In “Lenin, Ukraine, and the Amnesia of the ‘Anti-War Left‘,” Tom Dale provides an incisive analysis of the contemporary Left’s failure to substantively analyze the war in Ukraine. Writing in the independent socialist magazine New Politics, Dale writes:
The left lacks a unified theory of geopolitics, capitalism, war, and movement strategy to act as a reference point for its internal discussion. It lacks even a range of contending, explicitly articulated theoretical perspectives drawn from within its own ranks, and consistent with its broader world view, that clearly describe the lines of debate.
What it has instead is a mess of half-examined folk-theories, sentiments, and habits of argument. These have been drawn impressionistically from recent history, borrowed selectively from philosophically incompatible traditions—such as realism—or half-excavated from the bedrock of the left’s own past.
The article draws in depth on Vladimir Lenin’s own writings and positions to show that the founding father of the Soviet Union, for all his contradictions, had a much more nuanced understanding of war than today’s “anti-war left” has shown itself capable of. In his conclusion, Dale argues that the war in Ukraine
pits a flawed democracy against a personal autocracy; a social system with the potential for evolution against one hard-cased by a police state; and national self-determination against colonial annexation and cultural annihilation. Whatever one thinks, strategically, of Ukraine’s manner of handling its relations with the West and Russia, these are the matters at stake, and the primary ground on which the question of military support should be decided.
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