I agree. I cant help but notice that it’s one thing to denounce the nazis. That’s easy and a no brainer. But it says NOTHING on what it means to use the monopoly of force to protect capital. Such a thing has had MANY names. It was once called Slave trade. It was once called apartheid. It was once called colonialism. It was once called settlerism. It was once called fascism and it was once called imperialism.
If anyone is going to be capitalist; they gotta have a plan to make sure the people are seen to without basically doing a fascism and calling it something new… As if calling it a new name has anything to do with it being a great distinction to those it happens to.
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.
I agree. I cant help but notice that it’s one thing to denounce the nazis. That’s easy and a no brainer. But it says NOTHING on what it means to use the monopoly of force to protect capital. Such a thing has had MANY names. It was once called Slave trade. It was once called apartheid. It was once called colonialism. It was once called settlerism. It was once called fascism and it was once called imperialism.
If anyone is going to be capitalist; they gotta have a plan to make sure the people are seen to without basically doing a fascism and calling it something new… As if calling it a new name has anything to do with it being a great distinction to those it happens to.
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.