From Ukraine to Palestine: The challenges of consistent internationalism

First published at Spectre.

In the last two years, the world has been shaken by the intersection of several struggles. These include the heroic Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion, the uprising for women’s freedom in Iran, the renewed struggle for the liberation of Palestine, the popular resistance against the war in Sudan, and the new protests against the Assad regime in Syria.1 These movements each have their own dynamics and rhythm. Approaching these distinct movements from a common perspective and on an international scale poses serious questions for the left: Is it possible to support all these struggles simultaneously despite their distinct characteristics and contradictions? Can these struggles find solidarity with each other?

Many activists recognize in theory that these movements face the same decadent global capitalism and its imperialist state system. However, international and regional politics shape these resistance struggles, making it hard for them to unite against their common enemy. To accomplish that would require grasping that the cause of their oppression is not “bad governments,” but capitalism — a social and economic system ruled by the need to constantly accumulate capital and increase profits everywhere at any cost. That system generates economic crisis, austerity, geopolitical competition, wars, neocolonial dispossession, debt, and environmental destruction.

We are faced with the challenge of forging a politics capable of explaining the systematic opponent uniting these struggles from within them and their accompanying campaigns of solidarity. As Ashley Smith argues, building “international solidarity from below between oppressed nations like Palestine, Ukraine and Taiwan, as well as exploited workers in both the U.S. and China and throughout the world” is more urgent than ever.2 We live in a period of intensifying war and genocide (Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan). But forging this kind of solidarity is also an increasingly complex task in a state system beset by imperial rivalry between the United States, China, and Russia as well as growing interstate conflict.

These rivalries and conflicts impact working people’s democratic struggles, sometimes leading them to oppose one another. For example, supporting the democratic movements in Syria and Iran is often seen as a challenge to those supposedly “anti-imperialist” governments that make up the so-called “axis of resistance” opposing the genocidal Zionist project. Similarly, support for the Ukrainian people’s right of self-defense against Putin’s imperialist invasion seems to come at the cost of strengthening the United States, the European Union, and NATO, the main supporters of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine.

To avoid becoming selective anti-imperial internationalists — whose support to all liberation movements is unconditional “in theory,” but depends on one’s national position in practice, or who establish an ontological or historical hierarchy among the movements — the left must develop a class analysis independent of the interests of governments that embraces the totality of struggles, states, and wars at the global level. Such analysis must show the connections between disparate movements for liberation, and the opportunities to establish direct links of solidarity between the different sectors of the exploited and the oppressed — that is, the possibilities of uniting these movements from below.

Against selective solidarity

A consistent internationalism must abandon the self-defeating vision of liberation by stages, which argues that some anti-imperialist struggles must “wait,” or worse, are an obstacle to others. This leads parts of the left, for example, to contend that the immediate needs of the Iranian youth or the Ukrainian resistance must be indefinitely “set aside” in order to “first” defeat the Israeli genocide against Palestinians or the NATO project. Others downplay opposition to the Israeli genocide to curry favor with the United States and ensure its support for Ukraine against Russia. This logic subordinates some democratic struggles to the interests of other, supposedly “more important” ones; in the process it destroys the basis for any coherent international solidarity.

In fact, this “stage-ist” view of liberation treats some imperialisms as “lesser evils” that should not be actively combated. In some cases, it opens the door to implicit support of these “lesser evils.” This approach compromises any principled anti-imperialism. Even worse, it undermines the true mechanism for collective liberation, which must challenge the imperialist logic (which ranks these struggles and places them in competition) to replace it with the proletarian logic (which seeks an alliance between all the exploited and oppressed against the forces that divide them). A consistent internationalism must embrace all genuine struggles from below and channel them into a process of permanent revolution — that is, a process of uninterrupted struggle against economic, social, and political inequality until complete liberation is achieved throughout the world.

As Trotsky put it, the aim is “a revolution which makes no compromise with any single form of class rule, which does not stop at the democratic stage, which goes over to socialist measures and to war against reaction from without: that is, a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the preceding one and which can end only in the complete liquidation of class society.”3 In short, the permanent revolution must bring a working-class internationalist outlook from the outset to all struggles.

