Renfrey Clarke

Renfrey Clarke — In the view of Marxists, the rift that divides the world is a direct result of imperialism, whose core is always material and economic.

Renfrey Clarke — Few questions of international politics have seen the Western left as sharply divided as the war in Ukraine. But there is no good reason why Marxists, with the writings of Vladimir Lenin at their disposal, should lack clarity on how to analyse the war.

Renfrey Clarke — If Russia is to be described as practising “sub-imperialism” with relation to Central Asia and Ukraine, this will have to emerge from a more detailed study of Russian dealings over the years with the parts of the world concerned.

Renfrey Clarke and Dave Holmes — The fact that Russia is not part of the imperialist world has enormous implications for the way the conflict in Ukraine must be interpreted.

Renfrey Clarke - The war in Ukraine has presented left-wing theorists and commentators with a difficult analytical challenge. How are we to resolve this conundrum? As well as needing to answer the question of where Russia stands within the capitalist world-system we also need to decide how the right to national self-determination plays out within this context.

Dave Holmes and Renfrey Clarke - The war in Ukraine is being used to massively intensify the West’s anti-Russia campaign. But the blowback from the sanctions regime is destabilising Western Europe and intensifying the suffering of developing countries.

This article was originally published in 2016, in a special issue of the journal International Critical Thought (vol. 6, no. 4) that addressed the topic of “Russia, Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism”.