I started by explaining the purpose of my trip to Ukraine. I came to express my solidarity with Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion and my political support for the progressive movements in Ukraine. I also came to do interviews and write articles that would amplify the voices of Ukraine’s left to the U.S. left, which is divided on Ukraine between campists [1] who rationalize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as self-defense against NATO expansion and internationalists who oppose Russia’s war of aggression as a violent transgression of international law and Ukraine’s right to national self-determination. Ukrainians are absent from campist narratives about Ukraine. They characterize the war as a NATO proxy war with Russia, as if Ukrainians are acting as pawns of NATO rather than acting for themselves to defending their social and national rights.
I also explained that I was visiting Ukraine and other countries in Europe to make connections between American and European Green parties. The American Green Party, uniquely among the Green parties of the world, has been divided on solidarity with Ukraine. I wanted to explain that the campist position of our presidential candidate, Jill Stein, is not accepted by many of us in the Green Party of the U.S. I also wanted to explain that the Democrats are not in any way allies to green politics given their policies on climate, economic inequality, immigrant rights, imperialist wars, and democracy itself. I had planned months before to make these connections because the Greens in Europe and the U.S. have been taking at each other through the media instead of to each other for several years. I was afraid something would happen like what had happened a week before my talk in Kyiv.
Five days before the U.S. presidential election, the European Green Party sent out an open letter calling on Jill Stein to drop out and endorse Kamala Harris. The letter also criticized “the divergent values and policies of themselves and Jill Stein’s US Green Party. There is no link between the two, as the US Greens are no longer a member of the global organisation of Green parties. In part this fissure resulted from their relationship with parties with authoritarian leaders, and serious policy differences on key issues including Russia’s full scale assault on Ukraine.” [2] I thought the call to endorse was wrong, but that their criticism of the international policies of the U.S. Greens had merit, even if many U.S. Greens disagree with those international policies.
The Green Party of the U.S. responded the same day by saying that the European Greens did not appreciate how opposed to green political perspectives that the Democratic Party is, which I thought was a good point. But the U.S. Green response also told the European Greens that they did not understand how NATO “helped provoke the current proxy war in Ukraine.” That part of the response infuriated many European Greens I would speak to on this trip. They would tell me that they regarded this statement as extremely arrogant and ignorant, that it simply repeated Putin’s rationale for his war of aggression and did not comprehend the threat to European and world security of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As several European Greens reminded me, Russia’s invasion was the biggest act of aggression in Europe since Hitler and Stalin invaded and divided up Poland between them in 1939 soon after they had made their Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with each other.
That introduction led into my take on how Trump won the U.S. presidential election, which had happened four days earlier. Everybody in Ukraine wanted to know what Trump’s election it might mean for Ukraine. I explained that the vote showed that Trump won not because he received many more votes that he did in 2020, but because Harris lost nearly 10 million votes that Biden had received in 2020. I suggested that this result was because Harris ran to the right, trying to get moderate Republican votes and losing enough of the Democratic base she was taking for granted to lose the election. With polls showing the economy was the top issue for voters, I suggested that had Harris run on a progressive populist economic agenda, she would have won the election. But I also said that Democratic Party, controlled by superrich donors and affluent professionals who are its politicians and operatives, would never support such a redistributive economic program because they don’t want to pay the progressive taxes required. That has been true for the Democrats since the neoliberal turn they took in the mid 1970s. I also noted that Harris further depressed her vote by refusing to condition further arms to Israel on stopping its genocidal slaughter in Gaza, which is U.S. law and which the polls showed was supported by a majority of Americans.
I then discussed the role of the U.S. left in the election. Most of the progressive left campaigned for the corporate neoliberals of the Democratic Party, for Harris and the party’s down ballot candidates, as most U.S. progressives have been doing for decades. I explained my critical support and vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein as more a vote for an independent progressive alternative to the neoliberal Democrats and the neofascist Republicans than as a vote for Stein as a candidate. While Stein was good on opposing Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, she was terrible in blaming Russia’s genocial war in Ukraine on NATO expansion and calling for an end to U.S arms for Ukraine and negotiations, as if Russia would stop its attempt to recolonize of Ukraine if Ukraine was disarmed and could not resist the Russia invasion. I was also critical of messaging from the Stein campaign that did not recognize that neofascist Trump was a greater danger than neoliberal Harris. I said that was like saying it makes no difference for Ukrainians whether they are living under Ukraine’s neoliberal democracy or Russia’s neofascist autocracy. I also noted that the other independent left candidates with any modicum of support — Cornel West and Claudia De la Cruz of the Party for Socialism and Liberation — had the same campist position on Ukraine as Stein. I said it was a shame that the U.S. left had not put up an internationalist candidate.