Lessons from the Second Italo-Ethiopian War

The method of Marxist analysis developed by Trotsky (and others) is particularly useful for understanding the complex dynamics of wars in the imperialist epoch and offers a valuable framework for interpreting current conflicts. The present world situation, which is marked, on the one hand, by rivalries between imperialist powers with two loose blocs led by the United States and China, and, on the other hand, by intense struggles for democracy and self-determination, bears similarities to the crisis of the world order leading to the Second World War.4 4

Trotsky’s internationalist analyses of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1936), the Spanish Revolution (1936–1939), and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), provide us with a useful methodology to guide the left in opposing all imperialisms and supporting all national liberation struggles today.5  For Trotsky, it was crucial to analyze the multiple imperial and class dynamics active in each of these struggles. Consequently, he analyzed the Second Italo-Ethiopian War as part of the totality of imperialist conflicts, national struggles, and class contradictions on a world scale. In October 1935, Mussolini launched an invasion of Ethiopia in the context of the rise of fascism and Italy’s growing economic competition with France and Britain for access to new markers and resources. Italy had lost its previous colonial war with Ethiopia in 1896, and was looking to both secure a fourth colony in Africa and fuel its racist and nationalist project to divert growing class unrest.

This invasion resulted in a seven-month war that revolutionary socialists analyzed as driven by two contradictions: the first contradiction, or conflict, was Ethiopia’s struggle to secure its national sovereignty as an independent country against fascist Italy’s imperialist aggression. Ethiopia had been one of the few uncolonized territories in Africa; at the same time, the emergent interimperialist rivalries that would lead to the Second World War were developing. This second conflict between France and Britain (joined eventually by the USSR and the United States) and Italy and Germany (with the later addition of Japan) would become the global conflagration between the Axis and the Allied powers.

The Second Italo-Ethiopian War was taking place in an international epoch that Trotsky characterized as one of “catastrophic commercial, industrial, agrarian and financial crisis, the break in international economic ties, the decline of the productive forces of humanity, the unbearable sharpening of class and international contradictions.” To understand each national development, it was necessary to consider “the multitude of factors and the intertwining of conflicting forces.”6 

This led Trotsky to argue that “the prospective war between Ethiopia and Italy stands in the same relation to a new world war as the Balkan War in 1912 did to the World War of 1914–18. Before there can be any new big war, the powers will have to declare themselves, and in this regard the Ethiopian-Italian war will define positions and indicate the coalitions.” In fact, both of the twentieth century’s world wars were preceded by smaller national conflicts, in which rival imperialist powers measured their forces and tested potential alliances before directly confronting each other.7 

The Second Italo-Ethiopian War was primarily characterized by anticolonial struggle. Thus, Trotsky called on the revolutionaries to take a determined military stand with Ethiopia: “we are for the defeat of Italy and the victory of Ethiopia, and therefore we must do everything possible to hinder by all available means support to Italian imperialism by the other imperialist powers, and at the same time facilitate the delivery of armaments, etc., to Ethiopia as best we can.”8 At stake for the revolutionary internationalists was the obligation to materially and militarily support the oppressed nation’s right to self-determination. Trotsky rejected the liberal framing of the contest as one between “bourgeois democracies” and “fascism.” At the time, Ethiopia was ruled by a feudal state and many of the Allies ruled over colonies like tyrants.

In the context of the imperialist powers’ rearmament and growing economic conflict, it was imperative to oppose the sanctions that the Allies imposed on Italy and hypocritically justified in the name of support for the Ethiopian people.9 These sanctions were merely one imperialist bloc’s attempt to weaken the other and escalate their economic war.

Opposing all the powers’ military budgets and vigorously denouncing rearmament was also crucial.10 As Trotsky argued, “it is necessary painstakingly to expose not only the open military budget but also all the masked forms of militarism, not leaving without a protest war manoeuvers, military furnishings, orders, etc.” Any socialist policy had to address the double nature of the war, simultaneously and dialectically harboring these two contradictory dynamics, instead of either formally isolating them or tackling them in “stages.” That is, while supporting the dominant struggle of national liberation, revolutionaries had an obligation to oppose the interimperialist conflict from advancing towards its catastrophic end in the Second World War.

During the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, this kind of internationalist solidarity was concretized by united demonstrations of workers, youth, and the Black diaspora, which were independent of the capitalist governments. These forces sent direct material aid to the Ethiopian people and launched labor initiatives to impose workers sanctions against Italy through direct action such as, for example, disrupting shipping. In 1935, members of the Black diaspora in London organized the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE), headed by Amy Ashwood Garvey, C. L. R. James, and George Padmore.11 The IAFE held mass solidarity meetings and demonstrations. Similarly, in the United States, the Black diaspora organized solidarity demonstrations with the Ethiopian cause in Harlem.12 A. Philip Randolph, the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which became the first Black-led workers union in the American Federation of Labor, collected material aid to send directly to support the Ethiopian resistance.

