Canadian Left Responses to War in Ukraine – a Provisional Balance Sheet

By Richard Fidler

February 24, 2022 marked the opening of a new phase in the developing reconfiguration of global capitalist and popular forces. Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine, the prompt mobilization of resistance by Ukrainians, and the quick shift toward public support for NATO in much of Europe, confronted the international Left and progressive forces with some major challenges. The Left in Canada was no exception.

“This conflict will change everything,” wrote Quebec socialist Pierre Beaudet in a memo to the solidarity organization Alternatives that he directed, just days before Beaudet’s sudden death March 8. “As in any important debate, there are theories, strategic issues, choices to make in our practice.”

Beaudet pointed to some key features of the new situation:

1. Russia’s determination to prevail, its denial of “the very reality of Ukraine as the sovereign state and territory of a people with the right of self-determination,” risked a long war in which “resistance to the aggression is the only outcome on offer.”

2. Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s approach “borrowed from the tradition of the USSR under Stalin in imposing a centralizing and repressive state along with attempts to carve out a place in the global arena.”

3. The post-Soviet expansion of NATO, and Washington’s failures in its intervention in the Middle East and Central Asia, prompting Putin’s belief that this was now the time to strike a major blow in Ukraine, where Russia had already annexed Crimea in 2014 and supported pro-Russian separatists in the east.

“Now that Russia has attacked, there is no turning back. Either Putin wins his bet by the subjugation of Ukraine, which would allow him to ‘entrust’ to a new government the job of ‘re-establishing order.’ Or the situation will drag on into an endless conflict – unless Russia decides to wage war in the cities even if it means destroying them, with their people, as was done in Syria.”

The result will be “an immense realignment of priorities and strategies.

“NATO, its relevance diminished in recent years, will return in force. The member states will be required to increase substantially their military spending and become directly involved in the strategy of counter-attacking and weakening Russia….”

4. The Canadian government will follow the U.S. line, as always. Military spending will surge, financed by severe cutbacks in other expenditures. Fossil fuel export projects – perhaps “the LNG project designed to bring Alberta’s gas through Quebec” – will be relaunched as part of the “war effort.”

5. “We act in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance that aims to re-establish an inclusive and peaceful sovereignty without abuses of national minorities. Our solidarity can be exercised in the area of humanitarian assistance” which “must not be reduced to meet Ukraine’s needs.”

6. Russia’s invasion was a “blatant violation of the UN Charter and international law. The United States and their NATO allies, including Canada, have plunged us as well increasingly into this war by a flurry of sanctions and outrageous statements.” A peace process must include the United Nations, and not be left to the major protagonists like the European Union and NATO.

The analysis was prescient. With hindsight, we can think of some elements that can now be added. However, Beaudet’s argument had the virtue of centering our response on the need to support Ukraine’s defense of its territorial sovereignty and self-determination.

In the 18 months since Beaudet’s memo, his organization Alternatives has worked to promote solidarity with the Ukraine resistance while opposing Russian aggression and NATO expansion. It has also joined the international campaign for the release of Boris Kagarlitsky and other Russian antiwar prisoners. Its approach contrasts with that of the pacifist organization Échec à la guerre, which claims to oppose all imperialisms – especially U.S. “military domination” -- but has not rallied to defend Ukraine.

In what follows, I will outline and critically comment on some of the other responses to the war by the Canadian and Quebec left.

The parliamentary Left

When it comes to membership in NATO and its alliance with U.S. imperialism -- the bedrock of Canada’s foreign policy -- the labour-based New Democratic Party tends to march in lockstep with whatever government holds office in Ottawa. The Ukraine war is no exception. While supporting provision of weapons needed by Ukraine – as it should – the NDP has also agreed with moves to reinforce Canada’s military spending and NATO involvement as well as sanctions designed to harm the economic needs of the Russian people.

In a statement issued on the one-year anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion, the NDP reaffirmed its support of “the Ukrainians who are defending their country and … those who have been forced to flee.” But it called for strengthening the sanctions regime, and failed to raise the need to cancel Ukraine’s public debt as it seeks to rebuild.

The other party of Canada’s parliamentary Left, the pro-Quebec sovereignty party Québec solidaire, defends Ukraine of course. However, it has limited its support to a motion in Quebec’s National Assembly, on the eve of Russia’s aggression,[1] and a resolution adopted by its National Council on May 28, 2022. The resolution condemned Russia, reaffirmed Ukraine’s right to self-determination while calling for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the aggression, and urged rapid reception of Ukrainian refugees.

The QS council resolution emphasized that “this conflict must not be used as a justification to allow the exploitation of Quebec’s oil and gas resources, or to increase exports of fossil fuels from Canada on the pretext of replacing Russian oil and gas.”

Finally, it called on its members, and citizens, to “support peace demonstrations opposing the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army….”

However, QS has not itself initiated any such demonstrations although its program[2] declares that the party “will participate in building international mobilizations against military interventions (of imperialist powers) aimed at ensuring control over peoples and their wealth and attacking their sovereignty.” The party also calls for Canada’s immediate withdrawal from NATO and NORAD.[3]

Extraparliamentary Left

Québec solidaire identifies itself as “a party of the streets as well as the ballot-boxes,” and it is the extraparliamentary wing of the party that has taken the lead in defense of Ukraine. The popular website Presse-toi à gauche (PTàG) includes among its editors and writers the most prominent left-wing activists within QS. Since the war began each weekly edition has included a selection of articles on the war, the vast majority sympathetic to Ukraine.

Another left website based in Quebec, Pivot, has likewise supported Ukraine, although not as diligently as PTàG. In April it published a powerful rejoinder to a few accounts in mainstream media and left-leaning publications in Quebec that attributed the war to provocation of Russia by NATO and/or Ukraine.

In the rest of Canada, unfortunately, the major left publications and organizations have tended to ignore the Ukraine resistance or dismiss it as a “proxy” for what they portray as a NATO war against Russia.[4] People’s Voice, the Communist party monthly newspaper, not surprisingly supports Russia. “NATO, the US, EU and Canada have left Russia with few options,” said the CP in a statement issued in October 2022 that echoed some of the Kremlin’s narratives.

A prolific blogger on the war is Yves Engler, who has a well-earned reputation as the most prominent critic of Canadian foreign policy from an anti-imperialist standpoint. The author of many books and articles, Engler is associated with the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, an NGO that sponsors online seminars and petitions critical of Canadian corporate and government intervention abroad. Engler and the CFPI have campaigned against the provision of Canadian arms to Ukraine, and joined the international chorus advocating a “negotiated peace” in Ukraine that is not predicated on Russian withdrawal.[5]

Engler’s articles have been republished by some on-line “progressive” websites such as rabble.ca, which otherwise have little to say about the war.

A widely-read online website The Maple publishes well-researched critiques of Canadian foreign policy but has said little about the Russian war on Ukraine. Its managing editor Alex Cosh published an article in another left publication Briarpatch that repeated much of the Kremlin narrative justifying its aggression.[6] However, The Maple also organized an on-line debate between Ukrainian socialist Taras Bilous and Quebec blogger Dimitri Lascaris on the issue “Should Leftists Support Sending Weapons to Ukraine?”[7] Lascaris, who once ran for leader of the Canadian Green party, is notorious for his support of Russia as a force for peace. A readers’ poll conducted by The Maple following the debate found a substantial majority supporting Bilous in his defense of the Ukraine resistance.

A rare debate on the war: Canadian Dimension

Canadian Dimension, a Winnipeg-based monthly magazine (founded in 1963, on-line only since 2019), is undoubtedly the most prominent publication on the English-Canadian left. Its extensive coverage of the war[8] has been slanted heavily against Ukraine’s resistance, some of it authored by writers like Yves Engler and Dimitri Lascaris, as well as U.S. sources like CodePink. However, CD also published five articles this year by Russian antiwar critic Boris Kagarlitsky, and recently published a strong editorial statement protesting Kagarlitsky’s arrest and urging its readers to support the international solidarity campaign for his release.

