Building an anti-war movement on Ukraine
JVL Introduction
We are publishing a series of interesting pieces on the war in Ukraine from different left perspectives; we aim to inform and prompt discussion.
In that spirit and without endorsing the arguments of either side, we repost the exchange between Mike Phipps and the Stop the War Campaign on how best to build the anti-war movement.
This article was originally published by Labour Hub on Fri 25 Mar 2022. Read the original here.
For the broadest possible anti-war movement!
For the broadest possible anti-war movement
Mike Phipps publishes an exchange of letters with the Stop the War Coalition
Having attended the Stop the War Coalition demonstration on the war in Ukraine on Sunday March 6th, there was a concern among other anti-war activists about the small size of the march and the very few Ukrainians on it. Following some discussion, the appeal below was drafted and circulated. It aims to establish the central principles around which the broadest possible anti-war activity can be built.
“Massive demonstrations against war and in solidarity with the Ukrainian people all over Europe have not so far been matched in the UK, where protests have been small and often divided. We appeal to the entire Labour and trade union movement, pacifists, faith leaders, humanitarians, antiwar activists, those in solidarity with the Ukrainian people and all right-minded internationalists to build the broadest possible movement around three central demands:
• Russian troops out of Ukraine!
• No to war!
• Refugees welcome here!”
You can sign the appeal here
The appeal was duly sent to the Stop the War Coalition who issued the following response:
Dear Comrades,
Thank you for the statement you have circulated concerning the war in Ukraine. We would like to explain why we cannot sign it, nor support any demonstration called on the basis of the demands outlined.
This is not because we disagree with the slogans you have formulated. Stop the War has opposed the Russian invasion of Ukraine and called for the full withdrawal of the invading troops from the outset. “No to war” is a slogan which everyone can support under almost all circumstances, although it is not clear what this means under present conditions – if it means opposition to a NATO “no fly zone” over Ukraine then that would be better stated. And we agree that refugees, whether from Ukraine or other war zones like Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria (we assume that this is what you mean too), should be made welcome in Britain.
However, these demands do not address central features of the crisis. In particular, you are silent on the issue of NATO expansion. It is clear that this expansion has contributed to the war, without justifying it. Successive British governments have pushed this expansion, including to Ukraine. President Zelensky has publicly acknowledged that it is something which will form part of any peace agreement. By not taking a position on this issue, you are avoiding a key question on which British politics actually has an influence, and contributing to the imposition of a “consensus” whereby NATO and its role cannot be discussed.
Nor do you suggest any criticism of British diplomacy during the crisis, including the wish of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss to fight Putin to the last drop of Ukrainian blood, a position apparently supported by the Labour leadership. It is vital that we make concrete demands of the British government, and not take refuge in platitudes or demands on other regimes only, however justifiable. Your statement is also silent on the war psychosis, almost without precedent, being worked up by the media and politicians here.
There are other pressing issues on which there should be broad unity on the left and among anti-war campaigners – opposition to increased arms spending and to the eastward deployment of British armed forces, and the need for nuclear de-escalation and disarmament across Europe. These are demands on which there is an urgent need for mobilisation. Your proposed slogans as they stand could be supported by Keir Starmer without batting an eyelid, despite his witch-hunting of the anti-war movement and anti-war Labour MPs, and by Boris Johnson with a touch of hypocrisy on the refugee question.
We remain committed to building a united and powerful anti-war movement directed in the first place against the British government, which has played such a disastrous role in wars across the world over the last generation, and look forward to working with you in doing so.
Stop the War Coalition
As one of the instigators of the appeal, I replied as follows:
Dear comrades,
Thank you for the response to our appeal, which is disappointing, even strange. You say you do not disagree with the slogans we have formulated, but you “cannot sign it, nor support any demonstration called on the basis of the demands outlined.” That doesn’t sound very sensible.
You oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you oppose war, you support refugees being welcome here. But because the appeal – designed to build the broadest possible movement against the war – does not include an analysis of the role of NATO or a criticism of the British government’s role, then no activity based on its demands can be supported.
But it is not NATO that is waging war on Ukraine. And it is not the British government that is committing war crimes against its people. You say that it is clear that NATO’s expansion has “contributed to the war”, but this is not clear at all. It could equally be argued that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an act of unprovoked imperialist aggression, designed simply to seize the land and resources of a sovereign people. During the war on Iraq, Stop the War quite rightly did not claim that any action by the Saddam Hussein regime contributed to Iraq being invaded. The attack on Iraq was an act of unprovoked imperialist aggression. Why not hold Russian imperialism to the same standard?
This is clearly a different analysis to yours. But, in fact, it’s not in the appeal – and for a very good reason: we do not and should not require opponents of this war to sign up to any particular analysis. The main aim is to build a mass movement against the war.
In your penultimate paragraph, you suggest that there “are other pressing issues on which there should be broad unity on the left and among anti-war campaigners – opposition to increased arms spending and to the eastward deployment of British armed forces, and the need for nuclear de-escalation and disarmament across Europe.” Why not add in a few more demands? The reality is that the more detailed the programmatic demands, the more reason a wide range of individuals will find for absenting themselves from engaging with the central issue: the unprovoked war on Ukraine.
It was to be hoped that Stop the War could look beyond “unity on the left” on an issue of this importance, as it did in its heyday in 2003, when even Liberal Democrat politicians, not to mention faith groups that don’t naturally align with the left, were allowed onto its platforms. The only stipulation then was that they opposed the unprovoked attack on Iraq – not that they subscribe to a whole range of other criticisms, about NATO, British government diplomacy or arms spending. That was the right approach then and it remains so now.
It seems that the real error of our broad appeal is that even Keir Starmer could support it. That’s unlikely, and his attacks on the anti-war movement must be opposed. But we make no apology for attempting to appeal to supporters of the Labour leadership who are outraged by this unprovoked attack on Ukraine and want to organise constructively against it – not in a way that fans the flames of war – which is why the demand “No to war” is included – but in a way that solidarises with the plight of the Ukrainian people.
Having attended the Stop the War demonstration on March 6th, it was disappointing to note not only its small size but the almost complete absence of Ukrainians. What a contrast this was to the mobilisations against the attack on Iraq in 2003 when large numbers of Iraqis and people from neighbouring countries were present.
The urgency of our appeal is motivated by the belief that millions of people in this country want to oppose this war, but the current orientation of the Stop the War leadership, and its insistence that people share its full analysis of the role of NATO and British diplomacy, is an impediment to mobilising them.
Unless that orientation changes, Stop the War’s protests will continue to be poorly supported. You may take some solace from the notion that you have drawn a clear line in the sand against the Labour leadership and others, but the danger is that such an approach will marginalise Stop the War, not only over this conflict but over future ones.
That would be a tragedy, setting back any opposition in the UK to this and to future wars. And it would be a setback of Stop the War’s own making. The aim of our broad appeal is to prevent such an act of self-harm.
Mike Phipps, Chair, Brent Stop the War (personal capacity)
Our appeal is still live. It has been signed by a number of prominent peace and labour movement activists. You can sign it here
Mike Phipps’ book For the Many: Preparing Labour for Power was published by OR Books in 2018. His new book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
Mike Phipps is disingenuous. To oppose the war in Ukraine without mentioning the principal cause of that war, viz. NATO expansion and the threat to Russia is to treat the symptoms of an illness without seeking to cure those afflicted.
The reality is that Mike Phipps is a supporter of imperialism and therefore he has no criticism of the role of the US with its pivot to China and its breaking of the promises given to Gorbachev of not one inch eastwards in 1991.
Just as Phipps believes there was substance to the ‘antisemitism’ campaign in the Labour Party.
