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.
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.