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Michael Glackin ✍ I’m not surprised to hear the rumour that there were petrol bombs being kept on standby in car boots near Garvaghy Road, whether true or not.

The fact that nothing happened, the opportunity never arose and they were kept in their box is a credit to the residents, nationalist leaders, the PSNI and – in fairness – the Orange Order & loyalism.

It also speaks to the fact that they have no support within nationalism and republicanism. They are a tiny cabal of opportunistic anti-GFA puritan fanatics who lurk in the shadows while sending wee lads out to do the dirty work and the sentence that follows.

As a collective they may be the single worst element of our society.

Loyalism is more or less reduced to gangland criminality and factional infighting that are found in every city in the world, just under the guise of paramilitaries as a cloak of legitimacy within those communities.

The far-right anti-immigrant bigots are largely ugly, angry morons who lack the intellectual capability to separate reality from social media propaganda.

The Orange Order are fundamentally flawed, with the original sin of being an explicitly sectarian organisation, but they’re an old boys’ club now that has long lost its power, if not its usefulness to bad actors. Let them bate away where they’re welcome and mind their manners where they’re not.

Republican dissidents have a groupthink psychopathy that allows them to believe they are entitled – via their incredibly narrow interpretation of Irish history and bagful of clichés and quotations – to murder other members of our society. Imagine being so utterly convinced of your righteousness that you believe killing strangers is honourable in this age where Catholics have equality and a democratic path to constitutional change.

Now, as Newton Emerson’s piece in the Irish News today points out, mainstream republicanism – and Martin McGuinness in particular – looked this problem in the eye and put it in its place years ago. Unionism has never done this convincingly and now is being led down a shitty path by the extreme voices on that side.

Allister, Bryson, et al may not have gotten their march down the road and won’t be throwing any petrol bombs, but they’re having a cracking few weeks of creating their culture war, sowing division and throwing a grenade into our society, which was always the big prize in this episode. The dissident threat just underlines how things could quickly escalate.

Mainstream unionism, civic and political, needs to get that mentality under control and put it in its place instead of whataboutry and constantly pointing the finger at SF, SDLP and Alliance. Otherwise they risk letting this grow, fester and drag us back despite the vast, vast majority wanting to get on with our neighbours and make life here better for everyone.

⏩Michael Glackin  is an observer of events in North.

Petrol Bombs And Puritans

Geordie Morrow 🖌 with a painting from his collection of art work.


 Oil on canvas board 24”x20”, painted June 1977

⏩Geordie Morrow is a Belfast artist.

Milk Delivery

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

Green Party Inclusive Terminology Guidance Bars Women from Brighton

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink – George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

On Friday, as the largest conference in the Green Party’s history opened in Brighton, two of its members gave an interview from outside the building. Zoe Hatch and Jude English, directors of the Green Women’s Declaration, had been refused entry. Hatch said they had all been suspended or expelled, and that what they believed amounted to agreeing with the Supreme Court about single-sex provision for women, which she thought most of the British public did too. Saying it inside the Green Party, she said, is no longer allowed.

Shahrar Ali, the party’s former deputy leader, was outside as well, telling GB News he had been barred from attending and intended to go back to court. Inside, the party was holding what its own spokesperson had called, a fortnight earlier, the most democratic conference of any political party in Britain.

Continue @ Heartlands Tribune.

You Cannot Protect What You Cannot Define 🪶The Green Party’s Language Ban

Frankie McKillen ✍Billy “ Blue” Kelly and Brendan “ The Dark” Hughes came from the same republican generation. 

Both were deeply involved in the Provisional IRA. Both went to prison. Both lived long enough to see the armed campaign end and Sinn Féin enter the political institutions it had once rejected. And both looked at where republicanism had arrived and asked, in different words, essentially the same question: Was this what we fought for? 

There is another connection between them. We heard some of the most important things they had to say only after they were dead. Brendan Hughes gave his extensive recorded testimony to Anthony McIntyre for the Boston College Belfast Project. His interviews were conducted on the understanding that they would remain confidential until his death. They subsequently became the centrepiece of Ed Moloney’s Voices From The Grave. Billy Kelly created his own, rather less formal, voice from the grave. 

Six months before his death, he contacted Sunday World journalist Hugh Jordan and offered him an interview. Kelly imposed one condition: it was not to be published until he was dead. His explanation was extraordinary. “ If you put this out now I’ll be in big trouble. You’ll need to hold on to it until after I’m gone.” Kelly said he had wanted to speak for a long time but believed that, had he done so, he would have been “castigated and pressurised into retracting it”. So Kelly spoke while alive but chose to be heard from the grave. And when the grave finally released his words, they sounded remarkably familiar. 

