Zelensky’s speech before the Spanish Parliament — in which he made a parallelism between the massacres of Bucha and Gernika (Guernica) — the Spanish far-right took refuge in Francoist revisionism to deny Gernika, while denialism about the massacres in Ukraine was deployed in the left-wing sectors of Spanish social media. The communist intellectual and activist Manuel Delgado posted on his social networks “I believe nothing of what they tell us about what is happening in Ukraine. Nothing at all.”

The only antidote to this denialism, specific to identity withdrawal that turns its back on reality, is concrete internationalist practice. Any political orientation that does not develop in a permanent dialogue with praxis is deficient. The Spanish left will not be able to take relevant internationalist positions until it actively practices internationalism. The Spanish left will not understand anything of what is happening in Ukraine until it becomes willing to discuss with the Ukrainian left.

 

This is an English translation of an article that originally appeared in Spanish.

Why the Left Must Support Arms for Ukraine!

By: April 20, 2022
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[Note: This article was originally submitted to Jacobin in the hope of initiating a debate among the radical left. It was rejected.]

In a recent article in Jacobin, “What the Left’s Critics Ignore About Military Solutions to Ukraine,” Branko Marcetic argues that the left should oppose Western military aid to Ukraine. Marcetic condemns the Russian invasion and believes the Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves, but he insists they should not get arms from the United States or its allies. His case is quite unconvincing.

The first thing to note about Marcetic’s argument is that several times he says he is criticizing those leftists who call for sending “offensive” weapons to Kyiv. But this is a totally misleading way of putting things. No one on the left has called for the delivery of “offensive” weapons. An offensive weapon would be one that could attack Russia, rather than defend Ukraine. The distinction between such weapons is not always a sharp one, but, for example, antitank and anti-aircraft weapons can be used defensively against Russian forces in or over Ukrainian territory, while intermediate-range ballistic missiles could reach Russia. The transfer of weapons that would enable Ukraine to attack Russia itself has not been proposed by any one on the left. Those leftists who have explicitly discussed offensive weapons have done so precisely to reject their being provided to Ukraine.

Marcetic questions whether Western military aid has actually made any difference, suggesting that the Russian Army’s failures were due simply to its incompetence. Does he really think an unarmed Ukraine could have repelled even an inept Russian invasion? But then, he goes on to argue that

if Western military aid really has prevented a swift Ukrainian defeat against a Russian military not yet fighting at full capacity, then that has also risked simply prolonging the war and Ukrainian suffering, and eventually leading Moscow to ramp up the brutality of its assault as a solution to the stalemate.

It’s true that fighting back always carries the risk of prolonging a war and the suffering. That’s why we would never press the defenders from afar to fight on. This is a decision for the defenders to make themselves: they will bear the consequences and so only they can decide if the dangers of prolonging the fighting outweigh the costs of defeat. We say, however, that if and only if the victims of an unjust attack want to resist, they should be given the means to do so. Marcetic’s view seems to be that it is up to him and other outsiders to decide whether surrender is a better course than resistance. As Volodymyr Artiukh, a Ukrainian socialist and an editor of Commons: Journal of Social Criticism, a leftwing Ukrainian publication, remarked after Russia’s retreat from the towns and villages around Kiev revealed the brutal and systematic massacre of civilians:

This is graphic, but not surprising or something one could not predict. There is also no reason to think this will not repeat in other occupied places. This raises the following question. What is the cost of a ban on supplying weapons to Ukraine’s army that many on the left advocate? I think that it is legitimate to debate the issue of supplying weapons. There are reasons pro and contra.

But those who take a stance should also acknowledge the costs and take the responsibility for such a stance.

And the possible costs are increasingly looking horrendous.

Every time people fighting a just war are provided with the means to defend themselves, there is a danger that it will lead to more suffering. Soviet and Chinese arms to Vietnam gave the North Vietnamese and the NLF the ability to fight on and may, in retrospect, have caused more suffering to the people of Vietnam, than, say, the decision of the Danish government not to have resisted the Nazi invasion of its country in 1940. Any feeling person would be concerned about this, but did this mean that the international left should have called for Moscow and Beijing to stop their arms deliveries to Vietnam, to confine their support to non-military approaches? Or should they have left this decision up to the Vietnamese and backed their right to get the weapons they needed and requested?

Now it might be that at some point in a conflict one has reason to believe that the decision to continue fighting is being made not by the people of the nation under attack but by an elite undemocratically deciding in the name of the people. None of the reporting from Ukraine suggests that Zelensky is compelling the population to fight on against their wishes. And nothing suggests that it is Ukrainian government intransigence in negotiations that is keeping the war going, unless refusing total surrender is intransigence. (Ukraine has offered, in return for international guarantees, to proclaim itself a neutral state, promising not to join any military coalitions or host any foreign military bases or troop contingents and to refrain from developing nuclear weapons, and to resolve issues related to Crimea through negotiations with Russia for a period of 15 years, pledging not to try to resolve these issues by military means.)

