Ukraine ‘peace summit’ falters amidst growing international disunity

Russian and Ukrainian socialists issue joint appeal for solidarity, social and ecological reconstruction of Ukraine

 A peace conference initiated by Ukraine and hosted by Switzerland met June 15-16 with the participation of 57 heads of state and government, including Canada. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy had hoped the meeting would rally support for his 10-point peace plan released in October 2022, six months after the outset of Russia’s full-scale armed invasion of Ukraine and its subsequent occupation and annexation of about 20 percent of the country. However, the joint communiqué issued at its conclusion expressed “a common vision” on only three aspects: nuclear safety, global food security, and complete exchange of all prisoners of war and return to Ukraine of all Ukrainian civilians, including children, unlawfully detained or displaced by Russia.

The adopted text reiterated support for UN resolutions[1] affirming “the principles of sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of all states, including Ukraine, within their internationally recognized borders, including territorial waters, and the resolution of disputes through peaceful means as principles of international law.” However, it failed to commit the participating governments to any substantial program of economic reconstruction assistance to Ukraine, let alone cancellation of its enormous international public debt. Moreover, several countries from the expanded BRICS alliance – led by Brazil, India, and South Africa – abstained. China refused to attend the conference and Russia, of course, was not invited.

Russian president Vladimir Putin sought to refocus international attention on Russia’s absence from the summit through a statement June 14 reaffirming Russia’s supposed “willingness to negotiate” -- on terms tantamount to Ukraine’s capitulation. And Zelensky alleged that China had sought to persuade some countries not to attend. Such is “multipolarity” in today’s global context.

Socialists in Ukraine, Russia and Switzerland sought to supplement the ambitions of the official peace conference from an alternative internationalist perspective based on solidarity and oriented toward a radical social and ecological transformation in Europe as a whole. They drafted a joint declaration in support of Ukrainian self-determination and in favour of the democratic overthrow of the Putin regime. The declaration, with its 12 principles for a just peace in Ukraine, is reproduced below. As its authors indicated, its purpose is to “stimulate comprehensive discussions on national self-determination, inter-imperialist rivalry, geopolitical bloc thinking, rearmament, anti-imperialist and ecosocialist strategies and in general emancipatory working-class mobilizations, particularly with progressive social movements such as the feminist movement, the environmental movement, migration solidarity and trade unions.”

They started this discussion with an online conference on June 15, at which speakers from the launching organizations presented the major content and goal of the declaration and suggested ideas for further political discussion and collaboration. A dominant theme of this discussion, which I attended, was the need for the international Left to develop a comprehensive alternative ecosocialist strategy to capitalist multipolarity and imperialist rivalry. More than one participant noted the importance of the agreement just reached by France’s left parties, hastily assembled as a “New Popular Front,” to contest the snap legislative elections called by Macron around a program that included as a “common denominator” the pledge to “defend steadfastly Ukrainian sovereignty through the delivery of needed weapons.”

-- Richard Fidler

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 Ukraine: A People's Peace, not an Imperial Peace

 Joint declaration by ecosocialist, anarchist, feminist, environmental organisations, and groups in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance and for a self-determined social and ecological reconstruction of Ukraine

The Swiss government will hold an international conference for a peace process in Ukraine on 15 and 16 June 2024 on the mountain Bürgenstock, close to Lucerne. The Ukrainian government supports this conference.

 his conference is taking place in a decisive phase of the war. For months, the Russian invasion forces have been hitting gaps in the Ukrainian defences and pushing them back, with heavy losses of their own. The Russian leadership has announced a major offensive and is attacking the people in Kharkiv, a city of millions.

We support all steps towards a peace that enables the Ukrainian people to rebuild the country in a self-determined manner. Peace requires the complete withdrawal of the Russian occupying forces from the entire territory of Ukraine. With this in mind, we hope that the peace conference in Switzerland will contribute to the restoration of Ukraine's sovereignty.

The conditions for this are extremely difficult. The representatives of the Putin regime regularly declare that they do not recognise an independent Ukraine and deny the existence of the Ukrainian people. The Putin regime purses a Great Russian project, subjugates the people in the occupied territories with terror and aims to eradicate the Ukrainian culture. The ruling regime in Russia regularly commits war crimes against the Ukraine population. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched on 24 February 2022, not only calls Ukraine's independence into question. It also encourages other authoritarian regimes to threaten neighbouring populations, occupy territories and massively expel people. In order to avoid resistance at home, the Russian army is now also recruiting people from neighbouring countries and the Global South to serve as cannon fodder.

Due to the massive – and surprising – resistance of the Ukrainian population, the governments of Europe and North America began to support the Ukrainian army in its defence against the Russian occupying forces. However, they are backing Ukraine to assert their own interests in the global imperialist rivalry. The US aim to weaken its Russian counterpart while showing strength against rising China and setting the pace for the European powers which are both partners and rivals. But despite the US Congress finally approving a comprehensive aid package for Ukraine on 20 April 2024, which had been blocked by the Republican Party for nine months, the support for Ukraine has always remained selective and insufficient.

Similarly, the economic sanctions that have been imposed by the EU and US governments against Russia and the exponents of the Putin regime are selective, inadequately targeted, and insufficient. They do not prevent Russia from continuing to export oil and gas, along with other strategically important raw materials, to fill its war chest. Some European countries have even significantly increased their imports of LNG from Russia since the start of the war. Others, such as Austria, obtain over 90% of their natural gas imports from Russia. The governments of these countries are forcing gas consumers to finance Putin’s war against the Ukrainian population.

The Swiss government, the host of the peace conference, has not only been giving tax breaks to Russian oligarchs for decades, it has also refused to confiscate the assets of these oligarchs since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion. As a major hub of international commodities trading, Switzerland has offered Russian capital excellent opportunities to acquire wealth for many years. Many bourgeois politicians have gladly welcomed these businesses in Switzerland. Through the sale of dual-use products, Switzerland contributes to equipping the Russian war machine. And finally, the Swiss financial sector facilitates the trade of Russian oil.

Both in the US and in Europe, there is a growing number of voices in the political and economic establishment who want to tie their support for Ukraine to certain conditions. They aim to pressure Ukraine to cede large territories and several million people to the Putin regime. Such a peace, enforced by major imperial powers, would strengthen the Putin regime and fail to provide a basis for a lasting democratic reconstruction of Ukraine.

We need a peace that is based on, as well as supported by, the interests of the people and of workers in Ukraine and Russia. Such a perspective can only succeed if trade unions, women’s organisations, environmental initiatives and various civil society organisations from both Ukraine and Russia play a leading role in the peace talks.

Occupation is a crime! We are guided by the principles of self-liberation, emancipation, and self-determination of working-class and all oppressed peoples beyond geopolitical considerations. In this sense, we also stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, who have been fighting for their self-determination for decades. Likewise, we support the Kurdish and Armenian peoples and all other peoples threatened by occupation, national and cultural oppression.

Based on our positioning, supporting the Ukrainian resistance against the Russian occupation, we want to contribute to developing a common European perspective for radical socioecological reforms and ultimately for an ecosocialist transformation of the entire European continent in global solidarity.

By submitting this declaration for discussion, we want to contribute to a transnational process of understanding and political clarification among those left-wing forces throughout Europe and beyond that share these important convictions.

 

12 Principles for a Just Peace in Ukraine in a Europe based on Solidarity and Ecology

We, the undersigned organisations and initiatives, want to promote a peace process that adheres to the following 12 principles.

1. Achieving a socially just and ecologically sustainable peace requires the unconditional and complete withdrawal of Russian occupying forces from Ukraine, returning the entire territory to its internationally recognized borders.

2. Russia is systematically destroying cities, infrastructure, and the environment to demoralise the population and trigger a large wave of refugees. Against this daily terror, we demand that the “Western” governments support Ukraine in protecting its population and infrastructure against the bombing and missile attacks of the Russian occupying power. We are in favour of massive humanitarian, economic and military support for Ukraine from the rich states in Europe. The Ukrainian population urgently needs protection from Russian bombs and rockets.