When Canadian Dimension introduced an article by Kagarlitsky with the headline “Clear-eyed veteran Russian leftist dissident offers a courageous and politically indispensable take on the Russia-Ukraine war,” Toronto socialist Sam Gindin and Montreal-based professor David Mandel wrote an angry “reply to Kagarlitsky” deriding his analysis as “shallow” and “simple-minded.” Their article was largely a defense of Putin based on a selective discourse analysis purporting to show that “there is no hint here, or indeed anywhere in Putin’s speeches or writing, of a denial of the right of the Ukrainian state or people to exist” – deliberately overlooking the ample well-documented evidence to the contrary.[9] As for Gindin and Mandel, they argued that Ukraine could not possibly strive for sovereignty given its reliance on US support. It was just a “proxy” for US imperialism in its attempt to weaken Russia.

In a subsequent article, Mandel repeated many of the now-familiar (and false) Kremlin talking points in its narrative of defensive war. Canadian Dimension has now published a devastating rebuttal, refuting many of Mandel’s “myths” one by one.

The Gindin-Mandel piece was a clear illustration of how viewing the war as a defensive reaction by Russia to U.S. aggression tends to translate into support of Russia and justification of its action. Both authors had been developing this position on an internal discussion list of the Toronto-based Socialist Project over the past 18 months. In Gindin’s case, it seemed to reflect the disorienting impact of the war’s outbreak on a thesis he had long defended with the late Leo Panitch, articulated at length in their magnum opus The Making of Global Capitalism.[10] As I have summarized it:

“The book’s central thesis is that the United States has dominated the planet since World War II, integrating other powers (and countries) by way of subordination to its ‘informal empire.’ This portrayal is distinguished from the conditions of inter-imperialist rivalry that Lenin had characterized as a central element of prewar capitalism…. This new world superpower has integrated ‘all the other major capitalist powers into an effective system of coordination under its aegis’.”[11]

Clearly, this portrayal of a harmonized (if competitive) global capitalism was a long shot from the brutal imperial savagery of capitalist Russia’s violation of Ukrainian sovereignty. Gindin seems unable to explain this contradiction, and has fallen back on a more classic, but still unipolar, image of a U.S. empire determined to discipline, even militarily defeat a recalcitrant subaltern in its global order.

(If, as some argue, the war is fundamentally an inter-imperialist conflict, revolutionary socialists would support neither side, although they might still defend Ukraine state sovereignty.)

Gindin is by far the pre-eminent member of Socialist Project’s steering committee. Following his lead, the SP has refrained from campaigning in defense of the Ukrainian resistance. Instead, the few articles on the war published in its on-line Bullet have promoted pacifist themes and opposition to providing Ukraine with defensive weapons. The Bullet has also published two articles by David Mandel that attempt to “explain” and excuse the Russian invasion. Both articles proclaim that Ukrainian resistance is futile and should immediately cease.

It should also be noted that Socialist Project, unlike many groups and individuals representing a diversity of political perspectives, has not even endorsed the international campaign of protest against the arrest of Boris Kagarlitsky.[12]

Ex-Trotskyists rejecting Ukraine solidarity

Among the other political casualties of the war are some of the small groups with roots in various wings of the international Trotskyist movement. The Toronto-based International Socialists published a statement on February 24, 2022 denouncing “Russian expansionism” and calling for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine… and Canadian withdrawal from Eastern Europe, referring to its role in NATO “training fascists within the Ukrainian military.” Ukraine, it said, “is once again paying the price as a state stuck in between two major imperialist rivals,” Russia and NATO. The IS newspaper Socialist Worker has published several articles along the same lines since the invasion, all of them produced by their co-thinkers in Britain.

Spring, the on-line publication of a group that broke with the IS a few years ago, has reposted many articles on the war by Yves Engler, and two or three of its own. David Bush denounces the Russian aggression but insists “the main enemy is at home.” This means opposing “troop deployments and arms shipments” to Ukraine. James Clark, once a leader in the Canadian movement against U.S. aggression in the Middle East and Afghanistan, wrote a four-part series of articles on the antiwar movement of ten years ago, but made no attempt to link its lessons to the war on Ukraine.

Fightback (in Quebec, La Riposte, a recognized collective within Québec solidaire) is the Canadian member of the British-based International Marxist Tendency. At the outset of the war, its publications featured a lengthy statement by the IMT dismissing the Ukrainian resistance:

“All the talk of Ukrainian sovereignty is contradicted by the fact that the country has been under growing domination from the US since the victory of the 2014 Euromaidan movement. All the key levers of economic and political power are in the hands of a corrupt oligarchy and its government, which, in turn, is the puppet of US imperialism and a pawn in its hands…. In fact, the current war is to a large extent a US-Russia conflict, being played out in the territory of Ukraine.”

Subsequent articles on the war have replicated this approach.

Finally, it is worth noting the fate of a tiny current that originated in some 2004 expulsions from the U.S. Socialist Workers Party because they had questioned the SWP’s support of the Pentagon overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. John Riddell and Roger Annis, joined by Ian Angus, founded an on-line journal Socialist Voice and invited some other Marxists (including myself) to participate in its production. An on-line archive of the issues and pamphlets published before its demise in 2011 may be accessed here.

As it explains, Socialist Voice ceased publication because its key editors had become heavily committed to other enterprises. John Riddell had resumed publication of his massive volumes on the proceedings of the Communist International in Lenin’s day.[13] Ian Angus was publishing his website Climate & Capitalism and writing books on Ecosocialism.

As for Roger Annis, he travelled to Ukraine with two other Canadians – Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman – in 2014, at the invitation of Boris Kagarlitsky, and emerged as a supporter of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in Eastern Ukraine. He has since transformed his blog A Socialist in Canada into a shameless propaganda mouthpiece for Putin’s regime and its aggression, occupation and annexations in Ukraine. Independently of Annis, Desai and Freeman (he is a former Trotskyist, in Britain) have created their own website and authored a Manifesto that praises today’s China as “the indispensable nation in humankind’s struggle for socialism, offering aid and inspiration as a worthy example of a country pursuing socialism in accordance with its national conditions.” Among the initial signatories of the Manifesto is John Riddell.

The group praises China – and Russia – as paragons of “multipolarity,” the alternative they promote to U.S. unipolar hegemony. What this means for Ukraine is described by Radhika Desai in her recent book: “[T]his war takes the form of a US-led NATO war against Russia over Ukraine. In this war, Ukraine is the terrain, and a pawn—one that can be and is being sacrificed with the apparent cooperation of its West-oriented leadership.”

Conclusion

As in other countries, Canadian left responses to Russia’s war have tended to divide along two conflicting fault lines. Crudely put, there are those who see the war as a Russian imperialist assault on Ukraine and seek to mobilize solidarity with Ukraine’s popular resistance, including its right to acquire the weapons it needs for its defense. In contrast, there are those who reduce the war to a conflict between NATO and Russia, the Ukrainians being simply pawns of the Pentagon and its European allies. The first group call for immediate Russian withdrawal from Ukraine as the only path to a peaceful solution. The second claim that Russia has some legitimate interest in occupying all or part of Ukraine, and invent narratives to justify its aggression and deny Ukraine’s right of national self-determination. These differences cannot be reconciled. It is a fundamental rift.

Thanks to Art Young for his assistance in reviewing a draft of this article. – RF

---

[1] “L’Assemblée nationale adopte une motion unanime de soutien à l’Ukraine,” February 23, 2022. https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/politique/2022-02-23/l-assemblee-nationale-adopte-une-motion-unanime-de-soutien-a-l-ukraine.php.

[2] Programme de Québec solidaire. See, in particular, para. 9.2.1.

[3] North American Air Defense Agreement (NORAD).

[4] For a critical analysis of this convoluted reasoning, see “The war in Ukraine: four reductions we must avoid.”

[5] A typical article: “Cutting through Canada’s war propaganda.”

[6] See also “Yes, The Ukraine War Could Have Been Prevented,” by Alex Cosh, arguing that the war is a “NATO proxy war.”

[7] “Should Leftists Support Sending Weapons to Ukraine?”

[8] See the section “Crisis in Ukraine” on the CD website.

[9] See, for example, Putin’s speech on February 23, 2023 justifying his decision to invade Ukraine.

[10] The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2013).

[11] Richard Fidler, “Remembering Leo Panitch.” See the text following the subhead “Global capitalism.”

[12] As one of the very few SP members on its discussion list to dispute Gindin and Mandel, I was barred by the steering committee from posting any comment on “the Ukraine-Russia war” (sic) for two months earlier this year.

