The Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) is among the most energetic “left” opponents of support for Ukraine in the UK. We republish an article by USC committee member Sacha Ismail taking apart the arguments of one of its leading theorists, Alex Callinicos, written in 2022 shortly after the start of the fullscale invasion.

Socialist Workers’ Party leader Alex Callinicos has been debating Lebanese Marxist Gilbert Achcar about the war in Ukraine.

On 27 March [2022] Socialist Worker published a long piece by Callinicos arguing that an “understanding of capitalist imperialism as involving a system of interstate rivalry is completely missing from Achcar’s analysis” and criticising him for arguing that socialists should support Ukraine, including by supporting the provision of weapons by Western governments.

On 30 March the SW website published a reply from Achcar and a further reply from Callinicos.

Callinicos’ original article defines the war as “an ongoing battle between imperialist rivals, driven forward by capitalist competition”. In short, and at one point quite explicitly, he defines it as like World War One. That started from threats from Austria-Hungary to Serbia’s self-determination, but immediately became a general war between big powers for the redivision of the world, with Serbia’s rights unavoidably secondary to its main drivers.

His arguments are laced throughout with disingenousness and evasion. Right at the start, objecting to mainstream bourgeois narratives depicting a conflict between “democracy” and “authoritarianism”, he cites “enthusiastic” support for Ukraine from “the far right government in Poland” while claiming that India, which “remains a multi-party democracy” despite Modi, supports Russia. In fact India abstained in the pivotal UN vote; Poland is also a “multi-party democracy”; and India has arguably travelled even further down the road to far-right authoritarianism than Poland.

Types of imperialism

Callinicos suggests that the necessary “theoretical frameworks for understanding the conflict” are provided by “the idea of imperialism” — “but it’s important to be clear what we mean by imperialism”.

He suggests that Russia’s imperialism in Ukraine and elsewhere, “intent on restoring the old Tsarist Empire that was destroyed by the Russian Revolution”, is part of a “phenomenon that spans historical eras… the way in which powerful states dominate, conquer and exploit neighbouring societies”. (It’s not clear to me why Callinicos refers only to Tsarism and not to the pre-1991 “Soviet” empire.)

But “capitalist imperialism isn’t just big states bullying and conquering smaller states — though there is plenty of that. It’s a global system of inter-capitalist competition. Just as before the First World War, today imperialism means geopolitical competition against the background of global economic integration.” He highlights alliances and conflicts between what he calls the six leading imperialist powers — US, China, Russia, France, Britain and Germany — and the first three in particular.

“The power of the antagonists”, says Callinicos, “depends on their position in the capitalist world economy”.

Presumably Germany, and not for instance India, has been included in the list to underscore the idea of capitalist economic power, as well as to nod towards Western, or European, or NATO dominance. But Japan’s GDP is higher than Germany’s; Russia’s is lower than those of not only all the aforementioned, but also Italy, Canada and South Korea! No doubt various other economic statistics could illustrate the same problem. Some big powers, like Russia under the Tsars, under Stalin, and under Putin, are so by military clout; others, like Japan, have economic clout with relatively small military assets.

As for “just before the First World War”, the imperialism shaped by inter-capitalist competition in that period was primarily a matter of “big states bullying and conquering”, i.e. colonial imperialism (or sometimes semi-colonial, as in the tussles of the big powers over the decaying Ottoman Empire). This in a world which was “already divided”, so, largely, each empire could gain only by taking from another.

The dominant forms of imperialism today, a sort of “imperialism of free trade”, though also shaped by capitalist competition, are very different. The USA and Germany do not need East European states to join NATO in order to have investment and trade links. The USA is not trying to conquer Ukraine militarily because otherwise it will lose investment and trade openings there. Putin’s Russia resorts to old-style conquest-imperialism because it is economically weaker, rather as Portugal held on to its African colonies after other European powers had released theirs because it was economically weaker.

The positive working-class answer to denial of national rights is the self-determination of nations; the positive answer to challenge and end the economic disadvantage of weaker nations imposed by market relations even when they are politically independent is working-class struggle and socialist revolution.