Big Houses 

 One passage in Kelly’s interview immediately brought Brendan Hughes to mind. Kelly said: “A number of republicans have ended up with big houses and cars and a load of money and property.” He then contrasted their circumstances with his own: “But people like me and others – who fought the war and went to jail – ended up with nothing.” 

Almost a quarter of a century earlier, Hughes was making a strikingly similar complaint. Interviewed by Anthony McIntyre in Fourthwrite , (issue 1--interview starts at page 6) , Hughes talked about former IRA volunteers struggling economically while others prospered. When McIntyre pointed out that some people believed the struggle had been worthwhile, Hughes replied that among them were people with “big houses and guaranteed incomes”. Hughes’s criticism was not merely jealousy over who owned what. His argument was political and social. He believed a movement rooted in working-class republican communities had changed character. In his view, some people had moved into comfortable political and economic positions while former volunteers and the communities from which they came remained behind. 

Kelly, speaking decades later from his New Lodge flat, sounded remarkably similar. Different man. Different interview. Different time. The same uncomfortable image: big houses on one side, former volunteers wondering what it had all been for on the other. 

“The Brits Won” 

 Kelly went considerably further. His assessment of the IRA campaign was brutally concise: “The Brits won. There’s no other way of saying it.” Kelly said that he and others had joined the IRA believing they were fighting for a united Ireland and to end British rule. Looking at Northern Ireland at the end of his life, he concluded that they had failed. “We fought to get the Brits out of Ireland, but we failed,” was his assessment. He pointed to the continuing British constitutional position and the provisions governing a border poll. He even ridiculed the black-taxi cavalcade which accompanied the IRA ceasefire, saying it created the impression that republicans had won something when, in his opinion, they had secured nothing. 

Again, Brendan Hughes had travelled much of this road before him. Hughes became deeply disillusioned with the direction taken by the republican leadership. He complained that the thirty-two-county democratic socialist republic for which he believed he had struggled was no longer even being discussed. He regarded the political direction taken under Gerry Adams’s leadership as a fundamental departure from what he believed the IRA campaign had been about. 

There is an important distinction here. These were the assessments of Hughes and Kelly. Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams presented the peace strategy very differently, arguing that it created a peaceful and democratic route towards republican objectives. Adams also publicly rejected some of Hughes’s allegations and described Hughes and other critics as opponents of Sinn Féin’s strategy. But whatever view one takes of that argument, Kelly’s words demonstrate that Hughes’s disillusionment was not unique. 

What was it all for? 

Perhaps Kelly’s most powerful words were not “The Brits won”. They were these: “What was the point of the IRA campaign in the first place? What was it all for?” That question could almost have come from Hughes. Hughes had spent his later years wrestling with much the same issue. Men had died. Men had spent decades in prison. Hughes himself endured the blanket protest and hunger strike. Families and communities had lived through enormous suffering. What, Hughes wanted to know, had justified it? Kelly’s conclusion was even harsher. He said the IRA campaign had not been worth the loss of a single life and described the Troubles as a waste of human life, explicitly including violence beyond that committed by the IRA. Whatever anyone thinks of that conclusion, it is difficult to dismiss the significance of who was saying it. 

Kelly was not an academic analysing the IRA from a university office. He had been an IRA gunman and prisoner. He admitted killing British soldiers. He travelled to Libya as part of the delegation which sought weapons from Colonel Gaddafi. This was a man who had helped acquire the means to continue the war eventually asking: What was the war for? 

Adams And The Destination Of The Struggle 

Hughes’s criticism became deeply personal because of his former closeness to Gerry Adams. The two had been comrades and friends. Hughes subsequently came to believe that the political strategy associated with Adams had taken republicanism somewhere fundamentally different from the destination for which volunteers such as himself believed they had fought. 

Kelly’s final interview approached the issue from his own direction. “Sinn Féin led the people up the garden path,” he said. He contrasted republican rhetoric with the political reality he saw around him and complained that some republicans had prospered while people like himself had not. 

It would be too simple to say that Hughes and Kelly held identical views on every question. There is no evidence for that. But on several fundamental points their criticisms converge. They believed the IRA had fought to end British rule. They did not believe that objective had been achieved. They questioned what decades of armed struggle had accomplished. They believed some people associated with the republican movement had prospered while former volunteers and working-class republican communities had been left behind. And both expressed deep dissatisfaction with the political direction taken by Sinn Féin under Adams’s leadership. 

The difference Was When They Spoke 

There is one fascinating difference. Hughes became publicly outspoken while he was still alive. As early as 2000 he was telling Fourthwrite that he felt “no satisfaction whatsoever” with how things had turned out and urging republicans who disagreed with the leadership to speak out. But his most extensive historical testimony was preserved under the Boston College arrangement for release after his death. 

Kelly went further in protecting himself. He specifically instructed Hugh Jordan not to publish until he was gone. And he told us why. He feared being “in big trouble”. He feared being castigated. He feared being pressured into retracting his words. That ought to interest anyone concerned with republican oral history. 