[13] Pathfinder Press and Haymarket.

Canadian Left Responses to War in Ukraine – a Provisional Balance Sheet

By Richard Fidler

February 24, 2022 marked the opening of a new phase in the developing reconfiguration of global capitalist and popular forces. Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine, the prompt mobilization of resistance by Ukrainians, and the quick shift toward public support for NATO in much of Europe, confronted the international Left and progressive forces with some major challenges. The Left in Canada was no exception.

“This conflict will change everything,” wrote Quebec socialist Pierre Beaudet in a memo to the solidarity organization Alternatives that he directed, just days before Beaudet’s sudden death March 8. “As in any important debate, there are theories, strategic issues, choices to make in our practice.”

Beaudet pointed to some key features of the new situation:

1. Russia’s determination to prevail, its denial of “the very reality of Ukraine as the sovereign state and territory of a people with the right of self-determination,” risked a long war in which “resistance to the aggression is the only outcome on offer.”

2. Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s approach “borrowed from the tradition of the USSR under Stalin in imposing a centralizing and repressive state along with attempts to carve out a place in the global arena.”

3. The post-Soviet expansion of NATO, and Washington’s failures in its intervention in the Middle East and Central Asia, prompting Putin’s belief that this was now the time to strike a major blow in Ukraine, where Russia had already annexed Crimea in 2014 and supported pro-Russian separatists in the east.

“Now that Russia has attacked, there is no turning back. Either Putin wins his bet by the subjugation of Ukraine, which would allow him to ‘entrust’ to a new government the job of ‘re-establishing order.’ Or the situation will drag on into an endless conflict – unless Russia decides to wage war in the cities even if it means destroying them, with their people, as was done in Syria.”

The result will be “an immense realignment of priorities and strategies.

“NATO, its relevance diminished in recent years, will return in force. The member states will be required to increase substantially their military spending and become directly involved in the strategy of counter-attacking and weakening Russia….”

4. The Canadian government will follow the U.S. line, as always. Military spending will surge, financed by severe cutbacks in other expenditures. Fossil fuel export projects – perhaps “the LNG project designed to bring Alberta’s gas through Quebec” – will be relaunched as part of the “war effort.”

5. “We act in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance that aims to re-establish an inclusive and peaceful sovereignty without abuses of national minorities. Our solidarity can be exercised in the area of humanitarian assistance” which “must not be reduced to meet Ukraine’s needs.”

6. Russia’s invasion was a “blatant violation of the UN Charter and international law. The United States and their NATO allies, including Canada, have plunged us as well increasingly into this war by a flurry of sanctions and outrageous statements.” A peace process must include the United Nations, and not be left to the major protagonists like the European Union and NATO.

The analysis was prescient. With hindsight, we can think of some elements that can now be added. However, Beaudet’s argument had the virtue of centering our response on the need to support Ukraine’s defense of its territorial sovereignty and self-determination.

In the 18 months since Beaudet’s memo, his organization Alternatives has worked to promote solidarity with the Ukraine resistance while opposing Russian aggression and NATO expansion. It has also joined the international campaign for the release of Boris Kagarlitsky and other Russian antiwar prisoners. Its approach contrasts with that of the pacifist organization Échec à la guerre, which claims to oppose all imperialisms – especially U.S. “military domination” -- but has not rallied to defend Ukraine.

In what follows, I will outline and critically comment on some of the other responses to the war by the Canadian and Quebec left.

The parliamentary Left

When it comes to membership in NATO and its alliance with U.S. imperialism -- the bedrock of Canada’s foreign policy -- the labour-based New Democratic Party tends to march in lockstep with whatever government holds office in Ottawa. The Ukraine war is no exception. While supporting provision of weapons needed by Ukraine – as it should – the NDP has also agreed with moves to reinforce Canada’s military spending and NATO involvement as well as sanctions designed to harm the economic needs of the Russian people.

In a statement issued on the one-year anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion, the NDP reaffirmed its support of “the Ukrainians who are defending their country and … those who have been forced to flee.” But it called for strengthening the sanctions regime, and failed to raise the need to cancel Ukraine’s public debt as it seeks to rebuild.

The other party of Canada’s parliamentary Left, the pro-Quebec sovereignty party Québec solidaire, defends Ukraine of course. However, it has limited its support to a motion in Quebec’s National Assembly, on the eve of Russia’s aggression,[1] and a resolution adopted by its National Council on May 28, 2022. The resolution condemned Russia, reaffirmed Ukraine’s right to self-determination while calling for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations to end the aggression, and urged rapid reception of Ukrainian refugees.

The QS council resolution emphasized that “this conflict must not be used as a justification to allow the exploitation of Quebec’s oil and gas resources, or to increase exports of fossil fuels from Canada on the pretext of replacing Russian oil and gas.”

Finally, it called on its members, and citizens, to “support peace demonstrations opposing the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army….”

However, QS has not itself initiated any such demonstrations although its program[2] declares that the party “will participate in building international mobilizations against military interventions (of imperialist powers) aimed at ensuring control over peoples and their wealth and attacking their sovereignty.” The party also calls for Canada’s immediate withdrawal from NATO and NORAD.[3]

Extraparliamentary Left

Québec solidaire identifies itself as “a party of the streets as well as the ballot-boxes,” and it is the extraparliamentary wing of the party that has taken the lead in defense of Ukraine. The popular website Presse-toi à gauche (PTàG) includes among its editors and writers the most prominent left-wing activists within QS. Since the war began each weekly edition has included a selection of articles on the war, the vast majority sympathetic to Ukraine.

Another left website based in Quebec, Pivot, has likewise supported Ukraine, although not as diligently as PTàG. In April it published a powerful rejoinder to a few accounts in mainstream media and left-leaning publications in Quebec that attributed the war to provocation of Russia by NATO and/or Ukraine.

In the rest of Canada, unfortunately, the major left publications and organizations have tended to ignore the Ukraine resistance or dismiss it as a “proxy” for what they portray as a NATO war against Russia.[4] People’s Voice, the Communist party monthly newspaper, not surprisingly supports Russia. “NATO, the US, EU and Canada have left Russia with few options,” said the CP in a statement issued in October 2022 that echoed some of the Kremlin’s narratives.

A prolific blogger on the war is Yves Engler, who has a well-earned reputation as the most prominent critic of Canadian foreign policy from an anti-imperialist standpoint. The author of many books and articles, Engler is associated with the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, an NGO that sponsors online seminars and petitions critical of Canadian corporate and government intervention abroad. Engler and the CFPI have campaigned against the provision of Canadian arms to Ukraine, and joined the international chorus advocating a “negotiated peace” in Ukraine that is not predicated on Russian withdrawal.[5]

Engler’s articles have been republished by some on-line “progressive” websites such as rabble.ca, which otherwise have little to say about the war.

A widely-read online website The Maple publishes well-researched critiques of Canadian foreign policy but has said little about the Russian war on Ukraine. Its managing editor Alex Cosh published an article in another left publication Briarpatch that repeated much of the Kremlin narrative justifying its aggression.[6] However, The Maple also organized an on-line debate between Ukrainian socialist Taras Bilous and Quebec blogger Dimitri Lascaris on the issue “Should Leftists Support Sending Weapons to Ukraine?”[7] Lascaris, who once ran for leader of the Canadian Green party, is notorious for his support of Russia as a force for peace. A readers’ poll conducted by The Maple following the debate found a substantial majority supporting Bilous in his defense of the Ukraine resistance.

A rare debate on the war: Canadian Dimension

Canadian Dimension, a Winnipeg-based monthly magazine (founded in 1963, on-line only since 2019), is undoubtedly the most prominent publication on the English-Canadian left. Its extensive coverage of the war[8] has been slanted heavily against Ukraine’s resistance, some of it authored by writers like Yves Engler and Dimitri Lascaris, as well as U.S. sources like CodePink. However, CD also published five articles this year by Russian antiwar critic Boris Kagarlitsky, and recently published a strong editorial statement protesting Kagarlitsky’s arrest and urging its readers to support the international solidarity campaign for his release.

