From bad to worse: The new political setting and challenges for the Canadian left

By Socialist Project

Published 15 April, 2025

First published at Socialist Project.

The current political conjuncture can be defined by an unfolding sense, in Canada and around the world, that neoliberal policies have failed and even capitalism itself is not working. This is driven by the weakening, dismantling, or even destruction of the things that had made the capitalist system seem ‘legitimate’ and ‘fair’ in the eyes of the working classes — rising wages, affordable housing, improving healthcare, and protecting the environment. This constitutes a growing legitimation crisis.

While the most immediate origin of this impasse is the 2008-10 ‘great financial crisis’, it is more deeply rooted in the structure of the neoliberal state, which is undergoing further deepening of its authoritarian features across most countries, especially with the coming into power of the second Donald Trump administration in the US in January 2025.

The transformation of capitalist states to a more disciplinary and market-centred policy regime emerged as states sacrificed higher taxes on the wealthy, which had supported social policies and programs, to the needs of capital for increased profits in the face of the long crisis of the 1970s. The state’s accumulation functions — the various policy supports for capitalist class profitability and economic success — became predominant over social provisioning to meet human needs for health, aging, education, culture, and so forth. To accomplish this agenda, from the 1980s, there was an extensive centralizing of state power within central banks, ministries of finance, and policing and prison agencies, all of which are substantially insulated from democratic pressures and accountability.

The role of political parties, elections, and other state institutions associated with making the system legitimate became increasingly limited and circumscribed, along with a sustained curtailment of trade union rights. Yet, in the context of rising labour market precarity and stagnating wages into the 1990s, working-class dissent was largely contained. This neoliberal state — one of privatization, de-regulation, free trade, and increased policing — led many activists and socialist writers to speak of a setback in working-class politics and a ‘hollowing out’ of liberal democracy.

The effects of the 2008 financial crisis

It was in 2008 that these developments erupted into a full-blown crisis of political legitimacy, often termed the ‘global financial crisis’. The financial crisis initially concentrated on those institutions within the state system most directly associated with ideological integration — convincing people that the capitalist system is legitimate and just — such as political parties, the mainstream media, and education institutions. It also took the form of a crisis of imperialism, ‘reverberating out’ from the American imperial centre throughout the imperial system, including Canada, as well as echoing back to the US imperial core itself. Canada being the ‘empire’s most dependable ally’, it faced many of the same contradictions as the US in managing the economic, social, and ideological effects.

The financial crisis thus revealed the interconnectedness of distinct social formations that took shape through the period of US-led globalization. Over several years, financial instability, recession and unemployment, and bailouts rippled through particular social formations in distinct rhythms defined by each national state’s location within the imperial system, their balance of class forces, and their class composition. Each state had its particular manifestations, simmering tensions, and morbid symptoms — the appearance of Trump and the MAGA movement in the US, the re-emergence of major fascist movements in Germany, Italy, France and other parts of Europe, and explosive racist riots in Britain. In Canada, there was the emergence of a populist far right in the national Conservative Party, political splits into far-right parties in several provinces, and the emergence of the People’s Party of Canada.

The crisis has been augmented by popular anxieties about impending ecological breakdown, with wildfires, flooding, and record storms all hitting across North America with frightening regularity. The patent failure of capitalist states to take meaningful steps toward addressing the mounting catastrophe has eviscerated the myth of liberal ‘progressivism’ and ‘policy incrementalism’ that things will gradually get better. The illusions that have long been critical for legitimating the capitalist system such as the notion of ‘a better future’, and even the idea of ‘the future’ itself on which such ideologies rely, has abruptly vanished, especially in the eyes of young people.

Meanwhile, the continuation of austerity and privatization have kept increasing the exposure of working-class lives to the market, rolling back what protections remained from its ravages while expanding or entrenching its centrality and power in allocating resources. A new generation that has come of age in Canada since the 2008 crisis is now confronting a political and economic order that appears utterly incapable of providing meaningful, secure lives, manifested in major challenges of housing, maintaining incomes, and job security.

This regime of ‘market authoritarianism’ has been consolidated through the hardening of centrist coalitions, leaving the electoral terrain overwhelmingly unfavourable for intervention by socialist or popular forces. In addition to highly coercive governance at home, these forces have turned to a growing militarism abroad, including increasing Great Power confrontation and the development of powerful new weapons systems such as hypersonic missiles armed with a new generation of nuclear bombs. The growth of this militarism is evident in the US/NATO-backed war in Ukraine, (now being reassessed by the Trump administration as of 2025) and the Israeli-US genocidal war on Gaza.

Donald Trump and the rise of the right

The new Trump Administration has launched an aggressive mix of authoritarian attacks on key state institutions and immigrant communities, using presidential decrees to bypass legislative oversight. This concentration of executive power is mixed with a new and aggressive imperialist discourse, with sometimes illogical threats against other states and territories, including Greenland, Panama, China, and Canada. It is unclear how long it will take for these changes to be institutionalized and how deep these changes will go in making a new authoritarianism. So far, there is little opposition being organized in the US. Elements of the capitalist class still committed to the US-led globalization project are uncomfortable with Trump’s moves (except the promise of tax cuts) but silent; the Democratic party is directionless after the defeat of the Biden agenda and the popular alienation resulting from their backing the wars in Ukraine and Gaza; and the US left and the labour movement is still organizationally sputtering, noticeably silent on threats to workers in Canada and Mexico.

The hardening of politics and the state has been initially successful in North America in warding off the growing global threat of the far-right, movements propelled especially by increasingly radicalized smaller business owners (petty-bourgeoisie) long squeezed by globalization, alongside sections of the working class that are angry and politically confused. Despite their significant contradictions and major programmatic and strategic limits of the populist and hard right, such social forces have been the primary beneficiaries of the legitimation crisis. They have proven to be able to fill, to greater or lesser degrees, the ideological spaces evacuated by social democratic and liberal political forces in Europe and North America.

The ongoing neoliberal realignment of beleaguered social democratic parties, for example, has continued to both reflect and drive working-class decomposition, underpinned by the centrifugal economic forces of dispersal and precarity, forced increases in individual responsibility in job markets, and intensification within labor processes. This process has persisted following the political defeats of Bernie Sanders (bridging the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America) in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in the British Labour Party (as with Tony Benn earlier), and the impasses of the new parties of left realignment in Greece, Spain, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. The defeats have paved the way for corporate-backed liberal centrists to assert a renewed stranglehold on centre-left parties, with little in the way of electoral success to show for it. The NDP has followed a not dissimilar approach at both the provincial and federal levels in Canada.

The youth in Canada, US, and Europe have not been immune from embracing market and right-wing economic solutions due to their lack of confidence in their economic and social futures, manifested in growing electoral support for conservative parties, such as Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party of Canada and Trump’s Republican Party. Yet protest, as in previous eras — such as during the times of the anti-globalization movement, Idle No More, and Black Lives Matter uprisings — has drawn in new waves of young people. This time, it is the growth of the encampments and protests over Israel’s genocidal attacks in Gaza that has drawn new waves of young people into the world of anti-imperialist thinking, BDS actions, and progressive politics. Union organizing in the logistics sector and around Amazon, as well as other campaigns around the gig economy, have also sparked a new cohort of labour activists.