The reality is, whether we like it or not, Russia’s war is a defensive war. Phipps also ignores the 8 year long war that the Azov Battalion, which is part of the Ukrainian army, waged on the Donetsk and Luhansk republics.
What amazes me is that those who were so hot on ‘antisemitism’ prefer not to talk about the West’s arming of neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine. Their presence in the Ukrainian state is quite frightening but Phipps and others prefer not to talk about it.
See my
The Ukraine War – Who is Responsible for the Carnage?
Putin has fallen into the trap that Biden laid for him
https://tonygreenstein.com/2022/03/the-ukraine-war-who-is-responsible-for-the-carnage/
I believe Mike Phipps that STW’s response to your letter says almost everything that needs to be said.
I’m only adding anything because since you wrote that letter there has been a “Stand with Ukraine” demo in London, well attended by Ukrainians and awash with yellow and blue flags that could very well have been patched together from the yellow and blue material of the 2018/19 “People’s Vote” demos.
Those demos share something else: not only a dearth of red flags and banners but the absence of trade unions, socialists and political organisations of the left – unless you count David Lammy and Chris Bryant as the sharp end of left activism in modern Britain that is.
You probably need to ask again just why socialists like myself and Yanis Varoufakis (certainly no friend of Vladimir Putin) feel this way. Yanis says:
“The sea of yellow and blue currently covering europe is a hypocritical sea. This “movement” (however well-intentioned many of its individual components may be) does not have the interests of Ukrainians at heart.”
This movement as exemplified by the EU, falling in line to US imperialism’s every diktat, is simply a tail wagged by the NATO dog.
And the Ukrainian people? Just like the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, they are being made cannon fodder in pursuit of US geo-political objectives.
Mike Phipps argues that “it is not NATO that is waging war on Ukraine”.
I am not a scholar of politics, but to me it seems that Nato IS waging war on Ukraine by pouring weapons into the country, stationing/sending NATO troups right to the border of Ukraine, turning a blind eye to the AZOV battaglion and similar organisations in Ukraine, talking up war rather than looking for alternatives.
Putin is no angel but this does not let NATO off the hook. On the contrary.
As an ex-soldier, I have never regarded war as an exemplary way to resolve issues between states. Triggering factors are not ever fully rationally in evidence; perhaps why books are written and requiems played for decades afterwards. Wars happen…because we are imperfect people pursuing conflicting goals.
Those of us old enough to remember the Kremlin’s invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 well recall the “arguments” trotted out by the “Tanky” supporters of the CPGB that the invasions on those occasions were also against people who desired the overthrow of “socialism” and thus posed a threat to the Soviet Union. Such people have surfaced once again in the Left, under the delusion that Putin’s Russia is in some bizarre way shape or form still a “workers state”, albeit a “deformed” one. Not withstanding, RT tries to give oxygen to the same myth, with its bizarre attempts to cultivate a “progressive” image, whilst its guru Putin, crossing himself at every opportunity, supports giving the black-cowelled priesthood of the Russian Orthodox Church free reign to peddle their nationalistic, religious nonsense, whether imprisoning opponents on trumped up charges or sending out his murder squads to silence any opposition with Novichok poison.
Leon Trotsky, before his assassination in 1940, at the hands of a member of one of Stalin’s death squads, postulated that what was once a politically corrupt, self-serving bureaucracy, now had elements in its ranks who were headed towards outright fascism. Today, with its number of billionaire oligarchs, courtesy of firstly Yeltsin and now Putin, feeding off the proceeds of their pillage of Soviet industries to assuage their ever growing avarice for mega-yachts and high-end overseas residences that would put the Saudis to shame, Russia’s leaders can no longer be defended as some kind of errant “socialists”, let alone “communists”, as some on the so-called “Left” seem to think.
Putin’s recent attack on Lenin, stating that the Ukraine was a creation of Lenin’s, says much of what we need to know about Putin’s regime. They have now long gone over from being a vile, bunch of political parasites to a fully fledged, imperialist regime with as strong a penchant towards fascism as one could need.