I tried to explain why the U.S. far left is divided on Ukraine between campists and internationalists. Among the broad center and left in the U.S. political spectrum, polling shows that support for Ukraine is overwhelming. It is from the Republican hard right, which is perhaps a third of the population, as well as the campist wing of the far left, which is tiny compared to the hard right, where opposition to Ukraine comes from. But the opposition to Ukraine solidarity within the far left is substantial, dividing the largest groups like the Green Party and Democratic Socialists of America down the middle. I said that the U.S. left, like most Americans, is very insular and not well-informed on foreign affairs. They are vulnerable conspiracist campist narratives that are American centric, attributing popular movements for freedom, equality, and democracy in authoritarian anti-Western states to the manipulations of western covert action rather than the self-organized actions of oppressed peoples. In this way, they are American chauvinists despite their anti-imperialist pretensions. This insularity and ignorance makes many activists vulnerable to Kremlin propaganda, which is ubiquitous from secondhand sources online that brand themselves as progressive outlets. A contributing factor this problem is that absence of a strong left to educate activists on how to understand capitalism as a system, do a class analysis of power structures, and advance a system change agenda. In the absence of such left perspectives, many activists succumb to conspiratorial narratives that explain social problems as the evil doings of secretive elites rather than problems rooted in the capitalist system itself. Thus, in the case of Ukraine, many activists on the U.S. left accept conspiracist Kremlin narratives about the “Anglo-Saxons” leading the “Collective West” into a NATO proxy war on Russia without having ever talked to or read the writings of the democratic left in Ukraine.
I then explained why I think the U.S. left could fill the huge political vacuum on the progressive side of the U.S political spectrum that the neoliberal Democrats as well as the neofascist Republicans have left. The Stein campaign doubled the vote that my 2020 campaign received with about 800,000 votes compared to my 400,000 votes. I attributed that to the larger dynamics of the two races. In 2020, Trump was the issue and the pressure for a lesser evil vote for Biden to stop Trump was the dominant concern for progressive voters. In 2024, Israel’s genocide in Gaza was a central concern for many progressive voters and “Genocide Joe” and “Killer Kamala” were hard to sell as the lesser evil, making a Stein a protest vote against the genocide. That protest vote was too small to have much impact on U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine going forward. But, I argued, it was still worth it for the Green Party to run presidential candidates for three reasons: (1) it helped the Green Party obtain or retain state ballot lines in many states, (2) it put the Green Party policy agenda before the public, and (3) it recruited new activists to the Green Party.
However, I argued, the Green Party cannot expect to have much impact on the national policy debate because the winner-take-all election system puts the Green Party in the position of potential spoiler, which motivates many progressives who prefer the Green policy platform to vote for the Democrats as the lesser-evil that defeat the far-right Republicans. The Green campaigns were drowned in the media by the money raised by the capitalist parties, with the Greens raising a few million while the Democrats and Republican campaigns spent a few billion each. The commercial media follows the money. It does not cover a campaign being outspent a thousand to one.
I said the Greens will not have leverage on national policy and serious coverage from the commercial media until it has a caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. Then the Democrats will have to give something to get something from the Green on legislation. But the Green Party will not elect people to the House until it builds a bigger base of strong local parties that elect thousands of Greens to local office and, on that foundation of organization and public legitimacy, begins electing Greens to state houses and the U.S. House. I noted that the Greens and other good government reformers have made a lot of progress over the last two decades in instituting ranked choice voting at the local level and in a couple of states, which eliminates the spoiler problem for the Greens. In some local jurisdictions, ranked choice voting in multi-member district has been instituted, which creates proportional representation in legislative bodies, a reform that will give Greens their fair and proportional share of representation and power in government.
Despite the winner-take-all system, the U.S. had a long history of independent left parties having enormous influence on the national debate by electing members to local, state, and congressional offices. The Libery, then Free Soil, and then Republican parties put the question of slavery up for debate. After the civil war, the farmer-labor populist Greenback Labor and People’s parties put the questions of civil rights, economic inequalities, monopolies, and public utilities at the center of national debate in the Gilded Age. The Socialist Party put fair labor conditions, social security, and public enterprise into the national debate. That history of significant independent left politics was interrupted in 1936 when the Communists’ Popular Front policy led the left and labor into the Democrats’ New Deal coalition, from which a mass-based independent left with its own identity, analysis, program, and party has yet to re-emerge.
Building that party, I argued, is the historic task now before the U.S. left. A mass party of the working class, self-funded and democratically controlled by its dues-paying members, was the invention of the left in the latter half of the 19th century. It was how the left fought for and won the franchise and then used it to compete in elections with the top-down, elite-funded old parties of the landed and business elites. It is what the Green Party should become now instead of imitating the memberless party model of the Democrats and Republicans where informal elites tied to money and party infrastructures control the parties and the rank-and-file supporters only get to vote in primaries among candidates pre-selected by the moneyed and insider elites. The Green Party, or another left party if the Green Party cannot reform itself, needs to be democratic, socialist, feminist, ecological, and internationalist, promoting solidarity from below among peoples, not states.
