How a Section of the Left Accommodated the Partition of Ukraine
The Enablers: Part 2 of “With Washington and Moscow”
[Note: an earlier version of this was emailed to some subscribers on January 17. Apologies if you have already received this.]
The robber’s peace documented in Part 1 did not emerge from a vacuum. For three years, a section of the international left demanded precisely what Trump and Putin delivered: an end to Western arms supplies, immediate negotiations regardless of terms, and the acceptance of territorial realities on the ground. Now that those “realities” have crystallised into the formal partition of Ukraine, the architects of this advocacy deserve scrutiny.
Two distinct political traditions converged on the path of accommodation. The first descends from the pro-Moscow Communist parties that spent decades subordinating working-class internationalism to Soviet foreign policy. The Morning Star, the Communist Party of Britain, the leading figures of Stop the War Coalition: their trajectory from defending Budapest in 1956 to defending Putin’s land grab in 2025 follows a dreary logic. They were trained to apologise for the Kremlin’s empire. They simply switched emperors.
The second tradition should have known better. The International Socialist Tendency, the Socialist Workers Party, the theorists who built entire careers distinguishing themselves from Stalinist deformation: their slide into de facto campism represents a more profound betrayal. They had the theoretical tools to recognise Russian imperialism. They chose not to use them.
The Stalinist Hangover: Andrew Murray and the CPB Tradition
Andrew Murray embodies the institutional continuity between the Cold War Communist left and contemporary “anti-war” politics. A former member of the Communist Party of Britain, a senior figure in Unite the Union, a key strategist for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership, and a leading voice in the Stop the War Coalition since its founding: Murray sits at the nexus of every significant organisational current in British left-wing politics. His analysis of Ukraine provides the clearest window into how campism operates.
On 22 February 2023, with Ukrainian forces still defending Bakhmut, Murray published his verdict in the Morning Star:
“Ukraine has irrevocably lost Crimea and most of the Donbass. Soviet-era borders that could and should have been peacefully renegotiated... will have to be realigned.”
No ambiguity there. This was not a prediction. It was a prescription: stop fighting, accept partition. By February 2023, Murray had already determined that the territories Russia claimed belonged to Russia. The subsequent two years of Ukrainian resistance, of Kherson liberated and Kursk invaded, of hundreds of thousands of casualties: all of this, in Murray’s framework, was pointless slaughter prolonging an outcome that was “irrevocable” before the second anniversary of the invasion.
The analytical framework that produces such conclusions is the “main enemy at home” doctrine, stripped of any dialectical content. For Murray, the primary responsibility of the British left is to oppose British imperialism. So far, so Leninist. But what happens when Russian tanks roll across an international border? Murray’s answer: keep opposing British imperialism. What happens when Ukrainian workers organise resistance, when Ukrainian trade unionists dig trenches, when Ukrainian feminists coordinate evacuation networks? Keep opposing British imperialism.
Ukraine itself vanishes from the analysis. By December 2021, months before the invasion, Murray was already arguing that “Biden’s threats aren’t about protecting Ukraine” but about “extending hegemony.” The Ukrainian people, their history, their agency, their right to exist as a nation: none of this registers. They are, in his framework, a “pawn” in great-power competition. Pawns do not have interests. Pawns do not resist. Pawns are sacrificed.
The Morning Star editorial line has followed Murray’s lead with mechanical consistency. Their framing characterises the conflict as a “proxy war” designed to “bleed Russia” and ultimately “menace China.” By late 2025, the paper’s position was explicit advocacy for the Trump settlement, identifying Keir Starmer’s government as the primary obstacle to peace. The invading army? Secondary concern. The government attempting to sustain Ukrainian resistance? “Warmongering.”
This is not anti-imperialism. It is imperial apologetics wearing anti-imperial clothing. The CPB tradition carries within it decades of accumulated excuses for Soviet tanks: Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Afghanistan 1979. Each time, the “main enemy” doctrine provided cover. Each time, the local victims of Russian aggression were dismissed as tools of Western manipulation. Murray’s position on Ukraine is not a departure from this tradition. It is its logical culmination.
The Trotskyist Disgrace: Alex Callinicos and the IST
The Socialist Workers Party and the International Socialist Tendency present a more troubling case. Their entire organisational existence was premised on opposition to Stalinism. Tony Cliff’s theory of “state capitalism” was developed precisely to distinguish the genuine socialist tradition from the crimes committed in its name. “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism”: the slogan was supposed to represent a third camp, independent of both imperialist blocs.
What happened?