When Canadian Dimension introduced an article by Kagarlitsky with the headline “Clear-eyed veteran Russian leftist dissident offers a courageous and politically indispensable take on the Russia-Ukraine war,” Toronto socialist Sam Gindin and Montreal-based professor David Mandel wrote an angry “reply to Kagarlitsky” deriding his analysis as “shallow” and “simple-minded.” Their article was largely a defense of Putin based on a selective discourse analysis purporting to show that “there is no hint here, or indeed anywhere in Putin’s speeches or writing, of a denial of the right of the Ukrainian state or people to exist” – deliberately overlooking the ample well-documented evidence to the contrary.[9] As for Gindin and Mandel, they argued that Ukraine could not possibly strive for sovereignty given its reliance on US support. It was just a “proxy” for US imperialism in its attempt to weaken Russia.

In a subsequent article, Mandel repeated many of the now-familiar (and false) Kremlin talking points in its narrative of defensive war. Canadian Dimension has now published a devastating rebuttal, refuting many of Mandel’s “myths” one by one.

The Gindin-Mandel piece was a clear illustration of how viewing the war as a defensive reaction by Russia to U.S. aggression tends to translate into support of Russia and justification of its action. Both authors had been developing this position on an internal discussion list of the Toronto-based Socialist Project over the past 18 months. In Gindin’s case, it seemed to reflect the disorienting impact of the war’s outbreak on a thesis he had long defended with the late Leo Panitch, articulated at length in their magnum opus The Making of Global Capitalism.[10] As I have summarized it:

“The book’s central thesis is that the United States has dominated the planet since World War II, integrating other powers (and countries) by way of subordination to its ‘informal empire.’ This portrayal is distinguished from the conditions of inter-imperialist rivalry that Lenin had characterized as a central element of prewar capitalism…. This new world superpower has integrated ‘all the other major capitalist powers into an effective system of coordination under its aegis’.”[11]

Clearly, this portrayal of a harmonized (if competitive) global capitalism was a long shot from the brutal imperial savagery of capitalist Russia’s violation of Ukrainian sovereignty. Gindin seems unable to explain this contradiction, and has fallen back on a more classic, but still unipolar, image of a U.S. empire determined to discipline, even militarily defeat a recalcitrant subaltern in its global order.

(If, as some argue, the war is fundamentally an inter-imperialist conflict, revolutionary socialists would support neither side, although they might still defend Ukraine state sovereignty.)

Gindin is by far the pre-eminent member of Socialist Project’s steering committee. Following his lead, the SP has refrained from campaigning in defense of the Ukrainian resistance. Instead, the few articles on the war published in its on-line Bullet have promoted pacifist themes and opposition to providing Ukraine with defensive weapons. The Bullet has also published two articles by David Mandel that attempt to “explain” and excuse the Russian invasion. Both articles proclaim that Ukrainian resistance is futile and should immediately cease.

It should also be noted that Socialist Project, unlike many groups and individuals representing a diversity of political perspectives, has not even endorsed the international campaign of protest against the arrest of Boris Kagarlitsky.[12]

Ex-Trotskyists rejecting Ukraine solidarity

Among the other political casualties of the war are some of the small groups with roots in various wings of the international Trotskyist movement. The Toronto-based International Socialists published a statement on February 24, 2022 denouncing “Russian expansionism” and calling for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine… and Canadian withdrawal from Eastern Europe, referring to its role in NATO “training fascists within the Ukrainian military.” Ukraine, it said, “is once again paying the price as a state stuck in between two major imperialist rivals,” Russia and NATO. The IS newspaper Socialist Worker has published several articles along the same lines since the invasion, all of them produced by their co-thinkers in Britain.

Spring, the on-line publication of a group that broke with the IS a few years ago, has reposted many articles on the war by Yves Engler, and two or three of its own. David Bush denounces the Russian aggression but insists “the main enemy is at home.” This means opposing “troop deployments and arms shipments” to Ukraine. James Clark, once a leader in the Canadian movement against U.S. aggression in the Middle East and Afghanistan, wrote a four-part series of articles on the antiwar movement of ten years ago, but made no attempt to link its lessons to the war on Ukraine.

Fightback (in Quebec, La Riposte, a recognized collective within Québec solidaire) is the Canadian member of the British-based International Marxist Tendency. At the outset of the war, its publications featured a lengthy statement by the IMT dismissing the Ukrainian resistance:

“All the talk of Ukrainian sovereignty is contradicted by the fact that the country has been under growing domination from the US since the victory of the 2014 Euromaidan movement. All the key levers of economic and political power are in the hands of a corrupt oligarchy and its government, which, in turn, is the puppet of US imperialism and a pawn in its hands…. In fact, the current war is to a large extent a US-Russia conflict, being played out in the territory of Ukraine.”

Subsequent articles on the war have replicated this approach.

Finally, it is worth noting the fate of a tiny current that originated in some 2004 expulsions from the U.S. Socialist Workers Party because they had questioned the SWP’s support of the Pentagon overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. John Riddell and Roger Annis, joined by Ian Angus, founded an on-line journal Socialist Voice and invited some other Marxists (including myself) to participate in its production. An on-line archive of the issues and pamphlets published before its demise in 2011 may be accessed here.

As it explains, Socialist Voice ceased publication because its key editors had become heavily committed to other enterprises. John Riddell had resumed publication of his massive volumes on the proceedings of the Communist International in Lenin’s day.[13] Ian Angus was publishing his website Climate & Capitalism and writing books on Ecosocialism.

As for Roger Annis, he travelled to Ukraine with two other Canadians – Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman – in 2014, at the invitation of Boris Kagarlitsky, and emerged as a supporter of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in Eastern Ukraine. He has since transformed his blog A Socialist in Canada into a shameless propaganda mouthpiece for Putin’s regime and its aggression, occupation and annexations in Ukraine. Independently of Annis, Desai and Freeman (he is a former Trotskyist, in Britain) have created their own website and authored a Manifesto that praises today’s China as “the indispensable nation in humankind’s struggle for socialism, offering aid and inspiration as a worthy example of a country pursuing socialism in accordance with its national conditions.” Among the initial signatories of the Manifesto is John Riddell.

The group praises China – and Russia – as paragons of “multipolarity,” the alternative they promote to U.S. unipolar hegemony. What this means for Ukraine is described by Radhika Desai in her recent book: “[T]his war takes the form of a US-led NATO war against Russia over Ukraine. In this war, Ukraine is the terrain, and a pawn—one that can be and is being sacrificed with the apparent cooperation of its West-oriented leadership.”

Conclusion

As in other countries, Canadian left responses to Russia’s war have tended to divide along two conflicting fault lines. Crudely put, there are those who see the war as a Russian imperialist assault on Ukraine and seek to mobilize solidarity with Ukraine’s popular resistance, including its right to acquire the weapons it needs for its defense. In contrast, there are those who reduce the war to a conflict between NATO and Russia, the Ukrainians being simply pawns of the Pentagon and its European allies. The first group call for immediate Russian withdrawal from Ukraine as the only path to a peaceful solution. The second claim that Russia has some legitimate interest in occupying all or part of Ukraine, and invent narratives to justify its aggression and deny Ukraine’s right of national self-determination. These differences cannot be reconciled. It is a fundamental rift.

Thanks to Art Young for his assistance in reviewing a draft of this article. – RF

---

[1] “L’Assemblée nationale adopte une motion unanime de soutien à l’Ukraine,” February 23, 2022. https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/politique/2022-02-23/l-assemblee-nationale-adopte-une-motion-unanime-de-soutien-a-l-ukraine.php.

[2] Programme de Québec solidaire. See, in particular, para. 9.2.1.

[3] North American Air Defense Agreement (NORAD).

[4] For a critical analysis of this convoluted reasoning, see “The war in Ukraine: four reductions we must avoid.”

[5] A typical article: “Cutting through Canada’s war propaganda.”

[6] See also “Yes, The Ukraine War Could Have Been Prevented,” by Alex Cosh, arguing that the war is a “NATO proxy war.”

[7] “Should Leftists Support Sending Weapons to Ukraine?”

[8] See the section “Crisis in Ukraine” on the CD website.

[9] See, for example, Putin’s speech on February 23, 2023 justifying his decision to invade Ukraine.

[10] The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2013).

[11] Richard Fidler, “Remembering Leo Panitch.” See the text following the subhead “Global capitalism.”

[12] As one of the very few SP members on its discussion list to dispute Gindin and Mandel, I was barred by the steering committee from posting any comment on “the Ukraine-Russia war” (sic) for two months earlier this year.