The similarity between Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939 and Putin’s on the Ukraine in 2022 is stark, not withstanding that both the states that were attacked were capitalist is irrelevant, and the washed out, middle of the road, fence sitters on the so-called “Left” need to recognise this before their stance does any more harm to the struggle against the megalomaniac regime in the Kremlin.
When Putin stationed a hundred thousand plus troops near the border of Ukraine, what he was in effect saying is that either we can do this the easy way, or the hard way. And he gave Biden and NATO leaders several months to think it over. But given that ‘they’ created Russia’s security concerns in the first place, they were never gonna address them of course.
The invasion and the ensuing war could easily have been prevented had they done so. They left Putin with no choice, and deliberately so, so that they could then wage total economic warfare on Russia, and everything Russian.
The fact that Biden and Johnson and Stoltenberg et al have been repeating on pretty much a daily basis since Feb 24th that ‘the attack was *unprovoked*’ tells you ALL you need to know! As for Mike Phipps referring to STWs position regarding NATO expansion as STWs ‘analysis’, does he regard all the warnings during the past twenty-five years or so by experts that NATO expansion to the east will end badly as just their analysis?!
John Pilger put it like this in a piece he posted on Feb 17th:
Setting aside the manoeuvres and cynicism of geopolitics, whomever the players, this historical memory is the driving force behind Russia’s respect-seeking, self-protective security proposals, which were published in Moscow in the week the UN voted 130-2 to outlaw Nazism [the US and Ukraine are the two countries that voted against!]. They are:
– NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missiles in nations bordering Russia. (They are already in place from Slovenia to Romania, with Poland to follow)
– NATO to stop military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.
– Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.
– the West and Russia to sign a binding East-West security pact.
– the landmark treaty between the US and Russia covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be restored. (The US abandoned it in 2019)
These amount to a comprehensive draft of a peace plan for all of post-war Europe and ought to be welcomed in the West.
Mike Phipps appears to imply that these proposals by Russia – and Russia’s concern about NATO expansion during the past twenty-five years – was all a ruse. I wonder how he thinks the US would react at the prospect of Russian troops and armaments/missiles being based right on its border! Or relatively close!
As other commenters have stated, it is foolish and disingenuous to ignore the huge role that NATO, the UK and the US have played and are still playing in this conflict. It seems obvious to many people outside the Western corporate media bubble that this invasion could have been prevented if the US government, which is the dominant institution in Europe’s affairs, had been willing to treat Russia as an equal partner rather than as an enemy.
As for ending this war, honest and open diplomacy by the US government (Ukraine is plainly just a pawn) which treats Russia’s demands seriously might be a fine starting point. That will never happen, of course, and I can see we are at the start of many years of conflict in Eastern Europe, benefiting the ruling classes, Ukrainian fascists and the weapons corporations. If we on the Left do not want that, we need to organise here in the UK and internationally, demonstrating solidarity with the working class in Ukraine and Russia.
NATO (the USA) is using Ukraine to wage war against Russia. War in Ukraine did not start with the recent Russian escalation. Declaring solidarity with “the Ukrainian people” can easily be misinterpreted as support for the regime in Kiev, especially when Ukrainian colours are displayed with the slogan.
Peace campaigners should not take sides in a conflict, demands should be made of all participants especially our own government.
I notice with dismay that while everyone is trying, with a haste that is almost indecent, to be more Ukrainian than the Ukrainians, nobody is saying much about those people bravely resisting the war in Russia.
More than 15,000 have been arrested and detained, facing 15 years in prison. Many more have been severely beaten for going out onto the streets of more than 52 Russian cities to oppose Putin’s imperialist war.
They, too, surely, need our solidarity.
A Russia Solidarity Fund has been established to assist these courageous protesters with medical and legal costs.
For information, contact the Fund at rsfund2022@gmail.com