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.
I don’t exactly want Russia’s current particular brand of ideology to be spread either.
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?
It’s already happened. Ukraine’s military is decimated, they’ve lost 90% of their men and can’t mount any further attacks. They were built up from 2014-2022 to be the largest military in Europe, they were destroyed, they were re-built with massive donations from NATO and now they have been destroyed again. NATO has no more juice to squeeze. Russia has destroyed a massive portion of NATO’s munitions and have broken apart the largest military in Europe twice. Nobody else could have done this.
De-dollarization and multipolarity has already made massive strides in just the last few years, as the rest of the world moves away from the west after seeing it’s actions in this conflict. America bought a few more years for itself by cannibalizing and destroying the industrial base of Europe and especially Germany, but in the long run their western bloc is breaking down and weakening. This is unlike Iraq, with those we didn’t see massive moves towards de-dollarization and multipolarity. And unlike the cold war, there seems to be only 2 camps instead of 3 - the golden billion and the other 6 outside the garden walls. The westoids and restofus
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?
Not a nation-state by their own admission, and they don’t really do anything anti-imperialist or materially support any other cause
Russia is now rising to the sacred struggle to defend its state sovereignty and protect its security. We have always supported and stand by all decisions of President Putin and the Russian government. I hope that we will always stand together in the fight against imperialism.
-Kim Jong Un, from one of the all time anti-imperialism MVP AES, the DPRK
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
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 @[email protected].
and this struggle is between two capitalist empires which both want to do more capitalism, so there’s no benefit to either side winning
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?
For a Marxist clarifying the nature of the war is a necessary preliminary for deciding the question of his attitude to it. But for such a clarification it is essential, first and foremost, to establish the objective conditions and concrete circumstances of the war in question. It is necessary to consider the war in the historical environment in which it is taking place, only then can one determine one’s attitude to it. Otherwise, the resulting interpretation will be not materialist but eclectic.
Depending on the historical circumstances, the relationship of classes, etc., the attitude to war must be different at different times. It is absurd once and for all to renounce participation in war in principle. On the other hand, it is also absurd to divide wars into defensive and aggressive. In 1848, Marx hated Russia, because at that time democracy in Germany could not win out and develop, or unite the country into a single national whole, so long as the reactionary hand of backward Russia hung heavy over her.
In order to clarify one’s attitude to the present war, one must understand how it differs from previous wars, and what its peculiar features are.
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, but it seems unlikely to happen or, if it does happen, to be durable, considering how unstable and impoverished any resulting state and regime would be.
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?
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.
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.
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
I think, generously, the war accelerated this, but it would have happened anyway sooner rather than later. Confidence in the dollar was already dropping due to factionalism in the US government and the growing economic power of China. And I don’t think that acceleration has been worth the cost in human life.
Could you make an argument for why the war merely accelerated de-dollarization? What evidence is there that countries were turning away from holding USD reserves or moving towards international trade not denominated in dollars? Factionalism in the US government, led mostly by a trump administration, might have lowered confidence in US generally, but how has that impacted US economic hegemony?
This is a more devastating moment of clarity than it might seem at first glance. The promise of economic sanctions was never that they would punish people and corporations in authoritarian countries in order to provide vicarious emotional satisfaction for Western voters; the hope was that sanctions could simultaneously strengthen diplomacy while more or less replacing military force as an instrument of coercion. Western domination of key technologies, banking, trade routes, and international institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and the Paris Club—so the thinking went—would allow us to impose our desired outcomes not only on irritant regimes like Cuba, Venezuela, and Myanmar, but also on peer-competitors like Iran, China, and Russia. And we could do it all without having to fire a shot.
The success of the Russian economy at resisting the sanctions regime is directly related to the emerging multipolar world. Those peer-competitors like China, but also “irritant regimes” like Cuba are all watching things develop with great interest.
As an aside, I don’t think anyone here is doing math with human lives and saying that the blood spilled is “worth it”. That’s un-charitable, at best. It’s more of a material analysis - history, international relations, expanding russian economic influence on the EU, and politics has wrought war. Many on this site, myself included, wish for the war to end in a way that doesn’t result in the complete collapse or subjugation of the russian state because it would be net negative for anti-imperialism and the global south. But importantly they still want the war to end.
Recognizing that one side winning the war will benefit the cause of communism and the other won’t is not the same as uncritical support.
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
Yeah it doesn’t really seem like that’s happening or has any chance of happening from this conflict.
The US has been losing wars since the 50s, and they’re not even getting any American teenagers killed in this one.
It’s already happened. Ukraine’s military is decimated, they’ve lost 90% of their men and can’t mount any further attacks. They were built up from 2014-2022 to be the largest military in Europe, they were destroyed, they were re-built with massive donations from NATO and now they have been destroyed again. NATO has no more juice to squeeze. Russia has destroyed a massive portion of NATO’s munitions and have broken apart the largest military in Europe twice. Nobody else could have done this.
De-dollarization and multipolarity has already made massive strides in just the last few years, as the rest of the world moves away from the west after seeing it’s actions in this conflict. America bought a few more years for itself by cannibalizing and destroying the industrial base of Europe and especially Germany, but in the long run their western bloc is breaking down and weakening. This is unlike Iraq, with those we didn’t see massive moves towards de-dollarization and multipolarity. And unlike the cold war, there seems to be only 2 camps instead of 3 - the golden billion and the other 6 outside the garden walls. The westoids and restofus
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
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 @[email protected].
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
You can, but it seems unlikely to happen or, if it does happen, to be durable, considering how unstable and impoverished any resulting state and regime would be.
An impoverished and unstable regime is preferable to a stable rich nazi regime filled with NATO bases. Ukraine chose this path.
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
I think, generously, the war accelerated this, but it would have happened anyway sooner rather than later. Confidence in the dollar was already dropping due to factionalism in the US government and the growing economic power of China. And I don’t think that acceleration has been worth the cost in human life.
Could you make an argument for why the war merely accelerated de-dollarization? What evidence is there that countries were turning away from holding USD reserves or moving towards international trade not denominated in dollars? Factionalism in the US government, led mostly by a trump administration, might have lowered confidence in US generally, but how has that impacted US economic hegemony?
Quoting this pro-western piece in TabletMag:
The success of the Russian economy at resisting the sanctions regime is directly related to the emerging multipolar world. Those peer-competitors like China, but also “irritant regimes” like Cuba are all watching things develop with great interest.
As an aside, I don’t think anyone here is doing math with human lives and saying that the blood spilled is “worth it”. That’s un-charitable, at best. It’s more of a material analysis - history, international relations, expanding russian economic influence on the EU, and politics has wrought war. Many on this site, myself included, wish for the war to end in a way that doesn’t result in the complete collapse or subjugation of the russian state because it would be net negative for anti-imperialism and the global south. But importantly they still want the war to end.
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