[13] Pathfinder Press and Haymarket.

Pierre Beaudet’s literary legacy

Pierre Beaudet, who died a week ago, left a rich legacy of published works, both books and articles, that will remain a valuable resource for present and future generations of socialists in Quebec, Canada and internationally. I cannot inventory all of them, but I do wish to draw attention to some materials of particular importance to today’s activists.

Unfortunately, few of Pierre’s writings are available in English. However, I will start with those that are readily available online. Most are translations from Pierre’s original texts in French, although he drafted a few in English, which he spoke fluently. An example: “In Search of the ‘Modern Prince’: The New Québec Rebellion,” in Socialist Register, 2017.[1]

His articles on issues of the day appeared extensively in a number of English Canadian online publications. Some examples:

Socialist Project: https://socialistproject.ca/author/pierre-beaudet/

Canadian Dimension: https://canadiandimension.com/articles/author/pierre-beaudet

Life on the Left: https://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/search?q=Pierre+Beaudet

He published prolifically in French. The online Quebec journal Presse-toi à gauche reports that Pierre, who in recent years provided a weekly column, authored 579 of its articles.

One of Pierre’s major projects was Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme (NCS). Some years ago I translated (but apparently never published) an excerpt from an essay by Pierre Beaudet and others explaining its origins and how they saw the role of NCS. It is appended below. Pierre was without question the guiding spirit and foremost editor of NCS, although he relied on an editorial board representative of Quebec’s varied left tendencies and trajectories.

Pierre Beaudet wrote and edited many books, some of them voluminous collections of texts related to his academic disciplines, progressive economic and social development studies. He authored two books of an autobiographical nature: On a raison de se révolter: Chronique des années 70 (écosociété, 2008); and Un Jour à Luanda: Une histoire de mouvements de liberation et de solidarités internationales (Varia, 2018). He introduced and edited a collection of documents and articles by leading protagonists analyzing the rise and decline of the Quebec left in the 1970s and 1980s: Quel Socialisme? Quelle Démocratie? La gauche Québécoise au tournant des années 1970-1980 (Varia, 2016). And he co-edited a volume on the international workers’ and national liberation movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries which, strangely, largely omits the experience of the Communist International: L’Internationale sera le genre humain! De l’Association internationale des travailleurs à aujourd’hui (M Éditeur, 2015).

Three texts authored or edited by Pierre are devoted to the national question and its importance in Quebec left politics. All three are available online:

Les socialistes et la question nationale: Pourquoi le détour irlandais? Kindle Edition https://www.amazon.ca/socialistes-question-nationale-Pourquoi-irlandais-ebook/dp/B01MCT5VJA

La question nationale Québécoise à l’ombre du capitalisme: Textes choisis des Cahiers du socialisme (1978-1982), Introduction et édition Pierre Beaudet. Full text online: http://media.wix.com/ugd/a54ab7_7f75347c75cc4435a04a21cde4bcd11f.pdf

Le Parti socialiste du Québec et la question nationale (1963-1967). Pierre’s introductory essay is online here: https://www.cahiersdusocialisme.org/le-parti-socialiste-du-quebec-et-la-question-nationale/

* * *

The Collectif d’analyse politique and Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme: an initial balance-sheet (2009)

by Pierre Beaudet, Philippe Boudreau and Richard Poulin[2]

In 2007, the Collectif d’analyse politique (CAP) launched simultaneously a number of projects (workshops, documents, activities). We had an ambitious program that sought to “develop original research on the structural dimension of contemporary capitalism, work out some concrete and practical anti- and post-capitalist perspectives, and participate in the development of new alternatives to help energize the social movements and the political left.”

We also noted the paucity of left-wing journals in Quebec. The publications that were common in previous decades—Parti pris, Socialisme québécois, Cahiers du socialisme, Interventions économiques, Critiques socialistes, etc.—had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared. In fact, there were no longer any intellectual left journals in Quebec although there are a magazine, À bâbord !, and a web site, Presse-toi a gauche, which play an important and complementary role. One of our explanatory hypotheses was that the “scientistic” turn taken by the university-based social sciences periodicals, itself linked to changes in the conditions of production of “knowledge”, had worked to the detriment of their mission of stimulating intellectual thinking around the dynamics of social transformation. Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme (NCS) specifically responds to this need: to partially overcome the vacuum engendered by the disappearance of a certain tradition of progressive thinking in Quebec, that of the left-wing journals.

Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme

In January 2009, therefore, the CAP launched the first issue of NCS, on the topic of social classes. Four issues later, NCS seems to be off to a good start, with a readership of around one thousand per issue and an increasingly solid reputation among intellectuals and activists in the social movements. Each issue is prepared by a working group that includes some members of the CAP along with researchers and activists concerned by the featured topic. In addition to this bi-annual publication, there is a website updated daily with other articles and documents. In the coming months, NCS plans to deepen its thinking about ecosocialism, the work environment, health, education, the social movements and collective action, the unions and community movements, Marxism, the left in Quebec and North America, and many other topics.

Popular education

We initially explained that our perspective was a long-term one, and that we wanted to reconcile the need to participate in existing struggles with the necessity for critical thinking through some rigorous intellectual and political work. This is what we tried to do through some interventions, notably during the Quebec Social Forum where, in both 2007 and 2009, we hosted many workshops. The participation in these activities was excellent, validating our intuition about the need for deeper involvement within the social movements. This work was continued in the summer Université populaire, which we organized in August 2010: three days of intense discussions, hosted by more than 20 resource people, in which 150 people participated. In the fall of 2010, we also organized other events: a symposium on “40 years after October 1970” and a roundtable on “les rapports sociaux de sexe” [gender-based social relations].

A duty of diligence

From the outset we chose to identify ourselves with socialism, a banner (it must be said) that by the early years of this millennium was not unsullied. Beyond this proclamation, it seemed important to us to indicate that we were not reinventing the wheel, that we were part of a tradition of struggles and intellectual and theoretical work that had taken on many meanings and gone in many directions but that belonged to a “family of thought” inaugurated by Karl Marx and the communards, and which was developed subsequently by the great social movements of the 20th century. For historical reasons (to be explored and analyzed), a large part of this “family of thought” was subjected to a series of dogmas that later led many of the movements—identified with a certain “socialism”—to their downfall through some “adventures” and disastrous practical and intellectual authoritarianisms. There remain today innumerable lessons, insights, perspectives, that ought to be developed and modified, while creating some new ones. Nevertheless, these new perspectives require some intense work based on detailed empirical and theoretical studies, enquiries and explorations. In initiating the vast project of analyzing capitalism and post-capitalism, our “ancestors” gave us but few clues. Our program of work starts with these, but in the process it will open new trails not previously imagined.

At present the CAP has 30 members who come from the social movements, unions and the college and university teaching milieu. Not only is it inter-generational (which must still be improved) but it is also more multi-ethnic (to be improved) and it is trying to achieve parity between women and men. Above all, it is pluralist, bringing together individuals from the political and social left with a very great variety of nuances and currents, whether organized or not.

---

[1] Full text: https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/27136/20141.

[2] “Le Collectif d’analyse politique et les Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme : premier bilan,” Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme, no. 1, Printemps 2009, pp. 11-13.

Pierre Beaudet’s literary legacy

Pierre Beaudet, who died a week ago, left a rich legacy of published works, both books and articles, that will remain a valuable resource for present and future generations of socialists in Quebec, Canada and internationally. I cannot inventory all of them, but I do wish to draw attention to some materials of particular importance to today’s activists.

Unfortunately, few of Pierre’s writings are available in English. However, I will start with those that are readily available online. Most are translations from Pierre’s original texts in French, although he drafted a few in English, which he spoke fluently. An example: “In Search of the ‘Modern Prince’: The New Québec Rebellion,” in Socialist Register, 2017.[1]

His articles on issues of the day appeared extensively in a number of English Canadian online publications. Some examples:

Socialist Project: https://socialistproject.ca/author/pierre-beaudet/

Canadian Dimension: https://canadiandimension.com/articles/author/pierre-beaudet

Life on the Left: https://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/search?q=Pierre+Beaudet

He published prolifically in French. The online Quebec journal Presse-toi à gauche reports that Pierre, who in recent years provided a weekly column, authored 579 of its articles.

