A laboratory for a Left of resistance and solidarity against status-quo pacifism.
The collective Sinistra per l’Ucraina (“Left for Ukraine”) was formed in Italy in response to the Russian invasion of 24 February 2022, with the aim of expressing solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Today it launches a broader initiative that seeks, first and foremost, to rethink the common ground of a Left that has clearly fractured in the face of Putin’s war, with the goal of building an internationalist Left capable of recognizing imperialisms, authoritarianisms, and fascisms, distancing itself from campism, and affirming a concrete and coherent position alongside all oppressed peoples and the universal right to life and peace. We interviewed the collective about the methods of this new project and the reflections that underpin it.
How did the idea of launching a new “Internationalist Laboratory for a Left of Resistance and Solidarity” come about?
A long introduction is necessary to explain the path that led us to this decision. First of all, the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a shock for many. We were confronted with the invasion of a sovereign country, in the heart of Europe, accompanied by every form of brutality inflicted on the civilian population. Yet, with mass graves just a few kilometers from Kyiv, a large part of the Italian Left — and not only the Italian Left — rushed to speak of NATO provocations, proxy war, the Nazism of Azov, persecuted Russian-speakers. In short, the full arsenal of talking points required to understand and at times justify the invader was rolled out, even going so far as to question the reality of the massacres and mass graves in Bucha, in a perfectly denialist style, accompanied by revisionism of Ukrainian history — one need only think of the Holodomor.
Secondly, we noticed the incredible transversality of these positions: they were not confined to a single party or political area. The phenomenon was far more widespread than we had imagined. From so-called intellectuals and university professors to more militant grassroots circles, hostility toward the Ukrainian people and toward Eastern European peoples more generally was quite widespread. Much has already been written on why this happened, and we do not wish to return to that debate here. What struck us most, however, was the total absence of empathy toward an invaded and oppressed people. In some cases, this attitude even took the form of explicit contempt — something never before seen on the Left.
Finally — and this was perhaps the most disarming aspect — we initially came together very spontaneously as a group of people who shared the same sense of shock and attempted, through social media, to provide accurate information and dismantle the false mythology constructed around the Ukrainian question. We quickly realized, however, that this was not enough; in fact, it did not work at all. An old polemical exchange between Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek around 2013 on the concept of ideology comes to mind. Chomsky argued that the task of the intellectual is to unmask lies: if people knew the facts, they would react; therefore, the struggle must begin with empirical analysis and data. Žižek, by contrast, argued that ideology is not merely false information, but the very way in which we experience reality. As a result, even when we know the facts, we continue to behave in the same way. In this sense, ideology is what we do even when we know something is false, because it is rooted in desire and habit. We mention this because at the beginning we acted in line with Chomsky’s position, only to discover that in this case Žižek was entirely right. Nearly four years into the war against Ukraine, despite how the situation has evolved, positions on the Left have not shifted by a millimeter. We would even go so far as to say that more than an ideological phenomenon, what we are facing is almost a “religious” one. When differences are axiomatic in nature, dialectical debate becomes completely ineffective. Some among us still try to pursue dialogue; others consider it a waste of time and have begun to ask themselves what should be done instead.
From here emerged the reasoning that led us to the concept of a Laboratory, understood as both process and project. We realized that this is an extremely dangerous historical moment for the Left. Today the Left is entirely excluded from any significant process of material transformation on a global scale. But there is more. If the twentieth century witnessed the failure of concrete attempts to realize the socialist utopia, that utopia — however vague and imperfectly realized — was nonetheless present. Today, the internal crisis triggered by the Ukrainian question — whose first signs can already be traced back to the failure to support the so-called Arab Springs in the previous decade — has blown apart even the last common ground on which the Left could, in some sense, still recognize itself: that of shared analysis. In short, the common ground of analysis that seemed more or less stable up until February 2022 consisted of a trajectory that moved from a critical analysis of existing reality, to the representation of an alternative “ought-to-be” in opposition to the present, and finally to its material realization. Since then, even this ground has collapsed. The main consequence is that we now face not merely a political problem, but an enormous cultural one which, if not resolved, could bring about the end of a way of thinking, of a conception of the world, of a left-wing Weltanschauung belonging to the twenty-first century—a disaster of historically unimaginable proportions in light of the social and political developments of recent years.