Social democratic parties such as the NDP have long given up on the possibility of challenging capitalism and have advanced little more than modest reforms of the neoliberal regime in their endless search for a ‘capitalism with a human face’. It is crystal clear that entering these parties has not formed an anti-capitalist politics or allowed a vehicle for building a new left politics to emerge. The current context of a weak radical left, fragmented working classes, and a politically cautious trade union movement has led many on the left, in both Europe and North America, to see little alternative but to join forces with mainstream political parties as ‘junior partners’ in new ‘popular fronts’ as the only path to combat the immediate threat of the growing hard-right. This takes the form in Canada of varied electoral alliances of the NDP, the Greens, and Liberals (with a variant specific to Quebec), supported by a wide matrix of organizations of the social left seeking to block further erosion of social gains.

The growing threat of the right must be addressed. But this must not come at the expense of dissolving socialist politics into coalitions whose political and economic strategies — of neoliberalism and global war-making in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and across Asia — have been so directly responsible for the growth of hard-right forces in the first place. Indeed, in this conjuncture, it is more important than ever that the socialist left do everything possible to increase its visibility, create an organizational presence, and advance, as strongly as possible, an alternative political vision. This is not only necessary to preserve the democratic gains of the past but also to address the mounting demands of the ‘terrifying’ near future that Trump, NATO, and climate change are unrelentingly pushing us towards. If the market-based ‘solutions’ to the ecological crisis offered by the neoliberal center are inadequate, we must explicitly insist that only a fundamental challenge to capital, and a deep reorganization of the economy through a radical democracy and the implementation of a democratic planning regime, has any chance of leading to a sustainable future. That we are running out of time does not mean that centrist compromises or ultra-left posturing suddenly become more effective.

The opening for socialists

In the current moment, with the threat of Trump’s tariffs and their socioeconomic fallout there is a political opening for socialists. The need to re-calibrate Canada’s relationship to the US empire — for some, even to disengage from it — is becoming a popular topic amongst working people of all backgrounds. They express concerns about the level of integration with the US and the costs of Trump’s social and economic policies, including the demands for a radical increase in military spending and the militarization of the Arctic and the Canada-US border. Challenging Trump means different things to different sections of the capitalist class in Canada, with a majority wanting the status-quo ante, others calling for further integration, and a small minority seeking a more national-centred industrial policy, based on increasing competitiveness and capitalism, but in many ways still accommodating to the US empire and tied to export dependency. The latter includes proposals to build east-west fossil fuel pipelines, lower inter-provincial trade barriers, aggressively seek new export markets, pursue more neoliberal governance and economic policies, and accommodate demands for more spending on the military, with further military operational integration with the US and NATO in the Arctic, Europe, and East Asia.

Socialists have an opportunity to argue for disengaging with the US empire through building towards a different cooperative, socially owned, and democratically planned economy organized to meet human needs. Such an economy would be more oriented towards internal development, with social provisioning for housing, education, public transit, and healthcare for working people, and a determined move towards ecological sustainability and radically reduced carbon emissions. This would require a break with capital mobility, controls on finance and credit, a new tax regime and a halt to austerity, a move away from a reliance on fossil fuels, and a break from the more authoritarian neoliberal path that Trump is setting the US out on and that Poilievre, Doug Ford, and the Conservatives intend to tail.

The socialist left we need to build must be anti-imperialist. This does not mean sowing illusions that capitalism is ‘on its last legs’ or that the US empire is on the verge of disappearing as the dominant world power. We must soberly acknowledge the scale of the challenge. If the American empire has become more fragmented, and the American state is no longer enjoying a ‘unipolar moment’, and its primacy in the world order has eroded, it nevertheless remains the dominant global economic, military, and diplomatic power. Similarly, capitalist globalization and the mobility of capital is still very much in place, the corporations are still raking in profits, and environmental and social dislocations are not causing a rethink of the resort to price and market solutions in an attempt to resolve them. Capitalism will not collapse on its own; it must be transformed through working-class political action. This must include confronting colonialism, which is often closely linked with extractive fossil capitalism. This begins with declaring our solidarity with Indigenous Land Defenders, as a priority commitment to the right of colonized peoples to live with dignity and self-determination.

There is today a polarization of options. The politics of class compromise that defined the social democratic politics of the 20th century, coming out of world wars and the emergence of mass unionization, is no longer on the table. Even winning moderate reforms today requires direct confrontation with capital and capitalism which, in turn, requires building the deep social base necessary for this to become effective. Such efforts must go beyond the electoralism that sees voting for individual politicians as a shortcut. And it does not amount to rebuilding and enlarging conservative trade unions whose limited political horizons were so directly implicated in bringing us to where we now are. The left’s political efforts to build on the edges of the union movement can only occur in ways that leave us dependent and having to refrain from challenging the union’s political direction.

Isolated mobilizations and resistance — such as successful strikes in the auto sector and others — have been important. But they have been unable to provide a sustained breakthrough beyond the larger inertia of cynicism and fatalism on the part of the working class. The labour movement in Canada still needs to be transformed.

The socialist project moving forward

All this requires a socialist party, which can engage in working-class formation through political praxis, linking disparate struggles together and transforming unions into organs of class struggle. This is the setting the Left faces, in both Canada and beyond.

From this political statement, the Socialist Project is looking, not just at the past and present, but, like all socialists — at the future. Clearly, the present is not one of great success for the working class and socialists: the ravages of neoliberal capitalism, the vicious imperialism of Trump, the defeat and weakness of working-class movements, especially the organized labour movement, and the rise of right-wing populism and social conservatism, in the face of the inability of liberal centrism and social democracy to confront capitalism. This is not to mention the horrendous loss of life in wars such as in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere or the travesty of life without clean water, in the midst of plenty, in indigenous communities.

Still, there are possibilities and hope: the working class, although defeated politically, continues to fight back, albeit in forms that lack consistency, organizational power and cohesion, and a working-class-oriented political culture and ideology. But much of the turn towards cynicism and right-wing thinking and voting reflects the reinforcement of the worst components of capitalism — unemployment, inequality, climate degradation, social breakdown, and backlash — that inevitably come with political and social leadership that daily accepts and reinforces that the myth that there can be no alternative to capitalism. Workers respond to those who offer false solutions, such as the Trumps and Poilievres of this world.

But the insecurity, anger, and frustration that drive many workers to the right can serve as the bases of an alternative to the left. Socialists have a central place in efforts to build a class understanding and identification within and across the working class, in Canada and in other countries. We have an exciting responsibility and potential to work in key working-class institutions, communities, and unions to develop a new generation of leaders from the working class to build an alternative. They can find strong motivation from the huge protests over the Gaza genocide; the deepening anger, and resentment of working people looking for housing, health care, decent jobs, and affordable food and recreation; and the growing awareness of the need to create a Canada — in solidarity with others — where working people are capable of making key economic and political decisions, in the face of the US empire’s bullying, and the business class’s compromises and driving need to make profits on the backs of working people.

