The Left Cannot Agree Either, And That Is The Honest Part

There is no single left reading of this war, and pretending otherwise is how both halves of the argument get caricatured. One wing reads a war driven by imperialist rivalry, in which Ukraine is the terrain and the arms shipments prolong a slaughter fought over somebody else's balance of power. The other reads a war of national self-defence in which anti-imperialism, applied consistently, obliges support for the people being invaded. Both are published under the same masthead half the time.

The second wing has the harder argument to make and makes it from inside the country. A Ukrainian socialist serving in uniform has spent four years arguing against cutting Western aid on the ground that it would reward the invasion, while also arguing that Ukrainians want a ceasefire and cannot accept a settlement with no guarantee behind it. That position is not comfortable in any Western meeting hall, which is a point in its favour.

Anti-imperialism that can only see one empire is not a principle. It is a map.

The first wing's strongest ground is escalation and class, not geopolitics. Talk of Putin's defeat is dangerous as well as premature; European rearmament is being paid for out of the same budgets as everything else; and the reconstruction is being organised now, in wartime, through financial structures that will determine who owns the country that comes out the other side. The Ukrainian labour code has been rewritten under emergency powers and the war is the reason given.

What holds the two together, when anything does, is a refusal to explain the invasion by one man's psychology or by a map of alliances. The sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko's account of Ukrainian political capitalism — of the class that emerged from the Soviet collapse on both sides of the border, and what it wanted — is the only analysis on offer that treats Ukrainians as agents in their own history rather than as the object of a quarrel between Washington and Moscow. That is the test this tradition should be applying, and it is the one both wings keep failing in opposite directions.

There is no single left reading of this war, and pretending otherwise is how both halves of the argument get caricatured. One wing reads a war driven by imperialist rivalry, in which Ukraine is the terrain and the arms shipments prolong a slaughter fought over somebody else's balance of power. The other reads a war of national self-defence in which anti-imperialism, applied consistently rather than geographically, obliges support for the people being invaded. Both appear under the same mastheads, sometimes in the same month, and the quarrel between them has been running for four years without either side conceding a word.

The second wing has the harder argument to make and makes it from inside the country. A Ukrainian socialist serving in uniform has spent four years arguing against cutting Western aid, on the ground that withholding weapons from the invaded is not neutrality but the enforcement of a conquest — while also arguing that Ukrainians increasingly want a ceasefire and cannot accept a settlement with nothing standing behind it. That position is uncomfortable in every Western meeting hall, in both directions at once, which is a point in its favour rather than against it.

Anti-imperialism that can only see one empire is not a principle. It is a map.

The first wing's strongest ground is not geopolitics, where it is weakest, but escalation and class, where it is saying things nobody else in the debate will say. Talk of Putin's defeat is dangerous as well as premature, and the people saying so include former intelligence officers with no stake in Moscow's account of itself. European rearmament is being paid for out of the same budgets as housing and health, by governments that discovered fiscal space the moment the question was armaments. And the reconstruction is being organised now, in wartime, through financial structures that will decide who owns the country that comes out of this — which is a question about Ukrainians, asked by nobody at the summits.

That is where the two wings actually meet, and it is the least reported part of this argument. Ukraine's labour code has been rewritten under emergency powers, with the war given as the reason; the aid architecture is loaded with instruments that convert solidarity into claims; and a left that supports the resistance without watching what is being done to workers under cover of it is not supporting Ukrainians, only Ukraine. Jacobin publishes both halves of that, which is why it is worth reading on this subject when the front pages are not.

What holds the tradition together, when anything does, is a refusal to explain the invasion by one man's psychology or by a map of alliances. The sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko's account of Ukrainian political capitalism — of the class that emerged from the Soviet collapse on both sides of the border, what it owned, and what it needed the state for — is the only analysis on wide offer that treats Ukrainians as agents in their own history rather than as the object of a quarrel between Washington and Moscow. The Ukrainian left journal Commons has been arguing the same ground from the other end, on whether this country has a Soviet history and what an anti-colonial Marxism would say about it.

Both camps are living on illusions, and it is a French socialist paper rather than an American one that says so most plainly. The campists' illusion is that a settlement dictated over Ukraine's head would be peace. The solidarists' illusion is that a war can be won without asking who is paying for it and what they will want afterwards. The test this tradition should be applying is whether its analysis has Ukrainians in it as people who decide things. It is the test both wings keep failing, in opposite directions, and it is the only one that matters.