All of this has led us to approach the issue in laboratory terms. If the problem is cultural before it is political, then we must seek one another out and organize starting from a few simple common denominators, with the awareness that we are not few in number, but truly very scattered, and that we must begin again by building from a small number of basic foundational principles. Resistance and Solidarity are part of this common denominator, as is, at the most fundamental level, the rejection of an abstract and metaphysical pacifism that is absolutely incapable of influencing the evolution of ongoing material processes. Our action, therefore, is directed both toward the cultural front—through the shared reconstruction of a Left worthy of the name—and toward a much more practical one: supporting forms of Resistance and Solidarity with all those peoples who, today and in the future, will increasingly pay with their own bodies for the expansions and territorial reconfigurations of future spheres of influence decided by a very small handful of global powers. In this respect, for us, there is no “campist” distinction: we treat the oppressor in the same way, whether it be the United States, Russia, China, or Israel.
How did the group come into being? What initiatives have you undertaken so far? What kind of response have you received from people who were not originally part of your group?
The collective emerged spontaneously through contacts on social media among people who shared the same sense of outrage and concern. Over time, this informal network became more structured. Today we maintain active communication channels that combine daily information with collective reflection, and participation continues to grow. The response has been excellent, and also quite unprecedented. As we emphasized earlier, the rupture on the level of analysis has had some interesting consequences. If, in the past, starting from the analytical dimension of the critique of the present, differences in the representation and in the realization of the alternative moved along the tracks of greater or lesser radicalism—simplifying to the extreme, from moderate reformism to revolution—and divisions within the Left were predominantly situated along this axis, today the divisions are also of another kind. If we were to examine the signatories of our document, we would find among them both moderates and Catholics, as well as communists, socialists, and anarchists. We believe this happens precisely because the fault line that all of us perceive as the main one is not so much based on the greater or lesser radicalism of the project and of action, but rather on the reading of the contemporary world itself. Whether one is Catholic, social-democratic, anarchist, or communist, it is this different reading that brings us together, and the choice of resistance and solidarity adapts well to this heterogeneity, as was the case, for example, in the resistance in our country, or as it is today in Ukraine, and just as historically practices of solidarity have often united the world of the Left with the Catholic world.
At this moment, expressions of support and offers of help for our path are occurring in a very natural way: our common denominator is very clear. As for initiatives, beyond a certain consistency and fairly careful attention to the use of social media, in March 2025 we organized a “two-day” event in Milan in which, alongside Italian interventions, we hosted remote Ukrainian voices such as Hanna Perekhoda, Yuliya Yurchenko, and Oleksander Kyselov, as well as voices from the small but combative left-wing trade-union movement in the United States, such as John Reimann.
Many of us, moreover, carry out actions of concrete solidarity in Ukraine, ranging from material aid to the evacuation of civilians in war zones, often putting ourselves personally at risk. The example of the Giuditta Rescue Team, today Rescue Team APS, is very significant for us. One of our objectives is to establish relationships with all those organizations that make active solidarity their mission.
What kind of prospects do you see for collaboration with other similar actors at the European or international level?
As far as Ukraine specifically is concerned, we have absolutely no intention of speaking about or for Ukrainian women and men, but rather with Ukrainian women and men in flesh and blood. Our political points of reference are the Ukrainian Left, organizations such as Sotsialnyi Rukh, the journal Commons, Solidarity Collectives, trade-union activists from Zakhyst Pratsi, and so on. We are also in contact with ENSU – the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine. We could certainly do more if we had greater forces within our ranks, but little by little we are growing.
What is also interesting, however, is what is moving outside the Ukrainian question or, at the very least, how the Ukrainian question has been explosive not only in Italy or in Europe, but also within the Left in the rest of the world. One case above all: Kavita Krishnan was for many years a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation (CPI-ML), a radical left party in India. Today she is a signatory of our document and resigned from her party precisely in polemic with it over its “campist” position against Ukraine. We have realized that the split that has run through the entire Left since February 2022 has international dimensions, and it is on that level that it must be confronted. What is particularly striking is that the same problems and the same fractures concern culturally and politically different worlds; they are transcontinental, yet once again the common denominator on which we are working helps to bridge distances and to relegate differences to the background. Contacts with the Middle Eastern Left are also extremely important for us. We do not speak about and do not support only the Palestinian cause: having on our side, and at times among the signatories of our document, figures from the Syrian or Iranian Left as well is fundamental.
In your text you explicitly speak of a “Left that is dead inside” and say that you do not want to attend its funeral. Why, in your view, has it come to this?