How Many More? 

 Kelly said something else in his final interview which deserves attention. He felt qualified to speak not only for former prisoners but also for dead comrades who could no longer speak for themselves. There is a strange irony in that. Kelly wanted to speak for the dead, yet apparently believed he needed to become one of them before he could speak freely himself. Brendan Hughes became a Voice from the Grave through Boston College. Billy Kelly became one through Hugh Jordan and the Sunday World. Which raises the question: How many more Blue Kellys are there? 

How many former IRA volunteers have already recorded interviews with journalists or historians on the condition that they remain unpublished until death? How many have left tapes with their families? How many have written accounts sitting unopened in drawers? And how many hold views similar to those expressed by Hughes and Kelly but have decided that saying them publicly while alive simply isn’t worth the consequences? We don’t know. 

Nor should we assume that any future testimony will agree with Hughes or Kelly. Other veterans may leave behind accounts defending Sinn Féin’s strategy and reaching completely different conclusions. That is the point of oral history. You record the voices first and argue about what they mean afterwards.

Voices From The Grave 

There is something almost eerie about reading Kelly’s final interview alongside Hughes’s words from a quarter of a century earlier. Hughes talked about republicans with “big houses and guaranteed incomes.” Kelly talked about republicans with “big houses and cars and a load of money and property.” Hughes wondered what had become of the republican objectives for which his generation had fought. Kelly asked: “What was it all for?” Hughes believed the political direction of republicanism represented a departure from what he had fought for. Kelly’s final verdict was: “We lost and the Brits won.” 

Two veteran IRA men. Two different lives. Two different recordings. Two voices from the grave. And, separated by more than two decades, two remarkably similar questions about where Irish republicanism ended up and who benefited from the journey. Perhaps the most important question now is not whether Hughes and Kelly were right or wrong. It is how many more voices are still waiting for the grave before telling us what they really think.

🕮 Frankie McKillen is a Belfast Rockabilly

Voices From The Grave 2.0

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Twenty Five

 

A Morning Thought @ 3296

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 20-October-2026.

Photo of Jessica Krug

The issue of trans-racials, people who identify as being from a race or ethnicity they are not born into has raised its head again in the person of Hannah Gann a white Jewish woman of considerable wealth and privilege who self-identified as a Palestinian with mixed black (Tunisian) heritage.[1] She is not the first person to make such extravagant claims.

In 2015 Rachel Dolezal came to prominence in the US and internationally having been outed as white. Now, normally being white is not something you are outed as, but Dolezal has quite the chequered history. She was born to white parents, sued a black university for racial discrimination on the grounds she was white, altered her appearance and even became the head of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in Spokane. She, a white woman, had managed to pass herself off as black, not to other whites but to black leaders. It caused a moment of crisis for identitarians and was unintentionally great material for comics, though most stayed away from it. This was when Woke was goosestepping its way through cultural institutions, banishing all who would question it to the intellectual and cultural dungeons or side lines, particularly those who were Leftists. So she was best left alone and denounced. The uncomfortable questions she raised were not to be dealt with and unsurprisingly others tried their hand at it.

One of those who did was another white woman who passed herself off as Latina. Ostensibly easier to do. Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan was the first “Latina” president of the National Lawyers Guild who passed herself off as Colombian and sometimes as Puerto Rican. She did well out of it apparently and has been criticised by actual Latinas who haven’t had quite the same success as this brazen grifter.[2] There are others such as the white academic Jessica Krug, who apparently insisted on pronouncing her surname like the Spanish Cruz. She claimed, depending almost literally on the time of day, to being Afro-Latina, Algerian, Black, Puerto Rican etc. but was in fact a white Jew. Her book, published by the prestigious academic press Duke University Press was nominated for the Douglass Prize and also the Harriet Tubman Prize. The Douglass Prize is open to all, including whites, the Tubman Prize is not. Duke University ended up denouncing her and having to donate all their profits from her book to a fund for Latino and Black academics.[3]

This happened not just in the US but around the world. The influencer Oli London said he identified as Korean, then decided that wasn’t good enough and said he was a non-binary, gender fluid Korean and even underwent various surgeries to make himself look more “Korean” and renamed himself as Park Jimin Huening Kai Taeyong Imnida[4] before finally finding his home as a conservative Catholic and detransitioning.[5] It is a very appropriate ending for him. He started off believing there was some soul that was uniquely Korean and he had it and ended up believing in some universal Christian soul that we all apparently have. And he finally accepted he had been born in the right body, well what other body could he have been born in? The only trans he now accepts is the ridiculous notion of transubstantiation, which is the belief that Catholics literally eat the body of Christ at mass. I am not sure which is the more insane claim.