Marcetic asks:

But is the call for providing offensive support, practicalities be damned, to a country being invaded or repressed by a larger power really a principle today’s liberal interventionists would apply consistently?

Note again the use of the word “offensive” to describe the weapons. And note his reference to “liberal interventionists” as a way of implying that supporting Ukraine’s right to self-defense somehow necessarily makes you a “liberal interventionist” rather than a socialist internationalist. In any event, however, no one is damning practicalities. No one is proposing taking actions that risk world war. If Marcetic thinks otherwise, he needs to name those who have made such proposals and not imply that this charge applies to those who expressly oppose them.

Marcetic proposes several analogies to support his opposition to U.S. arms for Ukraine. No one, he says, called for China or Russia to deliver weapons to Iraq in 2003, even though we opposed the U.S. invasion. But the reason no one called for external arms to Saddam Hussein is that he was a murderous dictator ruling over a people unwilling to fight on his behalf, as evidenced by the lack of popular opposition to the invasion. In another analogy, Marcetic asks

should the Left abandon its demands for Washington to broker and actually implement a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians, and instead push for sending billions of dollars of weapons to Hamas in Gaza?

But this is silly. Weapons should be sent to allow people to defend themselves in a just war only when there is no non-violent way to defend them. In the case of Israel-Palestine, the United States doesn’t have to apply military force against Israel to get it to remove its boot from the Palestinians’ necks. It needs only to stop supporting Israel. If Washington announced that it was going to support Security Council sanctions against Israel and cut off its military aid, it’s hard to imagine Israel continuing its violations of international and humanitarian law. And if Israel did continue, a Security Council resolution authorizing peacekeepers or a no-fly zone over Gaza to protect Palestinians would be appropriate—and possible if Washington, as in this highly unrealistic scenario, changed its position.

There are countless cases where the United States had only to give the word to get its brutal subordinates to desist. So in 1986, it was unnecessary to send arms to the People’s Power protesters in the Philippines calling on Marcos to step down. All that was needed was for a Senator close to Reagan to call the Philippine dictator on the phone and say the time had come to leave. Marcos was on the next plane out of the country.

Marcetic raises the problem of the far-right Azov brigade (and, no surprise, it’s a photo of Azov veterans that accompanies Marcetic’s article). He asks:

What might happen if such groups have ready access to the copious weaponry now spreading through the country? What might it mean for the future of Ukraine’s brittle democracy or even Zelensky’s rule? What could it mean for vulnerable minorities like the Roma and LGBTQ community, both of which have been serially targeted with violence by these groups? How might it impact the prospects for a lasting peace, or at least stability, in the region once the war ends?

But what does Marcetic think it will mean for Ukraine’s brittle democracy if the country is conquered by its more authoritarian neighbor?

What will it mean for Ukraine’s sexual minorities if Kyiv is defeated by an enemy that considers LGBTQ rights to be a weapon used by the West to weaken and destabilize Russia? Societal prejudice has long made life difficult for LGBTQ Ukrainians; nevertheless, Ukraine had been before the war a refuge for LGBTQ people from elsewhere in Eastern Europe. As the co-founder of Ukrainian Pride explained, “If Russia wins, LGBTQ people in Ukraine will lose everything they have achieved in recent years.” This is why many members of Ukraine’s LGBTQ community have been fighting in the Ukrainian army.

Likewise, Roma have indeed been terribly treated in Ukraine, but their view of what a Russian victory would mean for them can be seen in the fact that they are willingly volunteering to defend Ukraine. As Sean Benstead has written:

Despite Putin’s bogus claims of a fascist junta in Kiev, the liberal democratic state—however incompetent and corrupted by institutional prejudice—retains semi-responsive democratic institutions, and at least the promise of a return to a less authoritarian order once peace has returned. To Ukrainian Roma, this is worth defending with their lives. Within the scope of the Ukrainian liberal democratic state, however damaged and dysfunctional, it is still possible to build social movements, benefit from the counsel of human rights organizations, and gain concessions from political and civil institutions.

But of course, neither Roma nor the LGBTQ community nor democratic activists in general can defend the limited rights they have secured if they don’t have weapons.

Ukraine’s left knows all about rightwing violence; they have faced it themselves. But this has not led them to call for Ukraine to be denied arms. Taras Bilous of the Ukrainian democratic socialist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh wrote on Twitter:

Before the war, I did everything I could with this problem. After I showed up at an anti-fascist protest with a picket sign calling for the disbanding of the far-Right Azov regiment (pictured) I was threatened and had to hide for some time.

Nevertheless, he has no doubts that social progress requires Ukraine getting arms to defend itself, even if this means that some of the arms will end up in the hands of far-right fighters, who represent a small fraction of Ukraine’s armed forces.

