Richard Agreed on the frame. It is worth stating it plainly because it answers the question you put to the RCIT better than the RCIT can. The stance you describe of the Ukrainian socialists, for armed resistance to the invasion, including the appeal for Western arms, combined with political opposition to the Zelensky government and its attack on labor rights, is not a halfway house between defensism and defeatism. This is what third-camp politics looks like when the country being invaded is yours. The nation defends itself with arms, whatever the source of those arms, and the class retains its political independence from the government conducting the defense. To demand weapons from NATO is no more a way of extending political confidence in NATO than accepting German transit in 1917 was a way of extending confidence in Ludendorff. The anti-Ukraine armament campists of Porto Alegre and London, pro-Putin, are not anti-imperialists. They are ranking states by their enemies, and the resistance of a nation that is invaded ranks below that of the invader because the invader's enemy is Washington. But I want to push back against one move in your third paragraph, because I think it allows the PMP to enter a space where it doesn’t belong. The armament of Ukraine and the Proletarian Military Policy are two different questions. The first is the right of an invaded people to the material means of resistance. The second is what the socialists in the capitalist states ask of their state's military machine. The comrades who move from supporting Ukraine’s weapons demand to supporting conscription at home, on the theory that a draft introduces the working class to military training and counters the professional officer caste, have transplanted the PMP’s logic onto precisely the terrain where it fails. That argument puts the lever of working-class power in the state’s own recruitment apparatus. The state holds the lever and decides who is conscripted, on what terms, and under whose officers, and it has already demonstrated, since 1973 in the American case, that it will redesign the whole manpower system the moment the ranks become politically unreliable. The PMP’s one non-negotiable premise was a mass conscript army as an established fact of working-class life, something to be fought over because there was no escape. It is not the PMP to say that the bourgeois state must create the conscript mass, and then we will fight it. It’s a petition to the state to build the terrain we have promised to subvert. And the state has read that letter too. And, in the one country in Europe currently at war, we should be honest about the reality of conscription. It is enforced mobilization, street detentions by recruitment officers, mass evasion, and the actual practice of the Ukrainian left on the question of defending the rights of soldiers and draftees against the coercion of the state, not celebrating the draft as a school of the class. You can see the class content of wartime conscription. It is not a military academy for workers. Your Poland 1920 point deserves more than a closing paragraph. Michael's answer to it exposes the method. When asked about the Warsaw march, he responds with a credential, “as an orthodox Trotskyist, I would defend it,” when the awkward fact is that the orthodoxy’s namesake opposed the operation. What follows is not an analysis of the war, its class content, or its consequences—specifically, giving Piłsudski a national rallying cry and strangling the Polish revolution the offensive was meant to deliver. It identifies which side of the speaker's tradition is on offer, as if that settled the question. That is the same operation as the RCIT’s Iran position and the same operation as its everywhere formula of “military but not political support”: the class question dissolves into the question of camps, with the camp identified by its enemy. You are right that the Zimmerwald Left opposed invasion, occupation, and annexation, and the tradition at its best maintained that revolution is not an export commodity delivered on bayonets. Defeatism that cannot say this of an army of a workers' state in 1920, is not defeatism. It is defeatism in the guise of loyalty. -- Tony
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