Rachel Dolezal has survived the whole thing, is now known as Nkechi Diallo and no longer says she is black but rather Trans-Racial. She got past her welfare fraud conviction as well and even managed to write a book with the unintentionally hilarious title of In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. Some of the others are still going strong as well.

However, there are consequences to these charades. Gann in fairness to her seems to acknowledge it:

I still believe in every cause I ever supported, in the ongoing fight for justice and in the righteousness of liberation for all oppressed peoples… I still believe that theirs is the real story and mine is just a sick, deluded distraction.[6] 

Almost everyone accepts that these charades undermine the causes the deluded participate in. All of the women mentioned here could have participated as women in struggles against women’s oppression. Two were Jewish and they could have participated as anti-Zionist Jews. But that doesn’t get them enough points in the Oppression Olympics that are so favoured in social movements. The more boxes you can tick, the more a right to be heard you have and the easier it is to shut down an opponent with “That’s because you are not…”. Class doesn’t matter and identity politics rule the roost. 

I lived in London for a short period in the 1980s and even then you could see the reactionary anti-working class seeds of what became Woke politics. The joke at the time was that if you were a black, Irish, lesbian in London with a disability nobody could criticise you. That is no longer a joke, that is the rule amongst most social movements, liberal and Left organisations. If you don’t have a disability pick one, preferably one that is not easy to challenge. In the 1980s, workers looking for an extra sick day would claim bad back. Couldn’t be disproved, or at least that is what one of the local doctors in my neighbourhood in Dublin used to say. He gave them out like confetti. Now you pick a complicated one, that only a medical professional after lots of study could claim wasn’t true. Left organisations and social movements have the highest rates of just about everything going, from autism to ADHD. It gains them brownie points and undermines those who actually suffer from these conditions.

At the time of the Rachel Dolezal scandal, Trevor Noah the South African comedian, based in the US, was also in the ascendent and a woke warrior. He was scathing of Delozal and the likes and said you can’t pick and choose the good parts. You haven’t lived as a black person, and all the oppression that entails, so you can’t just claim to be one. To be clear, race and ethnicity are socially defined concepts and whiteness as a concept has only existed for a few hundred years. The genetic differences between blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians etc, are miniscule and limited to secondary features like skin colour etc. Whether you can identify as black or Asian crosses no significant biological frontier, just a social and historical one. So far most liberals and Leftists reading this piece may have been nodding along in quiet agreement. Here is the sting in the tail.

If you can’t be trans-racial, then you can’t be transgender either. The biological differences between men and women are huge and sex is a biological category and women exist as a biological category. All of those who shriek in horror at the nonsense of Dolezal, Gann and others but think Eddie Izzard is a woman need to reconsider their politics and perhaps their mental health. The Trans-Racials only positive contribution is that they helped shine a light on this nonsense in quarters that were not open to discussion on the question of transgender. Some have the ridiculous idea that a man can identify as a woman, but draw the line at a white man identifying as a black woman. Stupidity reigns supreme.

References

[1] NBC News (23/09/2026) ‘Temu Rachel Dolezal’: Philly activist confesses to years of identity fraud faking Black and Palestinian Heritage. Doha Madani. 

[2] Prism Reports (07/01/2021) The National Lawyers Guild’s former first ‘Latina’ president is a white woman. Tiina Vásquez. 

[3] The Guardian (14/09/2020) Publisher denounces Jessica Krug for pretending to be black. Alison Flood. 

[4] Newsweek (28/06/2021) Oli London Before Surgery Pictures as Instagram Star Identifies as Korean. Ryan Smith. 

[5] EWTN News (04/11/2022) De-transitioner Oli London shares conversion to Christianity. Edie Heipel. 

[6] NBC News (23/09/2026) op. cit.

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.

Trans-Racials Ride Again! From Palestine To Latin America

Caitlin's Newsletter ★ Written by Caitlin Johnstone.

“Antisemitism” watchdog groups are flipping the fuck out about hip hop artist Macklemore saying “Free Palestine” while opening for Ed Sheeran, and the western press are of course helping to spin this ridiculous nonsense as a massive scandal.

During a New Jersey concert over the weekend, Macklemore said the following:

One of the reasons why I wanted to come on this tour was because I wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine.
I said, Free Palestine.
I want those words to be loud and clear, so the people from Gaza, all the way to the occupied West Bank, know that we have not forgotten them.
And this next song was inspired by the bravery of Columbia University students who led an encampment movement that mobilized the entire world; open up hearts, myself included, so thank you to those students that risked their diplomas, that risked their tuition, that risked their scholarships, that stood up and said, no. CUAD students, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voices for Peace. Thank you, guys.

Oh My God Shut The Fuck Up About "Antisemitism"

Christopher Owens 🔖 has just completed reading a potboiler. 


