How do socialists reconcile their opposition to military expenditure (especially increased military expenditure) with support for Ukraine being provided with the weapons it needs to defeat Russian aggression?
This is the question addressed in a statement currently being circulated by the Ukrainische Linke Initiative (ULI), a network in the German political party die Linke (the Left) in the run-up to the party’s annual conference later this month.
Die Linke has about 100,000 members. Historically, it is the product of a merger between the PDS (successor to the East German ruling party) and a breakaway from the SDP.
Die Linke had the good fortune to lose its most Stalinist-nostalgic and Putin-apologist members in 2023, when Sahra Wagenknecht and her followers broke away to form the BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance).
Even so, the position of die Linke on Ukraine leans heavily in a Stop-the-War-Coalition direction. A statement on its website, for example, condemns Putin’s invasion but goes on to argue:
“The decisive contribution of the Red Army and its Ukrainian fighters to the liberation (of Ukraine) from Nazism has not been forgotten. … We reject war as a political method and are also opposed to the delivery of weapons to Ukraine. … Russian fears of Ukraine joining NATO certainly contributed to the decision to incorporate the Crimea into the Russian Federation.”
The statement being circulated by the ULI (“Antimilitarism which forgets those who have been attacked is no antimilitarism”) challenges the politics of a motion (G.26: “We will not pay for your wars!”) which has been submitted to the forthcoming die Linke conference.
The statement agrees with the starting point of motion G.26: Against German rearmament, against the expansion of German military forces and military service, against the super-profits of the German arms industry, and against cuts in welfare spending.
But, the statement continues, motion G.26 sidelines Russia’s war against Ukraine (“it makes Russian imperialism a tangential question”) and reaches three false conclusions:
• A false history: The motion equates military support for Ukraine with the SDP voting for war credits in 1914. But the Ukraine war is not a re-run of the First World War: “One side is defending itself. The other side has invaded. Ukraine is not the German imperial Reich. It is a republic under attack. The attack was an imperial decision against Ukraine’s right to self-determination.”
• A false symmetry: The motion makes no mention of Russian aggression. Instead, it treats the war as one in which the two sides had the same choice as to whether to engage in the military conflict. But: “One side was invaded. The other side invaded. Symmetry between the aggressive power and those attacked is not pacifism. It is complicity with the stronger.”
• A false answer: The argument “No to weapons because Rheinmetall profits” abandons Ukraine to Russian imperialism. What is needed instead is a form of democratic control over the manufacture of weapons for Ukraine: transparency, no super-profits, no blank checks for the arms industry, parliamentary supervision, and no revolving door between politicians and the arms industry.
In this way, argues the statement, “support for Ukraine does not become the opposite of left antimilitarism but a touchstone for it. Not less weapons for Ukraine, but less opportunity for financial extortion by arms manufacturers. No weapons for profits, but weapons for those under attack.”
What should be expected from those who support motion G.26, concludes the statement, “is not less antimilitarism but consistent antimilitarism.”
The statement’s concept of “democratically coordinated weapons production” and “democratically controlled (weapons) production” needs to be fleshed out more. Surely the ultimate form of “democratic coordination and control” would be nationalisation under workers’ control? Even so, the statement’s proposals point in the right direction.
Curiously, the statement makes a point of calling for “a continuation of the delivery of defensive weapons to Ukraine, giving priority to air defence and protective equipment.” Surely Ukraine needs offensive weapons as well, if it is to recover the occupied territories and win the war?
But such qualifications are secondary to the central argument of the statement: Antimilitarism is not to be counterposed to military support for Ukraine; both flow out of socialist politics. And, whatever its limitations, the statement makes real political arguments which merit further discussion, in contrast to motion G.26
Despite its mealy-mouthed and bothsidesist verbosity, motion G.26 mentions Ukraine just once in passing, fails to characterise Russia’s war as one of imperialist aggression (and, indeed, fails to characterise it all), and repeatedly plays the victim card (can’t criticise arms for Ukraine without being accused of being a Putin-apologist, can’t criticise Israel without being accused of being an antisemite, etc.).
Closer to home, the politics expressed in motion G.26, and far worse, will be on display at the International Anti-War Conference being held in London on 20 June, a jamboree which will provide a platform for some of the most despicable spokespersons for the pseudo-antimilitarism and sham anti-imperialism rightly castigated by the ULI statement – Medea Benjamin, Tariq Ali and John Rees.
The event was initiated by the French Contre la Guerre network, run by the “Lambertist” group POI, which is influential within Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. Other speakers at the event include Ulrike Eifler and Felix Kreklow Rojas.
Publicity for the conference describes Eifler as a “German trade unionist”. True enough – she is a union bureaucrat with IG Metall. But she is also a member of the national Executive Committee of die Linke. And certainly not one who supports the ULI statement.
Rojas is described as a “German school striker”. True enough – but he is also a BSW member and a leading figure in the BSW youth section launched last year. (Given its size, it is not difficult to become a leading figure in it.)
Wagenknecht and her BSW are the people who split from die Linke because, among other reasons, they considered it too pro-Ukraine, and too soft on opposing arms supplies to Ukraine!
From Workers’ Liberty. Read the original here.
More content from this blog
- Iran’s Fearless Intellectuals, by Naghmeh Sohrabi – 7 March 2026
- What Everyone on the Left Should Know About Taiwan (At the Minimum), by Ralf Ruckus – 17 June 2025
- Compendium and Syllabus of Non-Campist (Mostly) Left Sources on the War in Ukraine, by Steve Ongerth – 8 October 2025
- How Britain’s Establishment made the Far Right Respectable. Interview with Daniel Trilling – 8 May 2026
- Fabric of Resistance: Women’s Activism in Times of War, by Liliya Vezhevatova – 2 July 2025