Blurring out Ukraine

Yet Callinicos objects to Achcar drawing out these distinctions — between conquest-imperialism and economic domination through market relations — to support Ukraine, on the grounds that “the Western imperialist powers are instrumentalising the Ukrainian national struggle against Russian imperialism for their own interests”. As if between the two outcomes, Ukraine being conquered militarily by Russia, and Ukraine winning its freedom but still suffering the cruelties of the capitalist world market, there is nothing to choose. He claims, falsely, that Achcar “focuses exclusively on the struggle between Ukraine and Russia”. In fact Callinicos largely sinks this struggle into wider tensions and conflicts.

The vague phrasing about “instrumentalising” begs many questions. After all big capitalist powers “instrumentalise” everything they can for their own interests — but in a range of widely varying ways.

In his long article, Callinicos does not answer Achcar’s important objection that “if any war where each side is supported by an imperialist rival were called an inter-imperialist war, then all the wars of our time would be inter-imperialist, since as a rule, it is enough for one of the rival imperialisms to support one side for the other to support the opposite side.”

In his later reply, in another example of disingenuousness, he answers it by inaccurately claiming that Achcar defines an inter-imperialist war as “one where both sides are seeking to conquer each other’s territory”, i.e. core territory as distinct from spheres of domination, in which case even World War One would not be “inter-imperialist”.

Other cases

Callinicos cites support by the US and its allies for the Islamist resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan after 1979, rightly characterising this as part of the US-led bloc’s Cold War struggle against the USSR. This does not prove what he seems to think it does. The wider international alignments and interventions notwithstanding, wasn’t it correct to specifically denounce and oppose the Russian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan?

Any hesitation or qualifications to positive socialist support for the Afghan “resistance” concerned its extreme-right politics and sectarian characteristics, rooted in various ethnic-religious minorities in Afghanistan and murderously opposed to other minorities. Neither of those kind of problems is anywhere near decisive in Ukraine.

Let us take another example, important but rarely discussed on the British left. The Bangladeshi “Liberation War” of 1971 was simultaneously a classic anti-colonial uprising, against Pakistan, and a cockpit for inter-imperialist conflict and manoeuvring. (Although there was plenty to object to in the Bengali liberation movement, including elements of ethnic sectarianism, it was in broad sweep clearly progressive.) Right from the start India energetically supported the Bengalis’ armed struggle, for a range of reasons but including to strike a blow at its long-standing enemy Pakistan. In the end, Bangladesh became independent only when India intervened directly by invading East Bengal and crushing the Pakistani army.

The US, China and many other states supported Pakistan; the USSR supported India and the Bengalis. Right at the end of the war the two main Cold War powers both sent ships to the Bay of Bengal. We can speculate what might have happened if Pakistan had not quickly surrendered to India.

In important (not all) respects Ukraine’s “liberation war” is less intertwined with inter-imperialist rivalry than Bangladesh’s was. Will the SWP now argue that it was wrong for socialists to support Bangladesh?

The war and NATO

Should Indian socialists have opposed their country’s government arming the East Bengali fighters? Callinicos is very clear that he opposes Western governments sending weapons to Ukraine, virtually concluding his second reply to Achcar with opposition not only to “sanctions” of all sorts but also “Nato arms shipments”.

To add to the confusion, however, the same paragraph agrees that the current conflict is also “a war of national defence on Ukraine’s part”, which “requires us to support the Ukrainians’ national rights”. In his first article too, Callinicos says that “it would indeed be good if the Ukrainian people were able to drive out the Russian invaders”. How? With placards and shouting, but no weapons? Elsewhere SWPers have somewhat surreally suggested that street protests are an alternative to Ukrainian military action against the Russian army. Callinicos does not seem to think that.

To finesse this point, the SWP confers magical powers on NATO weapons shipments, as if they, rather than numerous connections between the Ukrainian government and ruling class and Western governments and ruling classes, are central to Western imperialist influence in Ukraine.

Callinicos objects to Achcar arguing that a Russian victory in Ukraine will boost the most militaristic elements in Western states and reinforce NATO — as indeed the invasion of Ukraine already has — while a Russian defeat would create “better conditions for our battle for general disarmament and the dissolution of Nato”.

Disingenuousness again: if the Ukrainians won, Callinicos asks, would “the US and its allies react by disarming and dissolving Nato? Of course they wouldn’t.” But this is obviously not what Achcar argued.

• Longer version published in Solidarity, journal of Workers’ Liberty (issue 631, 6 April 2022)

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