Worker sanctions against Italy were counterposed to the government sanctions, as they gave workers the political agency to express their independent position, which rejected both Italy’s aggression and their own government’s military escalation. For example, in Britain, the Independent Labor Party (ILP) issued leaflets urging unions to form “All-Inclusive Workers Committee of Action” in solidarity with the Ethiopian people. C. L. R. James, while leading solidarity efforts in the ILP, addressed the workers who were “anxious to help the Ethiopian people” and incited them to “organise yourselves independently, and by your own sanctions, the use of your own power, assist the Ethiopian people.…Let us fight against not only Italian imperialism, but the other robbers and oppressors, French and British imperialism.” In the United States, the Workers’ Party also supported “the independent sanctions of the working class, its own boycotts, strikes, defense funds, mass demonstrations that can aid the battles of Ethiopian peoples, not the sanctions of finance capital and its puppet-states.13 

National liberation struggles amidst imperialist rivalry today

This methodology is profoundly useful for building solidarity with national liberation struggles in today’s imperialist order. To begin with Ukraine, Putin’s regime followed up his seizure of Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014 with an attempt at a full-scale invasion and occupation of Ukraine in February 2022. He claimed it was a “defensive” war to stop NATO expansion. Putin’s justification was, of course, a lie. Russian imperialism’s main motivation is reasserting to reassert its control over Ukraine, its natural resources, and the investments within both that country and others in its near abroad, such as Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Georgia. As Hannah Perekhoda has explained, Putin aims to build Russia’s empire, whip up Russian nationalism (in particular its old obsession of “turning Ukrainians into Russians”), and repress domestic movements struggling for democratic rights and improved living conditions.14 

Of course, like the Italo-Ethiopian War, the war in Ukraine has both a primary conflict (that is, Ukraine’s war for liberation from Putin’s imperialist aggression) and a secondary one (that is, the imperialist rivalry between Russia and Washington’s NATO bloc for economic, political, and military dominance over Ukraine and Eastern Europe). This secondary conflict, while remaining in the background, actively fuels the conflict.

Only developments in the war will determine whether this secondary rivalry will become the dominant one. For now, the primary feature of the war is national liberation. While NATO and Russia are not directly at war, this could change. For example, if NATO took direct control of Ukraine’s military or deployed its own forces in direct conflict with the Russian military, the character of the war would change qualitatively into a more directly interimperialist one.

The current struggle for the liberation of Palestine also contains two contradictions set in a hierarchical relationship to each other. It is primarily the Palestinian people’s fight against Israeli settler-colonialism and its supporters in the Western imperialist bloc (most importantly the United States and the European Union). At the same time, this conflict also involves, albeit indirectly, an interimperial conflict between the United States and Russia, as well as China, over hegemony in the Middle East.

Russian imperialism is for the moment playing both sides in the region. It supports Iran as a strategic military and political ally, while maintaining relations with Israel (despite criticism of its genocidal project), selling oil to Tel Aviv, and supporting the Abraham Accords and Israel’s normalization.15 

For its part, China also plays both sides. It has turned to diplomacy to broker the unity of the Palestinian resistance and support the so-called two-state solution, while it pressures Iran (with whom it signed an economic cooperation agreement in 2021) against entering into direct war with Israel.16 During the latest escalation between Iran and Israel in April, China called on “relevant parties to exercise calm and restraint to prevent further escalation.” At the same time, China dramatically expanded trade with Netanyahu’s Israel.17 It increased investment to become the second largest investor in Israel after the United States.18 Most of this investment is in Israel’s ports, telecommunications, energy, and technology—particularly its surveillance systems, which Beijing has deployed against its whole population, especially the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang.19 As a result of this trade and investment, China is now the second largest importer of Israeli goods and the largest exporter to the Zionist state.20 China also has enormous investments in the surrounding states, including Saudi Arabia, which joined into its $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Chinese imperialism’s objective in the region is not Palestinian liberation, but preserving its economic interests, its access to fossil fuels, and its enormous BRI investment. That is, China’s objective is protecting key resources that help it compete with its imperial rival, the United States.

Confronting “imperialist combinations”

The main task for revolutionaries in such conflicts is to take a principled position of material solidarity with struggles of the oppressed without lending any support to imperialist powers trying to highjack them for their own purposes. In the 1930s, Britain and France sold their policy of sanctions against Italy through “support” for the Ethiopian cause, while the United States sent selective material aid to China to weaken Japan. The “friendly” imperialisms quickly tried to co-opt the leaderships of these wars of liberation, posing as “allies” when in reality they were only trying to undermine their respective rivals and win legitimacy for their own depredations.

Trotksy called these deceitful imperialist maneuvers from above “imperialist combinations,” which sought to manipulate national liberation movements for their capitalist interests and confuse and divide the working-class movement, thereby preventing independent and effective international solidarity. Similarly, today, the United States and the European Union pretend to defend Ukraine’s right to self-determination against Russian invasion with sanctions against Moscow and by sending arms in dribs and drabs to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia and China pose as allies of the Palestinian people by arming Iran, all while hypocritically maintaining their capitalist ties with Israel.

