Should the Left support the division of the world into imperialist spheres of influence? A year ago, the very posing of such a question would have surprised me, since the answer seems obvious: of course not. Unfortunately, the apparent sympathy with Russian aggression against Ukraine by many on the Western left has shown that this is not so obvious.

Today’s radical left has long recognised only one foe, that which Ayatollah Khomeini aptly titled “The Great Satan” – namely the USA. Little attention was paid lately to about “The Lesser Satan” – or Russia. For over 30 years after the fall of the USSR, we only imagined a single imperialist actor on the world stage. But 179 days ago we were reminded of the presence of another imperialist contender with full force.

Six months into the conflict, a Russian army incapable of taking Kyiv is presented as a threat to the entire continent. Ukraine has become, according to President Zelensky, ‘a springboard for an attack on other nations of Europe’. For the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Russia represents nothing less than ‘a challenge to free people everywhere’. Given in the American airbase of Ramstein, Germany, his speech sounded like a script for a historical reenactment of the Cold War.

“I would like to remind you that if Sweden and Finland do not take steps to meet our conditions, we will freeze the process.” So said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara on 18 July, thus single-handedly setting the rules of the game for Finland and Sweden’s bid to join NATO. But can Swedish and Finnish government officials explain to the public what Erdoğan’s “conditions” are, and what they will do to prevent their accession to NATO being “frozen”?

Last week the Mirror newspaper exposed the case of an 87-year-old man, a sufferer of prostate cancer, who waited 15 hours for an ambulance after falling outside his house in Cornwall. Unable to move him, his family built a makeshift tent to keep off the rain. Conservative Party leadership contenders Rishi Sunak and Liz Trust have solutions for the NHS crisis—lots more privatisation. This means that you will now only wait 15 hours for an ambulance if you don’t have the right health insurance—in other words, if you are poor.

Marxism’s contributions to ecological literature and struggles is a rich and contradictory field of discussion. Marxism in diverse ways has fed into environmental struggles and broader ecological politics. Broadly, I would argue that there has been a deepening appreciation of the ecological themes in the work of Marx and Engels in recent decades. Most significantly, and recently, there has been a shift towards debates around Eco-Leninism, with several different attempts to read the climate crisis through the insights of Lenin. However, specifically Green Party politics, in some states, has seen a movement of former Marxist-Leninists towards a revisionist understanding of politics, with revolutionary objectives being discarded.

Into the third decade of the 21st century, what does it mean to talk of imperialism(s) and empire? Can every unequal relationship of exchange, power and cultural diffusion be considered imperialistic? How do we sift through the complexities of imperialist power in a rentier state like Pakistan whose ruling bloc has cultivated multiple foreign patrons?

The US withdrawal of 2021 was a military victory for the Taliban. For at least two years leading up to it, the Afghan government forces were losing more people dead and wounded each month than they were recruiting. So those forces shrank.

The Swedish left has come a long way since 2014. Though the tumultuous events that shook Ukraine that year never became a top priority for left debates in Sweden, the antifascist rhetoric mobilized by Russia did appeal to some. In March of that year, a near-fatal assault on a group of leftists in the city of Malmö by far-right activists galvanized the Swedish left around the antifascist cause.

According to Mao Zedong, the principal law of materialist dialectics is the unity of opposites. Thus, it is quite fitting to observe that we can find the unity of opposites on display in evaluations of Mao himself as represented by Domenico Losurdo and Alain Badiou. For Losurdo, Mao is praised for his realism, nationalism, and attention to economic modernization. By contrast, Alain Badiou sees Mao as an eternal rebel, a symbol of the communist idea, and a universalist. These positions could not be more opposed.