This requires the building of a socialist political party, based on the actions, ideas, and organization of the working class. The working class is large and is the source of the work that drives all aspects of social and economic life, yet we are divided by sector, labour market levels, status and identity: blue collar/white collar, immigrants and native born, migrants, precarious workers, men/women, transgendered, LGBT, public/private, homeowners/renters and the homeless. Bringing together these segments and building a political movement and common identity are the task of this kind of party. Summarizing lessons from experience and struggles is a key role for socialists, and an exciting prospect for building and challenging the existing social system. 

‘The green transition is a myth’: Adam Hanieh on the ongoing centrality of oil to capitalism

By Adam Hanieh & James Wilt

Published 15 April, 2025

[Editor’s note: Marxist scholar Adam Hanieh will be speaking at Ecosocialism 2025, September 5-7, Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. For more information on the conference visit ecosocialism.org.au.]

First published at Canadian Dimension.

Many vital left-wing books about global oil politics have been published over the last 15 or so years: Mazen Labban’s Space, Oil and Capital, Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, Matt Huber’s Lifeblood, and Simon Pirani’s Burning Up. Perhaps none have provided quite as sweeping and synthetic of an analysis as Adam Hanieh’s Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market, published by Verso in September.

In Crude Capitalism, Hanieh — a professor of political economy and global development at the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies — offers a highly readable overview of the oil industry, stretching from the late-1800s to the present day, stopping along the way for deep dives into topics ranging from the Soviet Union’s fossil economy, the rise of OPEC, and the failed promise of so-called “low-carbon solutions.”

Of particular usefulness is the book’s emphasis on petrochemicals and national oil companies, including their intertwined relationship in the Middle East and East Asia, especially China. Hanieh argues that this dynamic helps account for the United States’ ongoing support for Israel, with power over Middle Eastern oil producers used as a key lever to rebuff China’s rising global influence.

James Wilt spoke with Hanieh.

Many Canadian Dimension readers are familiar with the oil shock of 1973, where OPEC producers asserted greater control over the pricing and production of oil. Arguably far less known, but equally important, is the subsequent oil glut and the “counter-shock” of the 1980s. Can you explain this period of oil price stagnation and freefall, and how it set the stage for the rebounding of the industry in the 2000s?

This is an important period to understand better and is often overlooked in the current discussions on oil and fossil fuels more broadly. The place to start here is the world market and its dynamics at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, following the end of the post-war economic boom. This was a moment of major economic slump and the reorganization of the world economy, and this was deeply connected to what went on with oil at that time.

One part of this was the “Volcker shock,” a pivotal moment in 1980 when Paul Volcker, then chair of the Federal Reserve, raised US interest rates to more than 20 percent. He did this in order to create a recession with the goal of halting US inflation and strengthening the US dollar vis-à-vis other currencies. It triggered a global recession between 1980 and 1982, which was the deepest recession since the Second World War. In turn, this meant a contraction in economic activity, and therefore a huge drop in consumption of oil. So there was about a 10 percent drop in oil consumption between 1979 and 1983. It is not widely recognized that this was actually the largest drop in oil demand in history. It was even more than during the COVID pandemic.

The second dynamic alongside this global recession was an increasing diversity in the geographies of oil production. New oil reserves had come online in the 1970s and early 1980s, notably in the North Sea and in Mexico, and the Soviet Union was still producing significant amounts of oil. So concurrent with the global recession, we also have increased availability of supplies of oil outside of the traditional OPEC countries. This is non-OPEC supply.

As these two trends developed, there was a really important structural shift in the global oil industry related to the way that oil was priced. Up until the early 1980s, oil prices had been set in what is described as a system of “administrative pricing.” For the first part of the 20th century, up until OPEC, it was the big Western oil supermajors who set the price of oil. These firms were called the “Seven Sisters” — the predecessors of today’s ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and other big oil firms. They controlled oil from the moment of extraction, through refining, on to the petrol pump, with most of the world’s oil moving within their vertically integrated structures. And then after the establishment of OPEC, the big oil producers — Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran — gained much more influence over the price of oil. This is what is meant by administrative pricing — the ones who controlled crude supplies set the price at which oil was sold.

But during the early 1980s, OPEC’s ability to control the price of oil had begun to slip. Partly because there were new oil supplies entering the market such as those from Mexico and UK in the North Sea. There were also new oil traders entering the picture. These were private commodity trading companies that bought oil from producer countries and then sold it on what are called spot markets, which are financial markets where short-term contracts and cash prices could be negotiated for oil between buyers and sellers, often for one-off transactions, rather than the long-term contracts that had previously been in place with the big OPEC producers.

So we’re talking about three concurrent shifts. One is the global economic slump, the crisis of world capitalism in the early 1980s. Secondly, more supply of oil coming online and an increased diversity of producers. And thirdly, this emergence of new actors buying and selling oil.

There are two principal consequences of these trends that would be useful to highlight. First is the counter-shock itself, the big drop in the price of oil that took place between 1985 and 1986 when the price of oil dropped by about 50 percent. This impacted all oil producers, but had a particularly severe impact on the Soviet Union, which was reliant on oil sales to earn foreign currency. The collapse in the price of oil played a significant part in the crisis of the Soviet political economy through the late 1980s, culminating in the USSR’s eventual breakup in 1991.

The second consequence of this counter-shock was that it really marked the breakdown of the longstanding system of administrative oil pricing. And in its place emerged a market-based system of oil pricing, in which oil futures traded on financial markets set the price of oil. This is what we have today, and it is substantially autonomous—although not separate from—the physical production and consumption of oil. The link between oil and financial markets played a big part in the emergence of what is often described as “financialization.” I think it’s a problem that so much of the discussion about oil takes place without acknowledging these changes to oil pricing mechanisms—as if the 1980s never happened and we are still living in the 1960s.

One of the more effective pieces of oil industry propaganda that we’ve seen emerge in the last while is that, beyond a fuel for transportation, petroleum products are in countless things that we use on a daily basis: plastics, synthetic fibres, and so much more. For the most part, it seems that this line has largely been disregarded by the left. In contrast, your work argues that it’s vital that we understand the material uniqueness and significance of petrochemicals, and how plastics are being posed as the future of the oil industry. Why do you think this aspect of oil consumption has often been underappreciated, and why is it important to come to grips with?

One of the key arguments in the book is that we need to break with a kind of commodity fetishism when we think about oil. What I mean by this is that we need to situate oil and oil’s meaning, if you like, in the various logics of capitalism — not as something inherent to oil itself. If we take this approach, we can see oil beyond its role as simply a liquid transport fuel, and trace how it has become so embedded throughout a huge array of our daily lives. Finance is one side to this, but the petrochemical/plastics industry is another.