3. We oppose attempts by “Western” governments, NATO and EU exponents to pressure Ukraine into making massive concessions to the Russian occupying power. We oppose the idea that Ukraine must cede several million people to the Putin regime. It is only up to the Ukrainian people to decide how to confront this atrocious situation of ongoing and possibly increasing occupation. We support the armed and unarmed resistance of Ukrainians against the Russian occupying power.

4. We demand that all Russians who refuse military service be granted secure residence status in the countries of Europe and North America. Mass desertion is important to weaken the Russian war machine.

5. We support the political struggle of Ukrainian trade unions, women’s organisations, and environmental initiatives against the neoliberal anti-labour policies of the government under President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. These policies undermine Ukraine’s socially broad-based defence against Russian occupation and render a socially just and ecologically sustainable reconstruction impossible.

6. We stand in solidarity with the anti-war movement, democratic opposition, and independent labour struggles in Russia. We also stand in solidarity with the oppressed nationalities in Russia who suffer particularly badly from the war and fight for their self-determination. It is their youth that is being exploited as cannon fodder by the Putin regime. These movements are a key factor for achieving a just peace and a democratic Russia.

7. Russia has imprisoned numerous people from Ukraine as political prisoners. Many have been sentenced to decades in prison and penal camps. We demand their unconditional release. We demand that the International Red Cross be allowed to maintain regular contact with all prisoners of war. The exchange and release of prisoners of war is a prerequisite for any just peace.

8. Russia must pay reparations to the Ukrainian people. The oligarchs of Russia and Ukraine must be expropriated. Their assets must be made available to the reconstruction of Ukraine and, once the Putin regime falls to the democratic development of Russia.

9. We demand that the “Western” governments immediately cancel Ukraine's debts. This is a crucial condition for the sovereign reconstruction of the country. The rich states of Europe and North America must set up comprehensive and broad-based support programmes for the Ukrainian people and the reconstruction of the country. This reconstruction must take place under the democratic control of the population, trade unions, environmental initiatives, feminist organisations and organized neighbourhoods in the cities and villages.

10. We oppose all projects of the European and Northern American governments, as well as international organisations, to impose a neoliberal economic agenda on the Ukrainian people. This would prolong and deepen poverty and suffering. We also denounce all efforts to sell off the property and assets of the Ukrainian population to foreign corporations. The recovery and reorganisation of agriculture, industry, energy systems and the entire social infrastructure must serve the socio-ecological transformation of Ukraine, not the supply of cheap labour, grain and hydrogen to Western European countries.

11. An effective military support of Ukraine does not require a new wave of armaments. We oppose NATO’s rearmament programmes and weapon exports to third countries. Instead, the countries of Europe and North America must provide the weapons from their existing, huge arsenals that will help Ukraine to defend itself effectively. In this sense, we demand that the arms industry should not serve the profit interests of capital – to the contrary, we want to work towards the social appropriation of the arms industry. This industry should serve the immediate interests of Ukraine. At the same time, for social and urgent ecological reasons, we underline the imperative of democratically converting the arms industry into socially useful production on a global scale.

12. We want to initiate a debate on a radical reorganisation of Europe. We want to contribute to developing a common European perspective for radical socio-ecological reforms, and ultimately for a fundamental ecosocialist transformation of the entire European continent in global solidarity. Within this framework, we support the will of the Ukrainian people to join the EU, even though we reject the EU’s neoliberal foundations that impoverish millions of people and promote unequal development in Europe. We take the perspective of an accession of several countries in Eastern Europe and South-East Europe as an opportunity to reflect together on how such a radical socio-ecological change can be initiated throughout Europe, including a common energy strategy, ecological industrial conversion, pay-as-you-go unfunded pension systems, social labour regulation, solidarity-based migration policy, interregional transfer payments, and military security along with the conversion of the armaments industry. Trade union, feminist, ecological, anti-authoritarian left and socialist forces in Eastern Europe should play an important role in this debate.

This declaration has been launched jointly by Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) in Ukraine, Posle Media Collective in Russia, Bewegung für den Sozialismus / Movement for socialism and solidarity in Switzerland. 

We invite all interested organisations, groups, initiatives, media collectives and individuals to circulate and sign this declaration by 30 June. Please send confirmation of your signing to: Joao_Woyzeck@proton.me and redaktion@emanzipation.org  Individuals, please, sign here: https://forms.gle/EAPYSoJCHpWq4bHR6

 For an initial list of organizations and individuals who have signed the declaration, see https://emanzipation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2024_06_15_Ukraine_Peoples_Peace_Endorsements_Organisations_Individuals.pdf.

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[1] Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 2 March 2022, ES-11/1. Aggression against Ukraine; and Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 23 February 2023, ES-11/6. Principles of the Charter of the United Nations underlying a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.

[2] Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 2 March 2022, ES-11/1. Aggression against Ukraine; and Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 23 February 2023, ES-11/6. Principles of the Charter of the United Nations underlying a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.

Havana conference maps plans for a new international economic order

“The climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, and the sooner we face up to this fact the better.” – Jason Hickel.

Viva La Solidaridad Cubano-Palestina is emblematic of Cuba’s longstanding solidarity with Palestine – which predates this poster made by Marc Rudin in 1989 and still stands today.

Meeting in Havana, Cuba on April 28 to May 1, leading scholars, diplomats and policy-makers from 36 countries mapped plans to present a program of action for establishment of a New International Economic Order that will be presented to the September meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

The Havana conference – co-convened by the Progressive International and the Asociación Nacional de Economistas y Contadores de Cuba – marked the 50th anniversary of an earlier version of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), a set of proposals to end economic colonialism and dependency adopted by the UN on May 1, 1974.

A keynote speaker at the Havana conference was Jason Hickel. He teaches at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) in Barcelona and is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics. Hickel is best-known, perhaps for his book Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020), which presents degrowth as an anticapitalist alternative to ecological imperialism and unequal exchange.

I will say more about the Havana congress following Hickel’s address, which I thank the Progressive International for making available. – Richard Fidler

* * *

Climate, Energy and Natural Resources

By Jason Hickel

Thank you to Progressive International for organizing this event, and thank you to our Cuban hosts, who have kept this revolution alive against extraordinary odds. The US blockade against Cuba, like the genocide in Gaza, is a constant reminder of the egregious violence of the imperialist world order and why we must overcome it.

So too is the ecological crisis. Comrades, I do not need to tell you about the severity of the situation we are in. It stares every sane observer in the face. But the dominant analysis of this crisis and what to do about it is woefully inadequate. We call it the Anthropocene, but we must be clear: it is not humans as such that are causing this crisis. Ecological breakdown is being driven by the capitalist economic system, and – like capitalism itself – is strongly characterized by colonial dynamics.

This is clear when it comes to climate change. The countries of the global North are responsible for around 90% of all cumulative emissions in excess of the safe planetary boundary – in other words, the emissions that are driving climate breakdown. By contrast the global South, by which I mean all of Asia, Africa and Latin America, are together responsible for only about 10%, and in fact most global South countries remain within their fair shares of the planetary boundary and have therefore not contributed to the crisis at all.

And yet, the overwhelming majority of the impacts of climate breakdown are set to affect the territories of the global South, and indeed this is already happening. The South suffers 80-90% of the economic costs and damages inflicted by climate breakdown, and around 99% of all climate-related deaths. It would be difficult to overstate the scale of this injustice. With present policy, we are headed for around 3 degrees of global warming. At this level some 2 billion people across the tropics will be exposed to extreme heat and substantially increased mortality risk; droughts will destabilize agricultural systems and lead to multi-breadbasket failures; and hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homes.

Climate breakdown is a process of atmospheric colonization. The atmosphere is a shared commons, on which all of us depend for our existence, and the core economies have appropriated it for their own enrichment, with devastating consequences for all of life on Earth, which are playing out along colonial lines. For the global South in particular, this crisis is existential and it must be stopped.

But so far our ruling classes are failing to do this. In 2015 the world’s governments agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees or “well below” 2 degrees, while upholding the principle of equity. To achieve this goal, high-income countries, which have extremely high per capita emissions, must achieve extremely rapid decarbonization.

