Eleven instalments. Four years of war. One robber’s peace. The terms were set at Anchorage in August 2025: Crimea and Donbas recognised as Russian, Ukraine’s military capped, NATO membership constitutionally prohibited, $350 billion in minerals under Russian control. A ‘free economic zone’ with no managing entity and no enforcement mechanism. The fig leaf that wasn’t even trying.
The series began there. It traced how the CPB, the SWP and its International Socialist Tendency, Workers Power (the British section of the League for the Fifth International), the International Socialist League: organisations from different traditions, carrying different theoretical vocabularies, arrived at the same destination. Positions that functionally accommodated the partition. Positions that, when the dust settled, stood closer to the terms of the robber’s peace than to the resistance it extinguished.
The question this instalment has to answer is not who got it wrong. That was documented in Parts 1 through 10. The question is how. How did traditions that formally opposed each other on questions of state capitalism, permanent revolution, the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy, converge so completely on Ukraine? The answer is a framework choice. Made at the war’s outset, often unreflectively, it determined every subsequent political conclusion. The choice was this: Serbia 1914, or Ireland 1916.
The schema and its uses
In March 2022, Alex Callinicos set out the SWP’s theoretical position in Socialist Worker. The passage is worth reading carefully, because it shows the schema operating in real time:
‘The First World War started when the Austro-Hungarian Empire attacked Serbia, which it blamed for the assassination of its crown prince Franz Ferdinand. Russia then backed Serbia, leading to an escalating process of military mobilisations that ended in a terrible general war. The German Marxist Karl Kautsky argued that the role played by the Serbian struggle for national self-determination meant the conflict wasn’t just an imperialist war. Lenin responded, “To Serbia, i.e., to perhaps one percent or so of the participants in the present war, the war is a ‘continuation of the politics’ of the bourgeois-liberation movement. To the other ninety-nine percent, the war is a continuation of the politics of imperialism.” Of course, the balance is different in the present case since the direct fighting involves just Ukraine and Russia.’
That final sentence carries a lot of weight. ‘Of course, the balance is different.’ Yes. Somewhat. But the analogy does its work before the qualification arrives: Ukraine’s resistance is Serbia’s resistance, legitimate perhaps but subsumed, overwhelmed, rendered politically inert by the inter-imperialist competition surrounding it. The schema is in place. The conclusion follows.
The International Bolshevik Tendency made the same move more bluntly in their March 2022 statement: ‘Ukraine’s struggle to defeat Russia cannot be separated from NATO’s campaign to diminish Russian imperialism.’ A line from Raúl Sánchez Cedillo in Jacobin a year later: ‘I’m thinking about the conflict between imperialist blocs over a key country that is itself weakened by a civil war in the context of a war for independence, which in World War I was Serbia.’ Different organisations. Different rhetorical registers. The same historical template, applied with the same consequence.
The CPB arrived at the same place through a different route. Andrew Murray, writing in the Morning Star in February 2023: ‘Ukraine has irrevocably lost Crimea and most of the Donbass. Soviet-era borders that could and should have been peacefully renegotiated... will have to be realigned.’ The CPB’s Stalinist inheritance did not require invoking Serbia explicitly. It had a more direct path: the main enemy is always at home, NATO expansion provoked the war, Russia’s invasion is reaction not aggression. Different vocabulary. The destination is identical.
Workers Power’s 2014 supplement did not use the Serbia framework either. It accused the Fourth International of committing ‘its very own 4 August’ by supporting the Maidan uprising, claiming the FI had repeated the SPD’s betrayal of August 1914 by backing the wrong side in a class confrontation. The L5I’s British section produced this, but notice what it shares with the Serbia model. Both make the foundational move of subsumption: Ukraine’s specific situation, its particular class forces, the concrete character of its resistance, are dissolved into a pre-existing category. The Maidan becomes a fascist coup. Ukraine becomes Serbia. The schema determines the answer before the analysis begins.
What Lenin actually said
The Serbia model flatters itself as Leninism. It cites Lenin’s response to Kautsky. It invokes the Zimmerwald tradition. It positions itself as the rigorous anti-imperialist refusal of social-chauvinist temptation.