Marcetic goes on to discuss the case of the Spanish civil war. While it made sense for the left to call for sending arms to the Spanish Republic, he says, that’s no argument for arming Ukraine: “the Spanish were fighting fascists, while in this case the outcome of Western policy is indirectly arming fascists.” This is a disgraceful formulation. The Ukrainians are “fighting fascists”—they are trying to repel a brutal, rightwing, imperialist, ethnonationalist invader that denies the existence of their state and their people. And recall that there were rotten folks on the side of the Spanish Republic, and indeed they held a much stronger position in Spain than the small number of fascists do in Ukraine.

But don’t get me wrong, says Marcetic: “That of course doesn’t mean Ukraine isn’t deserving of our solidarity and support, but it does mean one should think carefully about the form that support takes.” Translation: you have our solidarity and support except insofar as it may extend to actually allowing you the means to defend yourself.

Marcetic worries that U.S. and British officials are hoping to turn Ukraine into a repeat of Afghanistan, creating a quagmire for Russia no matter the human cost. So, yes, if Washington or London were forcing weapons on Ukraine despite its wish to surrender, that would be morally unacceptable. But that is the opposite of what is going on. As Gilbert Achcar has noted, “not a single day has passed since the Russian invasion began without the Ukrainian president publicly blaming NATO powers for not sending enough weapons, both quantitatively and qualitatively.”

Can we really say to Ukrainians: for your own good we are going to turn a deaf ear to your pleas for the means of defending yourselves?

 

Stephen R. Shalom is on the editorial board of New Politics. He is a member of DSA, Internationalism from Below, and Jewish Voice for Peace.

U.K. War Resister Reflects On Troubled State of “Veteranhood”

By: , April 18, 2022
Book cover "Veteranhood"
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Military service in the U.S. and the U.K. promised more than it ever delivered for many post-9/11 volunteers. As sociologist and Vietnam vet Jerry Lembcke observes, “This generation of veterans went off to Iraq and Afghanistan with more hoopla than any generation since World War II. But a lot of them, particularly the men, came back deflated and disappointed with the experience they had. It did not live up to the mythology of what war is supposed to be, because there is no glory in these inglorious wars.”

Adding insult to moral injury, hundreds of thousands of modern-day veterans developed long-term medical or mental health conditions that were service related.  If these afflictions affected their job performance while still on active duty, the Department of Defense (DOD) thanked many of them for their service by drumming them out in punitive fashion. Depending on their discharge status, many became ineligible for free healthcare provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) or access to free higher education via GI Bill benefits. Under the rules of most old guard veterans’ organizations, they were not even welcome at their local post of the American Legion or Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Close readers of Joe Glenton’s new book, Veteranhood: Hope and Rage in British Ex-Military Life (Repeater Books) will be surprised to learn that any Brit who served for even a single day is considered a veteran. Medical care is, of course, less of a concern to former military personnel in a nation where a VA-style National Health Service covers everyone, plus higher education remains far more affordable than in the U.S. And even someone like Glenton–who went AWOL to avoid a second tour of duty in Afghanistan and then was court-martialed for it—later received a package in the mail which welcomed him to the brotherhood and sisterhood of former squaddies. It included, he reports, “one of the small enamel veterans’ badges widely worn among the ex-forces community and a bundle of brochures about getting on in post-military life.”

This UK peculiarity aside, Glenton’s account of how post 9/11 veterans in his country are “getting on” in civilian life reveals many striking parallels with the readjustment problems of their counterparts in the U.S. Now a free-lance military affairs correspondent for the Guardian, the Independent, and other papers, Glenton first wrote about his experience in uniform and afterwards in Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror (Verso). In that 2013 book, he confessed that his own enlistment decision was made by “a chump ready made for the army, indifferent, apolitical, and working class.” In rural Yorkshire, “life was hard, we were poor, and this took its toll,” via teenage drinking, drug use, housing insecurity, and minimum wage work.

After Al Qaeda recruits toppled the twin towers in Manhattan, Tony Blair’s Labour government rallied to the side of the Bush Administration. For Glenton, and many other working-class lads on both sides of the Atlantic, this terrorist attack was “the call to arms of the age; of my age.” As his recruiting station officer promised, he “would be paid and there would be ‘three meals a day and a roof over your head’ and girls would queue to swoon over me and my soldier friends.” There would be other opportunities as well, including one stressed on a ‘leaving card’ from his co-workers, on his last day in a restaurant job: “Make sure you kill some ragheads!”

Invaders, Not Guests

During Glenton’s subsequent year-long deployment in Afghanistan, he never got a chance to do that personally, confined as he was to a “logistics park” at Kandahar Airport. As an ammunition store man in the Royal Logistics Corps, he doled out Hellfire missiles and other high explosives “at an astonishing rate,” to fellow soldiers who were not being welcomed as “peacekeepers” outside the wire. Even through Glenton had limited contact with Afghan nationals, the nature of the war began to sink in. “We were not guests, but invaders. We were not friends of the Afghan people, we were occupiers…Insurgencies of the scale we were seeing cannot happen without popular support. I did not have to be a general to recognize this.”