This is not occurring. In fact, at existing rates, even the best-performing high-income countries will take on average more than 200 years to bring emissions to zero, burning their fair-shares of the Paris-compliant carbon budget many times over. Dealing with the climate crisis is not complicated. We know exactly what needs to be done, but we are not doing it. Why? Because of capitalism.

If I wish to get one point across today, it is this: the climate crisis cannot be solved within capitalism, and the sooner we face up to this fact the better. Let me briefly describe what I mean.

The core defining feature of capitalism is that it is fundamentally anti-democratic. Yes, many of us live in democratic political systems, where we get to elect candidates from time to time. But when it comes to the economic system, the system of production, not even the shallowest illusion of democracy is allowed to enter. Production is controlled by capital: large corporations, commercial banks, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets… they are the ones who determine what to produce and how to use our collective labour and our planet’s resources.

And for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs or achieve social and ecological objectives. Rather, it is to maximize and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. So we get perverse patterns of investment: massive investment in producing things like fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, industrial beef, cruise ships and weapons, because these things are highly profitable to capital… but we get chronic underinvestment in necessary things like renewable energy, public transit and regenerative agriculture, because these are much less profitable to capital or not profitable at all. This is a critically important point to grasp. In many cases renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels! But they have much lower profit margins, because they are less conducive to monopoly power. So investment keeps flowing to fossil fuels, even while the world burns.

Relying on capital to deliver an energy transition is a dangerously bad strategy. The only way to deal with this crisis is with public planning. On the one hand, we need massive public investment in renewable energy, public transit and other decarbonization strategies. And this should not just be about derisking private capital – it should be about public production of public goods. To do this, simply issue the national currency to mobilize the productive forces for the necessary objectives, on the basis of need not on the basis of profit.

Now, massive public investment like this could drive inflation if it bumps up against the limits of the national productive capacity. To avoid this problem you need to reduce private demands on the productive forces. First, cut the purchasing power of the rich; and second, introduce credit regulations on commercial banks to limit their investments in ecologically destructive sectors that we want to get rid of anyway: fossil fuels, SUVs, fast fashion, etc.

What this does is it shifts labour and resources away from servicing the interests of capital accumulation and toward achieving socially and ecologically necessary objectives. This is a socialist ecological strategy, and it is the only thing that will save us. Solving the ecological crisis requires achieving democratic control over the means of production. We need to be clear about this fact and begin building now the political movements that are necessary to achieve such a transformation.

Now, it should be obvious to everyone at this point that for the global South, this requires economic sovereignty. You cannot do ecological planning if you do not have sovereign control over your national productive forces! Struggle for national economic liberation is the precondition for ecological transition, and it can be achieved with the steps that my colleagues Ndongo and Fadhel have outlined: industrial policy, regional planning, and progressive delinking from the imperial core.

So that is the horizon. But at the same time we must advance our multilateral bargaining positions. This is what we need to do:

First, we need to push for universal adoption of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. This treaty overcomes the major limitation of the Paris Agreement in that it focuses squarely on the objective of scaling down the fossil fuel industry on a binding annual schedule. The objective here is to do this in a fair and just way: rich countries must lead with rapid reductions, global South countries must be guaranteed access to sufficient energy for development, and those that are dependent on fossil fuel exports for foreign currency must be provided with a safe offramp that prevents any economic instability.

Second, global South negotiators must collaborate to demand much faster decarbonization in the global North, consistent with their fair-shares of the remaining carbon budget.

Third, we must demand substantial resource transfers to the global South. Because the global North has devoured most of the carbon budget, it owes compensation to the global South for the additional mitigation costs that this imposes on them. Our research shows that this is set to be $192 trillion between now and 2050, or about 6.4 trillion dollars per year. Conveniently, this amount can be provided by a 3.5% yearly wealth tax targeting the richest 10% in the global North.

Of course, we should be clear about the fact that Western governments will not do any of this voluntarily. And it is not reasonable for us to place our hope in the goodwill of states that have never cared about the interests of the South or the welfare of its people.

The alternative is for global South governments to unite and collectively leverage the specific forms of power that they have in the world system. Western economies are totally dependent on production in the South. In fact, around 50% of all materials consumed in the global North are net-appropriated from the South. This is a travesty of justice but it is also a crucial point of leverage. Global South governments can and should form cartels to force the imperialist states to take more radical action toward decarbonization and climate justice.

And, by the way, speaking of South-South solidarity, global South governments should negotiate access to renewable energy technologies by establishing swap lines with China so that these can be obtained outside of the imperialist currencies, and thus limit their exposure to unequal exchange.

Comrades. We stand at a fork in the road. We can stick with the status quo and watch helplessly as our world burns… or we can unite and set a new course for human history. The Southern struggle for liberation is the true agent of world-historical transformation. The world is waiting. This is the generation. Now is the moment. Hasta la victoria siempre.

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More on the Congress

The 50th Anniversary Congress on the New International Economic Order adopted a “roadmap for a Global South insurgency to remake the world system.” (For a full list of participants, please click here.)

The assembled delegates debated strategies and tactics for winning a New International Economic Order and worked on major, structural reform proposals under five themes:

• Finance, Debt, and the International Monetary System

• Science, Technology, and Innovation

• Climate, Energy, and Natural Resources

• Commodities, Industry, and International Trade

• Governance, Multilateralism, and International Law

Proposals included a debtors club, cartels for critical minerals, coordination on commodity prices, BRICS financing for Southern state capacity, detailed programmes of regional integration including industrial strategy and collective public purchasing for medicines and components, reduction of material-technical dependency on the Global North, regaining national control over foreign exchange earnings, national and regional industrial policy, investment in food and renewable energy sovereignty, a global global, multilayered buffer stock system for essential commodities including food and critical minerals, coordinated exit from ICSID (International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes), denunciation of bilateral investment treaties, cross-border payment systems where international reserves are deposited, mobilisation of Special Drawing Rights for Southern development, establishing an association of raw material exporters, activate force majeure clauses so that all patents to combat climate change are ended, reparations for historical CO2 emissions from the Global North, and many more.

These proposals will be developed into a renewed and detailed Program of Action overseen by a technical committee of the Progressive International, and will be carried out through online fora and at further in-person conferences, with Algeria, Honduras, Mexico and Colombia all mooted as host nations.

The conference concluded with a presentation by President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermúdez outlining the vision of the Cuban Presidency of the Group of 77 + China for the New International Economic Order.

See also: Proposals for Unilateral Decolonization and Economic Sovereignty, by Ndongo Samba Sylla (with Jason Hickel)

Fighting Climate Change – Beyond Canada’s Carbon Tax

Free Transit Ottawa (FTO) organized a public meeting on March 18 on the theme “Fighting Climate Change: Beyond the Carbon Tax.”

The event was cosponsored by a range of local climate-justice movements: Ecology Ottawa, Horizon Ottawa, Justice for Workers, Fridays for Future and CAWI (City for All Women Initiative).

Speakers on the introductory panel were Emma Bider of Climate Justice Ottawa, Angella MacEwan of CUPE and the Green Economy Network, and myself representing Free Transit Ottawa.

The following text is based on my remarks. – Richard Fidler

* * *

Climate change is the most visible, most threatening expression of a larger, planetary ecological crisis, the result of a fossil-fueled economic system with its pursuit of endless growth which ensures that the exploitation of natural resources (both renewable and non-renewable) exceeds the carrying capacity of nature.

Our approach must be commensurate with the structural challenge that crisis poses to the way society is organized if we are to halt and reverse the ecological catastrophe toward which we are now hurtling – and which is fueled by our dependency on fossil fuels.

Globally, we are still fighting even to win recognition of the need to end fossil fuel dependency. The major achievement of the recent COP 28 conference – the 28^th annual meeting of the UN conference parties since the Kyoto conference in the mid-1990s – was, for the first time, a consensus agreement that we must “transition away” from fossil fuels if we are to attain the international goal of “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.