This transition to a synthetic world began in the mid-20th century. And it meant that natural products like wood, glass, natural rubber and fertilizers, and so forth, were systematically displaced by products of petroleum: plastics, synthetic fibers, synthetic fertilizers, and other kinds of petroleum-based chemicals. I spend some time in the book explaining what this did for capitalism, including enabling a huge expansion in the quantity and diversity of commodities that could be produced and consumed, cheapening manufacturing and reducing labour costs, and speeding up the turnover time of capital’s circulation. Of course, it also came with disastrous ecological consequences.

This moment was fundamental to oil’s emergence as the world’s principal fossil fuel, because it enabled oil to become the material substrate to basically all of the commodities that surround us. Once you stop and pause for a minute and just look around the room and think about where all these plastics, rubbers, and paints come from, you see how ubiquitous oil (and increasingly fossil gas) really is. It has woven fossil fuels into our daily lives, but in an unseen way. It not only made the oil industry so much more powerful — in the sense that this commodity becomes integrated into everything we consume and depend upon — but it has also made oil invisible. It’s a paradox: oil is everywhere but we can’t see it.

I think this is really crucial for the left to address because it takes the discussion both about oil and where oil’s apparent power comes from in a different direction. And it also helps us think about the problem of plastics in a different way. The dominant narrative about plastics is that the problem is one of toxic waste and the need to improve recycling. Obviously plastic waste is a hugely important issue, but the problem is actually much bigger than that when we place the emergence of petrochemicals in the bigger picture of what they do for capitalism. It also helps explain why the demand for petrochemicals and plastics is growing so rapidly. The estimate is that there’s going to be a tripling in the consumption of plastics by 2060.

One of the most striking examples here is the advent of fast fashion — the rapid turnover of clothing styles involving many micro-seasons of styles, and a huge increase in the quantity of clothes that are produced. Now, one side of this is of course the highly exploited workers in factories located across the Global South producing clothes on demand for the multinational clothing companies. But it was synthetic fibres — petrochemical products like polyester — that enabled this huge increase in clothing production from the 1980s onwards. The ever present tendency for capitalism to increase the quantity of commodities produced — in this case clothing — was made possible through oil and the petrochemical commodity.

Today, oil companies describe petrochemicals and plastics literally as the future of oil. And there is also an increasing recognition that plastics themselves are a major source of greenhouse gasses. If plastics were a country, the emissions associated with their production would rank them as the world’s fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter. So we need to think about plastics in the sense of how they have embedded the power of oil in our lives, and are thus a central question to tackling the climate crisis.

An important point you make is that historical and contemporary “energy transitions” have consistently been a process of addition, not replacement. What are a few past examples of this, and how might this understanding help us make sense of so-called low-carbon technologies like carbon capture and storage and hydrogen power?

I think there are many flaws in the way that energy transitions are typically thought about. The generally accepted notion is that capitalism is transitioning away from fossil fuels with renewables and various kinds of green technologies. We might quibble about how fast that is happening, but the assumption is that oil, gas, and fossil fuels are on their way out.

But if you look historically, energy transitions under capitalism have always been additive. The so-called coal to oil transition that happened in the middle of the 20th century is a good example. Coal, back in the early 20th century, was about 85 percent of the world’s primary energy. Now it’s much, much less: it’s about 25 percent. But if you look at the total quantity of coal that’s being consumed, we’re producing more coal than ever before. The same is true with natural gas. Natural gas only really became an important energy source in the 1980s and 1990s. Now it is significant and substantial, particularly in electricity production. But it doesn’t mean that oil or coal have declined in terms of their absolute production and consumption.

The reason for this is another feature of capitalism: the tendency to increase energy throughput, to draw in new forms of energy production and increase the total quantity of energy consumed and thus the quantities of commodities produced. The problem is that so much of the climate debate is framed in relative terms, and not in absolute terms. What matters is the absolute production of fossil fuels, not their relative share.

It’s exceedingly rare to see a global drop in energy consumption. It happened in the early 1980s with the global recession I’ve just spoken about. It happened in 1973 with the global recession associated with the oil shock. It happened in 2008, and it happened with COVID. But there has only been four times in the last six decades that we have seen a sustained drop in the global consumption of oil.

So when we look at renewables: it’s clear that, yes, there is going to be an increase in renewable sources, particularly for electricity. There may even be a drop in the relative share of fossil fuels for things like electricity production. But I think it’s unlikely that under capitalism we will see any genuine transition from fossil fuels. In this sense, the green transition is a myth. It’s not happening — and certainly not at the pace necessary to mitigate the worst case scenarios of the climate disaster.

The question of AI and the huge energy demands that are required for this sector confirm this point absolutely. Some of the predictions around the increased electricity and water needed to run data centers are mind boggling. And an increasing share may come from solar and wind (and nuclear). But this makes it even more unlikely to envision a shift away from fossil fuels.

The other kinds of technologies you mention such as hydrogen and carbon capture — these kinds of so-called low carbon solutions — raise a whole set of different problems, which I talk about in the book at length. But in short, I think really these are false or chimeric kind of solutions that are being pushed by oil companies, basically because they allow for ever increasing oil and gas production. In that sense, they’re even more dangerous than some of the illusions around renewables supplanting fossil fuels.

Another major argument in the book concerns the formation of an “East-East hydrocarbon axis” between the Middle East and Asia, which — in contrast to North America and West Europe — involves massive national oil companies and largely conventional oil resources. This aspect is another piece that seems to have been overlooked, with understandable emphasis on the private Western supermajors and consumption. Briefly, when did this East-East hydrocarbon axis start to take form, and how should it shape our understandings of the global industry?

Again, we need to start with situating oil as a crucial commodity within global capitalism and the major shift that’s taken place over the last few decades of much of global manufacturing towards China and wider East Asia. This shift in global production, much of it destined for markets in North America and Western Europe, was associated with a massive increase in the demand for oil coming from East Asia.

The share of China’s consumption of oil globally is about 14 percent of the world’s oil today, which has tripled since the early 1990s. So China now is second only to the United States in terms of global oil consumption. And this is the main reason why the world’s consumption of oil is about 40 percent higher today than it was in 1995. China has big oil supplies domestically but not enough to meet this demand. And so it had to be met by imports. The primary place where those imports came from and continue to come from were the Gulf states of the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the other monarchies of the Gulf.

Today, something like one-third of all oil consumed globally is in East Asia, and most of this is supplied through imports. China’s share of world oil imports now exceeds 20 percent. So that’s one-fifth of the world’s oil imports going just to China. And about 70 percent of all crude oil exports from the Middle East go to Asia. That’s what I mean by this East-East hydrocarbon circuit.

But it’s not just crude oil that’s important to this story. Coming back to the question of petrochemicals, we also see refined products moving from the Middle East to China and East Asia. And we see cross-border investments from big oil companies in the Gulf, and oil companies and petrochemical companies in China, moving back and forth between the two regions: joint ownership structures in major Chinese petrochemical firms that are now owned by Saudi or part owned by Saudi firms and so forth. We can see the same kind of patterns in wider East Asia, particularly South Korea and Japan.

It’s essential to put this in the global picture. The US and Canada are major oil producers — the US is the biggest oil producer in the world. But most of this North American oil circulates within North America. The Gulf’s oil production goes eastward now.