But Callinicos quoted one side of Lenin. There is another side, and it arrives from the same period.
In July 1916, Lenin wrote ‘The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up.’ The context was Karl Radek’s dismissal of the Easter Rising as a ‘putsch.’ Lenin’s response was not diplomatic:
‘To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie without all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc., to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution.’
‘Whoever calls such a rebellion a “putsch” is either a hardened reactionary, or a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon.’
And the principle that follows directly from that analysis, stated without qualification:
‘We must support every revolt against our chief enemy, the bourgeoisie of the big states, provided it is not the revolt of a reactionary class. By refusing to support the revolt of annexed regions we become, objectively, annexationists.’
Lenin wrote that in 1916. The Serbia model is reading half of Lenin and calling it the whole. More precisely: it is reading the Lenin of imperialist war and ignoring the Lenin of national liberation within the imperialist epoch. The distinction is not subtle. Lenin made it explicitly, in the same period, against Radek, against Kautsky, and it is the distinction on which everything turns.
Connolly, Mandel, and the stamps on the ammunition crates
James Connolly stated the Ireland model with characteristic directness in 1914:
‘Should a German army land in Ireland tomorrow we should be perfectly justified in joining it if by so doing we could rid this country once and for all from its connection with the Brigand Empire that drags us unwillingly into this war.’
The Easter Rising accepted a shipment of German arms. The Aud was intercepted; the rifles never reached their destination. But the principle stands: Irish republicans were prepared to take weapons from Imperial Germany, a belligerent in an imperialist war, because Ireland’s ‘enforced partnership’ with Britain established a separate political interest that German aid did not negate. The Easter Rising was not a German operation. The class character of the struggle depended on who was fighting, for what, against whom, not on the nationality of the gun manufacturer.
Ernest Mandel developed this into a general principle through his analysis of Vietnam. The formulation is precise and worth dwelling on: Mandel designated the Vietnam war primarily as a civil war in which US imperialism intervened. That sequencing is deliberate. You name the primary character of the struggle first, you account for external intervention second, and you do not allow the external intervention to swallow the characterisation. The Vietnamese CP maintained its ‘equidistant’ position relative to Moscow and Peking precisely to avoid having material aid cut off completely, and that independence confirmed the point: Soviet and Chinese weapons did not make Vietnamese resistance a proxy war for either power. The struggle remained what it was. The stamps on the ammunition crates changed nothing.
The principle is portable. NATO member states’ weapons in Ukrainian hands do not transform a war of national self-determination into an inter-imperialist proxy conflict. The transformation would require demonstrating that NATO, not Ukraine, controls the political direction of the struggle, that Ukrainian workers and soldiers are fighting for Washington’s interests rather than their own survival. No one has demonstrated this, because it is not true. Denys Pilash of Sotsialnyi Rukh made the point with devastating economy in March 2025: ‘If that is the case, on whose behalf is Ukraine now waging a proxy war? The US is clearly not on Ukraine’s side, it is converging with Russia. So, is Ukraine fighting a proxy war on behalf of Denmark? Latvia?’
The ‘proxy war’ framework became analytically incoherent the moment Trump and Putin sat down at Anchorage to carve up Ukraine between them. The organisations that had deployed that framework for three years had no tools left to understand what they were watching.
Why the schema travels
The Serbia model is appealing. It requires no judgment about the specific situation. It positions you as the principled anti-imperialist, equidistant from all great-power pressures, refusing the compromises that lesser analysts have succumbed to. It lets you maintain the posture of revolutionary integrity while doing nothing. It is, to use the blunt term, comfortable.
The Ireland model is harder. It requires accepting that the oppressed may receive aid from sources you oppose without thereby becoming agents of those sources. It requires siding with the invaded against the invader even when NATO also opposes the invader. It requires, and this is the difficult part, siding with the invaded against the invader even when NATO also opposes the invader, because the class character of the struggle is determined by who is fighting and for what, not by who else happens to be on the same side.