Three years into his military career and recently promoted to lance corporal, Glenton found himself back in England but resolutely opposed to doing another tour in Afghanistan. “I had joined the army half meaning to help people, to do something to improve the conditions of other people’s lives, not to occupy other people’s countries under the pretext of securing my own.” To avoid another combat deployment, he went into exile in Australia. Returning home after two years away, he faced charges of desertion which carried a prison sentence of ten years or more.

The rest of Glenton’s first book tells the story of how his court-martial  backfired on the Ministry of Defense (MOD). While awaiting trial but initially not confined to the brig, he became a high-profile peace campaigner. He spoke at Stop The War Coalition meetings, did TV, radio, and newspaper interviews, and personally delivered a letter to then-PM Gordon Brown, at #10 Downing Street, which called for the withdrawal of all British troops from Afghanistan. As part of a deal with the prosecution, Glenton eventually pleaded guilty– to the lesser charge of going AWOL—and served four months of a nine-month sentence in a military prison.

On his first night there, “alone and locked in a single cell,” he nevertheless felt liberated. He had found his calling as “an anti-imperialist activist,” and, after his release, completed university studies that helped him become a journalist, film-maker, and award-winning author. In Veteranhood, Glenton returns to the subject of how ending up in the “soldier box,” as he calls it, can have a lasting personal and political impact. In the UK, as in the US, military training “discourages critical thought” and “promotes antagonism” between those who serve and the vast majority of civilians who don’t. Even the author finds himself straddling the resulting “civilian-soldier” divide. After a decade of involvement in left-wing politics, including general election campaigning for Jeremy Corbin, Glenton still finds “dealing with civvies a trial. In moments of regression, they appear to me as ponderously slow, indecisive, dithering, governed by unmanly levels of self-doubt.”

Such estrangement didn’t exist, to the same degree, during the heyday of 21st century “citizen armies,” which included many volunteers and draftees with higher levels of class consciousness. As Glenton notes, “the modern British military has little in common with the military of WWII. Structurally, technologically, ideologically, and morally, these are two different organizations. One was a vast conscript army built…to fight fascism. The other is a small, rather backwards, and culturally separatist professional force.” Veterans of World War II “were far more likely to come from communities with a powerful sense of their role in the economy, with traditions and experiences of class solidarity and trade unionism.”

Some even participated in the so-called “Cairo Parliaments,” a series of quickly shut-down gatherings of active duty British troops stationed in Egypt. There, under left influence, they debated and voted on proposals for post-war reforms like nationalizing banks and mines, increasing pensions and access to higher education, and building four million affordable homes. In contrast, modern day vets exist in a world, shaped by Thatcherism and individualism, “in which traditional working-class organizations and communities have been diminished and replaced with a kind of warrior-ideal-meets-neoliberalism” As a result, too many ex-soldiers “cling to the only strong identity they have—that of the veteran.” And, as Glenton documents, that’s “an identity concocted by the very institutions that have wronged them”

Blazers or Something Better?

The resulting form of “identity politics” manifests itself, in often negative but some positive ways, across the spectrum. In his own book-writing quest to find “a better way of being a veteran,” Glenton bridles at the facile assumption that his former comrades constitute a solid “right-wing bloc whose politics do not extend much beyond braying racism and lagged-up squadrismo.” Instead, his journalistic portrait of the more than 2 million UK citizens who served in the military reveals them to be “a divided, fractious, and politically divergent group.”

The author does acknowledge that “far right gatherings always seem to include military veterans—bitter men, wraiths in berets,” like those who joined the militant defense of Whitehall statuary about to be targeted by Black Lives Matter protestors. Seven months later, ex-military personnel were disproportionately involved in storming the U.S. Capitol to prevent Donald Trump from being toppled. As Glenton observes, that event—which featured former soldiers stacking up in tight formation to breach the building–became “an upscaled and vastly more lethal American version of our July 2020 anti-BLM riot.”

Glenton devotes a whole chapter to critiquing what he calls Blazerism”— mainstream vet culture, with its hosts of “sartorial signifiers—berets, medals, regimental ties, and blazers.” While Blazers may be vocally anti-socialist and anti-liberal in their social media barrages and voting patterns, they are, as Glenton reveals, quite collectivist within their own “ex-forces community.” For example, many are devoted to British Legion-backed charitable work, while always ready “to play homeless ex-serviceman off against migrants and civilian rough sleepers,” who are not among the deserving poor. The century-old Legion soldiers on “as a monolithic, highly political corporate charity and ultimate custodian of Remembrance.” At the other end of the spectrum, Glenton lauds the public education and organizing activity of Veterans for Peace UK. With far fewer foot soldiers, VFP-UK tries to counter “the revanchist nostalgia of Blazerism” by fostering a veteran identity based on broad left values. According to the author, members of the group also tap into what one ex-military nurse calls the “positive experience of their service—the camaraderie, being part of team, and having a sense of purpose.”