One of Pierre’s major projects was Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme (NCS). Some years ago I translated (but apparently never published) an excerpt from an essay by Pierre Beaudet and others explaining its origins and how they saw the role of NCS. It is appended below. Pierre was without question the guiding spirit and foremost editor of NCS, although he relied on an editorial board representative of Quebec’s varied left tendencies and trajectories.

Pierre Beaudet wrote and edited many books, some of them voluminous collections of texts related to his academic disciplines, progressive economic and social development studies. He authored two books of an autobiographical nature: On a raison de se révolter: Chronique des années 70 (écosociété, 2008); and Un Jour à Luanda: Une histoire de mouvements de liberation et de solidarités internationales (Varia, 2018). He introduced and edited a collection of documents and articles by leading protagonists analyzing the rise and decline of the Quebec left in the 1970s and 1980s: Quel Socialisme? Quelle Démocratie? La gauche Québécoise au tournant des années 1970-1980 (Varia, 2016). And he co-edited a volume on the international workers’ and national liberation movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries which, strangely, largely omits the experience of the Communist International: L’Internationale sera le genre humain! De l’Association internationale des travailleurs à aujourd’hui (M Éditeur, 2015).

Three texts authored or edited by Pierre are devoted to the national question and its importance in Quebec left politics. All three are available online:

Les socialistes et la question nationale: Pourquoi le détour irlandais? Kindle Edition https://www.amazon.ca/socialistes-question-nationale-Pourquoi-irlandais-ebook/dp/B01MCT5VJA

La question nationale Québécoise à l’ombre du capitalisme: Textes choisis des Cahiers du socialisme (1978-1982), Introduction et édition Pierre Beaudet. Full text online: http://media.wix.com/ugd/a54ab7_7f75347c75cc4435a04a21cde4bcd11f.pdf

Le Parti socialiste du Québec et la question nationale (1963-1967). Pierre’s introductory essay is online here: https://www.cahiersdusocialisme.org/le-parti-socialiste-du-quebec-et-la-question-nationale/

* * *

The Collectif d’analyse politique and Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme: an initial balance-sheet (2009)

by Pierre Beaudet, Philippe Boudreau and Richard Poulin[2]

In 2007, the Collectif d’analyse politique (CAP) launched simultaneously a number of projects (workshops, documents, activities). We had an ambitious program that sought to “develop original research on the structural dimension of contemporary capitalism, work out some concrete and practical anti- and post-capitalist perspectives, and participate in the development of new alternatives to help energize the social movements and the political left.”

We also noted the paucity of left-wing journals in Quebec. The publications that were common in previous decades—Parti pris, Socialisme québécois, Cahiers du socialisme, Interventions économiques, Critiques socialistes, etc.—had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared. In fact, there were no longer any intellectual left journals in Quebec although there are a magazine, À bâbord !, and a web site, Presse-toi a gauche, which play an important and complementary role. One of our explanatory hypotheses was that the “scientistic” turn taken by the university-based social sciences periodicals, itself linked to changes in the conditions of production of “knowledge”, had worked to the detriment of their mission of stimulating intellectual thinking around the dynamics of social transformation. Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme (NCS) specifically responds to this need: to partially overcome the vacuum engendered by the disappearance of a certain tradition of progressive thinking in Quebec, that of the left-wing journals.

Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme

In January 2009, therefore, the CAP launched the first issue of NCS, on the topic of social classes. Four issues later, NCS seems to be off to a good start, with a readership of around one thousand per issue and an increasingly solid reputation among intellectuals and activists in the social movements. Each issue is prepared by a working group that includes some members of the CAP along with researchers and activists concerned by the featured topic. In addition to this bi-annual publication, there is a website updated daily with other articles and documents. In the coming months, NCS plans to deepen its thinking about ecosocialism, the work environment, health, education, the social movements and collective action, the unions and community movements, Marxism, the left in Quebec and North America, and many other topics.

Popular education

We initially explained that our perspective was a long-term one, and that we wanted to reconcile the need to participate in existing struggles with the necessity for critical thinking through some rigorous intellectual and political work. This is what we tried to do through some interventions, notably during the Quebec Social Forum where, in both 2007 and 2009, we hosted many workshops. The participation in these activities was excellent, validating our intuition about the need for deeper involvement within the social movements. This work was continued in the summer Université populaire, which we organized in August 2010: three days of intense discussions, hosted by more than 20 resource people, in which 150 people participated. In the fall of 2010, we also organized other events: a symposium on “40 years after October 1970” and a roundtable on “les rapports sociaux de sexe” [gender-based social relations].

A duty of diligence

From the outset we chose to identify ourselves with socialism, a banner (it must be said) that by the early years of this millennium was not unsullied. Beyond this proclamation, it seemed important to us to indicate that we were not reinventing the wheel, that we were part of a tradition of struggles and intellectual and theoretical work that had taken on many meanings and gone in many directions but that belonged to a “family of thought” inaugurated by Karl Marx and the communards, and which was developed subsequently by the great social movements of the 20th century. For historical reasons (to be explored and analyzed), a large part of this “family of thought” was subjected to a series of dogmas that later led many of the movements—identified with a certain “socialism”—to their downfall through some “adventures” and disastrous practical and intellectual authoritarianisms. There remain today innumerable lessons, insights, perspectives, that ought to be developed and modified, while creating some new ones. Nevertheless, these new perspectives require some intense work based on detailed empirical and theoretical studies, enquiries and explorations. In initiating the vast project of analyzing capitalism and post-capitalism, our “ancestors” gave us but few clues. Our program of work starts with these, but in the process it will open new trails not previously imagined.

At present the CAP has 30 members who come from the social movements, unions and the college and university teaching milieu. Not only is it inter-generational (which must still be improved) but it is also more multi-ethnic (to be improved) and it is trying to achieve parity between women and men. Above all, it is pluralist, bringing together individuals from the political and social left with a very great variety of nuances and currents, whether organized or not.

---

[1] Full text: https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/27136/20141.

[2] “Le Collectif d’analyse politique et les Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme : premier bilan,” Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme, no. 1, Printemps 2009, pp. 11-13.

Pierre Beaudet, Presente!

Pierre Beaudet, a Quebec leader in international solidarity and progressive scholarship, died in Montréal on the night of March 7-8. Pierre was for decades a central organizer, author and editor in a range of grassroots movements and left publications. His presence and inspiration will be sorely missed by many, both young and old, as Judy Rebick indicates in this tribute she published in rabble.ca, an online magazine she cofounded two decades ago.

I follow it with an article by Pierre, written less than a week before he died, that addresses the very issue Judy cited as one that she would look to him to explain. Bear in mind that this was written very early in the war before many implications were clear. Pierre wrote it in his capacity as director of Alternatives, the international solidarity organization he founded and to which he had recently returned. My translation. And I conclude by briefly recalling some of my own memories of Pierre as a friend and comrade. – Richard Fidler

* * *

Friends and colleagues remember Pierre Beaudet

by Judy Rebick, March 11, 2022

“Pierre was a great leader, an extraordinary thinker and had a big heart. The world will miss Pierre greatly.”

Just when we needed him most to explain how the global political reality will change with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pierre Beaudet, one of Canada’s most brilliant progressive thinkers and activists has died.

I met Pierre about twenty years ago when he invited me to sit on the board of Alternatives, a progressive international development NGO that Pierre helped found in Montréal in 1995. He introduced me to international solidarity work through Alternatives and the World Social Forum. In fact, he was part of the group that helped establish and grow the WSF, an extraordinary effort to build an alternative to corporate globalization.

He encouraged me to write about the struggle in Latin America and to go on a mission to Palestine. Pierre was a great leader, an extraordinary thinker and had a big heart. The world will miss Pierre greatly.

I went to several World Social Forums with Pierre in Brazil, Venezuela, and Kenya. Pierre was also central in bringing the WSF to Montréal and organizing a Quebec/Canada/Indigenous social forum in Ottawa. I’ll let him explain the importance of the World Social Forum, writing in Canadian Dimension:

“The WSF process was original because it was an open space where participants themselves were to define the agenda through self-organized political and cultural activities. Much of the work involved drafting an alternative economic program… At the same time, there was much discussion of how to ‘democratize democracy,’ for meaningful citizen participation within the framework of liberal democracy. These immense brainstorming sessions were carried out by many social movements that also took advantage of the WSF to create new international and action-oriented networks, such as Via Campesina and the World March of Women. The WSF methodology was also adopted by hundreds of national and municipal forums in which citizens had a chance to act, play, speak out and express their hopes. It thus helped to bring movements together, create new dynamics and give rise to new projects. One such successful forum was organized in Ottawa in 2012. The Peoples’ Social Forum brought together a critical mass of movements from Canada, Quebec and Indigenous communities for the first time in Canadian history.”