One thing this has done is really strengthened the big majority state-owned or national oil companies that are based in the Middle East. The standout company here is Saudi Aramco, the Saudi state-owned firm, which is by far the largest oil company in the world. Its profits last year were about $121 billion. If you add up the profits of ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies, Shell, and BP, Aramco’s profits exceed all of them combined. So it’s a massive company. And it’s no longer simply a crude oil producer. It’s also one of the biggest petrochemical firms in the world now. It’s a major refiner of oil. It’s a major shipper. It owns fertilizer production sites. So all down the value chain, Aramco and the other big Gulf producers are present. They’re following the same pattern that the Western supermajors followed in the early- and mid-20th century of downstream integration. All of this is not to say that the Western companies are not important. They’re absolutely crucial. It’s instead a call to see the diversity of the actors in the global oil industry today.

How can we make sense of the role of oil in global militarism, while also accounting for major recent shifts in oil production, with Canada making up a larger share of US oil consumption, replacing OPEC imports?

There are a lot of simplistic narratives about oil, American imperialism, and the Middle East. The idea that the US wants to grab the oil supplies in the Gulf or elsewhere in the region is not the case. Saudi Arabia’s oil is owned by Saudi Arabia and produced by Saudi Arabia and the US is not going to take that oil and has no intention of doing so. The other myth, of course, is that there is a US dependency on oil from the region. The US is actually the biggest oil producer in the world: it doesn’t need oil imports from the Middle East.

But that doesn’t mean that the Middle East and Middle East oil isn’t critical to American imperialism. I don’t think we can understand the Gaza genocide today, or the crucial place of the Middle East in US geopolitical ambitions, without centering it in oil. This has been the case since after the Second World War. The US became the leading capitalist power globally alongside the rise of oil as the primary fossil fuel. These dual transitions in the world system were conjoined and very much fed one another — and the Middle East was the vital crucible in this process, as I discuss in some detail in the book.

Today, the rise of China and relative erosion of American power is closely connected to the Middle East’s importance to US imperialism. Because of China’s dependency on oil from the Middle East, and all of the refined and chemical products associated with it, there has been a growing connection politically as well as economically between China and the broader Middle East region. In this context, the US is attempting to reassert its primacy in the Middle East, particularly its alliances with the Gulf monarchies, in the face of this kind of encroachment of China’s influence.

If we ever got to a situation where the US wants to place sanctions on China, for example, a key question is going to be where China gets its oil and its access to the Middle East’s oil supplies. It’s also going to be a question of the currency in which China trades and the role of the US dollar in the global financial system. One of the ways that Russia has attempted to get around sanctions is to trade more in renminbi (Chinese yuan). China is also looking at oil trading with the Gulf in renminbi rather than US dollars, which again would play a major role in the event of any kind of US sanctions or any kind of heightening conflict between the US and China. We also need to think about the huge quantities of petrodollars that have accumulated in the Gulf — we’re talking trillions of dollars here. Where those funds are invested and what role they play in supporting the US dollar is a really important part of the story.

To come back to the wider geopolitics of the region, historically, the US had two major pillars of influence and power in the Middle East. One was Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, and the second was Israel, particularly after the 1967 war. And what the US has tried to do over the last couple of decades is bring these two pillars together: to normalize relationships between the Gulf and Israel under American hegemony. And it has been able to do that to a significant degree. The United Arab Emirates have normalized with Israel, and so has Bahrain. Saudi Arabia has openly said it would be willing to do so if there was some settlement around Palestine. So these two pillars of American power remain absolutely critical to US influence and this attempt by the US to reassert its dominance in the Middle East.

This is ultimately why the US continues to fund, support and back Israel and its war against the Palestinian people, and now across the wider region. This is an attempt to reassert American power in the face of the kinds of rivalries that we see emerging globally. The Middle East is such an important part of this global picture because of the ongoing centrality of oil to capitalism.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. James Wilt is a Winnipeg-based PhD candidate and freelance writer. His latest book is Dogged and Destructive: Essays on the Winnipeg Police.

 

Ukraine and the Trump-Putin axis of reaction

By Christopher Ford

Published 16 April, 2025

First published at Labour Hub.

The Trump–Putin Axis is having profound implications not only for Ukraine but for the global order as well. The fact that neither a ceasefire nor peace has been realised is hardly surprising. The primary objective here is not the safeguarding of Ukrainian lives but rather fostering a rapprochement between the United States and Russia.

This was illustrated on 2nd April, when President Trump imposed sweeping tariffs that impacted Ukraine and even targeted already sanctioned Syria — yet Russia and its supplier North Korea were conspicuously absent from the list. This new alignment, far from a sudden development, was foreshadowed even before Trump took office on 20th January. Notably, during the summer of 2023, Republicans blocked a critical nine‐month aid package to Ukraine for nine months.

The ideological underpinnings of the axis

The Trump’s team and the MAGA movement has long been permeated by figures who have done business with and are sympathetic to Russia. But this rapprochement of the rival oligarchies goes deeper: the US reactionary right considers key features of Putin’s Russia — national chauvinism, white supremacy, staunch Christian conservatism and the fascistic theories of Alexandr Dugin, which promote a view of sovereignty defined by dominance, as its own shared ideology. 

There are historical precedents for such unlikely partnerships. China, for instance, curtailed and eventually ended its aid to North Vietnam to foster better relations with the United States, prolonging the Vietnam War.  The closest antecedent is the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact — a non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union. Although Trump and Putin are not identical to the tyrants of that era — and we are not on the brink of another world war — the similar scale of the retrogression in global politics and ideological consequences is stark.

In much the same way that the Communists and others on the left supported the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (blaming France and Britain as responsible for the war, rather than Hitler), today sections of the labour movement — opponents of Ukraine’s struggle for freedom — find themselves now aligned with the MAGA Republicans.

Such convergence underscores a critical lesson: we cannot separate domestic anti-fascism from international anti-fascism. Ukraine’s fight for freedom is intrinsically linked to the global battle against reactionary forces — a connection underscored by the displays of support for Ukraine at anti-Trump protests in the United States.

Hypocritical outrage and Ukraine’s vulnerability

After three years of war, Ukraine’s vulnerability is the product of both external and internal failures. Western powers — the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France — have faltered on multiple fronts. Their moral outrage over apparent American duplicity rings hollow when contrasted with their response to Europe’s worst conflict since World War II. As Russian troops gathered along Ukraine’s border, these powers  did little to deter the looming full-scale invasion. They failed to impose significant sanctions on Russia and failed to provide Ukraine with critical military aid. Even the sanctions that were imposed — particularly on Russian oil exports — were insufficient, enabling billions of dollars per month in revenue to continue fuelling Putin’s war machine.

The strategy of supporting Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes,’ rather than equipping it with the means to decisively end the occupation, has only prolonged the conflict.

These are not the only causes for Ukraine’s current vulnerability. The Ukrainian government has failed to fully mobilize the economy for the war effort and ensure the welfare of the people — challenges made starker by a contrast with Russia’s transformation into a war economy with defence spending at levels unseen since the Cold War.

