this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
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You dummy, if both sides have a neo-nazi problem, then the side that has neo-nazi as their government AND as the military branch (AZOV) is the much, much more serious problem to worry about. Especially if that neo-nazi government and military is being aided by western powers.
Oh, aided by western powers who also aid "Israel" in their genocidal quest of eradicating Palestine? Zelensky also said he wants Ukraine to be the "Israel" of Europe btw.
So certain strands of campist so-called anti-imperialist discourse have actually reached the point of stooping as low as using NATO's support for the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime to whitewash putinist as "the lesser evil". Fascinating. You fantasize yourself an ML while parotting anti-intellectual bullshit (no, the Ukrainian government is not ...neonazi, words do have actual fucking meanings) while swallowing whole the Rusich and other Wagner nazis.
Yup, I am a dummy. I should have fucked off from this stupid thread earlier. Cheerio.
hahaha holy fuck. Yea do fuck off and don't forget to pick up your mask that you dropped.
Sure buddy. But I never wore a mask. It's always nice however to see the fake "Marxist Leninist" mask slip off of confident campists like you to reveal the social chauvinism that Lenin spent so much energy demolishing. 100 years ago your social chaunivistic ilk was voting to "critically support" the Kaiser's meatgrinder while making up excuses about the British and French imperialists. Only they at least fantasized social democracy while you only have Wagner's boots to lick.
Yeah I believe you.
Tell me, what is the correct ML position then?
Also campism is a meaningless word. I don't support Russia uncritically but I do support it for its anti-imperialist role. If anything it seems like "campism" fits you pretty well, no?
Russia has no anti-imperialist role. Russian capital exports influence wherever it can, it's just a smaller player than the US/NATO bloc. Or are you going to make the case that Imperial Germany also had an anti-imperialist role?
The correct Leninist position is revolutionary fucking defeatism. The Americans should lose in Iran, Israel should lose in the Levant, France should lose in the Sahel, Russia should lose in Ukraine. I mean fuck, I'm no dengist, but nobody can deny that the Chinese are playing this game beautifully for fucks sake, keep feeding the fuckers rope to hang themselves.
The correct Leninist perspective should be a swift end to the war, which means Ukraine surrenders as soon as possible. Russia is not an imperialist power. It has a strong nationalist bourgeoisie, but no ability to export capital on the global stage in any real capacity. It's stuck at the phase of monopoly national capitalism, which results in contradictions sharpening within Russia as they cannot export those contradictions to the global south.
Russia has legitimate security interests in not wanting NATO dogs at their doorstep with missiles pointed straight at them. Ukraine had the ability to make peace long ago and refuse to be a part of an escalating imperialist encirclement of Russia, but it chose to be the Israel of Europe (minus the settler-colonialism).
Not an imperialist power and without the ability to export capital? Tell that to Bashir's regime in Sudan. Or to the Georgians, the Armenians etc.
A Ukrainian defeat just means entrenchment of a frozen conflict like one of the many Russia has imposed on its borders for decades, effectively carving for its oligarchy a competition free sphere, condemning the Russian periphery to misery while feeding the Moscow and Petersburg elite. Russian imperialism/colonialism since the time of Peter the Great has not been focused in the south. Its target has always been the east and north and as much of the more industrialized west it can subjugate. That it's current borders already encompass much of that sphere should not be allowed to hide that Russia is a settler colonial state for anything basically east of the Urals
The Russian imperialism of the Tsar was abolished by the Soviet Union. It didn't magically reappear when the Soviet Union dissolved. What the west wants most out of this war is a weakened Russia by which means imperialists can plunder its economy and give imperialism a new lease on life. Russia has an utterly paltry sum of finance capital and is largely propped up by export of commodities like oil and gas. They cannot export the contradictions to the global south, even if they wanted to.
A Ukrainian victory would lead the road straight to continued encirclement of Russia and the potential for imperialists to retake the control they lost in the late 90s with the rise of Russia's nationalist bourgeoisie, and cement Ukraine's status as a European Israel. It would further NATO leverage and entrench western hegemonic imperialism.
Repeating the assertion doesn't make it true. I gave you my economic reasoning why Russia is a smaller imperialist and why its imperialism is not principally directed southwards. You say "paltry" but that's not supported by the facts. At the most vulgar level I can bring up the often-made comparison with the economy of Italy. But compared to Italy, Russia also has military assets and nuclear weapons. Russian capital dominates specific dependent countries and tries to insert itself where it can, even in the global south. The case of Sudanese mines and Russian implication with Bashir is not a joke. It is NOT at the same caliber as the US and NATO but it IS a smaller imperialist power vying for a slice of the pie.
So, terms like "encirclement" are not interesting in this context. Imperial (and later nazi) Germany argued the same.
A Ukrainian victory would likely devastate the putinist oligarchy in Russia. It would also potentially strengthen the Europeans in their nascent Imperial antagonism with the US. The Americans were stupid enough to get involved in Ukraine when they would be much better served coopting Russia to encircle China.
Russia has only 6 of the top 500 companies in the world. It physically cannot compete in the realm of imperialism due to being largely industrial and not at all financialized. You are arguing for an expansion of NATO and a strengthening of the unquestioned imperialist hegemony. This is not anti-intellectualism, it's a principled ML stance.
How many of the 500 companies does Sri Lanka have? I have consistently labelled Russia a smaller imperialist. You have now given some quantification of how much smaller. The claim that Russia is not financialized is bizarre for a country that actually exports capital to places like Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, etc. Again, it's not Wall Street. It's weaker, smaller. But it's ...doing its best.
And, accusing me for arguing for NATO expansion is bringing us back to the dishonest rhetoric devices of EmmiLee, trying to paint my position as something it isn't. Just when I thought we were having a conversation.