A writer returns to his college town, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor. But after he drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device – a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate our memories, and a moving exploration of the relationships that make us who we are.

I know. Who farted, right?

Universally hailed on its release earlier this year (even winning the Orwell Prize for Fiction), this 145-page book has been sitting on my shelf for most of the year. It’s cover ever so slightly reminiscent of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the combination of mounting praise and HAL trying to hypnotise me into reading the book finally broke my resistance.

And you know what, it’s ok.

Split into three parts (an interview between the narrator and his old mentor, Thomas; an argument with a curator after the narrator reveals he didn’t record the interview; and a conversation with Thomas’s son Max) the book skips along at a steady pace but with little weight (at least not until the end) nor with any particularly engaging characters. The end result is a collection of vaguely interesting ideas that never quite come together in a meaningful sense but you recognise the author’s intent and still go along with it.

Take this excerpt for example:

The man in the old-fashioned hat came by to check the tickets. I enlarged the little QR code and he scanned it. Then I put my earbuds in and began to listen to a talk, recorded in Paris in 1973, that Thomas gave about translation. I took a photo of the win-try, postindustrial landscape through my masked reflection as the train picked up speed, and then I checked and deleted the photo and shut my eyes and faced the past. My mentor paused, fifty-one years ago, and poured water into a glass. Someone in the audience coughed twice.
I was in Paris. (I don’t know how else the recording influenced the dream.) I was getting Eva from what must have been her school. I stood outside a tall and ornate wrought-iron fence, waiting for the gates to open. There were other parents and caregivers around, whispering to each other or into their phones. I don’t speak French, but it was clear that people were anxious. The wind was picking up. I heard sirens in the distance. I looked at my phone, but there were no alerts.

As you can probably guess, technology and our ambivalent relationship to it are a driving theme. While you can appreciate the ambition and the very skilled prose that does a lot of the heavy lifting, it ultimately feels like it has nothing to say while suggesting otherwise.

Such contradictions could be fascinating but in this case it’s akin to a potboiler.

Ben Lerner, 2026, Transcription, Granta Press. ISBN-13: 978-1803513805

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.

Transcription

Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.


Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Twenty Four

 

Religious Derangement Syndrome @ 20

 

A Morning Thought @ 3295

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.

7-September-2026

What, really, have socialists learned from the Russian war on Ukraine? Has it changed our understanding of the way that imperialism works? Tell us we were right all along?

Reflecting on the first four years since the invasion, Oleksandr Kyselov, a Ukrainian socialist based in Sweden, wrote in February that Ukrainians found themselves “trying to safeguard our future free from foreign dictates, and simultaneously sacrificing any chances to actually have one”.

Subjected to polarising propaganda, exposed to the attacks by Russian ‘liberators’ on our homes and core infrastructure, watching arrogant sticky-fingered moralising elites surprisingly exempt from ‘common duty’, learning about a striking dependence of our ability to fight back on the political expediencies abroad, we may find out that a fragile ‘least unjust peace’ is the best we can get.

And still, even seeing all of this, too many of the European left are busy stretching familiar old frameworks over a changed world. As if continuing to hope that, should they just deny, condemn, and denounce loudly enough, selectively pontificating about internationalism while reinforcing the borders of their national units, they will be spared the new reality of the world.

This reinforced my scepticism about “the left” as a category. Its historic failure to consider, or draw lessons from, the tragedy of the Syrian revolution, emptied the term of much meaning. That’s how I saw it nine years ago, anyway – and Ukraine has made things worse.

Demonstrators outside a court in Moscow, where Lidia Moniava, founder of a children’s hospice,
was on trial for social media posts about the war. Photo from Bereg

This, in turn, raises another question. What about those sections of the “left” claiming to be Marxists? Can we seriously use the term “Marxist” to describe people who, during the largest military conflict of our lifetimes in Europe, have – as Kyselov puts it – kept denying, condemning and denouncing, in the hope of being “spared the new reality”?

I do not have a comprehensive answer to that. But here’s a contribution: comments on a lengthy article about “geopolitical fractures and the Marxist critique of imperialism” by Alex Callinicos, a well-known Marxist writer. I read it, hoping to find the theoretical underpinnings of the political stance of the Socialist Workers Party, of which Callinicos is a member, on the war. The SWP recognises Ukrainians’ right to resist the Russian invasion in words, but opposes it in practice (see Feature 5 below); since 2022, it has called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine, but did not do so during the eight years (2014-22) that they propped up the tinpot Donbass dictatorships.

Callinicos deals with imperialism as a global phenomenon, referring as examples to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine. My comments focus only on Ukraine, and what that tells us about imperialism generally. Five features of his analysis stood out for me.

Feature 1. Callinicos dissolves the particular in to the general.

