Comradeship // Freechat

Please explain how contemporary Russia is imperialist.

there are many people who call themselves marxist-leninists on this site who do not subscribe to anything marx or lenin had to say about inter-imperialist conflict.

This is a bad faith way to start your post on this and also doesn't make sense in this context. Russia isn't imperialist, so how is it inter-imperialist rivalry? Some reasoning on why Russia is not imperialist found here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Russian_%22imperialism%22

It is possible we're reading different posts, but in my time here, how I see Russia talked about is with the term "critical support" if support is given at all; meaning that (roughly speaking) the person supports them with regard to resisting the western empire, but does not support anything else about its leadership, necessarily. Russia and the US are far from equal powers dueling for hegemony, as a framing like "inter-imperialist conflict" might suggest, and it is not helpful to understanding imperialism or global conflict to reduce something to "both sides" simply because neither government is socialist.

IIRC, Mao goes into the concept in On Contradiction, of varying allying conditions with the Kuomintang and how that relationship evolved. I think it's a decent analog to what we're talking about here. Imperialism is the prevailing force of global power, not local reactionaries, and so some amount of allowance for that needs to be made in considering who is and isn't worth "supporting": https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

And modern day China seems to understand this and utilizes it to further an alternative to the western imperialist order. If they were only willing to have ties with those states who are controlled by a communist vanguard party, they'd have limited allies on the global stage, which would make it easier for the empire to isolate them, undermine them, etc.

EDIT: this entire site is filled with ultras, third-worldists, and campists whose beliefs amount to little more than “america bad” but framed in whatever quotations of leftist thinkers they need to justify themselves. read for yourself, think for yourself, and above all just get organized instead of treating politics like religious salvation and orthodoxy like so many people do.

How about addressing the content of what is being said instead of doubling down on bad faith nonsense. From what I can gather, usually the term ultra is used to refer to people who expect purity out of socialism, rather than contending with conditions as they are. So not sure how you get that out of numerous people in this thread saying varying statements along the lines of that support for Russian leadership is a tenuous thing to have at best, relative to its resistance to imperialism, while you are saying no one should have any support for them. 🫠

And how do you arrive at such a liberal reddit-brain-sounding analysis as "people believe little more than 'america bad'"? The western empire refers to more than the US, but the US is the power center of it at this point in history and has been for a while now. Please stop projecting your own reductionist thinking onto others because people disagreed with your views on Russia and Ukraine. I mean, for god's sake, you accuse others of using quotations as justifications for those views like this is inherently a failing, but you did just that in this very post and when challenged on how the term you used applies to this situation, it appears you ignored it with an edit, doubling down with an even more ridiculous and nasty framing about the entire website.

I'm genuinely confused as to where this extreme rejection of everyone is coming from, as you otherwise seem to want to be here and otherwise appear to share similar views as others here have.

Modern Russia does not fit any definition of imperialist.

this entire site is filled with ultras, third-worldists, and campists

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