The obstruction to economic reform has been a combination of the self-interest of Ukrainian capitalists, free-market zealots in Ministries and the role of global capital.

There is an additional contributory factor to Ukraine’s current predicament, which is the response of the European (and North American) labour movement to the Russian invasion. While most of the labour movement has formally opposed the invasion, there has been a restraint to the point of silence in advocacy for the necessary aid to defeat Russia.

The evolution of Moscow’s oligarchy into a fascist dictatorship and an incipient fascist oligarchy in Washington have combined not only to the detriment of Ukraine but to threaten democracy more widely by fuelling fascist and authoritarian forces globally.

Ukraine is on the frontline of the battle for democracy but not only for the freedom of Ukrainians; their fate is intimately linked to fight against this new global reaction.

The global realignment

The global realignment of USA has seen a combination of accommodation, with Russia and increased deterrence as regards China. There are several possible outcomes to this process. A rapprochement with Russia could continue without any viable peace in Ukraine, as historian Timothy Snyder has argued: “So far, it’s a war-mongering process. American policy under Trump has been thus far to make the war easier for Russia and harder for Ukraine.”

The axis began forming in earnest on 12th February, when Trump called Putin to ‘reset’ relations and reopen dialogue on ‘topics of mutual interest.’ From the outset, Ukraine — and Europe — were relegated to the periphery of these strategic discussions, with Russia facing no equivalent pressure to concede anything beneficial for Ukraine, or even a suspension any hostilities.

Later, at a NATO meeting in Brussels on 12th February, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth declared it “unrealistic” to expect Ukraine to revert to its pre-2014 borders. With NATO membership effectively ruled out, Hegseth insisted that U.S. policy would prioritise American interests, as encapsulated by Trump’s unilateral decision-making. This was further evidenced at the Riyadh Summit on 18th February, where US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov alongside Trump’s envoy Steven Witkoff and Russian sovereign wealth fund chief Kirill Dmitriev. Their agenda centred on a return to business as usual—normalising diplomatic relations, beginning work on a Ukrainian peace settlement, and spanning the possibility of enhanced economic cooperation.

The Summit was followed sharply by Trump propagating disinformation — falsely claiming that Ukraine had initiated the war and refusing to label Russia the aggressor. On 24th February at the United Nations, the US voted with Russia, China, and other allies against a resolution condemning the invasion. Soon after, the Trump administration disbanded task forces that combated Russian disinformation, tracked sanctions evasion by oligarchs and investigated Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Offensive cyber operations against Russia were suspended, and US forces in Poland, engaged in supplying aid to Ukraine, were reduced.

Coercing Ukraine: A transactional agenda

Having set the scene for betrayal, Trump’s administration embarked on what it described as “dividing up certain assets.” According to this transactional approach, Russia would retain its occupied Ukrainian territories, sanctions would eventually be lifted, and remaining unoccupied Ukraine would be relegated to a neo-colonial status. Under these conditions, Ukraine was compelled to repay $500 billion — four times the aid disbursed under the Biden administration — by surrendering 50% of its national resource proceeds (such as from mining). Moreover, Ukraine would have to repay twice the amount of any future US aid, effectively imposing a 100% interest rate.

When Ukraine demanded security guarantees to shield itself from renewed Russian aggression, Trump dismissed these as Europe’s responsibility. The White House made clear that, should Ukraine wish to meet with Trump on 28th February, acceptance of the controversial mineral deal was mandatory. This pressure reached a climax when Trump and Vice President JD Vance launched an orchestrated attack on President Zelensky in the Oval Office — a confrontation that culminated in Zelensky being asked to leave the White House.

These actions demonstrate that Washington’s primary objective is rapprochement with Russia, with ending the current phase of the war merely a means to that end. To compel Ukraine to accede to Trump’s conditions, Washington resorted to both coercion and delegitimization of Zelensky. On 3rd March, Trump suspended all military aid to Ukraine. Two days later, intelligence sharing — vital for early warning of enemy air attacks and battlefield operations — was also halted. Around the same time, Elon Musk threatened to suspend Ukraine’s Starlink satellite system. In response, Russia launched over 80 missiles and 1,550 attack drones on Ukraine.

Concurrently, a campaign emerged to undermine President Zelensky’s legitimacy. Trump labelled him “a dictator without elections.” Figures like Tulsi Gabbard and the Director of National Intelligence falsely claimed that Kyiv had cancelled elections and silenced its opposition, while Musk urged Zelensky to leave Ukraine to escape corruption charges. These narratives mirror Kremlin demands for regime change, even as senior members of Trump’s administration engaged in secret talks with Ukrainian political opponents like Yulia Tymoshenko and leaders from Petro Poroshenko’s party.

Directly, these US actions helped Russia mount a counter-offensive that reversed Ukrainian gains in the Kursk region. Under intense pressure, Zelensky indicated that Ukraine was ready to sign a deal with the US regarding its mineral deposits, and following talks in Saudi Arabia on 11th March, Ukraine agreed to Trump’s ceasefire proposal.  

Confident that Washington would not retaliate, after an 18th March call between Trump and Putin, the Kremlin  did not reciprocate but agreed to refrain from attacking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Following further talks in Riyadh on March 25th, the White House announced an agreement promising “safe navigation” in the Black Sea — but only on the condition that sanctions on Russia financial institutions were lifted.

Throughout this period, Russia has maintained maximalist demands to secure Ukrainian territory and continued bombing Ukrainian civilian areas. On 2nd April, Putin signed a decree conscripting 160,000 new soldiers, clearly preparing for another offensive.

Meanwhile, Washington did nothing to pressure Moscow further — indeed just as Trump was imposing widescale trade tariffs, travel sanctions were lifted on Putin’s advisor and money man, Dmitriev, to travel to Washington. On the agenda was the restoration of Russian-American relations, and to work to restore business relations. On 10th April in Istanbul, US-Russia talks proceeded under the banner of “normalising broader relations,” with Ukraine conspicuously absent from the agenda.

With no ceasefire in sight, Trump revised the terms of an agreement that would grant the U.S. dominance over Ukraine’s critical minerals and energy assets. The new terms, which resembled economic colonialism, required Ukraine to repay prior US assistance at 4% interest, contribute royalties from its natural resources, and accept that the US would retain majority control over the fund’s board while freely withdrawing profits — whereas Ukraine would have no such control. Trump further backed these draconian measures with explicit threats against any attempt by Ukraine to renegotiate the deal.

In essence, without any meaningful pressure imposed on Putin, this coercion has served primarily to tip the balance of power on the battlefield — effectively weakening Ukraine’s position between the two powers. Such conduct suggests that it is entirely feasible for Trump to eventually broker a deal with Russia that would neither bring about a genuine ceasefire nor lead to a sustainable peace — a prospect now openly discussed by some MAGA commentators.

The dual crisis of capital and labour

Trump’s rapprochement with Russia — and the broader US pivot toward the Asia-Pacific — has thrown Europe into uncertainty, upending long-held assumptions about the transatlantic alliance. European powers have reluctantly acquiesced to US demands for increased defence spending. This deference is driven by both a desire to maintain US oversight and a fear of abandonment of mutual defence commitments by Trump.