Playing The Veteran Card

Glenton is a fierce and hilarious critic of special operators who’ve turned themselves into celebrity vets. Special Forces veteran Ant Middleton is among those, on both sides of the Atlantic, who have “monetized” their military service by peddling books, apparel, or other products under a newly acquired personal brand. Thanks to his second career as a television personality, best-selling author, and “positivity guru,” Middleton raked in four million British pounds in 2021 alone, according to the Sun (which employed him as its “Ask Ant” columnist). As Glenton asks: “Are the people who lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan really the people to dish out life advice? Can they supercharge your Bitcoin scam? Can former Navy SEAL Hank McMassive’s ten-point warrior code get you through a long shift at a Nottingham call center? Should you buy their new brand of Predator Drone Coffee.”

The author’s answer is a resounding “No” but that hasn’t stopped major parties in Britain and the US from marketing more veterans themselves as a new breed of politician, somehow better than the rest. The distinct brand of these “service candidates” is their unassailable patriotism and demonstrated past devotion to a cause greater than themselves. Nevertheless, as Glenton reports, “the ex-military people who have found their way into Parliament are mostly conservative former officers,” like Captain Johnny Mercer, Tory Minister for Veterans (until his April 2021 sacking) and “the sullen personification of a failed officer corps.”

Mercer’s counterparts in Labour can be found in its Friends of the Armed Forces.  Resurrected in 2020 by Sir Keir Starmer, this group provides little counter-weight to “reactionary ex-servicemen’s dominance in public life” because it’s essentially “a stage prop for the Labour Right.” And, as we document in a forthcoming book, the same is true of the corporate Democrats who play the veteran card in US politics. As members of Congress, they rubber-stamp ever bigger Pentagon budgets, and even betray other veterans by trying to privatize the NHS-style health care system that serves nine million former enlisted personnel.

Not surprisingly, Glenton faults New Labour for initially importing the “American model of soldier-worship.” When the author joined the army in 2004, “soldiers were not popular and veterans were barely mentioned in the press.” In the period since then, the British state, its generals, MPs, the media, and military charities have engaged in what Glenton calls “a conscious campaign to re-popularize the military.” This “militarisation offensive” was necessary because millions of UK citizens were not big fans of the disastrous foreign interventions backed by Tony Blair. Labour’s response to that domestic opinion problem was outlined in a 2018 “Report of Inquiry into National Recognition of Our Armed Forces,” which included a foreword by then PM Gordon Brown himself. According to Glenton, the report became “an instruction manual for militarists looking to secure public support for war or reduce, to a tolerable level, active public opposition to military occupations” of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The fruits of this long-term project–embraced even more wholeheartedly by the Tories—are often on display. They included mandatory professions of support for the troops by “any parliamentarian broaching a defence topic; the Sun’s cretinous annual military awards and Turbo-Remembrancing; the careful positioning of uniformed service personnel at sports matches; and ardent poppy nationalism.”

Arrayed against this mainstream celebration of “veteranhood” (and the universal “heroism” in uniform that always precedes it) is the small cohort of “critical veterans” championed by the author. Those interviewed by Glenton and profiled in his book remain engaged in various forms of left activism—BLM, the climate movement, renter’s unions and trade unions, the Northern Independence Party, Irish and anti-monarchical Republicanism, anti-fascism, and advocacy for Scottish independence. If nothing else, he concludes, they are helping to inform the left’s own “outsider perspectives on war, the military, and veterans” by dispelling harmful but popular myths about all three.

Harsh Critique of Chomsky on Ukraine

By: April 18, 2022
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On April 8, Noam Chomsky was in a dialogue with Bill Fletcher, Jr. live on The Real News.  Fletcher is a syndicated columnist, a regular media commentator and the former president of the TransAfrica Forum.  The discussion was called “A Left Response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.”  Though Chomsky denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine, calling it a crime of aggression, it wouldn’t be far wrong to say Chomsky placed all of the blame for Russia’s attack on the U.S. government.  The U.S., he said, crossed obvious “red lines” when it was clear that Russia would react violently.

The title of the event should have been “Chomsky Calls for Realpolitik for the 21st century.” All the authorities he quoted in support of his arguments were strategists, diplomats, and ambassadors, like George Kennan, Jack Matlock, Chas Freeman, CIA directors and the like.  These are “realists,” political theorists in a tradition going back all the way to Machiavelli that rejected talking about how states should act and instead talked about how they did act and how a “prince” or statesman had to be realistic and not try to go against the flow.  Realists want nations to respect great powers’ “spheres of influence,” “national interests,” the balance of power, etc. and rail against human rights, democracy, equality or other moral considerations as a major concern for foreign policy.