I concluded by thanking Sotsialnyi Rukh for their writings and interviews that have been very helpful to the internationalist left in the U.S. Sotsialnyi Rukh has put a priority on communicating to the left in the West and the Global South because they believe the problems of exploitation, ecological destruction, and war can only be solved by an international socialist movement. I told them that their statements against Israel’s aggression in Gaza and of solidarity with Palestinian national liberation were particularly helpful to internationalists in the U.S. in the last year because they demonstrated that the campist narrative that puts Israel and Ukraine in the same western imperialist camp and Russia and Palestine in the same anti-imperialist camp is just false. I told Sotsialnyi Rukh that their writings and interviews have set a standard of empirical investigation and systemic analysis that is a cut above of most U.S. leftist commentary and one the U.S. left should emulate. The U.S. left should also emulate the working relationships that Sotsialnyi Rukh has established with trade unions, student unions, feminists, and environmentalists and the educational programs it conducts for their members and the public. So that is why I am here, I concluded, to share what you are saying and doing back in the US.
In the discussion after my presentation, most of the comments were about Trump’s election. The Ukrainian leftists were very worried that Trump would cut off support and encourage Putin to have his way with Ukraine. They ridiculed Ukrainian political leaders like President Zelensky, former president Petro Poroshenko, and Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko who had begun flattering Trump moth hope that he would give stronger support to Ukraine than Biden had with his “escalation management” self-deterrence. The Ukrainian leftists agreed that Biden had only half-supported Ukraine, but thought that the Ukrainian political elites who were counting on Trump for stronger support were delusional wishful thinkers.
The Ukrainian leftists were mixed about my vote for Stein and the Green Party. Some said they understood that it was the only vote against genocide in Gaza even if Stein’s position on Ukraine was terrible. But many agreed that a vote for Stein was a vote for genocide in Ukraine as much as a vote for Harris was a vote for genocide in Gaza. Vladyslav Starobubtsev said he did not understand how I could vote for a pro-Russian imperialist like Stein. Stein “is trying to get us killed” he said bluntly. I said it was not her intention to get them killed, although I had to grant that her call for cutting off arms to Ukraine could get them killed.
I take Vladyslav’s criticism of my vote seriously. He is a Sotsialnyi Rukh member who has made many appeals to the international left to support Ukraine. [4] He is also a historian of the central role of that socialist currents played in the Ukraine’s movement for independence in the 19th and and early 20th centuries. [5] The historical perspectives of Ukrainians like Vladyslav is something we should understand. He has argued that the self-organization of Ukrainians in the current war to resist the Russian invasion and the mutual aid to fill in the gaps in social services that the neoliberal Ukrainian state is not providing has “revolutionized” politics in Ukraine by empowering ordinary people, which bodes well for post-war reconstruction. [6] Whether it turns out that way is significantly contingent on what the international left does to support the Ukraine and the Ukrainian left in this war.
1. Dan La Botz, “Internationalism, Anti-Imperialism, and the Origins of Campism,” New Politics, Winter 2022, https://newpol.org/issue_post/internationalism-anti-imperialism-and-the-origins-of-campism/.
2. European Greens, “US elections: European Greens call for Jill Stein to step down,” November 1, 2024, https://europeangreens.eu/news/us-elections-european-greens-call-for-jill-stein-to-step-down/.
3. Green Party US, “Green Party of the United States responds to European Greens,” November 1, 2024, https://www.gp.org/gpus_responds_to_european_greens.
4. Bill Fletcher interviews Vladyslav Starodubtsev, “ One Ukrainian Democratic Socialist’s Opinion on the War,” Real News Network, September 20, 2022, https://therealnews.com/one-ukrainian-democratic-socialists-opinion-on-the-war; Vladyslav Starodubtsev, “Africa and the War in Ukraine: Russian Money, Wagner Group, and Grassroots Solidarity,” Commons, May 31, 2023, https://commons.com.ua/en/afrika-rosijskij-imperializm-ta-vijna-v-ukrayini/.
5. Vladyslav Starodubtsev, “The Progressive Legacy of the Ukrainian People’s Republic,” Friedrich Ebert Siftung, July 17, 2024, link in https://vladyslavstarodubtsev.substack.com/p/vladyslav-starodubtsev-publications.
6. Federico Fuentes interviews Vladyslav Starodubtsev, “The war has revolutionized politicsl in Ukraine,” Green Left, September 5, 2022, https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/war-has-revolutionised-politics-ukraine.