Is this happening? The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, in a recent study,[1] reports that half of the oil consumed by humans has been burned in the past 27 years; half of the gas in the past 21 years; and half of the coal in the past 37 years. As a result, half of the world’s 1.77 trillion tonnes of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions have been released in the past 30 years. Fourteen per cent have been emitted since the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015.

To date, renewable energies like wind, solar or thermal, have not made much of a dent in energy consumption or per capita fossil fuel use. Renewables have “only served to increase overall energy consumption.” In 2022 fossil fuels still accounted for 82.9 per cent of total world energy consumption.

But emissions from carbon production and use are destroying the global climate. So we have to find and develop renewable and substitute sources of energy. And, equally if not more important, find ways to eliminate much inefficient and socially undesirable consumption of energy. And adapt our societies to be less reliant on the market forces that drive production and consumption under our fossil-fueled capitalism, with their attendant growing social inequality and deterioration of public services.

Where is Canada in all this?

Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer. More than half of its production is exported. Canada gets 90.8 per cent of its primary energy production from fossil fuels (54 per cent from oil, 31 per cent from natural gas, six per cent from coal). The remainder comes from hydro, nuclear and renewables sources.

The federal government’s Emissions Reduction Plan, the latest iteration of its Pan-Canadian Framework on Green Growth and Climate Change, promises to reduce emissions by 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2030 – and to net zero by 2050.

The Plan includes a forthcoming cap on oil and gas emissions; a green buildings strategy; and the creation of clean renewable electricity grids. But it also features promotion of electric vehicles (mainly cars) and extensive funding of new (and so far undiscovered or unproven) technology such as carbon capture and storage or direct air capture, allegedly to “offset” continued extraction of oil and gas.

And then there are the new pipelines and liquified natural gas (LNG) plants, built to export Canada’s increasing fossil-fuel extraction for many years to come. [Consumption of exported gas is not included in Canada’s emissions statistics.] The government-owned TMX pipeline project has cost some $35 billion to date. The LNG plant in Prince Rupert, fed by the controversial Northern Gateway gas pipeline, has cost $40 billion to build. Four more LNG plants are in the works.

Much of the federal Plan is left to the provinces and private business to implement, with dubious results. In Ontario, Ford ended a slew of renewable energy projects and is increasing the province’s reliance on natural gas. Alberta’s Smith has sharply curtailed renewable energy projects. British Columbia’s NDP government is pursuing LNG expansion and overseeing a dramatic ramp-up in natural gas fracking. In Newfoundland and Labrador, oil and gas now account for about 25% of the province’s gross domestic product, and the province aims to double oil production.

Still central to the federal Plan is the carbon tax or its counterpart in B.C. and Quebec, cap-and-trade. “Putting a price on pollution,” says the Plan, “is widely recognized as the most efficient means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Producers and consumers alike are subject to periodic graduated carbon price payments in the hope that, through market forces, increased costs will promote more climate-friendly expenditures.

However, we need to be clear. Regulating emissions is an alternative to planning and quantifying the needed cutbacks in fossil fuel extraction and development. As many critics have noted, carbon pricing doesn’t even regulate emissions, it just puts a price on them based on an arbitrary calculation, the “social cost of carbon,” that tends to ignore the “externalities” — the cumulative emissions, feedback loops, and (in the case of carbon trading credits) the disproportionate impacts of climate change on countries in the Global South. For business, carbon pricing is just a cost of doing business. And it will always be limited to ensure that Canadian businesses are not disadvantaged by competitors’ prices and to avoid economic disruption that would motivate greater market intervention.

For consumers, however, carbon pricing tends to download moral and financial responsibility on households that burn fossil fuels for heating or transportation. The feds have tried to offset public resentment over the tax through rebates for 80% of consumers. And, more recently, public opposition has forced them to exempt Maritimers from the tax on home heating oil, and to remove the tax from farm fuels. Yet the government still insists that carbon pricing will reduce Canada’s carbon emissions by up to one-third by 2030.

Clearly, the overall objective of Canada’s official climate plan is to retain fossil fuels as Canada’s primary energy source for as long as possible, using market-based “offsets” and carbon trading to achieve “net zero.” Not surprisingly, many Canadians are resentful at moves to make them help pay for these anti-ecological and antisocial policies and programs.

What’s the alternative?

In his recent book A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, [2] Seth Klein argues convincingly that we need a radically different approach. He contrasts Canada’s listless response to today’s climate crisis with the massive mobilization the country experienced in WWII. That included adoption of an emergency mindset, mandatory measures, a reconfiguration of industrial production (e.g. jeeps and tanks, not cars) and above all no reliance on market forces; real planning, nationalizations (about 50 Crown corporations), and spending what it took to win.

A comparable mobilization is needed now, Klein urges. It would start with a national needs inventory as the basis for coordinating mass production of the equipment needed to realize our new GHG reduction targets. New factories would be built, as needed, to produce solar panels, wind turbines, electric heat pumps and electric busses at a mass scale. (The technology already exists.) A clear wind-down pathway would be adopted for all fossil fuel extraction in Canada, guided by a robust just transition plan for existing fossil fuel workers and communities that currently rely on these industries.

Along with a ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure, we need to develop a massive green public infrastructure plan, involving all levels of government. Billions of dollars would be invested in renewable energy, building retrofits, high-speed rail and expansion and electrification of cross-country railways, mass public transit, along with electric vehicle charging stations and methane capture from farms and landfills.

And because even under the best-case scenario a certain amount of global warming is already locked-in, Klein reminds us, we also now need to undertake major investments in climate adaptation and resilience infrastructure, with a focus on ensuring that vulnerable communities are better protected from climate disasters and related events (forest fires, extreme heat events, flooding, etc.). We also need to significantly invest in forest management that will lessen wildfire risks to rural and Indigenous communities, while providing thousands of sustainable jobs in resource-based communities. We need a large-scale program to repair and enhance Canada’s natural climate sequestration systems — helping nature suck carbon from the atmosphere. That includes an extensive reforestation program, and of course the preservation of existing old-growth forests.

Klein then adds an important point. As advocates of a Green New Deal have emphasized, he says, “we need more than just direct climate infrastructure investments — we also need large-scale investments in social infrastructure and the caring economy.”

“That means investments from all levels of government in zero-carbon public and non-profit housing — a bold commitment to build hundreds of thousands of new units of non-market housing. And it means federal and provincial funding for universal, public, accessible, quality child care and home care for seniors and people with disabilities. These are public services that are already virtually carbon-free and would represent a major enhancement to household affordability.”[3]

Finally, we need to set in law and regulation clear dates by which certain things must happen. “Clear targets … — embedded in law and well publicized — will send a much stronger signal to the market than any form of carbon pricing. They communicate to businesses and consumers that they must reorient their plans accordingly. If effectively enforced, these targets will push manufactures, builders, installers and extraction companies to make investment plans that align with these dates.”

That said, I would note a few things Klein overlooks. His national perspective must be supplemented by an international dimension. This means solidarity with climate-justice struggles in the global South – the peoples who are primary victims of global warming – in opposition to unequal trade relations, super-exploitation of their labour, and the pillage of their natural resources by transnational capital, and for relief from illegitimate debts. It means collaboration with countries like China in developing global trade in alternative energy resources and technologies.

Indigenous people are prime targets of attempts to coerce or coopt them into “partnering” with corporations and governments in the capitalist exploitation of their lands and resources. Solidarity with their struggles for self-determination and autonomy is essential.

The transition is itself a source of supplementary emissions that must be offset if the carbon budget is not to explode. Yet we need to reduce global energy consumption, that is, reduce productive and/or transport activities. This means challenging the capitalist growth imperative.

Does this mean de-growth? Some production or services should not degrow but be suppressed, ASAP: coal facilities and mines, oil extraction, weapons production, the advertising industry, plastics, pesticides, etc. But others should grow – such as renewable energies, organic agriculture, and essential services (education, health and culture).

Overall, this points to the “system change” that our movements have counterposed to climate change. Strategy, programs oriented to satisfying social, community needs, not subordinate to profit motive. And that, if I may say so, is a huge difference from the analogy Klein makes with the World War II mobilization. Then, ruling elites united in leading the national war effort. That unity was in their class interest.

