I think it’s important to understand that Marxist-Leninists should be supporting the people of both countries, rather than picking one of two capitalist states to back. I understand that Russia has its excuses for doing this, and the Ukraine government has its excuses for what it has done, but it’s important to remember that they are both capitalist countries in the age of imperialism; what they are really after is power. Please feel free to correct me if you believe I got anything wrong.
I feel as if I’m being slightly misinterpreted here. When I say a capitalist state should cease to exist I do not mean it should be bombed into oblivion by other capitalist states. I mean they should be overthrown. Obviously I don’t think the west was justified in what it did to Iraq, but supporting the capitalist government of Iraq to undermine the west, rather than the people of Iraq is not the correct response. And yes, capitalism is bad, therefore the capitalist governments should be dissolved, but that is not to say the nations themselves should be bombed.
It should go without saying that all capitalist governments should eventually be dissolved, but that doesn’t mean it is best to fight all of them at the same time no matter the circumstances. Sometimes it might be better to have hired thug with you who is a bit shady and untrustworthy but knows how to fight, then a best friend that is scrawny and essentially useless. If Russia were to have an attempted communist insurrection now, their army, economy and pool of talented personnel would suffer massively and would essentially give NATO a free pass to move in and conquer Russia. The West did exactly this to Syria where they armed Anti-Assad leftist along with ISIS with the intent of weakening and fracturing Syria as whole.
Exactly, russia having an communist insurgence right now would be no different them the anarchist insurgence in the spanish civil war, it would be just useless infighting that would give fascists an free card to do what they want.
It absolutely is, or rather was at the time. You support even a capitalist government at odds with imperialism, because any blow against the global imperialist system is a blow against capitalism. It is part of the historical process that culminates in socialism. As Marx himself says “the communists, in short, support every uprising against the existing nature of things.”
We do not uphold socialism as a moral system. We uphold historical progress, and we recognize any state struggling against imperialism as progressive. This is the difference between us and liberals. A state like the modern Russian Federation, that fights for the interests of its national bourgeoisie, is undermining global capitalism, and thus ultimately undermining its own existence as a capitalist power. It is creating the conditions for socialism to emerge on the global stage, whether the government and people know it or not.
Fucking yeah. I think more leftists should bear this in mind. We’re not here making distinction between good and evil. For more than 5000 years the mankind have only created various form of “evil” political structure. Was it because people were not smart or morally enlightened to see that those regimes were “bad”? If you travel 5000 years back into the past will you be able to guide mankind into building an immaculately good socialism in a matter of years, or even decades? Of course no, because the material condition was not ripe for socialism.
So it’s really pointless to guide your politics with mere moral sentiment, which will either lead you into ultra-leftism or liberalism. You need an analysis of the material, historical condition. So people who say “Russia bad”, should really offer something more than a bland moral categorisation. They should offer a materially possible alternative, a better historical path towards world socialism.
Our liberal political culture taught us none of that and have trained us to be moralists about politics because liberalism is highly moralistic. It’s moralistic precisely because it was built upon the very misconception that human mind has been clouded until some European white dudes in 17C or 18C came up with the Enlightenment and that was the precise moment the human race had discovered the moral truth about human rights, freedom and so on. This is an ideological historiography that worked and works very well to justify the bourgeois revolutions and sanctify itself as the final form of human society. Marxists do not do that. We study the rationality behind history and try to help giving birth of a further, more rationalised form of society.
We don’t even want to sanctify socialism as “eternally good” and then plan to stay in socialism forever. We always recognise even a socialist state cannot be “100% good” whatever that means, because socialism itself is always in a dialectical movement transitioning into something else: communism, or backtracking into capitalism. Morality is a mode of thinking that either sanctify or vilify the present. It’s designed to be black and white. Whereas dialectics is a mode of thinking that trace the world in its motion. It knows things can’t be understood by simply putting them into different boxes, because they’re forever changing, and the reason why they’re changing is that there are contradictions inherent in it. And it’s precisely because things are inherently contradictory, they are both good and evil at the same time – binary categorisation simply can’t make sense of it.
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As a Christian ML/Juche student, I would actually argue that morality is real, and discoverable philosophically, but that its realization in the material world is always dependent on particular historical circumstances. Moral action is the domain of the subject; but humanity, even in socialist countries, is still largely the object of history. Thus, for now, the field of moral action is the field of subjectivity: the individual, and those close to them. It is thus not helpful, at this stage of historical-material development, to view politics through a moral lens.
If we are not going to support the state, with is the only organised form of the country to defend itself against imperialism, then who are we going to support? Like it or not, the russian people are dependent on the russian state to defend themselves against the west, there is a reason the Putin still is popular. We cant just say we support the people, because the people on a capitalist state are not the ones on power, the capitalists are, so the capitalists are responsible for the security of the country and the people living in it. If we are going to support the people, then it needs to be an people’s state, organised enough in a way that the people can defend themselves.
I think it is important to support capitalist iraq to gain its own independence and strength, and then support the people to have a revolution. Do not support the people to have a revolution while iraq is still at war with the west, that will only weaken it further.