To pay tribute to someone I consider to be one of the most important thinkers and organizers of my generation, I spent the last couple of days interviewing a few of his closest comrades.

Monique Simard, a well-known Quebec feminist who went to university with Pierre and has been friends with him ever since told me, “His vision of international solidarity was unparalleled. He had a global vision of politics. Pierre knew everything about everywhere not only about the big picture, but he could tell you about the details in each country. The spectrum of his knowledge was so wide. It was amazing.”

Pierre’s international solidarity work started in South Africa where he got so involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, he moved there but had to return to Montreal because of his mother’s ill health. He put his expertise on Africa together with comrades who were involved with struggles in South Asia and the Arab world to found Alternatives in 1995, just as the anti-globalization movement was beginning. Not unlike the period we are in today, this was a moment where the global social and economic order was changing from the Cold War to neo-liberalism.

Robert David, who helped to found Alternatives and remained there in leadership positions until 2007, told me, “Every time you had a meal with Pierre, you’d get a lesson. He had a remarkable combination of political and strategic analysis and the ability to organize people around it and do it. A very rare quality.” Robert explained how Alternatives had a different approach to international work than most NGOs, with Pierre leading.

“He would tell the groups we worked with to write the proposal that would be accepted and then do what you really needed to do with it and explain later.” Rather than act as an enforcer of government funding rules, Alternatives would be a co-conspirator with local groups: solidarity not charity.

“The peak of our work at Alternatives,” said Robert, “was perhaps in 2001 in Quebec City where we organized, on behalf of a coalition of groups, the People’s Summit of the Americas, in protest of the government-held Summit of the Americas. It was an international gathering of some 5,000 activists and politicians to discuss our response to neo-liberalism in the Americas.” Hugo Chávez, then President of Venezuela, attended the People’s Summit and later, along with a three-day demonstration of thousands, helped to stop the Summit of the America’s plan to create a free-trade zone across all of the Americas.

Pierre was also one of the people in Quebec who worked hard to build solidarity between Quebec and English Canada. André Frappier, a long-time trade union activist and leader of Québec Solidaire, a left-wing political party in Quebec, worked with Pierre on many projects and wrote me about his fondest memories.

“Pierre was a theoretician who contributed greatly to political discussion and debate, but above all he was an organizer, a builder of networks and places of activism. A committed activist against the power of the oligarchy, he kept an indelible memory of a 1968 demonstration in support of taxi drivers striking against the airport monopoly of taxis and buses by the Murray-Hill company. He was proud of the embedded projectiles from riot police fire on his lower back that remained there all his life.”

André also noted that Pierre, while a supporter of the national liberation struggle in Québec, was no less an internationalist. Initiator of the Alternatives summer university, he participated in creating spaces for discussion about international politics and the links between the left in Canada and Quebec.

Pierre’s writing was featured in rabble.ca and Canadian Dimension over the years. In 2017, Pierre wrote in The Bullet a response to the Leap Manifesto. While supportive of the general idea, he pointed to a major weakness:

“However, there is a blind spot. Much like in the tradition of the Canadian left, the Leapists have ignored the fact that the Canadian state, from its creation till now, is not and cannot be the terrain of emancipation. This state is illegitimate. Its foundations are rotten, since it was erected on class and national oppression, whereas the First Nations on the one side, and the Québécois on the other side, have been dispossessed. To put it bluntly, this state has to be broken and eventually reinvented. Speaking about reforming Canada on the left does not make sense [unless], from the onset, there is clear and explicit commitment to work with the First Nations and the Québécois by recognizing their right to self-determination and their nationhood.”

Talking to Pierre’s old friends and comrades, one of my favourite stories came from André Frappier: “Pierre was a passionate being and a walking, talking political school. Two years ago, I worked for two weeks building a new fence in his back yard. Carpentry was not his strength, but while he held the boards I needed, he told me about his understanding of Lenin’s writings and the history of communism, as if he had a book in his hand.

“Pierre was a unique being, a builder, a weaver of networks, a hard worker who understood the importance of passing the torch. He continued the work of organizing World Social Forums in recent years with activists from the younger generation.”

And he also reached younger generations through his teaching at University of Ottawa and Université du Québec en Outaouais, his mentoring and his extensive writings.

Even though he received a PhD in 1990, he refused the comfort of an academic job until he decided to leave Alternatives in 2005. On Facebook, many of his students both in formal and informal settings talked about how much they learned from him.

Pierre is survived by his two sons Victor and Alexandre. His former partner, Anne Latendresse, wrote on Facebook:

“Pierre, the father of my son, my accomplice of more than 30 years, left us on the night of March 7-8. Death came to get him at home, without even waving at us. We weren’t prepared…

“His heart was so big, that he carried the whole planet and hugged these suffering men and women and fought to transform the world. With clarity, he was desperate for our inability to get there. But from Gramsci, he had learned to practice ‘the pessimism of the intelligence and the optimism of the will’.”

Thank you, Anne, and know that we share your mourning for this wonderful man.

The war in Ukraine

By Pierre Beaudet, March 2, 2022

This text is intended to introduce a debate within Alternatives. It argues that this conflict will change everything, including in our area of solidarity and international cooperation. As in any important debate, there are theories, strategic issues, choices to make in our practice. This text does not answer everything. It expresses a view that is not the only approach now being expressed. It will therefore be necessary to have a lengthy and in-depth discussion in the coming period, and this contribution will have achieved its objectives if it can simply break the ice. – PB

Ukraine, with a population of 43 million, is foundering in the war unleashed by Russia’s invasion. There are thousands of victims. A large part of the country’s infrastructure, including energy and communications facilities, has been destroyed. In the streets of Kyiv and the other major cities, the Ukrainian people are engaged in street battles with the powerful Russian army. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have fled into exile.

Meanwhile, the United States and its allies are imposing severe sanctions against Russia while organizing major military assistance but without willing to become involved on the terrain. There does not appear to be any possibility of negotiation, at least in the short term. The conflicts will likely increase, with further destruction.

The aggression

Russia prepared its attack over a long period. It was launched last week with the hawkish speech by President Vladimir Putin, who denied the very reality of Ukraine as the sovereign state and territory of a people with the right of self-determination. In the initial days, the Russian army destroyed with its short and long range missiles a major part of the military infrastructure as well as crucial energy and communications systems. Russia claimed it would spare civilians, which would exclude massive indiscriminate bombing. The Russian advances have continued, encountering as they reached the cities a strong Ukrainian resistance. In military terms, this resistance relies on small decentralized contingents with very effective weapons such as mobile anti-air and anti-tank missiles. It is also getting unlimited support in weapons and money from the United States and its allies.

If the war becomes bogged down in the cities, it will result in destructive combat in the midst of highly-populated regions. The collateral costs will be huge, and this may lead the United States and NATO to become more involved. That is what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is hoping, and in this he no doubt reflects the majority opinion that resistance to the aggression is the only outcome on offer. Russia, however, cannot easily back down, as this would be a terrible defeat for Vladimir Putin. So there is a great risk that the war will go on.

How did we get to this point?

The implosion of the Soviet Union in 1989 profoundly destabilized what was then the second biggest power in the world. The vast majority of the republics that were part of the USSR broke free, including Ukraine which became independent in 1991.

Coming into office in the early 2000s, Vladimir Putin promised to be the “strong man” who would re-establish that power. First he focused on annihilating the Chechen rebellion. He turned then to what he defined as the “near exterior” including Georgia, Belarus and some republics in central Asia, combining threats and interventions with cooptation of local elites. This was relatively effective, and gave Putin the idea that he could expand his interventions, for example by supporting the regime of Bashar El-Assad in Syria, where he gambled on the weakening and failure of the US strategy. The “strong man” then followed this up with various measures to paralyze the opposition in Russia. Putin’s approach borrowed from the tradition of the USSR under Stalin in imposing a centralizing and repressive state along with attempts to carve out a place in the global arena.