Today, we have no such cross-class unanimity. Instead, we face what some critics call a “regime of obstruction” based on a matrix of corporate and financial control of our political and economic processes, the news and other cultural media – its power centers a combination of Calgary-based petroleum interests and Toronto-based finance and banking.[4] It’s a structural problem. To resolve it, we need to build alliances, coalitions of workers, farmers, indigenous communities, racialized minorities, students, youth and poor against the entrenched fossil oligarchy. And link decarbonization with opposition to capitalist austerity.

A key challenge – Restructuring transportation

If we break down Canada’s GHG emissions by sector, more than half are in fossil fuel resource extraction (25%) and transportation (28%).[5] How might the alternative strategy outlined here work in transportation, a service that along with housing and healthcare is integrally important to the day-to-day experiences of the people in our local communities?

Topping Seth Klein’s list of measures to get our transportation sector to carbon-zero is (and I quote) “expanding public transit, including a plan to make public transit not only more accessible and convenient, but also dramatically more affordable (minimally, that means free public transit for lower-income people, but could well involve making transit a ‘free’ publicly paid service, just like health care).”[6]

That is what we in Free Transit Ottawa propose: making public transit accessible to all, at no user charge, just like public schools, most health care, fire services, bike paths and sidewalks. A radically improved public transit system, which would be a major step toward fighting poverty and social exclusion, would also be the biggest single measure we could take to combat climate change.

What about trucks and cars? Rail expansion could reduce much highway trucking, and urban trucking can be electrified. As for cars, the private vehicles that have shaped the design and culture of our cities for more than a century – contributing to urban sprawl, loss of greenspace, wetlands and agricultural land, higher costs and waste of time for daily commuters, etc. – it is necessary not only to put bans on the manufacture, sale and advertising of new fossil fuel-burning cars, but to replace them through expansion of electrified urban public transportation and inter-city rail.

That was the point made by the workers at GM’s auto plant in Oshawa, which the company closed in late 2019 after more than 100 years of operations. Green Jobs Oshawa, the campaign led by Unifor Local 222’s political action committee, called on the federal government to take over the plant as a publicly owned enterprise and convert it to electric vehicle manufacturing, with a focus on the production of vehicles for government truck fleets such as those of Canada Post – following through on the postal workers’ union proposal for making the post office a hub for electrification and local community banking and home services.[7]

Far from replacing cars, however, Ottawa and some provinces are simply planning to electrify them. They have already arranged to invest some $50 billion on the construction of three giant factories – two in Ontario, one in Quebec – to manufacture batteries for EVs. Critics question the need for such giant subsidies to the foreign companies in question when they might well invest in battery production without the subsidies. We might ask, as well: what if such sums had been spent on expanding and electrifying urban public transit? And what about the environmental cost of extracting the minerals needed to produce these batteries? Can we really hope to reduce carbon emissions through massive development of mining, among the most energy-consuming and polluting industries?

Finally, we must bear in mind that the campaign for free and improved public transit will face serious opposition from property developers who own large tracts of land on the edges of cities, the oil and auto industries, other business sectors that favour low taxes and limited government, and the politicians who represent them.

To achieve free and accessible public transit, we will have to build a movement powerful enough to overcome this opposition. That movement will be centred on those who are transit dependent as well as environmental activists, but must also include a wide range of working and professional people, including those in Ottawa who currently work for the public transit utility, OC Transpo.[8] To build it, we will need to engage in educational activities as well as struggles for immediate reforms that lower the cost of public transport and/or increase its accessibility – joining existing struggles and initiating new struggles.

Ultimately, we need a different kind of government with the political will to lead, coordinate and consolidate the transition, a government based on the support of the victims of climate change, not its perpetrators.

 

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[1] David Hughes, Getting to Net-Zero in Canada: Scale of the problem, government projections and daunting challenges (CCPA, February 2024).

[2] Seth Klein, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency (Toronto: 2020).

[3] Ibid., pp. 183-184.

[4] Shannon Daub, Gwendolyn Blue, Lise Rajewicz, and Zoë Yunker, “Episodes in the New Climate Denialism,” in William K. Carroll, Regime of Obstruction: How Corporate Power Blocks Energy Democracy (AU Press, 2021), p. 226.

[5] Followed by industry (14%), electricity (11%), agriculture (9%), residential buildings (6%) and non-residential buildings (4%).

[6] A Good War, p. 187.

[7] Delivering Community Power, https://www.deliveringcommunitypower.ca/.

[8] The OC Transpo union, affiliated with the Amalgamated Transit Workers, has publicly supported the work of Free Transit Ottawa. The national union is sympathetic as well. “ATU Canada advocates for fares to be affordable for all, and advocates for progress toward creating a fare-free transit.” https://www.atucanada.ca/blog/free-public-transit-canada.

That other 9-11: The coup that ended Chile’s Popular Unity government

By Richard Fidler

This year, on September 11, we mark the 50^th anniversary of the coup in Chile. The violent military overthrow of the Popular Unity government put an end to a turbulent experiment in the parliamentary road to socialism initiated with the presidential election of Salvador Allende just three years earlier. The coup government headed by General Augusto Pinochet launched massive and deadly repression and inaugurated the capitalist world’s first major wave of neoliberal economic “reforms,” many of which remain in force today.

It seems appropriate to look back at the Chilean experience – the first breakthrough for the Left in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 – and to think about the lessons to be learned for today’s Left and progressive movements. Allende’s electoral base, the Unidad Popular (UP), or Popular Unity, was a coalition of his Socialist party with the Communist party and several much smaller parties around a programmatic agreement that promised “revolutionary changes” to “liberate Chile from imperialism, exploitation and poverty.” And it pledged to do this in full respect for and compliance with the country’s parliamentary, legal and other institutions.

For an initial balance sheet, I recommend an important article by Ralph Miliband first published in the 1973 edition of Socialist Register. Miliband was a prominent sociologist and author of numerous books on socialism and politics, including Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society. His essay, too lengthy to be reproduced here, merits reading in its entirety. But here is a brief excerpt, from its concluding section, on “the question of the state and the exercise of power.”

It was noted earlier that a major change in the state’s personnel is an urgent and essential task for a government bent on really serious change; and that this needs to be allied to a variety of institutional reforms and innovations, designed to push forward the process of the state’s democratization. But in this latter respect, much more needs to be done, not only to realize a set of long-term socialist objectives concerning the socialist exercise of power, but as a means either of avoiding armed confrontation, or of meeting it on the most advantageous and least costly terms if it turns out to be inevitable.

What this means is not simply ‘mobilizing the masses’ or ‘arming the workers’. These are slogans – important slogans – which need to be given effective institutional content. In other words, a new regime bent on fundamental changes in the economic, social and political structures must from the start begin to build and encourage the building of a network of organs of power, parallel to and complementing the state power, and constituting a solid infrastructure for the timely ‘mobilization of the masses’ and the effective direction of its actions. The forms which this assumes – workers’ committees at their place of work, civic committees in districts and sub-districts, etc. – and the manner in which these organs ‘mesh’ with the state may not be susceptible to blueprinting. But the need is there, and it is imperative that it should be met, in whatever forms are most appropriate.

This is not, to all appearances, how the Allende regime moved. Some of the things that needed doing were done; but such ‘mobilization’ as occurred, and such preparations as were made, very late in the day, for a possible confrontation, lacked direction, coherence, in many cases even encouragement. Had the regime really encouraged the creation of a parallel infra-structure, it might have lived; and, incidentally, it might have had less trouble with its opponents and critics on the left, for instance in the MIR, since its members might not then have found the need so great to engage in actions of their own, which greatly embarrassed the government: they might have been more ready to cooperate with a government in whose revolutionary will they could have had greater confidence. In part at least, ‘ultra-leftism’ is the product of ‘citra-leftism’.

Salvador Allende was a noble figure and he died a heroic death. But hard though it is to say it, that is not the point. What matters, in the end, is not how he died, but whether he could have survived by pursuing different policies; and it is wrong to claim that there was no alternative to the policies that were pursued. In this as in many other realms, and here more than in most, facts only become compelling as one allows them to be so. Allende was not a revolutionary who was also a parliamentary politician. He was a parliamentary politician who, remarkably enough, had genuine revolutionary tendencies. But these tendencies could not overcome a political style which was not suitable to the purposes he wanted to achieve.