Such imperialist combinations are a major challenge to developing international solidarity from a working-class perspective. To defeat them, a principled anti-imperialist and internationalist policy must express and mobilize unconditional concrete and material support for all movements for democracy and liberation, while at the same time opposing all imperialist states — including those pretending to play “progressive” roles — and warning against the influence such states try to develop in these movements.

Today, the United States is the most flagrant example of imperialist combination. There is no doubt that a victory of the Ukrainian resistance will give confidence to other peoples oppressed by the Putin regime in Georgia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and throughout Russia’s former empire. They, alongside the oppressed nationalities within Russia and the Russian working people as a whole, would be encouraged to stand up for their democratic rights and demands for social equality.

However, the Biden-NATO-EU-Zelensky combination sows an illusory hope that the Ukrainian working class can rely on Western imperialism to defeat Russian imperialism. This maneuver is both deceptive and dangerous: it confuses class consciousness and obscures the real path to real self-determination and independence for the Ukrainian people.

The Biden administration has once again shown the callous cynicism behind its “democratic” colors. The latest supplemental military aid package approved in May 2024 perfectly illustrates this sibylline manipulation.21 Of the additional $95 billion approved, $61 billion is for “aid to Ukraine.” In reality 37 percent of that portion is for US arms production to restock its arsenal, 18 percent is to bolster NATO’s presence in Europe, and only 22 percent ($14 billion) for direct arms shipment to Ukraine.22 $26 billion of the total aid package will fund the genocide of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel, while the remaining $8 billion is devoted to countering China in the Indo-Pacific region.

The message to the United States and to the world population is that supporting national liberation efforts in Ukraine comes with the threefold price of: first, massively resupplying the United States’ and NATO’s military, while accelerating the militarization of the European Union; second, increasing the funding for the genocide of the Palestinian people; and third, helping the United States prepare for a coming third World War with China.23 

This Western “aid” has had the effect of putting the Ukrainian people on the ropes. Under pressure from Western creditors and their debt system, Zelensky’s government has passed neoliberal privatization reforms since coming to power, and is currently selling the country to the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in successive peace and reconstruction summits.24 Moreover, the government is imposing antiworker measures and cuts to social rights amidst the current war.25 To get rid of the bloody Russian occupation, Zelensky is telling the Ukrainian people to surrender their wealth to predatory Western capitalism, mortgaging the future of their national sovereignty.

In the face of this filthy blackmail, socialists must reject any military budget that serves US and EU imperialist interests and entraps Ukraine in neocolonial debt. We should instead propose independent alternatives of working class solidarity, as well as articulate and highlight the links of reciprocal solidarity between the distinct progressive struggles that rival imperialisms seek to divide and confront.

That is why it has been key, for example, that supporters of Ukraine have shown solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.26 The formation of the Ukraine-Palestine Solidarity Group, which differentiated itself from Zelensky’s neoliberal and pro-imperialist government, was particularly important. In their “Letter of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” they “reject the Ukrainian government statements that express unconditional support for Israel’s military actions [insofar as] this position is a retreat from the support of Palestinian rights and condemnation of the Israeli occupation, which Ukraine has followed for decades.”27

Similarly the independent platform for “A People’s Peace, Not an Imperialist Peace” dismantled the false equation between aid to Ukraine and support for NATO’s growth. The platform declares that:

An effective military support of Ukraine does not require a new wave of armaments. We oppose NATO’s rearmament programmes and weapon exports to third countries. Instead, the countries of Europe and North America must provide the weapons from their existing, huge arsenals that will help Ukraine to defend itself effectively. In this sense, we demand that the arms industry should not serve the profit interests of capital—to the contrary, we want to work towards the social appropriation of the arms industry. This industry should serve the immediate interests of Ukraine. At the same time, for social and urgent ecological reasons, we underline the imperative of democratically converting the arms industry into socially useful production on a global scale.28 

Against the maneuvers and distortions of rival imperialisms, all national liberation movements and democratic struggles must maintain their political independence from capitalist states and their imperialist allies. We must unconditionally defend the right of self-defense of all oppressed peoples, which includes their right to request and accept all the material and military aid from any source necessary to achieve their liberation.

But this does not exempt internationalists from warning that all imperialist aid comes with strings and conditions, and from highlighting its dangerous effects. In navigating all these contradictions, the left must advocate the only effective political strategy: building an independent and class-based path to forging solidarity among the exploited and oppressed both within and without each country.

The task of revolutionaries in this imperialist epoch is precisely to decipher the innumerable conflicts within each struggle and its internal class dynamics, and to push forward initiatives and platforms of joint struggle that can challenge and defeat the imperialist combinations. Only with such a consistent internationalist approach can class solidarity on a world scale be built in practice and win our collective liberation.