Callinicos writes:

February 2022 [i.e. the all-out invasion of Ukraine] marked another, more threatening step-change in this conflict [between the western powers on one side and China-Russia on the other], with the outbreak of a major war on the European continent and the polarisation of the state system resulting from the mobilisation of [‘liberal internationalist’ scholar G. John] Ikenberry’s ‘global West’ behind Ukraine and China’s support for Russia. Rather than treat this fracturing of the international system as a series of discrete events, it is better to understand it as a developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers. (My emphasis, SP.)

This is important, methodologically, in my view.

Surely the “global process of confrontation” is actually made up of “a series of discrete events”. Surely, our understanding of any global process has to be rooted in a convincing analysis of its parts. Instead of this, Callinicos proceeds from his understanding of the global process – a clash of imperialist camps – and, where the parts don’t fit, presents a flawed and inaccurate view of them.

Feature 2. Callinicos imagines an “expansion of Russian power” that does not accord with reality.

Callinicos sees Russia not as a declining empire, or as a subimperialist power with aspects of dependence on global capital, but as a would-be great power. He approvingly quotes Sergey Radchenko, who writes that “even though the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight, its successor, Russia, still eyed a position of prominence in the global order”, and goes on to claim that Putin:

[…] used Russia’s position in the global economy as one of the main energy producers to rebuild its military power and geopolitical influence externally.

Callinicos then surveys the activities of the Russian armed forces and the Wagner group in the Middle East and Africa, and asks, “What made possible this expansion of Russian power into MENA and beyond?” Answer: two “interconnected determinants”: (1) Russia exploited a gap left by the Obama administration’s efforts, after defeat in Iraq, to reduce US involvement in the Middle East; (2) regional powers based in the Middle East (Israel, Saudi Arabia and others) have become more self-assertive “with the emergence of new centres of capital accumulation in the region”; “global energy production adds a further dimension to these interstate manoeuvres”; and “Russia figures as an important partner to Saudi Arabia in the OPEC+ cartel”.

This creates the impression that over the past two decades Russian imperialism has become stronger. In reality, the opposite is true.

First: Russia’s position as a big energy producer is in many respects a source of weakness, not strength. In the early 2000s, Russia consolidated its position in the global economy as a highly dependent exporter of oil, gas and metals. Low oil prices in the 1990s exacerbated the post-Soviet economic crisis; in 2000-08, Russian capitalism strengthened as those prices rose, but the 2008 crash, and falling prices, exposed its extreme vulnerability.

Azerbaijan and its oil had been lost to Russia in the 1990s; in the 2000s it was replaced as the economically dominant power in central Asia by China and the western powers. And it was losing ground to the European powers in Belarus, the Baltic states, and of course Ukraine. The Russian elite was well aware of this and obsessed throughout the 2000s about the dangers of dependence on oil revenues and the need to diversify the economy. That did not happen.

It could be argued that Russia’s dependence on commodities revenues was a key factor that eroded its “great power” status. To suggest, as Callinicos does, that its status as an energy producer enhanced that status is mistaken.

Second: as for Russia’s military adventures in the Middle East and Africa, look how they ended. Bashar al-Assad’s regime was toppled in Syria, in large part because Russia was unable and/or unwilling to provide the military support needed to protect him.

Putin faced the Maidan uprising in Ukraine in 2014 as the leader not of a power gaining in economic or political strength, but of a weakening power that had to compensate for its subordinate position in the global economy, and the fragility of its social base at home, by ramping up nationalist rhetoric and shifting towards a more authoritarian method of rule.

It is noteworthy that Rob Ferguson, another writer in SWP publications, does not share Callinicos’s eccentric view of Russian power. In 2022, he concluded, in an analytical article – with a measure of understatement, but still – that “Russia’s energy and raw material base was still insufficient to overcome the vast disparity in economic and military power with NATO – as well as China”. This, Ferguson argued, “intensified the pressure on the Russian state to demarcate its regional hegemony, putting the question of the states along the Eurasian faultline at the fore of Russia’s concerns”.[1]

Feature 3. Callinicos imagines western military support for Ukraine as a cause, not an effect.

Proceeding from the general (“global process of confrontation”) to the particular (“a discrete series of events”), Callinicos presents a version of one aspect of these events – western military support for Ukraine – that does not bear serious scrutiny. Referring to the all-out invasion of 2022, he writes:

The war itself thus represented a radicalisation of the global struggle that was already developing between Washington, Beijing and Moscow.

He then qualifies that statement, in three sentences that I deal with below (Feature 4), where he acknowledges that “traditional Great Russian nationalism” may have played a part in causing the war, but hastily insisting that it is “no simple struggle for self-determination”. And then he writes:

The US and other Western powers were heavily involved in training and supporting the Ukrainian military from 2014-15 onwards.