Miliband focused his analysis on the trials and tribulations encountered by the UP government as it sought to pursue, and then retreat from, its reform program in the face of strenuous and mounting opposition by Chile’s capitalists backed by Washington. Writing from afar, he was unable to assess the reactions among the popular forces that constituted the government’s social base. That, however, is the subject matter of a remarkable study of “constituent popular power and the politics of conflict” in Chile from 1970 to 1973 that – in the words of its author Franck Gaudichaud – are “keys to understanding a thousand days that shook the world.”[1] Gaudichaud’s text, adapted from his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Michael Löwy, is a detailed analysis of the forms of “popular power(s)” created in their struggles by the workers, peasants and “pobladores” of the shanty-towns during the UP regime.

This research shows that at the heart of this period of social confrontations and political upheavals, various attempts at what we have proposed to call popular constituent power arose. A notion defined as ‘the creation of social and political experiments of organized counter-power and counter-hegemonies’ leading to ‘new forms of popular collective appropriations’ and ‘a calling into question – total or relative – of relations of production, forms of work organization, social and spatial hierarchies and material or symbolic mechanisms of domination’. It is precisely in the specific (and historically determined) configuration taken by these forms of popular power that the true originality of the Chilean process, its transformative capacity and its historical force are located. This, beyond the unprecedented nature of Allende’s project of transition to socialism or a supposed intangible stability of the democratic institutions of the ‘compromise State’. And it seems to us that there is here a path worth taking, to explore, in the study of other great political crises or Latin American revolutionary processes.

If we examine the various facets of this collective turmoil which mobilized several tens of thousands of employees, pobladores and left-wing activists, we see the emergence of a ‘grammar of protest’ little known to Popular Unity. This idée-force is that of popular power, but in this turbulent sky, one star shone more brightly than others: that of the industrial cordones.[2] Certainly, ‘the theme of the industrial cordones refers to one of the most important and successful experiences of Popular Unity, perhaps approaching one of the most realized utopias of Chilean socialism: that in which the workers built themselves as an historical actor with strong collective economic and political responsibility within the ongoing process. Appearing most of the time on the outskirts of the major cities, these are territorial bodies of class coordination, bringing together the unions of several companies in a specific urban area, with the immediate aim of realizing demands such as the extension of the nationalized sector, workers’ control of production, the self-defense of factories, the increase in wages or even, in the medium term, the establishment of a new institutional architecture, based on municipal and provincial popular councils. The cordones thus draw a new topography of struggles in urban areas, alongside other actors in the social movement. They gradually anchor themselves in a city in struggle and territories appropriated by and for massively mobilized popular classes.

A militant in the Chilean process in the early 1970s was the Peruvian peasant leader and ecosocialist Hugo Blanco, who died this year at the age of 89. Released from prison in 1970 by Peru’s revolutionary military junta, Blanco made his way to Chile. He authored many articles on the grassroots mobilizations and political conflicts under the UP government. Some were translated and published in English in Intercontinental Press, a socialist newsweekly published in New York City.[3] They provide insightful analyses into the class dynamics of the events, and can be accessed on line. Here is a representative sample:

Chilean Workers Organize Distribution, April 23, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1115.pdf#page=16&view=FitV,35

Right Wing in Popular Unity Consolidates, April 30, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1116.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Threat Mounting in Chile, May 7, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1117.pdf#page=8&view=FitV,35

The Sharpening Struggle in Chile, May 28, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1120.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

Fascist Provocations, Labor Unrest in Chile, June 4, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1121.pdf#page=11&view=FitV,35

Chilean Workers Organize to Meet the Rightist Threat, June 11, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1122.pdf#page=18&view=FitV,35

The Workers’ Cordones Challenge the Reformists, June 18, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1123.pdf#page=12&view=FitV,35

The Role of the Cordones Industriales, November 26, 1973 https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1973/IP1142.pdf#page=19&view=FitV,35

Also worth reading:

Allende’s dream, Pinochet’s coup and Chile’s present By Carmen Aguirre.

People in Chile never stopped resisting the dictatorship that began 50 years ago, or seeking to revive the social reforms of the 1970s. A childhood in exile has made it impossible for me to forget that.

This article, published in the Toronto Globe & Mail September 8, is remarkable not least because it is almost unique, amongst the coverage of Chile’s coup in the business media, to remind us of the complicity of Pierre Trudeau’s government in related events before, during and after the Pinochet coup.

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[1] Franck Gaudichaud, Chile 1970-1973, Mille jours qui ébranlèrent le monde (Presses universitaires de Rennes 2013, free on-line since 2017). In French only, at present.

[2] The Spanish word cordones could be roughly translated in English as “lanyards,” that is, interlaced bodies of workers in different workplaces or geographic units.

[3] As a staff writer for Intercontinental Press in the early 1970s, I met Hugo Blanco for the first time in 1974, in Italy, at the Tenth World Congress of the Fourth International.

A Ukrainian Socialist Lays Out the Aims and Struggles of Her Country’s Left

Leftists in Ukraine are simultaneously resisting Russian imperialism and the domestic imposition of neoliberalism.

By Ashley Smith, Truthout

On the anniversary of Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian left faces a dual challenge — resisting Russian military attacks while also fighting against their own government’s imposition of neoliberalism and austerity. Meanwhile, the global left remains deeply divided in its approach to the war and its relation to Ukrainian leftists’ appeals for international solidarity.

Alona Liasheva is a sociologist, researcher of urban political economy, and works at The Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen. She is a co-editor of Commons: Journal for Social Criticism and member of Ukrainian democratic socialist group Sotsialnyi Rukh (The Social Movement).

In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Ashley Smith speaks with Liasheva about the nature of the war, the conditions faced by her country’s working-class majority, the popular and military resistance and the Ukrainian left’s strategy in wartime and for reconstruction.

Ashley Smith: Russia has launched waves of missile attacks on Ukraine. What impact has that had on people’s lives? How has it impacted popular consciousness? What effect has it had on people’s determination to resist the invasion?

Alona Liasheva: Russia started launching this latest round of missile attacks on October 10. They were supposed to weaken the Ukrainian army, but it didn’t work. Here in Lviv, they seemed to hit everything but the military buildings. While civilian buildings lost their electricity and suffered blackouts, the military buildings were up and running either with regular electricity or generators.

So, the victims of these missiles were civilians and civilian infrastructure. Many lost heat in the middle of winter and had to endure extremely cold conditions in their houses and apartments.

The attacks knocked power out at hospitals, turning off refrigerators that keep the COVID vaccines cold. We couldn’t get vaccines for a while as a result. All sorts of people and organizations mobilized to get us new vaccines, get generators to key places, and get the electricity back on.

I think Russia hoped to break the will of the Ukrainian people. But the opposite has happened. In surveys, popular support for the military resistance to Russia has remained steadfast.

Many on the Western left persist in calling the war a proxy one between the U.S./NATO and Russia. They also call for an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated settlement to end the war. What are the problems with these positions?

Really this is an easy question. Just listen to what Putin just said in his state of the union address. He declared that his goal is to conquer Ukraine and subsume it into the Russian Federation. At the same time as he was speaking, the Russian Army was attacking and killing civilians.

So, both Putin’s rhetoric and his military’s action demonstrate that Russia does not recognize Ukraine as an independent nation, let alone a negotiating partner. He is certainly not interested in a just peace. With his regime dedicated to our national eradication, we have no choice but to defend ourselves.

Unfortunately, it’s that simple. Most everyone understands this in Ukraine. In sociological surveys, I’ve asked people what they think of a ceasefire and negotiations. Almost without exception, they say that Russia cannot be trusted in any talks.

That is especially true of people who have lived in the occupied areas of Ukraine. They describe living under a regime which they did not choose, which did not represent them, and which violently rejected their right to think of themselves as Ukrainians.