Now, what has any of that have to do with us on the Left?  Where are the matters dear to us like democracy, equality, class and national self-determination? In fact, not a single leftist was mentioned by Chomsky in his hour-long interview.

Fletcher mentions that in his final speech before the invasion, Putin didn’t emphasize the supposed threat of NATO but claimed that Ukraine had no legitimate reason to exist.  Chomsky agrees (13:55 ) that Putin has said those things, but then immediately minimizes them and brings up a Putin quote that “anyone who wants to reestablish the Soviet Union with its former borders is out of its mind.”  He says Russia is really not that strong with an economy the size of Italy.  Then he makes an astounding comment. At 15:40 he says, “It’s not about to conquer anybody, inconceivable.” That’s a pretty bizarre statement, seeing that Russia was invading Ukraine right as he spoke.  Did he mean Russia is not going to conquer all of the old Soviet Union’s empire?  Well, he sure didn’t say it.

In the next sentence, Chomsky says, “Ukraine is indeed a special case as it’s been for 30 years.” He then goes on to say there were other statements about Russia’s war goals made by Russia’s foreign minister that explained the main desire of Russia was for neutralization and demilitarization of Ukraine, and security for the Donbas region.  So Chomsky wants us to think that Lavrov and other Putin flunkies are controlling what Russia really wants, not the gent who speaks to his underlings from one side of that very long table.

Chomsky detailed the assurances made to Gorbachev and others that if the Soviet Union (in 1990) allowed Germany to reunite and join NATO then NATO would not advance “one inch” further eastward.  These verbal promises were made though there was nothing as solid as a treaty defining this.  On the other hand Chomsky did not mention the written and signed 1994 Budapest Memorandum which guaranteed in writing that Russia and the US and Britain would respect Ukraine’s then existing 40-year-old borders.  When Fletcher brings it up (19:21) and the general question of security, Chomsky ducks the question and starts talking about neutrality which he says has worked well for Mexico, Austria and Finland.

Fletcher brings up the Budapest Memorandum again (21:30) and asks how Ukrainians could expect Russia to abide by a treaty since in 2014 Russia violated the Memorandum, seized Crimea, and supported the Donbas separatists.

Chomsky answers, “Certainly Ukraine could not assume that Russia would abide by treaty” and then goes off on the fact that the U.S. doesn’t abide by treaties and gives example after example.   Then he seemingly goes back to Fletcher’s question and says the issue is “Are the circumstances such that the great powers will live up to their commitments?” and then he goes on a riff of what would the situation have been now if the U.S. had listened to the warnings of statesman like Kennan.  Other than saying something vague about “circumstances,” he doesn’t explain how Ukraine was supposed to deal with a Russian government that ignored its own written pledge not to invade.

Chomsky elaborates that statesman warned that Russia would accept NATO expansion and humiliations, but only up to a point.  Its red lines were in Georgia and Ukraine (25:45) which are “deep within the Russian geo-strategic heartland as recognized on all sides.”  What kind of a Leftist talks like that?  What Leftist thinks Mexico or Cuba is part of the U.S. “heartland” just because it borders or is near to the U.S.?

At 27:47 Chomsky looks back at the “current situation.”  He says U.S. policy now is to fight to the “last Ukrainian” and block prospects for peace, giving Putin no alternatives except “suicide” or a path to nuclear war.  Not entertained is the idea that Ukrainians want to fight to live in their own country after seeing what it was like to live under Russian domination. No, it’s the U.S. calling the shots.

Fletcher asks Chomsky why Putin would be worried about NATO expansion into Ukraine since he knew Germany and France were opposed to the idea and would veto it. Chomsky replies that the U.S. has overwhelming power and countries are terrified of this “violent rogue state” and goes on to talking about the U.S. war against Cuba. In short, he doesn’t answer Fletcher.

One thing that stuck in my craw was that Chomsky said several times, “Crimea is off the table.”  Who is he to say that?  It was part of Ukraine for 70 years.  It was understood in writing in the Budapest Memorandum that it was part of Ukraine.  So currently it’s made up of overwhelmingly Russian speakers.  One reason for that is a brutal ethnic cleansing during World War II.  Stalin deported a quarter of a million people from Crimea, mostly Tatars.  Tens of thousands died.  Chomsky makes much of the fact the Crimea is home to a warm water port.  So what? Russia has plenty of ports.  See this list.  What if it was landlocked?  There are 44 land-locked countries in the world.  They take goods by truck and rail to the seaports of other nations.  Leftists don’t have a problem with that, only “strategic” thinkers.  The Left universally condemns the U.S. for forcing Cubans to allow it to maintain a military base on Guantanamo.  So why should Russia have the eternal right to have one on the Crimean peninsula?