If anything NATO already expanded in Scandinavia BECAUSE of Putinist imperialist adventurism. You assume the outcome and work backwards towards a line. That's not principled anti-imperialism, that's ... campism.
The absurdly tiny level of capital export in the case of Russia is critically important for understanding how it exists within a global system of imperialism. Damn right it's trying to become an imperialist power, but it physically cannot, and the proof of this is in how little finance capital they actually contain. They are best described, at most, as a regional power that cannot run its economy based on capital export. Imperialism is not any export of capital, it's the dominance of finance capital.
The reason this circles back to arguing for NATO expansion is because, in your misidentified label of Russia as a "smaller imperialist" and therefore placing the correct stance as opposition to Russia and support for Ukraine, this is an unquestionably pro-NATO stance, achieving NATO's aims of weakening Russia. A weakened Russia is not going to weaken the nationalist control of Russia, it will only service the imperialist encirclement.
The actual path to socialism for Russia is not through balkanization. It's through worker organizing and a continued sharpening of contradictions within an encircled nationalist controlled economy. They cannot export their contradictions to the global south (itself not a term for the literal south but instead the systemically underdeveloped nations), and so contradictions sharpen domestically, bringing more to socialism.
Small is not the same as absurdly tiny. We are not talking about Andorra or Cyprus, we are talking about Russia. A regional power is a power like Turkey. And it's very clear that Russia is more than that. Turkey does not have satellite states (ok, fine, the TRNC), the way Russia dominates eg Belarus or the way it threw around its weight in the former Soviet sphere until they shot their own foot due to putinist adventurism. Russian finance capital will very well resume this role the moment the current "disagreements" between them and the Western imperialists get settled.
I don't make any grand claims to know what the path to socialism is. But to bring back my Imperial Germany analogy, I don't see why the encirclement of one imperialist by another should force any socialist's allegiance, it's just not normative.
Russia has far more hard power than most regional powers, but it has practically no finance capital. Your continued vulgarization of imperialism is why you continue to conflate Russian regional influence with the total international domination of the west.
At what point did "total international domination" become the threshold for imperialism?
Imperialist economies are oriented around imperialism itself as the foundation of the economy. Russia materially has a drive to become imperialist, but through encirclement cannot become so. This is why contradictions sharpen domestically, rather than being exported. This is why Russian finance capital is so small, even if it is at a monopoly nationalist stage, it has no room to grow. The US Empire and the west form an imperial hegemony that is weakening day by day, while Russia still cannot expand. Russia is accelerating the decline in imperialism.
But you are factually wrong! Pre-war, Russia indeed had a peripheral hegemony of countries it was exploiting to feed its economy. It was growing. That peripheral hegemony is now weakened, eg., when Russia was unable to protect its assets in Armenia, but that's precisely because it played the imperial antagonism game. It's now a losing imperialist, not an anti-imperial power.
Edit:
And for goodness sake, what is this aberration?
Imperialism is a system. If US imperialism loses, that means a different element of the system wins. That doesn't mean socialism, it means reconfiguration.
You keep expressing this as "regional hegemony," but it isn't the same as imperialism. Russia simply has a stronger economy and thus has regional counter influence towards western imperialism. Russia's economy is not oriented around capital export and isn't imperialist. You say you aren't a Leninist guru, and I think you should use this as an opportunity to both revisit Lenin as well as read up on modern analysis of imperialism. The idea that a regional power can meaningfully establish an imperialist presence in a world of western domination isn't a Marxist line, and it causes you to see regional influence as equivalent to total global hegemony.
I think we've reached a fix point and just circling an irreducible disagreement. I guess the theoretical question (to which I have no answer) would be "at what point does a large peripheral power cross the threshold to becoming a small imperialist?".
I am also profoundly in disagreement with your "total global hegemony" category, because to me that looks like replacing an abstract category (imperialism) with a concrete (US/NATO) which at this point gets us into Marxist metaphysics.
But I'll leave it at that because I have other things to do. Maybe you're right and revisiting Lenin should be one of those. At any rate thanks for an engaging discussion that went way above the idiotic mudslinging that I was responding to.
I think it's pretty easy to look at it in terms of classes. In Russia, the nationalist bourgeoisie are in power, and because of the lack of capital export as a driving factor, there is practically no imperialist bourgeoisie in Russia. Meanwhile, the west is driven entirely by imperialism, this is how their economies perpetuate. In a conflict between nationalists and imperialists, the nationalists are the more progressive force, which is why the ML line is in critical support for Russia.
Even when Russia wins, they do not have the ability to translate this into imperialism. They can try, but the south is already developing beyond the point where they can be taken advantage of as easily. The rise in south-south trade has resulted in development, whereby imperialism is eroding. Russia's weakening of NATO supremacy assists in national liberation movements in the global south, such as in the Alliance of Sahel States.
"principled anti-imperialist stance" while advocating for the expansion of NATO and imperialism. Do you not see any of the contradictions? Why the EU supports "Israel" that also supports Ukraine, and that Ukraine supports "Israel" and wants to be the "Israel of Europe"? That Ukraine has been bombing Donbass for almost 8 years before Russia intervened. That even western media had reported on the neo-nazi problem in Ukraine when suddenly it stopped in 2022? (History did not start in 2022)
You disguise your chauvinism as "anti-imperialist" but it's clear that you
You asked me earlier about the correct line. I responded to you:
Where's my untouched spoil? Where's my chauvinism?
You throw words you dont understand like mud.
The correct position is revolutionary defeatism... from my enemies!
Actually 100 years ago communists were calling for an immediate end to WW1, and Russian Bolsheviks organized against Russia's participation in the war, while American liberals were sending Eugene Debs to prison for opposing western involvement.