The way I see it, as an armchair dengist with no real authority to speak and could be very wrong, Russia is ironically addressing all of this by calling out the west. The only (maybe not only but most obvious) way to maintain non antagonistic contradictions (for the bourgeoisie dictatorship) is to go down the path it is going.
But the truth is there is no winning for Russia as it pertains to developing imperialism (which is part of why I don’t think Russia can be accurately called imperialist). It is very specifically bared from being part of the core, but it must challenge the core to develop in any “sovereign” way. Yet if it successfully challenges the core then it undermines capitalism by weakening the global order, by getting closer to China, by presenting a geopolitical alternative to the core, and also by exacerbating its internal contradictions.
Russia challenges the west to keep its internal contradictions in check, but by doing this it may, as a beautiful twist of dialectics, eventually exacerbate internal contradictions that will intensify class struggle. Russia must deal with the fact that nazism is the enemy of Russian people, that Russia’s soviet heritage lives on through the USSRs victory against nazis, that the western world is becoming less concerned with nazism, AND finally, that the Russian system itself is susceptible to nazism. Something has to give and it means a better future is not impossible.
The way I see it, as an armchair dengist with no real authority to speak and could be very wrong, Russia is ironically addressing all of this by calling out the west. The only (maybe not only but most obvious) way to maintain non antagonistic contradictions (for the bourgeoisie dictatorship) is to go down the path it is going.
But the truth is there is no winning for Russia as it pertains to developing imperialism (which is part of why I don’t think Russia can be accurately called imperialist). It is very specifically bared from being part of the core, but it must challenge the core to develop in any “sovereign” way. Yet if it successfully challenges the core then it undermines capitalism by weakening the global order, by getting closer to China, by presenting a geopolitical alternative to the core, and also by exacerbating its internal contradictions.
Russia challenges the west to keep its internal contradictions in check, but by doing this it may, as a beautiful twist of dialectics, eventually exacerbate internal contradictions that will intensify class struggle. Russia must deal with the fact that nazism is the enemy of Russian people, that Russia’s soviet heritage lives on through the USSRs victory against nazis, that the western world is becoming less concerned with nazism, AND finally, that the Russian system itself is susceptible to nazism. Something has to give and it means a better future is not impossible.