Alex Callinicos, the SWP’s leading theoretician, has spent three years arguing that the Ukraine war is “inter-imperialist” in character. His August 2025 analysis of the Trump-Putin negotiations is revealing:
“Trump is primarily concerned with breaking Russia away from China... Amid this great-power manoeuvring, the Ukrainian people are the merest pawns.”
Pawns again. Always pawns. Never agents. Never subjects of their own history. Callinicos describes the conflict as a “three-sided imperialist contest” in which Ukrainian resistance serves Western interests regardless of Ukrainian intentions. The logic is impeccable within its own terms: if the war is fundamentally inter-imperialist, then supporting either side means supporting imperialism. The working class has no side. Any outcome is equally bad.
Except this framework requires treating Ukrainian national existence as either irrelevant or illusory. Russia invaded to destroy Ukrainian statehood. Putin stated openly in June 2025 that “all of Ukraine is ours” and that “wherever a Russian soldier sets foot is ours.” This is not a border dispute. It is a war of colonial conquest. The IST tradition possesses the theoretical vocabulary to name this: imperialism, national oppression, the right of nations to self-determination. Cliff himself developed the concept of “deflected permanent revolution” to explain how national liberation struggles could succeed even under non-proletarian leadership.
But that theoretical vocabulary requires acknowledging that Russia is an imperialist power conducting a war of national oppression. It requires distinguishing between the imperialist aggressor and the invaded nation. It requires, in short, making a judgment rather than retreating into false equivalence.
The SWP chose equivalence. Their newspaper argued that “if either Russia or the West wins in Ukraine, it will be disastrous,” but also that “a victory for the Ukrainian government... would also be disastrous.” Three disasters, all equally bad. The position has a certain geometric elegance. It also has the practical consequence of opposing any outcome in which Ukraine survives as an independent nation. If Ukrainian victory is disastrous and Russian victory is disastrous and a negotiated settlement is disastrous, what remains? Paralysis dressed as a principle.
The theoretical poverty here is striking. The IST tradition distinguishes between imperialist wars and wars of national liberation. Lenin himself, whom Callinicos invokes constantly, insisted in 1916 that the “epoch of imperialism” does not preclude “national wars on the part of... small (annexed or nationally-oppressed) countries against the imperialist powers.” Ireland 1916, Vietnam 1965: these were not rendered illegitimate by the involvement of rival imperialist powers. The Irish Republicans accepted German weapons; the Vietnamese accepted Soviet weapons. Neither movement’s legitimacy depended on the purity of its suppliers.
Callinicos knows this history. He has written about it. Yet when confronted with an actual war of national survival, he retreats into abstractions about “inter-imperialist competition” that would have condemned every anti-colonial movement of the twentieth century.
Serbia 1914 or Ireland 1916: The Choice That Determined Everything
The theoretical framework organisations chose at the war’s outset determined their political conclusions. Those who framed Ukraine as Serbia 1914, a small nation whose legitimate grievance was subsumed into a larger inter-imperialist conflict, arrived at positions of neutrality or opposition to Ukrainian resistance. Those who framed Ukraine as Ireland 1916 or Vietnam 1965, a genuine war of national liberation in which external aid does not negate the justice of the cause, arrived at positions of solidarity.
The Serbia analogy flatters itself as Marxist sophistication. World War I was indeed an inter-imperialist slaughter in which millions died for nothing. Serbian resistance to Austria-Hungary was indeed instrumentalised by the Triple Entente. But the analogy requires ignoring everything specific about the present conflict. In 1914, multiple empires competed for colonial spoils; in 2022, one empire invaded its neighbour to destroy it as a nation. In 1914, Serbia’s allies shared its imperial appetites; in 2022, NATO’s interest in Ukrainian survival, however cynical its motives, coincided with Ukrainian interests in Ukrainian survival.
The Ireland analogy is less comfortable for those who wish to oppose Western imperialism above all else. James Connolly accepted German weapons. He was not thereby transformed into a German agent. Ho Chi Minh accepted Soviet weapons. He was not thereby transformed into a Soviet agent. The class character of a national liberation struggle depends on who is fighting, for what, and against whom, not on the stamps on the ammunition crates.
Gilbert Achcar, in his debate with Callinicos, pressed this point precisely. A Russian defeat would actually weaken NATO by removing the “Russian threat” justification for military spending. Callinicos responded that a Russian defeat would instead “celebrate” NATO’s power. Two opposite conclusions, both presented as obviously Marxist. But only one analysis treats Ukrainians as subjects capable of pursuing their own interests. The other treats them as objects whose fate is determined entirely by great-power manoeuvring.
The American Dimension: PSL, DSA, and the Marcyist Inheritance
The accommodation of partition extended across the Atlantic through organisations with different lineages but convergent conclusions.