That regime imposed terrible economic conditions, discriminated against women and LGBTQ people, and abducted children and sent them back to Russia. That’s why Ukrainians would not accept Zelensky saying, “we’re not going to fight anymore, we’re going to agree to a ceasefire, and negotiate away occupied territories.”

All of this has changed my own view about diplomacy, which I had advocated over the last eight years. I supported the Minsk agreements as a way to freeze if not resolve the conflict.

Putin shattered my illusions, violating the agreement and launching this invasion. Negotiating with him at this point would be the height of naivete. It would be shooting ourselves in the foot.

I know that the left tends to look for a nefarious U.S. plot behind everything. Of course, I think it’s important to analyze every conflict to understand all the players, the dynamics, and who’s culpable.

In the case of Ukraine, it’s far simpler than many on the left think. Ukraine was attacked by an imperialist army, and as a result we are in a struggle to defend our lives and our very right to exist as a sovereign nation.

Those on the left in the U.S., especially straight white men who tend to be those most vocal in opposition to Ukraine’s right to self-determination, should take a moment and reflect on their privileged position.

They are not being attacked by an imperialist army. They have not been denied the right to say, “I’m Ukrainian. I want to live in my city. I want to peacefully do my job.” They have not been told you cannot be gay, or you cannot get this or that job because you’re a woman.

Instead of listening to us about our experience, instead of identifying with our struggle, too many on the left construct complicated narratives about geopolitics, which frankly do not hold up under close examination. The main problem is that 44 million people are being denied their nationhood, political subjectivity, and agency.

Why is it important for the international left to support Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination? What are the stakes of Ukraine’s victory or defeat in the war?

In reality, everyone in the world has a stake in Ukraine’s struggle for liberation from invasion and occupation. After the Second World War in Europe, countries agreed to have a red line that they would not cross; they would not invade and occupy other countries.

But increasingly, imperialist powers started crossing this line around the world. Russia did the same first in Chechnya and then Syria, Georgia, Donbas and Crimea. If Russia were to succeed with its invasion of Ukraine, it would set a precedent for other imperialist powers and states to do the same — invade, occupy, shoot and kill civilians with impunity.

That’s why the invasion is not simply a regional conflict; Russia is setting a process in motion that could lead to higher and higher levels of imperialist interventionism and potentially a Third World War between nuclear armed powers. So, solidarity with Ukraine is in everyone’s interests.

Really it should not even be a question. Support for struggles for self-determination from Palestine to Ukraine is a principle for the international left, or it should be. At its best, the left has always defended the right of oppressed nations to struggle for their liberation.

Any compromise of that principle discredits the left in the eyes of oppressed peoples. By contrast, international solidarity with all struggles of the oppressed strengthens our collective power to resist all imperialist powers and fight for progressive social change throughout the world.

This is not an abstract question for us. The international left can make a material difference in whether we are able to win or lose. The more solidarity with us, the more humanitarian aid, the more support for our unions, and the more support for our left will strengthen our capacity to resist Russian imperialism and fight for a progressive future in Ukraine and indeed in all of Eastern Europe.

Betrayal of that internationalism will weaken our struggle and it will discredit the left inside Ukraine and internationally. Who would join a left that justifies and excuses imperialist war or ignores the struggles of the oppressed for liberation?

Can you talk more about your experience with the international left? Have you found support? Have you been able to forge ties with Russian socialists and anti-war activists?

Unfortunately, many in the international community used a Cold War framework to understand the war. Most of these ended up ignoring or refusing to support our struggle for self-determination.

They variously sided with Russia, excused its aggression, or wrongly portrayed the war as an inter-imperial one between the U.S./NATO and Russia. The worst of these have gone so far as to blame Ukraine for being attacked. That is like blaming a woman for being raped because she wore a short skirt.

Others on the left sought out Ukrainians to talk with or read our books and articles to understand the war from our point of view. Whether they knew it or not, they were adopting a method that should be a principle on the left — listening to those who are being oppressed.

They built solidarity with our struggle for self-determination. Such leftists, trade unionists, and particularly international feminist networks, which I am part of, have played an important role. They have lobbied for Ukrainian interests, including supporting our right to secure weapons, which are essential for our ability to defend ourselves.

They have also provided humanitarian assistance, joined our international campaign to get our debt canceled, supported our unions’ struggle to defend our labor rights, and helped with many other campaigns. In Eastern Europe we have gotten lots of support from Razem in Poland in particular. They have played a pivotal role in our struggle for debt cancellation.

We have also gotten support from many Russian organizations and activists. Some, however, adopted the position of those on the Western left that blamed Ukraine for the war or the U.S. or NATO. They recycle Putin’s talking points verbatim.

But for most of our Russian allies, it was really an easy question. Being in an imperialist country, it was not a complicated theoretical problem. They saw that Putin ordered an invasion of another country, Ukraine, and said the solution was simple — Russia had to get out.

Those Russian organizations and activists, especially Feminist Antiwar Resistance, organized protests right after the invasion. But the Russian regime has repressed them, jailed many and forced huge numbers of activists to leave the country or go into hiding.

As a result, we cannot say that there is an antiwar movement in Russia now. Despite this we maintain close relations with Russian organizations and networks of militants both abroad and in Russia itself.

One of the challenges the Ukrainian left faces is how to support the struggle for liberation and at the same time protest the government’s neoliberal policies and attacks on the labor movement. How have your group, Sotsialnyi Rukh, and others navigated this?

It is not as hard as it would seem. In reality everyone criticizes the government. That vibrant political discussion is a result of the war itself. The horrible truth is that when bombs are hitting your house, you are forced to ask why this is happening, how to resist it, what the government is doing to defend you, how they can do it better, and what you can do to make the resistance more effective.

Fear and anger have motivated people to do everything from volunteer to fight to organize mutual aid to help one another through the catastrophe of war. People gravitate to one another in emergencies. No one wants to be alone; you want to join a collective and improve your conditions.

Inevitably such politicization spills over into every other arena of Ukrainian society. People start thinking about their rights as workers, as women, as LGBTQI people, and so on. That’s why a lot of Ukrainians are joining different political groups and organizations. Some people have gravitated to right wing organizations and their traditionalist ideas or religious ideas.

At the same time, the left has grown as people search for progressive solutions. Our organization has recruited a lot over the last year. We have way more members to do way more work. People are more active, ready to organize, and eager to mobilize for all kinds of initiatives.

Left-wing student groups have developed. They organized protests against universities being closed, raised demands about their rights, and built international solidarity with student organizations around the world.

Trade unions have also raised their demands and built new organizations. Some of these grew directly out of war conditions. For example, when Kherson was occupied, some turned to one another to protect themselves against the Russian forces. Others fled together to other parts of the country where they knew few people except each other.

In both cases, people relied on one another for mutual aid, building networks in the process. These became the basis of union organization in the case of medical workers, most of whom were nurses. They have formed a union to fight for their interests and for those of their patients.

As a result of all this ferment in civil society, many, not just the left and feminist groups, have made criticisms of how the government leads the war and its class and social policies. Of course, a majority support Zelensky as the leader of the government and military resistance, but not uncritically.

In that context, the left can both stand on the same side as Zelensky in the resistance and oppose his reactionary neoliberal laws and attacks on union rights. We are gaining an increasing audience based on this approach.

We write articles explaining why his neoliberal policies are unjust, undermine morale and compromise the resistance. We send these to government ministries and parliamentary committees. Sometimes our viewpoint is heard and has an impact.

Sometimes we’re ignored. That’s why we publish our positions on our website, send them to the media, and share them directly with unions and social movement organizations. We also share them internationally and draw on our allies to pressure the government.

One of our key tools is petitions. If a proposed law gets 25,000 signatures on petitions, it must be brought to the president’s attention. For example, we helped with a petition for a law legalizing gay marriage. It quickly got 25,000 signatures, forcing Zelensky to publicly state that he agreed with the proposal. The government has not passed it yet, but we have helped spur a public discussion about gay marriage.

Such campaigns are how the government was forced to crack down on corruption. It was not the result of a journalist just writing an article that exposed it, but the result of long-term activity by liberals and anti-corruption activists.