Role of the United States

Since the demise of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, Russia has continued to be confronted by Washington, beginning with the latter’s reneging on the promise made to Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, that it would not incorporate the former components and allies of the USSR into NATO. Instead, the US has built a veritable iron circle with several of these territories, threatening Russia indirectly. There were some limits to this strategy, so the United States launched the terrible “endless war” in the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as its incursion in the Balkans. But its failure after some years resulted in opening up areas of conflict in which Moscow was able to insert itself, in Syria, as mentioned, and with Iran and other countries anxious to avoid the destruction experienced by Iraq. Little by little, Russia could see its horizon broaden by looking to China and other “emerging” countries aspiring to greater autonomy within the global system. The Russia-China convergence is of course a product of the explicit US strategy that seeks to prevent China from moving into the lead in capitalist globalization.

A fight to the finish

This gave Putin the impression that he could strike a major blow in Ukraine. When a staunchly anti-Russia government was imposed in 2014, Russia reacted by annexing the Sebastopol region and supporting the pro-Russia territories in eastern Ukraine. A “mini war” (with 14,000 victims, nonetheless) prepared the way for the present conflict. Demanding that the United States exclude any possibility of Ukraine membership in NATO, Putin was well aware that this issue was non-negotiable. Some European states (including Germany and France) had a more accommodating position, but lacked the ability to say explicitly what could have been an alternative project: acceptance of a sovereign Ukraine with neutral status (as were Finland and Austria in the past), establishing of a new European agreement involving disarmament of borders, Russia’s integration in the agreements, intra-European economies, etc. In the end, as Putin had expected, the US view prevailed.

Leap into the unknown

Now that Russia has attacked, there is no turning back. Either Putin wins his bet by the subjugation of Ukraine, which would allow him to “entrust” to a new government the job of “re-establishing order.” Or the situation will drag on into an endless conflict – unless Russia decides to wage war in the cities even if it means destroying them, with their people, as was done in Syria. In either case, the conditions will have been created to revive a new kind of cold war, fueled by fierce attacks on the Russian economy, increasing militarization of central Europe, the Baltic states and Poland, support to the Ukrainian resistance, etc.

This new Cold War 2.0 will represent an immense realignment of priorities and strategies. NATO, its relevance diminished in recent years, will return in force. The member states will be required to increase substantially their military spending and become directly involved in the strategy of counter-attacking and weakening Russia: harsh economic sanctions, military and political support of states and movements confronting Russia, a major “battle of ideas” to reinvent the monster that had created such fear in Western opinion for more than 30 years. And so on.

Consequences for Canada

No doubt the Canadian government will follow the US line, as it has done since the beginning of the conflict. With the immense polar frontier between Canada and Russia, this could have major consequences. Canadians’ reluctance to invest the billions needed for purchasing weapons of mass destruction will be seriously weakened, with a resulting surge in the military budget financed by severe cutbacks in other budget allocations. And Canada, eager to increase its oil and gas exports via huge pipeline projects to the Pacific and Atlantic, will be able to relaunch these projects on the pretext that they are part of the “war effort” against Russia. We will have to pay close attention to what is going to happen with the proposed LNG project designed to bring Alberta’s gas through Quebec.

This Canadian shift will of course be strongly encouraged by pursuit of the war, which, we repeat, was initiated by Russia. Public opinion in Canada, and not only among Canadians of Ukrainian descent (1.8 million persons) has understandably mobilized against Russia.

On solidarity and international cooperation

The area in which we are involved will be strongly affected. It is certain that humanitarian aid is going to be oriented towards the millions of Ukrainians who are in or on the way to exile. That is necessary, from a humanitarian standpoint. What is not is its discriminatory nature. There are at this point at least 10 million Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans (to mention only those) languishing in detention camps administered by states in the pay of NATO member countries. The great majority of these wretched of the earth know already that they will never be accepted as refugees. Meanwhile, some disregarded conflicts are breaking out in the Horn of Africa while the international (dis)order prevents the UN from seriously intervening.

No one should be surprised, therefore, if the humanitarian aid (administered by Foreign Affairs Canada) is not sharply reorganized to assist Ukraine – which is not dishonorable but will become so if the already very modest resources offered to other countries and peoples in crisis are reduced.

In the coming period, the new board of directors of Alternatives, with other NGOs and international solidarity movements, will have to look at how we can promote our views and act responsibly in the eyes of a population that is currently distressed by the conflict and its possible consequences.

Among the options now being discussed in our circles, we will have to develop ourselves our basis of action taking into account past experience and the uncertainties in the present context.

· Peace must be re-established as soon as possible, if only in the form of a ceasefire that gives those responsible some time in which to extricate themselves from the present impasse.

· This peace process should include the United Nations. While the European Union and NATO are major protagonists, they cannot be left to tackle this.

· We act in solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance that aims to re-establish an inclusive and peaceful sovereignty without abuses of national minorities. Our solidarity can be exercised in the area of humanitarian assistance wherever in the country people are suffering the impact of the war.

· Humanitarian aid, and development assistance to poor countries (especially in Africa) must not be reduced to meet Ukraine’s needs.

· Canada must not align its policies with those of the United States, via NATO or otherwise. It should promote disarmament and the peaceful resolution of conflicts while defending human rights without discrimination.

Russia invaded Ukraine four days ago in blatant violation of the UN Charter and international law. The United States and their NATO allies, including Canada, have plunged us as well increasingly into this war by a flurry of sanctions and outrageous statements.

[The text ends by announcing a demonstration in Montréal on March 6 in solidarity with an international day of action to protest both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the expansion of NATO.]

* * *

A true friend and comrade…

Although I was long acquainted with his work I did not meet Pierre Beaudet until the World Social Forum in Caracas in 2006. We soon became good friends. Soon afterwards, Pierre found employment at the University of Ottawa, where he was instrumental in establishing the School of International Development and Global Studies. He invited me to participate in his efforts to establish an Ottawa section of the Collectif d’analyse politique (CAP), publishers of the Nouveaux Cahiers du socialisme, a semiannual review Pierre had cofounded in 2009. On three occasions he included me as a guest lecturer in his course on Latin American social movements and politics.

When teaching at UOttawa, and later the Université du Québec campus across the river in Gatineau, Pierre, who commuted from his home in Montréal, usually stayed overnight for a day or two per week at my home. He always brought with him books and magazines – Le Monde Diplomatique and the New York Review of Books were among his favourites – to leave with me and we often exchanged Marxist books we both found useful. Conversations with Pierre were a delight; he was knowledgeable and insightful on a vast range of subjects, and I enjoyed his ironic sense of humour.

My niece Nancy Burrows, who has known Pierre longer than I through her active leadership in the Quebec women’s movement (she coauthored a chapter in one of his books on L’Altermondialisme), mentioned to Pierre in an email exchange that she had heard he knew her uncle. His response captured our friendship rather nicely, I think:

“I spend two nights a week with your uncle, with whom I very much enjoy discussing late into the night why the Indonesian Communist party screwed up in 1966, or if Lenin had listened to the mutineers at Kronstadt, and other similar stories that have remained in the head of the unrepentant Marxist oldtimers like us. It has helped me endure Ottawa more easily…. We also discuss intersectionality in the Dogon country in Mali, the place of LGBTQs in the present Chilean movement, peaceful insurrections that get things moving more than petitions. What would have happened if Rosa Luxemburg had not been assassinated, etc., etc., it never ends between us.”[1]

- Richard Fidler

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[1] “Je passe deux soirées par semaine avec ton oncle avec qui j’ai bien du plaisir à discuter tard dans la nuit sur pourquoi le Parti communiste indonésien s’est planté en 1966, ou encore si Lénine avait écouté les mutins de Kronstad, et d’autres histoires du genre qui sont restés dans la tête des pépés marxistes non repentis dans notre genre. Cela me fait endurer plus facilement Ottawa… Nous discutons aussi de l’intersectionnalité dans le pays dogon du Mali, de la place des LBGTQ dans le mouvement chilien actuel, des insurrections pacifiques qui font bouger les choses plus que les pétitions. Sur ce qui serait arrivé si Rosa Luxemburg n’avait pas été assassinée, etc. etc. ça n’arrête jamais entre nous…”.