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the_dunk_tank
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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Explain how one capitalist country moving their de jure border a couple hundred miles at the cost of thousands of lives advances the cause of global communism, because I ain't seeing it.
so they should just allow the hegemonic capitalist empire to spread nazism and install puppet governments in all the nations around them and slowly balkanize and rip their country apart for a 2nd looting?
The US has attempted to throw coups in almost every nation bordering Russia in the last decade. Russia stopped them in Syria, Kazakhstan and Belarus but failed to stop them in Ukraine. The current Ukrainian government are Maidanite fascist putschists and puppets of America. They are being used as proxies to destroy russia, doing ethnic cleansing on the borders to provoke russia. Their state is illegitimate. Their borders don't matter and aren't sacred. Those regions want to leave after being oppressed by the Galician fash for 8 years while the western world looked on and did nothing except perfidiously buy time to give more tanks to nazis
I don't exactly want Russia's current particular brand of ideology to be spread either. I just don't see how you can look at this conflict and think either side are the "good" guys. Or how either result will be better than the other.
This is America's brand of ideology injected into them by force after the collapse of the USSR. The USA is the #1 source of reaction on Earth, spreading it far and wide with their coups and actions. They are the blackest reaction, the source of all fucking evil and the hegemonic empire. They turned Ukraine into a Nazi cesspit. I don't want America's current particular brand of fascism to KEEP SPREADING LIKE IT HAS FOR 80 YEARS
If the Russian ideology and the American ideology are the same, and Ukraine's getting one of them either way, how can you feel like there's a side that's worthy of support?
This is an extremely weird way of seeing geopolitics, as "ideology" spreading. It's very neo-con and American.
It's about destroying the NATO army of the world empire. It's that simple
They're killing Nazis and Americans. That makes them the good guys by definition. DPRK and China support them. How do you look at the situation and see it as "both sides are the same" when all AES are on one side in opposition to all western imperialists on the other?
Isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?
https://chiapas-support.org/2022/03/06/there-will-be-no-scenery-after-the-battle/
Not a nation-state by their own admission, and they don't really do anything anti-imperialist or materially support any other cause
-Kim Jong Un, from one of the all time anti-imperialism MVP AES, the DPRK
You don't have to be a state to be existing socialism.
But the point is that there are socialists who share my view.
Ok, address my other point that they don't really do anything with other socialist nations or involve themselves outside their region. They are entirely disconnected from the people involved here, whereas the nations on Asia and in Europe are not. It's easier to get idealist and both-sides the further away you are from the nazis
I'm far as fuck from Ukraine so why would I pick a side either?
Do you live in a NATO nation or the US? You need to be opposing your own nation's involvement and acting as a fifth column.
Opposing my nation's involvement (which I do) is different than rooting for Russia.
What does that opposition entail then?
The same as yours: I post online.
How so? You're a traitor to NATO and russian bot according to libs then right? You're on our side already if you do that, so just sit back and enjoy the party and crack open a cold Z
People's incorrect interpretation of my position doesn't cause me to adopt that misunderstood position out of spite.
And besides, this is Hexbear, not reddit. I thought (obviously incorrectly) I'd be able to have a take against the grain without being called either a Putin bot or a Nazi, but apparently not, as I've been called a Nazi several times already.
lmao motherfucker you're the one who started out by accusing everyone of uncritical support for Russian capitalism, don't play that "I'm just smal victim asking questions" bullshit
Don't want to be called a nazis, then don't play bothsidism for nazis and don't glorify your ignorance about a conflict that's been waging for nine years now
The position isn't spite, it's revolutionary defeatism.
Read Lenin :)
And yet here you imply that theyre the same. Curious!
Out of curiosity, do you think it was acceptable for leftists to give critical verbal support to Britain and France in 1939 in their fight against Nazi Germany?
I think that was absolutely correct, but other people here are telling me Lenin says the correct position is to always root for your imperial nation to lose no matter what because it will bring about communism.
You aren't seeing it because you haven't been paying attention.
I didn't write the following, but it is a good summary as to why it should be the position of Marxists and leftists in general to critically support Russia especially with respect to the SMO. It was a response to someone else naively saying they just didn't like war in general and this war is just one capitalist state fighting a proxy war against another, similar to what you're saying. While it's understandable to feel that way, given the amount of propaganda you're force-fed, it is not materialist and it is completely failing to see the bigger picture. The person who wrote the response is @SimulatedLiberalism@hexbear.net.
