IN RELATION to the crisis enacted out on the territory of Ukraine there are several ideas that form the basis of the position adopted by what we might call the “internationalist left.”

“Internationalist” in this context defines the left that elevates the interests of the working class as a whole over any spurious “national interest” shared with our rulers.

The foundation is opposition to the continued existence and global or regional dominance of military blocs. Where once the innocent deemed this a possibility — grounded in the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact which had united the socialist countries of Europe and thus ceased to exist when socialism was dismantled — it has now vanished along with illusions about an end to the history of class struggle.

The practical expression of working-class internationalism today is the demand for an end to the expansion of Nato as a precursor to its dissolution. To this aim we must add to our condemnation of Putin’s invasion that not only is it a crime but a mistake that has brought about the opposite of what he pretends is his aim.

When, last week, the Ukrainian President Zelensky abandoned the demand that Ukraine join Nato he at once changed the politics around the war which ensued when Russia invaded.

Firstly, this immediately gave greater substance to the negotiations which have continued between the combatant parties ever since the invasion started.

In doing so he validated the position taken by the the principled internationalist left in Britain, best expressed by the Stop the War Coalition, that the expansion of Nato was and is a principal cause of the tensions which have led to war.

It threw into immediate confusion the “moving right” coalition of former leftists whose demands constitute an appeal to prolong the war.

So when, at the point at which Zelensky takes Nato membership off the table and opens the way for a negotiated settlement, the self-appointed leader of Britain’s belligerent left, Paul Mason, backs Western governments sending arms and encourages international volunteers to join Ukraine’s military. All this as part of a “solidarity” package including debt relief and aid.

In a nod to the complex class politics of Ukraine, Mason says this “does not mean uncritically supporting the Zelensky government, or its privatisation strategy, or its alliances with Ukrainian oligarchs, or its anti-democratic laws. It means turning the resistance into a movement for social justice in the new Ukraine.”

How this might be facilitated when, just a few days later, Zelensky bans all opposition and leftist parties excluding only the socialist and communist parties which were banned several years ago remains obscure.

Instead he proposes passive resistance, strikes, sabotage of the occupation forces, and if possible, armed resistance.

This he argues is because: “It’s entirely possible that a capitalist and democratic Ukraine can mobilise its people in a resistance war to paralyse Putin’s armies, but the idea of a transformative social resistance is out there.”

Quite which forces might predominate in today’s Ukraine — where the state’s coercive apparatus, its police, secret police and military is reinforced by neonazi and right nationalist armed formations that have been conducting a decade-long armed assault on the Eastern oblasts of Ukraine’s national territory is a moot point. Today an unsavoury collection of repurposed jihadis, deserting British soldiers, former Nato special forces and assorted mercenaries are being assembled as an anti-Putin auxiliary.

Take account of what these people report of their first encounter with the Russian military.

Weaned on a diet of romanticised Hollywood fictions in which pastoral nomads armed with AK47s are defeated by well-equipped elite formations — buttressed only by total air superiority, deep logistical support, advanced communications and swift medical evacuation — these wannabe Rambos instead encounter a trained military force, equipped with armour, superior communications and effective air support. Instead of risking scattered small arms fire and an occasional explosive device improvised by villagers they confront a modern military force. Where these foreign legionnaires are able to escape the vigilance of their Nato and Ukrainian military minders they are deserting in droves.

A multimissile strike on their assembly point close to the Polish border provided an object lesson in 21st-century warfare. It is not for amateurs. And as for those deluded leftwingers who might be recruited to Paul Mason’s 21st-century centuria, they should understand that armed service in the present day Ukrainian state is analogous to the Spanish civil war only up to a point.

A small contingent of Irish Blueshirts were induced to fight along side Franco’s fascist forces. Mussolini’s legions and the Luftwaffe but such was their indiscipline and incompetence that they were quickly repatriated.

Rather than Mason’s call to armed resistance being answered by a new International Brigade enlistment in this cause is attractive principally to an international alliance of the foolish and fascist.

If they were to see active service it may well be alongside the Nazi-tattooed auxiliaries of the Azov Battalion. Indeed, it is reported that the puffed up “world’s top sniper” Oliver Lavigne-Ortiz, who gained his reputation in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, survived a short 25 minutes when deployed in Mariupol.

Mason’s idea of solidarity is support for Nato’s sanctions on the people of Russia and Belarus “designed to paralyse the state’s ability to make war, and to deter Putin from continuing the occupation.”

The consequence of this sanctions regime — backed only by an “international community” that excludes the vast bulk of the Africa, Asia and Latin America — is that Russia and China now team up with a large part of the global South to institute a new unit of international exchange which will deny the dollar its hegemonic position in world trade.

