Donald Parkinson has written a strong response to a recent piece on the war in Ukraine. I concur with his emphasis on the need for clear political positions, his point that elected representatives of the socialist movement in the US must make a call on the question of weapons shipments, and his principled anti-war stance.
At the same time, I want to propose that the questions addressed in the letter are somewhat more complicated than Parkinson suggests. He writes, “Ukraine is not merely fighting a defensive war of national liberation.” Instead, “this war is a battle between the semi-peripheral nation of Russia, which is trying to assert its own sphere of influence, and a proxy of the global hegemon, the USA, who are dedicated to ensuring their position of unipolarity.”
In spite of the “merely” clause, Parkinson essentially sets up an either-or opposition here: this is either a defensive Ukrainian war against Russian aggression, or a geopolitical struggle between regional power Russia and the US hegemon. The first analysis would lead to the pro-Ukrainian “defencist” position that Parkinson criticizes; the second would lead somewhere akin to a “defeatist” position, where in a war between two world powers one should oppose the imperialism of one’s own country. Parkinson clearly favors the “inter-imperial proxy war” analysis, and draws his political conclusions accordingly.
However, the situation in Ukraine seems to me more ambiguous, combining elements of a popular struggle against a foreign occupier/invader with elements of an inter-imperial proxy war. If my analysis is correct, this raises a conundrum for the left: how do we oppose the escalation of a proxy war while still supporting a legitimate popular struggle against an occupying power? In practice it is not easy to separate out these elements; Ukrainians need arms to expel an imperial invasion by regional power Russia, but Western weapons shipments also inflame a dangerous imperial rivalry and uphold US global hegemony.
Returning to the original article to which Parkinson responded, I believe that Hilgers’ hesitancy on the question of weapons shipments stems from this ambiguity in the war itself. Because of the multifaceted nature of the war — as both a popular local defensive war by a smaller state against a regional power’s invasion, and part of a global struggle for hegemony between the US as a leading power and Russia as a regional power — no position on the question of weapons feels satisfactory. As Parkinson rightly points out, for US socialists to support, or fail to oppose, arms shipments to Ukraine would be a betrayal of anti-war principles, arguably collapsing our movement into the defense of the dying unipolar hegemony of the US. However, to merely oppose weapons shipments to Ukraine, seemingly in favor of a settlement where Ukraine cedes territory to Russia (which would arguably legitimize the invasion), is essentially to call on Ukrainians to surrender to a larger occupying power. This feels like a rather tone deaf response to the Russian invasion — an invasion that involves a more substantial commitment of force than the Western flow of arms to Ukraine.
Again, no position feels satisfactory, but Parkinson rightly points out that we must take a position: if you were in, say, Bernie Sanders’ position and had to vote on arms shipments, would you be for or against? As such, I will ultimately concur with Parkinson’s stance that NATO weapons shipments should be opposed by socialists in the West. While I agree in principle with Tempest’s position that Ukrainians have a “right to get the weapons it needs for its defense from whatever source available” — they should not be dismissed as pawns of US imperialism for doing so — socialists in Western states also have a responsibility to oppose military escalations, and I would thus encourage socialist representatives in parliaments to vote against weapons shipments.
However, I do not think that a just resolution to the conflict can be achieved simply by Western powers ceasing to arm Ukraine. This is because US arming of Ukraine is not the root cause of the war; rather, even acknowledging the backdrop of NATO expansionism, the Russian invasion is the central issue at hand. As such, our only chance of a just outcome would depend on mass action by Russian workers and oppressed populations alongside Ukrainian resistance to the Putin administration’s imperial war. Hosting political education events with Russian left oppositionists and Ukrainian socialists struggling against the invasion may seem abstract or ineffectual, but a realistic portrayal of the war demands that we give precedence to these mass struggles, even while maintaining a principled stance of opposition on the question of Western arms shipments — a secondary issue in relation to the Russian invasion.
In solidarity,
Robin Jones