At 40:38 Fletcher asks about Putin’s warfare in Chechnya and Syria and Fletcher says he sees “a line that goes from Chechnya to Ukraine” for which the U.S. has had little or no role.

Chomsky really goes off the rails here when he talks about Syria. It’s worth quoting his whole statement.  At 41:39 he starts:

“Syria, it was criminal and murderous and destructive, but if we want to know the reasons they were not obscure.  The United States, France, Germany were supporting opposition forces which by 2013, 2014 were mostly jihadi forces which were fighting against the recognized government of Syria, the government that has a seat in the United Nations and is internationally recognized.  They were trying to overthrow it, that’s a Russian ally.  The CIA was providing advanced weapons to the opposition forces, advanced anti-tank weapons, which did stop the Assad armies.  Quite predictably. It didn’t take a genius to predict it .  I predicted it.  Others did.  The Russians reacted. Russia came into the war, really for the first time, to attack the CIA’s anti-tank weapons.  Then they went on to support Assad’s brutal, vicious effort to reconquer Syria, horrible atrocities, and so on.  Technically it’s not criminal, certainly not illegal, but it’s criminal in the moral sense not in the legal sense. That’s what happened in Syria.”

Fletcher interrupts and says, “One of the things you’re discounting is that there was an uprising in Syria.”

Chomsky:

“There was an uprising, it was part of the Arab Spring, a democratic reformist uprising, and Assad crushed it with extreme violence.  That led on to the civil war and gradually the jihadi forces pretty much took over.  You can debate the details, but by 2013, 2014 there was a largely jihadi based opposition, which the U.S. was supporting attempting to overthrow the government  brutal murderous government responsible for the overwhelming most of the crimes, but happened to be the international recognized government, which was a Russian ally and when it got to the point where the CIA was providing advanced weapons, not surprisingly, the Russians moved in to destroy them.  Then it went on to the destruction of the rest of Syria.  Is it pretty? No, it’s very ugly.  Nobody believes the Russians are saints, but they’re an imperial power, minor in comparison to the United States, as an economy they’re on par with Italy and Spain, advanced weapons.  They are…we don’t have to recall Russia was invaded and virtually destroyed twice in the 20th century by Germany alone …Now the idea of an advanced, hostile military alliance run by the world’s most powerful and aggressive state which is providing and enhancing strategic and defense cooperation with Ukraine and with a robust and exercised program in keeping with Ukraine’s status as an enhanced NATO opportunities partner….a serious threat to Russia.”

Fletcher: “Is it really a threat to Russia? We’re not talking about 1941…Russia has the most nuclear weapons of any country on the planet.  Who is concerned about Ukrainian security?”

I’ll stop quoting at 46:50 to talk about Syria.

Chomsky’s factual account is mostly false. The U.S. was not fighting to overthrow the Assad government!  It had sent small arms to Syrian opposition groups and some anti-tank weapons, but nothing that could defend them against the Assad air force (like the MANPADS they desperately requested). It specifically barred allies like Saudi Arabia or Qatar from supplying them either.   By 2013 ISIS had spread over large parts of Syria and Iraq and that became the U.S. absolute #1 priority.  From then on, the U.S. sent aid to military units only if they would promise to use them exclusively to fight ISIS.  Despite all the handicaps, Syrian armed groups had nearly defeated Assad in 2015.  Russian air force planes attacked them to save Assad not to fight the U.S. whose support for “rebels” opposing Assad had ended years before.  In fact the U.S. and Russia were cooperating in the fight against ISIS.

Now for Chomsky’s political arguments.  He repeats twice and at length the fact that Assad was the “internationally recognized” head of government in Syria and so had a right to get military aid from his ally Russia. Chomsky’s love for the Hobbesian sanctity of sovereignty is bewildering.  As early as the 17th century, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius argued that the rights of the sovereign should be limited by the principles of humanity.  International law and powers given to the United Nations have more and more constrained the power of sovereignty.  Assad’s sieges of whole cities defied UN Security Council resolutions for instance Security Council Resolution 2139 which demanded an end to his barrel bombs, his hindering of UN food convoys to areas under siege, and the release of women and children in his prisons.  Likewise Russian activity in Syria was an international  crime, a war crime, not  as Chomsky claims merely in a “moral sense”.

Chomsky talks about Russia “reacting” as if it was a law of nature, as if he was describing what happens when a person touches a live wire. There was no necessary reason for Russia to “react” and join in the mass murder of Syrians.  Putin could have happily exercised his tyrannical controls over Russians no matter what happened in Syria.

Bringing up the fact that Russia was twice invaded by Germany is really beneath Chomsky.  What the Kaiser and Hitler did gives Putin the right to do anything he wants for the sake of Russian security?  Where have we heard that argument before?  Right, that’s exactly what Israel says.  Jews were killed in a Holocaust so we, Israel, can do anything we want because it’s all for our security.