That is why the schema was portable across such different traditions. The Stalinist inheritance of the CPB, the state-capitalist framework of the SWP, the post-Trotskyist 2014 framework of Workers Power as the L5I’s British section, the Morenoist categorical method of the ISL: none of these had the same theoretical DNA. But all of them contained a version of the subsumption move. Reduce the specific situation to an inter-imperialist schema. Conclude equidistance. Apply the conclusion without further analysis.
This is what made the SOAS meeting of June 2014 possible: Workers Power, the CPB, Counterfire and Socialist Appeal in one room, assembled around their shared characterisation of Maidan. Different theories, same destination. The convergence was not accidental. It was the logical outcome of organisations that had all, through different routes, equipped themselves with a schema that produced the same answer to the same question regardless of the specifics of the situation.
The correction and its limits
The L5I corrected the arms error at its June 2023 Congress. The resolution acknowledged: ‘we did so in an inconsistent way when we did not recognise the right of the Ukrainians to receive the means for this end. We correct this error.’ The convergence with the ISL followed in Istanbul, December 2025.
This matters. Corrections matter. The capacity to acknowledge error is a condition of political development.
But the August 1914 charge against the Fourth International was not retracted. The Maidan coup framing survived, softened, into the 2023 resolution. The German L5I section was still publishing its ‘five-level analysis’ opposing arms deliveries in Western parliaments four months before Istanbul. The convergence happened at the level of the conclusion rather than at the level of the method. The schema that generated the wrong answer for a decade was not examined; it was overridden for this situation.
Organisations that correct conclusions without examining methods remain vulnerable. The Serbia model will return. It always does, and it will find the same theoretical infrastructure waiting for it.
The alternative that was actually available
The Fourth International’s position was not ‘critical support for NATO.’ That characterisation, deployed repeatedly by organisations defending their neutrality, requires misreading the 18th World Congress resolution of February 2025. What the resolution said was this: ‘As internationalists, we defend Ukraine’s right to self-determination and their right to resist the invasion... this is no reason when the Ukrainian people, in their hour of need, deserve all the means necessary to defend themselves, to refuse such means, or for us to sabotage their provision.’
That is solidarity with the oppressed against all their oppressors: Russian occupation, Western debt extraction, Zelensky’s attacks on labour. The ‘two fronts’ framework that Ukrainian socialists articulated from the beginning of the war. Fight Russian invasion as the priority. Fight the neoliberalism the war is being used to entrench simultaneously. The 325 IMF conditionalities attached to Ukrainian survival. Law 5371, which gutted the Labour Code for 70 per cent of the workforce. Trade union organisers conscripted. Union properties seized.
The concrete demands that followed from this framework were not gestures. Unconditional cancellation of Ukrainian debt. Arms for self-defence with democratic accountability, not blank cheques. Opposition to IMF structural adjustment. Confiscation of frozen Russian oligarch assets for reconstruction under democratic control. Sanctuary and material support for Russian anti-war exiles. Direct solidarity with Ukrainian labour movements resisting Zelensky’s wartime legislation.
This is what solidarity that touches the ground looks like. Not a statement of equidistance. Not a schema applied in advance of analysis. A programme derived from the specific situation of a specific working class fighting on two fronts simultaneously.
Where things stand
The series began with the robber’s peace. It ends with naming the intellectual operation that enabled it.
The theoretical error is now identifiable: the choice of Serbia over Ireland, applied through organisational traditions with different vocabularies but identical destinations. The alternative is articulated. The Fourth International chose Ireland over Serbia in February 2022 and held that position through three years of pressure, partition, and the collapse of the proxy-war framework it had always refused.
What remains is assessment, not rallying conclusion.
Stop the War has not withdrawn the Nineham review. The Morning Star runs the Odesa myth annually. The Workers Party assembled at Holland Park in May 2026 with far-right co-sponsors. These organisations have not corrected the error because they do not recognise it as an error.
For others, the question remains genuinely open. The ISL/L5I convergence corrected the arms position. Whether the method that produced the position has been examined is a test that has not yet arrived.
The series documented what happened to the people who were handed over. It named the framework that made it possible. It is not a rallying close because the situation does not warrant one. The work of connecting with Sotsialnyi Rukh and the Ukrainian trade union movement, opposing the IMF conditions attached to reconstruction, supporting Russian anti-war exiles, breaking campist institutional capture in the British left: that work is not finished, and pretending otherwise produces bad politics.