Brian Becker of the Party for Socialism and Liberation represents the frankest iteration of campism. His analysis celebrates “multipolarity” as the end of “30 years of US unilateralism,” treats Russia and China as progressive poles against American hegemony, and describes Trump’s Ukraine policy as “Kissinger in reverse”: a strategic pivot to isolate China by accommodating Russia. The invasion itself was, in Becker’s telling, a “strategic response” to Western aggression.
The PSL tradition descends from Sam Marcy’s Workers World Party, which split from American Trotskyism in 1959 over the question of supporting Soviet intervention in Hungary. Marcy called them “tankies” at the time. The term stuck. The political content never changed: unconditional defence of any state opposing American hegemony, regardless of its internal character. North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Russia: all receive the same treatment. Class struggle within these states? Irrelevant. Democratic movements crushed by their governments? Western provocations.
The Democratic Socialists of America present a more fragmented picture, with genuine internal debate between those who recognise Ukrainian resistance as legitimate and those who view the conflict exclusively through the lens of NATO expansion. The DSA International Committee’s February 2022 statement focused almost entirely on “NATO’s expansionist drive” while barely mentioning the invasion itself. Three years later, their position remains frozen in that initial framing: oppose American militarism, full stop. Whether this opposition requires accepting Russian territorial conquest is a question they prefer not to answer directly.
Convergence: Red-Brown and the “Rage Against the War Machine”
The most damning indictment of the campist left is not theoretical. It is the company they keep.
In February 2023, the “Rage Against the War Machine” rally at the Lincoln Memorial brought together Ron Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, Jill Stein, and representatives of the “Patriotic Socialist” movement. Russian flags in the crowd. Tucker Carlson promoting the event. The horseshoe bent until its ends touched.
This convergence is not accidental. The campist left and the MAGA right share a common framework: American foreign policy as the root of all evil, NATO expansion as the cause of the invasion, Ukrainian resistance as an obstacle to peace. Their motivations differ, but their conclusions align. When Medea Benjamin of Code Pink celebrates Trump’s willingness to tell Ukraine it will “not become a NATO member,” she is celebrating the same outcome that Steve Bannon celebrates.
The Morning Star has responded to this convergence with telling silence. Andrew Murray has responded with irritation at the accusation rather than reflection on its substance. The SWP has responded by insisting that their opposition to the war is principled while the right’s opposition is cynical, as if the distinction matters to the Ukrainians whose country both positions would abandon.
The Balance Sheet
What did three years of “anti-war” posturing accomplish?
The organisations documented here opposed arms deliveries that allowed Ukraine to survive the initial assault. They opposed sanctions that constrained Russian war-making capacity. They demanded negotiations at every stage, regardless of terms, and attacked anyone who suggested that the terms mattered. They characterised Ukrainian resistance as Western manipulation, Ukrainian casualties as pointless sacrifice, Ukrainian existence as a geopolitical abstraction.
Now Trump and Putin are delivering what they demanded. Territory surrendered. Resources extracted. Security guarantees that will prove worthless the moment they are tested. The robber’s peace.
Murray, Callinicos, German, Becker: they will protest that they never endorsed these specific terms. They merely opposed the arms that might have prevented them. They merely demanded the negotiations that produced them. They merely attacked the governments attempting to sustain Ukrainian resistance. Their hands, they will insist, are clean.
But politics is not an exercise in maintaining clean hands. Politics is the sphere of consequences. The consequence of opposing arms supplies is that fewer arms arrive. The consequence of demanding negotiations is that negotiations occur. The consequence of attacking resistance is that resistance weakens. The consequence of treating Ukrainians as pawns is that they are treated as pawns.
The Fourth International chose differently. From February 2022 onward, our tradition recognised the Ukraine war as what it was: a war of national liberation against colonial conquest. We supported Ukrainian resistance, including its right to obtain weapons from any source. We maintained criticism of NATO, of Zelensky’s government, of Western motives. But we did not allow that criticism to become a reason for abandoning Ukrainians to their fate.
The difference between these positions is not academic. It is the difference between solidarity and betrayal.
Part 3 will amplify Ukrainian socialist voices: the trade unionists, feminists, and leftists who fought Russian imperialism while their supposed comrades in the West explained why they shouldn’t.
About this series
“With Washington and Moscow” examines how a section of the international left moved from opposing both Cold War blocs to accommodating the joint US-Russia partition of Ukraine. The series documents the settlement terms, traces the political trajectory of organisations that enabled this outcome, amplifies Ukrainian socialist voices, and argues for an internationalism that sides with the oppressed against all imperialisms.
The other parts of this series are available at https://redmole.substack.com/t/with-washington-and-moscow