Europe now faces the dual challenge of a nominal ally in Washington that is simultaneously imposing tariffs and undermining liberal democracy alongside Moscow, with key MAGA Republicans openly supporting the far right in Europe.

Despite these challenges, Europe has not envisioned rallying to provide an alternative to US aid to Ukraine. To counter Russian imperialism effectively, European aid would then need to increase from the current 44 billion euros per year to 82 billion euros, a modest sum compared to the over 800 billion euros allocated to the ReArm Europe Plan.

Instead, of empowering Ukraine to have freedom of choice autonomously of Trump and Putin, initiatives from the UK and France have focused on forming an ethereal “coalition of the willing” tasked with assembling a “reassurance force” to be deployed far behind demarcation lines once any deal is imposed. Russia has already rejected such a force as “completely unacceptable,” and President Zelensky has dismissed its projected numbers as ineffective. Rather than sabotaging a peace settlement, as some critics like Andrew Murray of Stop the War have claimed, these measures propose to underpin a Trump-Putin partition plan that would leave Russian occupation intact.

The stakes for democracy

The Ukrainian question is pivotal to global politics. If Trump and Putin succeed in undermining Ukraine’s struggle for freedom, the result will not be sustainable peace; rather, Russian imperialism will merely pause to recuperate and regroup before resuming its real objective of asserting dominance over Ukraine.  Such an outcome would embolden reactionary forces worldwide, reshaping the global landscape into fragmented regional capitalist power blocs driven purely by naked self-interest.

To respond with some form of radical abstentionism in the face of the Trump’s rapprochement with Putin is to become complicit in the betrayal of Ukraine and of resistance to the incipient fascism in the USA.

For the labour movement — in Europe, the United States, and beyond — a de facto victory for Putin’s Russia at the behest of Trump would be disastrous. Yet, so far, neither the European nor US labour movement has yet to project its own independent alternative to what is being offered by the Trump-Putin Axis. This is an urgent necessity.

The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign has, with allies, has made a modest contribution, with our a Plan for an Alternative to Russian Occupation of viable measures to oppose the imposition of an unjust peace that cements Russia’s occupation of Ukraine, raising with renewed meaning for today the old slogan of “Neither Washington nor Moscow”, but a free, democratic and united Ukraine.

Christopher Ford is Secretary of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. This article is based on a talk he gave to the Solidarity with Ukraine Conference, held in Brussels last month. 

TUESDAY 22 APRIL: EARTH DAY Stop Russia's ecocide

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No to partition! Russian troops out! International solidarity conference

Over two days in Brussels at the end of March, 200 people came from all over Europe to hear from Ukrainians the situation in their country and to discuss with them how we can deliver solidarity.   Brussels conference lifts Ukraine solidarity to higher plane: Read here the report from Dick Nicholls   Read and watch here some of the contributions from Vanya Vyhovsky (Progressive-Democrat Senator, Vermont), Johan Sjöstedt (Left Party, Sweden), Christopher Ford (USC), Søren Søndergaard (MP in the Parliament of Denmark - Red-Green Aliance), Simon Pirani (writer, historian and energy researcher), Felix Le Roux (Union Syndicale Solidaires), Yvanna Vynna (Bilkis), and others. Nona, a member of Bilkis, spoke at the workshop on Feminist Struggles in Ukraine. More from the conference is available here.   The conference adopted a declaration "Ukraine is not for sale! No to partition! Russian troops out!".

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Stop Seapeak - End Fossil colonialism

Glasgow company Seapeak owns and operates six tankers that transport $5 billions a year of Russian liquified natural gas. The profits directly supports Russia’s war on Ukraine. Coalition organising meeting Wednesday 16 April 6pm. All welcome. ZOOM LINK HERE

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As friends of Ukraine, supporters of its self-defence and self-determination against Russian imperialism, we support the Ukrainian trade unions’ struggle to defend workers’ rights. In particular we salute their ongoing resistance to a proposed new Labour Code that includes numerous restrictions on the rights of the workers and their organisations; as well as draft law 5344d, restricting the rights and social security of people with disabilities.

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Useful links

European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine >>> https://ukraine-solidarity.eu/ Sotsialnyi Rukh (Ukraine) >>> https://www.facebook.com/social.ruh/ Ukraine Information Group >>> https://ukraine-solidarity.org/ Ukraine Solidarity Campaign Scotland >>> https://www.facebook.com/groups/804453764446657 Commons, journal of social criticism >>> https://commons.com.ua/en/ SD Platform >>> https://sdplatform.org.ua/main/en Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine  >>> https://kvpu.org.ua/en/ Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine >>> https://www.fpsu.org.ua/

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Dmitrii Kovalev (Left for Peace without Annexations, Russia): ‘True peace requires going back to Ukraine’s original borders’

By Dmitrii Kovalev

Published 12 April, 2025

The Left for Peace without Annexations is a coalition of several organisations from different backgrounds (socialist, Trotskyist, Maoist, etc). I am a member of the Communist Tendency, the Russian section of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency, which is part of this coalition. 

The coalition has activists within Russia, where they agitate for defeatism, while our supporters in exile provide support. We can count on support from a faction in the German party Die Linke (The Left). However, most of the European left remains eurocentric and even chauvinistic.

We stand for revolutionary defeatism: we want Russia to lose this war. In our opinion, true peace can only be achieved by going back to Ukraine’s original borders, without any annexations. If there is a need to modify these borders, then only the Ukrainian people can decide that. 

We also stand for unconditional support for Ukraine. The resources of Ukraine belong to the Ukrainian people, not to Russian President Vladimir Putin nor to European imperialists and neither to US President Donald Trump.  

Questions such as a possible ceasefire can only be decided by the Ukrainian people. We consider membership in NATO and EU as imperialist actions that go against the independence of Ukrainian people and therefore politically oppose this. But, again, any such membership is the sole decision of the Ukrainian people. 

We believe military equipment should be delivered to Ukraine, without this needing a build-up of Europe’s militaries. Sanctions on Russia should serve Ukrainian interests, not European profits. To ensure this, sanctions should come from workers organisations, such as trade unions, not imperialist governments.

We stand for the destruction of the present Russian Federation. We recognise that most Russian citizens have a “centrist” opinion on the war: they are not exactly in favour, yet they do not express their opposition.

We need to understand that the Putin regime has destroyed all left-wing organisations and trade unions within Russia. It is only now — after three years of war — that we can see the beginnings of new organisations that seek to swim “against the current”. 

Despite this, there are some organised people active on Russian soil. With them we strive to support political prisoners, while spreading information (which remains very difficult). 

In exile, our main problem is the sectarian, eurocentric and chauvinistic left, which hinders our efforts at connecting with broader layers of the population. Nevertheless, we try to keep connecting, listening to Ukrainian people, and finding an audience in trade unions, among other actions.

This is an edited version of the speech Kovalev gave at the “Solidarity with Ukraine” Conference in Brussels on March 26-27.