Then he quotes newspaper articles detailing cooperation between the Ukrainian intelligence services and the CIA in gathering intelligence on Russia. And then:

The massive surge in weapons supplies to Ukraine by the NATO powers and closely aligned states such as Australia must be seen in this context. From the Western side, the Ukraine conflict has been a proxy war waged to weaken and drain a potential challenger, an inter-imperialist conflict in the kind of terms that Lenin and Luxemburg characterised in the first world war.

This is playing ducks and drakes with reality. Its inclusion in a theoretical article shows how shaky its foundations are.


For a start, the intelligence operations referred to are only one part of a larger picture. From 2014 Ukraine was fighting a war, the prosecution of which required not just intelligence but heavy weapons. It received utterly negligible supplies of these from the western powers until 2022. As the chart shows, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute registered US arms exports to Ukraine as zero until 2015. Note that the chart, sourced from SIPRI’s database, measures exports with the institute’s standard method, the trend-indicator value (TIV).[2] In 2015 US arms supplies to Ukraine were 4 TIVs, compared e.g. with 92 TIVs to Greece and 112 TIVs to Norway. In 2021, when all those CIA agents referred to were well aware of the Russian troop build-up on Ukraine’s border, US arms exports to Ukraine remained negligible: 20 TIVs compared with 39 TIVs to Canada and 139 TIVs to Singapore.

The graph shows US arms exports to Ukraine, with those to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Singapore included for comparison. The table shows the top 20 recipients of US arms exports in 1993-2025; even including three years of war (2022-25), Ukraine only gets to 16th place.


The negligible level of western arms supply to Ukraine between 2014 and 2021, when it was fighting a defensive war against a larger aggressor, was preceded by more than two decades during which (1) in 1994 the US helped to convince Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal, (2) NATO accepted eastern European countries into membership, and (3) NATO forces in Europe were substantially reduced from cold war levels (the number of US tanks in Germany fell from 5000 in 1990 to zero in 2013).

Callinicos says the US and UK are “training and supporting the Ukrainian military”, without saying that this “support” included starving Ukraine of weapons supplies. He refers to a “massive surge in weapons supplies”, but omits that this was a reaction to the 2022 invasion. Cause and effect are reversed. Such game-playing does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Feature 4. Callinicos refers only once, and in passing, to the social dynamics in Ukraine, and in Russia, during the period under discussion.

Having stated that the 2022 invasion was a “radicalisation of the global struggle”, the next three sentences read:

Pace the [“realist” scholars John] Mearsheimer and [Sebastian] Rosato, the Russian invasion seems [“seems”!] not to have been simply an instrumentally rational response to NATO expansion and Ukraine’s increasingly close alignment with the US, but arises also from an ideological investment, certainly on Putin’s part, in traditional Great Russian nationalism that denies Ukraine a distinct identity. The assertion of that identity informed the Ukrainian national mobilisation that helped to block and push back the initial advance on Kyiv. But this war is no simple struggle for self-determination.

This is the only reference to the Kremlin’s nationalism, and the only reference to Ukrainian society, in the entire article of 12,500+ words.

Callinicos does not even discuss the idea that the social turbulence reflected in the Maidan – from socially progressive, to pro-European, to outright reactionary – needs examining. Nor the social dynamics in Russia that have pushed the elite towards an authoritarian, near-fascist style of rule, and – in the view of many Marxist writers – towards all-out war.

Callinicos acknowledges that Ukraine’s assertion of “a distinct identity” “informed the national mobilisation”, but does not comment on what the significance of that might be, either historically or in the twenty-first century. He writes that the war is “no simple struggle for self-determination” (not many wars are “simple”), but only to return to his erroneous portrayal of the extent of western involvement.

This is where dissolving the particular into the general (see Feature 1 above) becomes a problem.

Would you look at Brexit as part of the “developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers”, without also considering the social dynamics in the UK – the advance of neo-liberalism, the surge of right-wing populism, the travails of the labour movement, the effects of de-industrialisation and dependence on financial and service industries?

Would you look at the Malvinas war as part of the “developing global process of confrontation among the main imperialist powers”, without also considering the class struggles in Thatcher’s Britain and Galtieri’s Argentina?

What, then, is the credibility of an “analysis” of the Russian war on Ukraine that starts from a preconception about the “global process of confrontation”, and fails to mention the class struggle and other forms of social change in either Russia or Ukraine?

This approach says something about the development of Marxism, in my view. The stated aim of Callinicos’s article is to show how the Marxist critique of imperialism “can encompass empirically aspects of the present conjuncture that liberalism and realism are unable to account for”. He does not explain why the social forces at work in Ukraine, and in Russia, should not be treated as one of these aspects.

This not only holes his argument below the water-line in the ways I have mentioned. It also misses an important opportunity to engage with the body of serious Marxist scholarship – by Ilya Matveev (Russia), Daria Saburova (Ukraine), Yassin al-Haj Saleh (Syria), Kavita Krishnan and Rohini Hensman (India)[3] and many others – who see these social forces, and the Kremlin’s reaction to them, as central to the causes of the Russian war.