Let’s leave Syria.   At 47:40 Fletcher again asks about Ukrainian security and Chomsky again ducks talking about U.S. misdeeds and crimes in Afghanistan.  Later he says basically if Ukraine had been neutral like Austria or Finland there would have been no security worries.

Then he goes on to justify what Russia did in 2014, repeating the now familiar charge that there was a coup “with direct U.S. involvement.”  Essentially this man of the Left claims that Ukrainians had no right to overthrow a government that banned protest and shot into crowds, and whose president was notoriously corrupt.  Then he gave a justification for Russian seizure of Ukrainian territory,  “Russia could have just stood by and clapped as we could have stood by and clapped if a pro-Chinese government was established with Mexico calling for a military alliance with China.”

Chomsky repeats that Russia had its only warm water port including naval bases in Crimea.  “They were being immediately threatened [my emphasis] by the pro-US government that took power with direct U.S. involvement.”  This is false.  What “direct threat” was there to its warm water port? Had Ukraine banned Russian trade through Sevastopol?  Had it demanded Russian troops leave the Crimean Peninsula?  The answer is “no” in both cases.

Fletcher finally asks, “Many people on the US Left think there’s nothing we can do about Putin.  What should we do?”

Chomsky answers that we should get the US to abandon its policy of fighting to the last Ukrainian and leaving Putin with no exit, “his back up against the wall” and accept that Ukraine will have a status like Mexico, Austria and Finland.  Again he says Crimea is “off the table.” Again, it’s the U.S. that’s being unreasonable.

Finally consider what isn’t in Chomsky’s remarks.  For one, the words “solidarity with Ukraine” are absent. He never suggests we in the Left ask Ukrainians what they want, whether they think they’re American pawns or whether want to fight on to defend their country. Chomsky, a self-described anarchist, does not mention what any Ukrainian anarchist or socialist is thinking, and he never talks about weapons, whether Ukraine has any right to get weapons to defend itself.

Noam Chomsky’s exercise in realpolitik is depressing.  He should know that the Left should not be involved defending notions of spheres of influence or geopolitics.

Rosario Ibarra: Mexican Socialist Feminist, 1927-2022. Presente!

By: April 17, 2022
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Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, one of the most important figures of the Mexican left, died on April 16, 2022 at her home in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon at the age of 95. She was the leader of the Mexican human rights group Eureka Committee of the Disappeared and was the first woman candidate for the Mexican presidency in 1982 as the candidate of the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT). She ran a second time in 1988. In 2006, thanks to proportional representation, she was elected to the Mexican Senate where she served first as the PRT Senator and then as Labor Party (PT) Senator.

Ibarra became a human rights activist after her son Jesús Piedra Ibarra disappeared on April 18, 1975, presumably kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by the Mexican government as happened as well to 500 others during the 1960s and 1970s. He was a member of the September 23 Communist League (LC23S), a clandestine urban guerrilla group that engaged in violent attacks against wealthy institutions and individuals and opposed the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Following her son’s disappearance, Rosario Ibarra, together with 100 mothers of the disappeared, created the Committee in Defense of Prisoners, the Persecuted, the Disappeared, and Political Exiles. After succeeding in finding out the fate of 148 such disappeared people, they changed the organization’s name to Eureka, meaning we have found them.

Years of fighting for human rights turned Ibarra into a public figure. In 1982, the small new Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) asked her to be its presidential candidate, the first woman to run for the country’s highest office. She held election rallies throughout the country speaking about the needs of working people and the need for a socialist alternative. It was in that campaign that she defined herself as a socialist feminist, running as the candidate of the common working woman and housewife.

Miguel de la Madrid of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) won the presidency that year in a typically corrupt election with 75 percent of the vote, the Conservative National Action Party (PAN) receiving 15 percent. But Ibarra received 416,488 votes or 1.77% of the total, about half as many votes as the long established and much better known Mexican Communist Party. Her campaign served both to enhance her reputation and to put the PRT on the political map.

Six years later, she ran again, but with Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of Mexico’s legendary president Lázaro Cárdenas running for president she received few votes.

Ibarra was a magnificent orator in the dramatic Mexican style whose speeches, with their long perorations inspired her audiences. As her interpreter at a large public meeting at the United Electrical Workers union hall in Chicago in the 1980s, I was both thrilled and challenged to put her dramatic speech into English, especially when it was constantly interrupted by the applause and cheers of her audience.

From the 1970s until her death, Ibarra remained active in all of the causes of Mexico’s working people and the oppressed whether as a private person or after 2006 as a Senator.

In 2019, when the Mexican Senate voted to honor her with the Belisario Dominguez award for human rights work, she had her daughter Claudia Ibarra return the medal to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, saying she could not accept it until Mexico learned the truth about its disappeared, who now number nearly 100,000 — 98% of them from 2006 onward, disappeared during an era of the government’s war on drugs.

 

 

 

 

 

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