Lenin’s principle from 1916 stands without qualification: ‘By refusing to support the revolt of annexed regions we become, objectively, annexationists.’ The organisations surveyed in this series became, objectively, annexationists. Some of them know it. Most of them do not.
Endnote: A Proxy War for Kamala Harris?
The thesis surfaced again on a Wednesday morning in July, in a WhatsApp group of Members’ Charter supporters, in the undergrowth of a party that had just finished imploding.
One contributor set it out at length, and the argument was better than most. Better, or more informed anyway; the two are not always the same. He did not pretend NATO was a single bloc arming Ukraine. The split in the American ruling class he mapped with some care: the Democrats, the agencies, the neoconservatives who had voted for Harris, locked in with the European hawks to keep the war running; and against them the MAGA core, Vance and Miller, who want a deal with Putin so as to prise Russia loose from China.
Concede the map. It is more honest than the version where NATO is one hand and Ukraine its glove.
A proxy war is directed by the power it is fought for. That is what the word means; strip that out and ‘proxy’ is noise with a grievance attached. So follow the map to the end. If the government that actually sits in Washington wants Ukraine to concede, wants the deal, wants the minerals and the capped army signed over, then whose proxy is the soldier in the trench? Not the White House’s. The White House is at the table with Moscow, carving him up. The proxy-master our contributor is left holding is the faction that lost the election. The war, on his own account, is being fought on behalf of the people out of office. A proxy war for Kamala Harris.
Sit with the part that matters. The cruder campist, the one who still thinks NATO is a monolith shovelling arms eastward, at least tells a story that hangs together. This contributor is too good a reader of Washington for that. He can see the split. Seeing it is exactly what wrecks the slogan, because the moment you concede that the sitting American government is converging with Russia, the proxy thesis has nowhere to stand except on the shoulders of the party that is not governing. The sharper the reading of the American ruling class, the more absurd the conclusion it is bent to serve.
Part 9 names the moment the framework died: Anchorage, last August, Trump and Putin sitting down to divide Ukraine between them while the word ‘proxy’ emptied out in real time. This is that death seen from the far side, months on, in a chat thread, by a man still saying the last rites and calling the corpse a living body. The Ukrainian who fights the invader and, in the same breath, the partition being written over his head by Washington and Moscow together is not fighting anyone’s proxy war. Two fronts, one war, no one’s cat’s-paw. The series title was only ever the name of that table.
The debate did not last. An administrator declared it ‘boring’, then threatened to delete it, then opened a side group and sent it there to die quietly, away from the people who had found it interesting. The disagreement was too much for the room to hold. Part 9 closes on a warning: that formations which correct their conclusions without examining their method stay exposed, and that the Serbia schema would return and find the old infrastructure waiting. Here it was, back already, in the compost of a defeated party, among people casting round for a category that spares them the trouble of looking at what is in front of them.
Where it goes from here. Nowhere in particular, if I am honest. The schema does not need a healthy movement to live in; it prefers a sick one, a demoralised one, a scattering of people who have just lost and need the loss to have been someone else’s fault and someone else’s war. It will be back the next time a defeat leaves that undergrowth behind. I have no clean way to end this, and reaching for one would be its own small campism: the tidy category dropped over a situation that has not earned it.
‘With Washington and Moscow’ examined how sections of the international left moved from opposing both Cold War blocs to accommodating the joint US-Russia partition of Ukraine. The series documented the settlement terms (Part 1), traced the organisational trajectory (Part 2), amplified Ukrainian and Russian socialist voices (Part 3), excavated the foundational Odesa myth (Part 4), uncovered the 2014 origins of British campism’s revolutionary alibi in Workers Power, the L5I’s British section (Part 5), analysed how schematic method produces accommodation even within organisations formally committed to Ukrainian self-determination (Part 8), and identified the theoretical framework choice that determined everything that followed (Part 9).
All parts: https://redmole.substack.com/t/with-washington-and-moscow
Forensically & persuasively argued, an excellent article! Thanks
An excellent article. Thanks