Already there are discussions about the reconstruction of Ukraine after the war. Many are concerned that it will be done along neoliberal lines, using debt and dependence as means to deepen free market reforms. What kind of reconstruction do you advocate and how does the fight for that grow out of the liberation struggle?

There will be an enormous struggle over the terms of reconstruction, just as there has been an enormous struggle over the neoliberalization of Ukraine since the 2008 global financial crisis. I’m not naïve enough to believe that after our victory, Ukraine will rise up and support social democratic reforms. But we can help lead a fight for as progressive a reconstruction as possible.

There is no doubt that Zelensky and the international financial institutions have a neoliberal reconstruction planned. The Western powers and the IMF and World Bank will give out loans on the condition that Ukraine implement further free market reforms like deregulation, cuts to the welfare state, and an opening to global capitalism.

We have a great deal to defend, especially our health care system. I can go to the hospital and get basic medical services like blood work and vaccinations for free. Of course, it’s underfunded, so you have to wait for some services. Because of that, people who have money go to private clinics.

But it’s still better than in the U.S. Some of my friends are refugees in New York City. They have been shocked by advertising for health insurance, the cost of health insurance, the co-pays on medical visits and how much people pay for services even when they have health insurance.

Debt cancellation should be the first thing done to help a country reconstruct itself after war, occupation and economic crisis.

I’m confident that the struggles we have seen emerge during the war will make it possible to stop the worst of neoliberal reconstruction. We don’t want to end up like neoliberal America!

For example, the new organization of medical workers will be able to fight for better pay and working conditions and defend the entire health care system. Through such struggles, we will make the case that another, socially just reconstruction is possible.

Instead of loans we should get direct aid and most importantly reparations from Russia to rebuild our country. Our existing debt should be canceled. It would be insane to use reparations from Russia to repay debt to the international financial institutions and western banks.

Our campaign for debt cancellation should be a global precedent for all indebted countries. Debt cancellation should be the first thing done to help a country reconstruct itself after war, occupation and economic crisis.

Free of debt and more loans, Ukraine could then invest in a progressive reconstruction of the country, defend our welfare state and invest in the public sector. Our whole economy will have to be rebuilt from our agriculture to our military industry, which will be essential so that we can defend ourselves against future attacks from Russia. Such a reconstruction would be in the interests of the country’s vast working-class majority.

The new fight will be similar to the one after 2008. The Ukrainian government took loans from the IMF and agreed to their neoliberal conditionalities. But people rose up against them, forcing the government to balance between the popular pressure from below and the international financial institutions.

The same pattern will happen in reconstruction. Zelensky will take the loans and agree to neoliberal terms, but then face domestic opposition. The results of that struggle will be determined by the balance of power both domestically and internationally.

That’s another reason why we need solidarity from the international left, indebted countries in the Global South and international unions. Our fight is against imperialism and the entire model that has been imposed on nearly every society.

If we can win liberation and a progressive reconstruction we can set a positive example for struggles of the exploited and oppressed throughout the world.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

Ashley Smith is a socialist writer and activist in Burlington, Vermont. He has written in numerous publications including Truthout, The International Socialist Review, Socialist Worker, ZNet, Jacobin, New Politics, and many other online and print publications. He is currently working on a book for Haymarket Books entitled Socialism and Anti-Imperialism.

The Left, Ukraine and Russia

The current issue of the Quebec online weekly Presse-toi à gauche publishes this article by Marxist ecosocialist Daniel Tanuro and others, published first in the Belgian publication Le Vif.  My translation. -- Richard Fidler

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What the war has revealed about the nature of Ukrainian and Russian societies

Looking back on the year that has passed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we would like to take a break from the military and/or geopolitical considerations, the usual analyses devoted to this war, and focus on what it has revealed about the nature of the societies involved.

Over the past year, we have been involved, through the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine, in numerous solidarity or information actions which have enabled us to get to know Ukrainian realities better. The numerous contacts that we gained have confirmed the existence of a plural and diverse civil society. All of its branches, in all their diversity, are fully enrolled in the resistance to Russian aggression, a resistance that they conceive not as a strictly national cause but as a fight of society itself for the preservation of its way of life, its values, etc. A year ago, if Putin’s Blitzkrieg failed, it was above all due to the resistance of the population, the countless initiatives by ordinary citizens to repel the invader. The state in Ukraine is weak, inefficient and deeply infected with corruption, as Zelensky’s recent sweeps also illustrate. Without the miracles performed by networks of popular self-organization of all kinds, the very survival of the country would have been more than improbable.

Ukrainian society is pluralistic and the “Maidan Revolution” in 2014 gave rise to a quite remarkable flourishing of cultural and artistic production, particularly in the field of cinema. The Russian invasion, however, created a paradoxical situation. The first victims of the abuses of the occupiers are Russian-speaking Ukrainians and the resistance in the occupied zones in the East and South is mainly due to them. But as a result of the aggression, nationalist feelings have developed which reject all that is Russian, sometimes attacking Russian culture and language as a whole in an indiscriminate and irrational way. It is likely that only a common victory over the aggressors will establish a more balanced situation.

Russian society, on the other hand, is characterized above all by two things: fear and enfeeblement. Putin’s regime has moved from illiberal authoritarianism to open dictatorship, and repression continues unabated. While his war arouses little more than a contrived enthusiasm, public demonstrations of opposition require great courage and remain sporadic. A majority of Russians prefer to look elsewhere and avoid talking about the war.

André Markowicz, a poet and writer who is the most eminent and passionate renovator of the French translation of great Russian literature has published a brief essay “Et si l’Ukraine librait la Russie?” [What if Ukraine were to liberate Russia?]. This goes to the heart of the matter. Ukraine is fighting first for its freedom, but it is also necessary that “Ukraine win the war so that the Putin regime collapses and there is in the ruins of this regime a democratic possibility.” As indeed shown by the precedents of the Crimean War (1853-1856), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), the Great War (1914-1917) and the Afghan War (1979-1989). There is a recurring history in Russia of military defeats becoming the opening for revolutions or reforming upheavals. The beautiful motto of the Polish insurgents of 1830, “For your freedom and for ours,” remains current.

Putin’s regime is national-conservative and neo-imperialist, with special reference to the legacy of Nicholas I, the most reactionary of all 19th century czars. His alleged populism boils down to the accents used to castigate liberal opponents or disgraced public servants. But in his international policy as in the exercise of Russian soft power, Putin combines with gusto the simultaneous support and use of the most diverse currents and personalities, from the extreme right to the extreme left, to weaken other powers and disseminate his propaganda.

This is one of the reasons[1] behind the major split that the war in Ukraine has created in the ranks of the left, especially the radical left. While anti-fascism and anti-colonialism are supposed to be part of its DNA, we have seen a part of it, the importance of which varies depending on the country, take up all or part of Putin’s arguments, most often in the name of extremely sketchy geopolitical considerations (Russia is said to be surrounded!!). Seasoned militants or intellectuals who have spent their lives promoting “armed struggles for national liberation” in the four corners of the globe, now refuse, in the name of a “peace” imperative, to distinguish between the aggressor and the attacked and to support the latter.

Our action, in contrast, foregrounds the right of peoples to self-determination and therefore respect for the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine. But we also want to help strengthen the entire democratic and emancipatory potential that we see expressed in multiple forms within Ukrainian social life. This support we bring above all to the resistance pitted against the imperial will to annihilate it, but we address it as well to the progressive social forces which in Ukraine itself seek, for example, to thwart the ultra-liberal socio-economic policies of the government or the seizure of precious natural resources by certain highly-favoured oligarchs.

[The authors close with a call to readers to participate in a demonstration convened by groups promoting solidarity with Ukraine’s resistance, which was to be held in Brussels February 25.]

France Blanmailland (lawyer)

Daniel Tanuro (ecosocialist writer)

Jean Vogel (ULB professor)

Laurent Vogel (European Trade Union Institute researcher)

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[1] The other reason being the obsession with “American imperialism” alone, as a result of which any bloodthirsty dictator becomes a champion of the people the moment he finds himself in conflict with the United States government.