Brussels conference lifts Ukraine solidarity to higher plane

Friday 11 April 2025, by Dick Nichols


The Brussels Solidarity with Ukraine conference on March 26–27drew together about 200 activists from a score of countries, in support of the Ukrainian people’s national and social rights.


The gathering was organised by the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU) and the Ukraine Solidarity Campaigns (USC) of England and Wales and Scotland. It was devoted to strengthening people-to-people solidarity, as the menace of Ukraine being partitioned and pillaged by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s and United States President Donald Trump’s governments looms ever larger.

The conference also took place in the context of ongoing conflict between Ukraine’s trade union, feminist, environmental, civil rights and progressive political movements and the neoliberal domestic policies of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government.

The choice of Brussels as host city was determined by the need to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between Ukraine’s many social movements, Ukraine solidarity groups and Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and national MPs from left, green, social-democratic and progressive national independence formations.

Such parliamentarians — notably former Finnish education minister Li Andersson (Left Alliance) and Jonas Sjöstedt (former leader of the Swedish Left Party) — spoke at a March 26 European Parliament event organised by The Left group in the European Parliament (“Solidarity with Ukraine: Reconstruction and Civil Society”) and at the Solidarity with Ukraine conference itself.

In his European Parliament speech, Sjöstedt spelled out the double-sided character of progressive solidarity: “The war in Ukraine is not only raging on the front lines. The battles taken by labour rights defenders, climate activists and women’s rights activists are shaping and will continue to shape Ukraine’s future. We must stand up in solidarity with these movements, especially in times of war, and we will continue to do so.

“We must continue to stand up for worker’s rights in the drafting of new labour codes in Ukraine, we must fight for the health care workers who work under even more dire conditions, and we must continue to drive change to stop the ecologically disastrous Russian shadow fleet [of rusting oil tankers].”

Tanya Vyhovsky

Intervention from other elected representatives opened other key topics for conference discussion. A powerful example was Tanya Vyhovsky, progressive Democrat Senator for the United States state of Vermont, who tackled the Trump threat to Ukraine head on.

“This is not business as usual, and unfortunately the vast majority of Democrats are acting as if it is … the Musk-Trump agenda is a fascist agenda and the Musk-Trump-Putin agenda is a global fascist agenda.”

She added: “It is important for me personally [as a Ukrainian-American] that the war in Ukraine ends with a real peace. And that means no occupation, no land annexation; it means the Russian troops go home. It does not mean holding the Ukrainian people hostage for resources.”

Resisting the Trump-Putin agenda was also not just about defending Ukrainian rights: “Anyone who thinks that this agenda is not a threat to them is delusional — it is a threat to all of us. It is a threat to our society and a threat to our climate.”

For Vyhovsky, the only possible response is “to build a global network for solidarity. The oligarchs and the billionaires and (frankly) mobsters that have taken over the US government, they have connections across this globe […] they have a plan to divide up the world, treating it through the lens of capital, as assets only.

“We must stop that. And we can, and that’s through building international working-class solidarity and remembering that we are connected. What happens to Ukraine happens to all of us.”

Li Andersson

Finnish MEP Li Andersson led the discussion on a progressive defence policy — how to simultaneously provide Ukraine with the arms it needs to expel the Russian invader and for defence of the countries threatened by Putin’s ambitions while not buying into the militarist rationale of the European Commission’s €800 billion plan for “defence spending”, recently unleashed under cover of “standing by Ukraine”.

A key point made by Andersson was the need for a progressive defence policy to reject targets for defence spending being set as a proportion of gross domestic product: “I really think that setting such a target is a foolish way of measuring defence capabilities. Defence spending should not be based on abstract targets, but on needs and priorities.

“There have, for instance, been times when Finland needed to buy new airplanes. In such a situation, defence spending goes up. After the investment is made, however, it can and should drop — even below the NATO target of two percent.”

The plenary session on “What Peace?” saw interventions from French Green MEP Mounir Satouri (chair of the European Parliament’s human rights sub-committee) and Danish Red-Green Alliance MP Søren Søndergaard. Both were focussed on the conditions that would have to prevail so that a just settlement of the war against Ukraine could at least be envisaged.

For Søndergaard, a just peace was unthinkable without a defeat of Putin’s invasion and Ukrainian involvement in negotiations about its own future: whatever ceasefire agreements Ukraine might have to accept in the interim, military support from EU countries would have to be maintained and increase if the Trump administration winds down or even ends its support for Ukraine.
Ukrainian activists inspired by solidarity

The conference was notable for the participation of Ukrainian social movement leaders and activists — the second largest contingent present after the local Belgians.

The interventions of speakers like labour lawyer Vitaliy Dudin (activist with the left Ukrainian force Social Movement), Oksana Slobodiana (leader of the health workers union Be Like Us), construction workers leader Vasyl Andreiev (vice-president of the majority Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine) and Yuri Levchenko (leader of the People’s Power, an initiative to build a Ukrainian party of labour), forcefully brought home the suffering and sacrifices involved in resistance to the Russian invasion.

This burden falls overwhelmingly on the shoulders of Ukraine’s working people.

The importance of working-class and trade union solidarity with Ukraine’s labour movement was a red thread running through the conference and was given special attention in a session that brought together Sacha Ismail, the USC (England and Wales) trade union liaison officer; Cati Llibre (vice-president of the General Union of Workers in Catalonia) and Felix Le Roux from the radical French trade union confederation Solidaires.

The next most profiled theme was that of the feminist struggle in Ukraine and women’s role in the country’s reconstruction. Yvanna Vynna from the grassroots feminist organisation Bilkis made a memorable presentation of her organisation’s role in simultaneously supporting the defence effort while maintaining the fight for women’s rights.

The ongoing struggle to defend civil liberties, particularly in the occupied territories, was treated by Mykhailo Romanov, representing the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, and Bernard Dréano, chairperson of the France-based Centre for Initiatives and Studies on International Solidarity and initiator of the People First petition (demanding the release of all captives resulting from the Russian invasion).

An important message came in a workshop by exiled Russian opponents of Putin’s war. Maria Menshikova, correspondent of the banned magazine Doxa, Dmitrii Kovalev (Left for Peace without Annexations) and Viktoria (representing Feminist Anti-War Resistance) all stressed that any victory for Putin’s “special military operation” would be a defeat for the movement for democratic rights within Russia itself.

The success of the conference was best measured by the response of its Ukrainian participants. Speaking at the closing public meeting, Oksana Dutchak, editor of the Ukrainian journal Commons, compared her mood before and after the event — sombre beforehand given the Trump-Putin moves to “fix” Ukraine behind its own back, and inspired afterwards to experience the wave of solidarity at the conference.

Solidarity counts. The job after Brussels is to make it stronger and more coordinated. One tool for that job will be the draft Brussels Declaration, to be adopted in final form at a future teleconference and soon to be opened for discussion and amendment.

Green Left 7 April 2025


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Dick Nichols
Dick Nichols is Green Left Weekly’s and Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal’s European correspondent, based in Barcelona.


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