A second consequence is that Russians, including those fleeing Putin’s security state, cannot access their Paypal accounts or use their credit cards unless, that is, they have switched to China’s rival and vastly popular service providers.

But our ruling class and their servants and scribes, are not the audience to which Mason directs his polemic.

Where these people admit the currency of the term “imperialist” and its connotations they do not take alarm. Mason’s target audience is rather the left that was radicalised by a succession of imperialist wars — some carried out under the banner of Nato and others not so caparisoned.

The effect of his intervention is to simplify the inter-imperialist character of the Ukraine conflict so as to denature Western imperialism and beautify its military instruments.

Thus he presents the clashes taking place over the ground of Ukraine as a “systemic conflict” between an alliance of “two allied imperialist capitalist dictatorships” and the “liberal-democratic West.”

There is a real debate about the character of China’s mode of production but only those irredeemably ignorant of Marxist analytical categories would categorise it as the same as Putin’s state of captive kleptomaniac capitalist oligarchs.

For Mason “Western political and economic elites express an active preference for, and attachment to, the rule of law, science, democratic process and universal human rights.”

In one bound our superhero conjoins his paean of praise for our ruling class with an insistence that there can be “no truce in the class war.” We can maintain “our opposition to spending cuts, repressive laws, racist immigration and refugee regimes, and any attempt to use the situation to impose restrictions on civil liberties.”

Thus, while we are permitted to prosecute the class war against our law-abiding, scientific-minded, democracy-loving ruling class with their attachment to universal human rights, Mason offers us a new front in the class struggle.

We can redesign Nato as a defensive-only alliance, with clear limits to “out of area” operations, and democratise the professional, right-wing dominated security and military machines of the West.”

To this “Another Nato is possible” refrain Mason posits a “Another European Union is possible” in which our continent becomes “self sufficient in food, energy and military technology by 2027.”

Perhaps your present writer fails to understand these formulae “from a Marxist point viewpoint” but does this not seem a rather short interval in which we, the people of the western alliance, must persuade the bourgeois states in which we live to abandon their predatory wars, reorientate their police, military and intelligence organisations to serve the people unburdened by misogyny, systematic racism, their morbid obsession with trade unions and homophobia?

Is it not rather a tall order to constrain — in such a narrow time frame — our homegrown oligarchs, enhance worker protection and union rights, take banks and public services into public ownership, institute workers control of industry and tame Big Pharma?

Is it not a big ask to achieve a simultaneous agreement on all these things across the member states of the EU while simultaneously ensuring that non-EU members of Nato like the US and Canada carry out parallel actions so as to democratise military decision taking.

In Mason’s idealised world “strategic autonomy” for Europe entails a “massive, debt-funded and state led-investment programme, with the distributional impacts of rearmament and de-carbonisation shifted on to the rich.”

Let us, for a moment, leave aside what “rearmament” means at this present conjuncture when the war is already providing the rationale for massive arms expenditure the burden of which is unlikely to fall on the rich.

Discount how, in a period in which energy prices are doubling and tripling for working people, the costs of “decarbonisation” might be paid by the energy monopoly beneficiaries of this price gouging and profit taking.

Instead, reflect on the resistance the actually-existing capitalist class in the states of Nato and the EU would mount to a movement which might tried to implement such a programme.

In fact, just ask someone who tried to do just some of this in just one country. We cannot ask Salvador Allende because he is dead. Patrice Lumumba is similarly unable to give is his views. Some agency or another made sure Olaf Palme’s notions of neutrality would not endure.

Just ask Jeremy Corbyn what happens when you challenge the power and profits of the rich.

Mason commenced his piece with an unwise venture in Althusser and Foucault. Anyone more familiar with the focus in French Marxism on the mechanisms of ideological reproduction in capitalist society might subject their own journey from Corbynista to his present incarnation as a shrill for Nato with rather more circumspection.

To buttress his imaginary construction of working-class internationalism as “pro-Putin” and “neoStalinist” Mason, quotes the dissident communist EP Thompson on the distinction in the Marxist tradition between theology and active reason.

Mason unconsciously directs us again to EP Thompson who, in his 1977 criticism of Lesek Kolakowski’s revisionism, paints a portrait of the type Mason exemplifies:

“You have assumed that the loudest, the most strident, the most modish or the most ‘reputable’ voices are those that are most significant. You were perhaps unaware of the great ‘law of development’ of intellectual life in the West, in this stage of competitive consumer society, that cultural modes must change, like sartorial fashions, with dizzy speed from one year to the next; that in ideas as in suburban villas it is style and self-exhibition and not structure that determines acceptance and that, moreover, very many intellectual workers — even men and women whose work is to teach youth, to write, to present television — literally do not remember positions which they adopted ardently and with vituperation against all opponents two or three years before.”

Nick Wright blogs at 21century manifesto.