It would be a cheap shot to criticise Callinicos or anyone else for something they have not written, and that is not my point. Rather, that the reluctance to engage with other Marxists can only obstruct the development of Marxism as a living body of ideas.

Feature 5. Callinicos separates analysis from politics.

Of course many Marxists working in universities have in recent decades increasingly detached analysis of politically urgent issues from political commentary that might inform the labour movement and social movements. So this is a much wider problem that one for Callinicos alone. But in his article, published by a non-academic socialist journal, he takes this to an extreme.

The SWP, of which Callinicos is a member, (i) between 2014 and 2022, made no call for the withdrawal of Russian troops, and raised no challenge to those “lefts” who vigorously supported the Russian-backed tinpot dictatorships in the Donbas,[4] (ii) condemned the Russian invasion of 2022, but, along with post-Stalinists, portrayed NATO expansion as its primary cause, (iii) acknowledged the right of Ukrainians to defend themselves from invasion in words, but opposed it in practice, and (iv) supported calls in the UK labour movement to end arms supplies to Ukraine.

A drone workshop. Photo from Solidarity Collectives

It is worth considering what the SWP actually means by the Ukrainian people’s “right to resist the invasion”, as a statement by the international network they belong to put it, since this is combined with a demand on western governments for “no arms shipments to Ukraine!”

How are people to resist an invasion, without arms from western governments? Some people favour arms provided by civil society (inevitably a tiny supply compared to what the state provides). And so Ukrainians living abroad, and civil society groups, have raised millions of euros to support civil defence (drone factories, medical supplies, etc). Trade unionists and e.g. anarchist groups participate – but the SWP does not.[5]

For some SWP members, the “right to resist the invasion” does not even extend as far as the right to ask for weapons, let alone to receive them.

For example, SWP members worked hard but unsuccessfully to defeat a resolution passed by the National Education Union conference in April last year, supporting not the export of arms to Ukraine by the UK government but “the right of Ukraine to self-defence and to resist Putin’s occupation, including the right to seek arms to defend itself”.

Similarly, when the Universities and Colleges Union conference decided in 2024 to endorse an appeal by the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine to western governments to send military aid, SWP members sought through conference procedure to block that call from being heard.[6]

Of what does the “right to resist the invasion” consist, if not of the right to ask for weapons, be it from western governments, Ukrainians abroad, or anyone else? This is not just about politics, but about socialist morality.

Callinicos does not comment on this in his article. Its function, rather, is to provide these damaging, and I would say immoral, politics, with a “theoretical” justification: the fragile, general assertions about the “global process of confrontation”, the false picture of Russian imperialism, the reversal of cause and effect, and the blank spot where society should be.

In my view, the development of Marxism as a meaningful approach to the problems that capitalism is throwing at us in the twenty-first century will mean rejecting this kind of imposition of political dogma on to analysis – what Kyselov calls “stretching familiar old frameworks over a changed world”. 7 September 2026

🔴 Thanks to Links journal for reposting this article.

References

[1] Robert Ferguson, “Imperialism, war and the Eurasian faultline”, International Socialism 175, June 2022

[2] SIPRI has over decades of research developed the TIV as a common unit, “based on the known unit production costs of a core set of weapons and intended to represent the transfer of military resources rather than the financial value of the transfer”. There is a full explanation here

[3] See, for example, Ilya Matveev, “The War in Ukraine and Russian Capital: from military-economic to full military imperialism” (Alameda Institute, 2023) and “Between Political and Economic Imperialism: Russia’s Shifting Global Strategy” (Journal of Labour and Society, 2021); Daria Saburova, Travailleuses de la résistance. Les classes populaires ukrainiennes face à la guerre (Autonomies, 2024); Yassin al-Haj Saleh, “Why Ukraine is a Syrian Cause” (Dawn, 2022); Kavita Krishnan, “Our indifference to Ukraine did harm to our struggle in India”, Commons, 2023; Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (Haymarket, 2018)

[4] In 2014, Eamonn McCann, for many years a leading figure in the SWP’s sister organisation in Ireland, argued that, with regard to Ukraine, “If we have to take sides […] Ireland should side with the Russians”. For the SWP’s newspaper, war crimes by Russia and its allies, e.g. the shooting down of the MH17 civilian aircraft, were to be blamed on “imperialist rivalry” (see also here and here).

[5] I expressed my own view of these difficult issues e.g. here

[6] For those interested in trade unions’ arcane conference procedures, see motion 29 (moved by pro-Ukrainian activists) and amendment 29A (moved by SWP members) here

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Russian Empire, Social Dynamics And Where Marxism Goes From Here

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