I keep seeing this take cropping up in online Western leftist circle and to be very honest, I always consider this to be the laziest takes on war for people claiming to be on the left.
This is no different than saying that there is no difference for the left when it comes to whether the North or the South wins in the American Civil War because neither of them was socialist. Well, would it surprise you that Marx wrote an entire collection of essays just on analyzing the American Civil War?
To quote Lenin from his Lecture on “The Proletariat and the War”, October 1 (14), 1914:
We can write entire essays about the war in Ukraine, and it is anything but “a war between American and Russian capitalists”.
For one, if this is about Russia expanding its capital, why is the Russian Central Bank doing everything it can (including rate hikes and devaluing the ruble) to undermine Putin’s effort to achieve economic self-sufficiency in the face of unprecedented sanctions, and directly aiding the Western imperialist cause? If anything, it is stifling the expansion of Russian capital.
Such narrative crumbles at the slightest inspection of what is actually going on within the Russian political and economic structures, and points to a more fundamental division that Michael Hudson had pointed out regarding the conflict between finance vs industrial capitalism.
And we’re not even getting to the wider geopolitical implications of the war in Ukraine yet - what does it mean for Western imperialism? The anti-colonial struggles of the Global South? The effects on global financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO) and the efforts to decouple from such oppressive structures (which is what de-dollarization is all about).
We have to ask ourselves, what would a fascist victory in Ukraine mean for left wing movements in Eastern Europe? What could the total subjugation of Russia - a country that has large scale military equipments, raw resources and minerals, and agricultural products - to Western capital mean for the anti-colonial movements in the Global South?
Leftists who refuse to apply a materialist and historical method to understand the world’s events will inevitably fail to see the underlying currents of the global state of events, and as such they cannot predict where the world is heading and will not be able to position themselves to take advantage of the impending crisis.
After all, it was WWI that resulted in an explosion of socialist movements within the imperialist European states, why? Because the socialists back then actually combined theory and practice (what Gramsci referred to as praxis) to take advantage of the predicament.
How do rate hikes signal that Putin is being undermined by the central bank? Don't most countries attempt to raise capital in the short term during wars? "Buy War Bonds!" and all that. If anything, isn't that a signal that capital is being consolidated in the state in order to devote to war effort?
But I want to ask you the other side of a question you raised: what happens to left wing movements in Eastern Europe if Russia completely annexes Ukraine? It creates a migration crisis and a new "threat" on the eastern border. That's not a clear-cut W for the communists like you're making it out to be. We already know how Europeans react to these sorts of things, and it hasn't been good for the communists.
Has anyone in the Kremlin actually expressed interest in annexing the entirety of Ukraine? I've seen this claim thrown around a lot, but I've never seen a source.
Certainly not that I know of, and as I mentioned in my other comment, it seems so obviously counterproductive, I would look at it with an extremely skeptical eye if someone from the Kremlin did say something weird as hell like that.
No, as usual, it's just western projection and lies. Because Russia did attack places in western Ukraine early on, NAFO types take that as undeniable proof that Russia wanted to take all of Ukraine and thought it could do so in a week but failed (like that weeks Saturday morning cartoon villain, Putin shaking his fist but promising he'll be back next week). So it becomes part of the canonical text of The Narrative. It also allows NATO/the west/US to claim they didn't actually lose the war because "Look! See, Russia didn't take over all of Ukraine like we know they wanted to! We won afterall!" When Ukraine's military finally collapses, and Russia's terms don't include making the entirety Ukraine part of Russia proper, that's what everyone in the west will be using as their strongest copium.
No, they have not. It is pure Western projection. Even maximalist predictions only assume Russia would annex everything east of the Dnieper plus Odessa.
Well the other users here tell me that Ukraine is a "Nazi junta" and Putin has said his goal is to de-nazify Ukraine, so how else could he accomplish that goal? Even if it's just some temporary regime, all the Nazis (which again, I've been assured Ukraine is like 90% Nazis) would flee west, leading to the same problematic outcomes.