Here a real Pandora’s box opens. We would need a long analytical effort to understand why what has happened has happened. There are several components that would need to be analysed in depth; I would say that, to a certain extent, one can attempt a brief list. First of all, the Left today seems incapable of reading the transformation of the world except through twentieth-century lenses. In this sense, perhaps already in 2016 Enzo Traverso had said almost everything in his book Left-Wing Melancholy: after the collapse of actually existing socialism, the Left lost the horizon of the future and of utopia; the memory of the struggles of the twentieth century became melancholic, more commemoration than project. This “nostalgia” did not necessarily have to be regressive: it could have become a critical resource, if it had been used to reread the past without mythologizing it. But this did not happen, and the crisis of the Left stems from having replaced the idea of emancipation with that of the mere management of the existing order.
This way of seeing things, which was already evident in 2016, is exactly what led the Left to pivot toward geopolitical analysis, moreover one that is often erroneous and “melancholically” referred to a world that no longer exists. The Left often places itself in the position of an observer of the present, in the total absence of an autonomous project of transformation: for almost four years now we have been hearing about imminent nuclear disasters and gas bills that are rising. What remains in the background, or is ignored altogether, are the realities of the peoples who are paying the highest price. The extreme position in this sense is “campism”: if we wanted to return to the origins of left-wing thought, campism is that thing which means no longer sitting to the left of the king, as happened in 1789, but instead seeking out new kings—enemies of your own king—in order to sit precisely to their right, even if those kings are even worse than your own. The absence of an autonomous project, a misreading of the present, the concrete unrealizability of the proposed solutions, and an almost total lack of empathy toward peoples oppressed by an oppressor who is not “Western” (if this word still has any meaning…) have led the Left to lose credibility, to be sidelined from the transformation of the world, and essentially to accelerate its own suicide in this century.
We, quite simply, do not want to attend its funeral, because we feel the need to build another Left, one capable of project-making on an international scale: in the historical process currently underway, marked by generalized political and social regression, we believe this to be indispensable. The end of the Left, of a progressive conception of historical becoming, is also the gravestone of democracy.
In your view, how is a truly internationalist project articulated today, and what are its underlying assumptions?
As stated earlier, we start from common denominators, from a reading of the world that we have realized is more widely shared than it might appear, even across different continents. The young Left of the East is indispensable in this sense, and not only in generational terms. There are remarkable intellectual figures born even at the beginning of this millennium, but the importance of these figures also lies in another reason: they have experienced first-hand Russian imperialism and colonialism and actually existing socialism, and subsequently they have experienced first-hand the plundering carried out by capitalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this sense, they are not conditioned in their analysis and in their action by any myth, which instead characterizes the more western part of our continent. We have a great deal to learn from them. At the same time, we would like to deepen dialogue with the world of the Arab Left and with the Asian Left more generally, a world that is deeply embittered by the positions taken by the “Western” Left. Starting from actions in support of Resistance and concrete Solidarity, we aim to prepare a common ground on which to build a shared path and, first and foremost, a cultural project capable of re-actualizing left-wing culture and making it a shared heritage, only later transforming it into a more specifically political project. As far as Latin America is concerned, there are some positions similar to ours, even if in this case there exists a very important problem and a kind of justification with regard to “campist” positions: the imperialist danger in Latin America is hanging directly over their heads, and it is very likely that the United States will return to dealing more decisively with its “backyard.” To all those peoples, our solidarity and our support for any resistance they may undertake go always and without exception.
Have you also reflected on the organizational form you have taken and on what kind of organization the Left would need today?
Certainly a network-based organization, capable of putting subjectivities in different parts of the world into relation with one another. In this sense, technology used intelligently makes contact possible and allows for the overcoming of significant language barriers. For this reason as well, we included a reference to the cybersecurity necessary for our action. As for the type of organization, however, it is necessary to reiterate a concept already expressed. For decades we have been battered by left-wing containers without content, or at least without content capable of realizing anything in the materiality of history. At this moment we do not need a package, an appealing packaging inside which there is something meagre or completely useless. We must concern ourselves with the cultural dimension, with the creation of shared content, and with the networking of international and internationalist solidarity before thinking about containers. We know perfectly well that this is an enormous task, perhaps a utopia, but we must try. Many years ago, on a T-shirt produced by fair-trade commerce, there was a phrase by Emil Cioran: “A life without utopia would be an unbreathable life.” Probably, for all of us, this is the condition in which we find ourselves and the reason why we have decided to move forward.
The interviewer, Emma Catherine Gainsforth, is an editor at MicroMega and a translator. She has written for il manifesto and DinamoPress. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Salerno, where she conducts research on the effects of platform economies on journalism.
The Italian original of this interview was initially published on MicroMega. This English translation, by Daniel Mang, first appeared on the Left Renewal Blog.
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