You can regime change without total annexation
I'm not as versed in the economic nuances as the person I quoted above, but from what I do understand, I think your confusion comes from conflating finance capitalism with industrial capitalism. Finance capitalism in Russia has more interests tied to western interests. All the sanctions hurt them, though the sanctions did not hurt the industrial capitalists nearly as much because Russia still has great productive capacity (unlike the US whose foreign policy is almost completely ruled by finance capital now). It is the productive capacity that is being consolidated in Russia under the Russian government, which has been nationalizing a lot of industry - something we commies tend to see as a good thing. I'm sure others with a better understanding of the economics could give you a more precise/accurate answer. Reading some more Michael Hudson would do us both some good. Still, it does not undermine the fact that a victory for Russia would be beneficial for everyone who is not a NATO country, or an aspiring one, it would be beneficial to the global working class.
It doesn't create a new threat. The threat has been existing for a while which is why the SMO became necessary. This will be a problem going forward, but it already was, and would have been worse had Russia done nothing as NATO continued to train Nazi paramilitary groups for that express purpose, continue to spread deeply racist Russophobic propaganda among the populace, crush any whiff of dissent and/or leftist, and put military bases and Nukes within a distance that Moscow couldn't take them down before they reached the capital city.
At least this way, the Russians living in Eastern and Southern Ukraine won't be ethnically cleansed, but instead protected and become part of the Russian Federation, as they overwhelmingly want to do. This problem you're describing about terrorism happening won't only be directed towards Russia, either. When the war is inevitably lost by Ukraine, there will be a lot of Nazis who are going to justifiably blame the west and we will be looking at some hideous terror actions against western Europeans.
As for leftist movements in Eastern Europe, it can't be much worse than it is now, where they are all completely repressed, made illegal, and in Ukraine, shot as traitors. I highly doubt Russia is going to "completely annex Ukraine" because anything they might gain from annexing it in its entirety is easily outweighed by the many difficulties of doing so. I think as far as territory under Russian control, Russia will be happy with Crimea, the current contested Oblasts and perhaps a bit more where there is actual support for Russia by the Ukrainians living there. However, that doesn't mean Russia wouldn't demand regime change in Ukraine, making sure that a government is installed that is not frothingly hostile to them, will not pursue NATO membership under any circumstances, and will not be pro-west in general. In such a scenario, I don't see any reason why leftist parties that are now illegal will not be able to begin to operate again, especially seeing as leftist parties tend not to be pro-western for very obvious reasons. The government Russia is trying to (and succeeding at) taking down is extremely fascist and there is literally no hope for anything even the tiniest bit leftwing to gain any sort of foothold there. It's impossible to predict how things like that will percolate out of this war, but to think that the status quo, or the pre-war situation in Ukraine was better for leftists is just not knowing anything about the recent history of the region.
Russia being ultimately victorious would indeed be good for leftist projects in that region. But it is nothing compared to how much better it would be for leftist projects in the rest of the world. It is in the rest of the Global South where hope can truly flourish and I'm totally fucking here for it. That's a whole other effort post, but also hopefully it's even more obvious why that's the case.
I'm incredibly unconvinced. In Ukraine in particular all the communist parties had their bases in Luhansk and Donetsk before they were banned. There won't be any leftism left in a partitioned Ukraine. And as you said, none of this goes well for the rest of Europe either.
As for the global south, what's the outcome? De-dollarization? Already happening. American hegemony viewed as less of a threat due to losing a proxy war? As I said in another comment, America has been losing wars, proxy and otherwise, for over half a century. And this war in particular has been a very weak commitment by historical precedent.
I just don't see how Russia (or Ukraine) gaining any territory or concessions from this war helps anybody beyond what's already happened. It's a waste of lives and money that could be more directly helping people. I'm not cheering for anybody here.
The de-dollarization is happening because of the war. America signaled to the globe that holding usd reserves is unsafe as they can seize those funds on a whim, as they did with Afghanistan and now Russia. Furthermore, Russia's resilience to economic sanctions is an important signal to the rest of the world that it can be done, and you have a network of countries unwilling to join the western sanctions regime. That network is growing. Were trending to a multipolar world, and not one led by russia, but chiefly by china
The global south benefits from multipolarity. Not just as a counterweight to us military hegemony, but economic sanctions regimes as well. It's undeniable that the global south benefited when the ussr was still around, that would certainly be the case in a world where a Chinese led bloc is the other pole
https://mronline.org/2022/05/07/russia-and-the-ukraine-crisis-the-eurasian-project-in-conflict-with-the-triad-imperialist-policies/
ProxyTheAwesome and Frank already covered all the points I have and I can't think of anything to add.
Multipolarity