Imagine that you’re a landless peasant from a poor country in West Africa:
You’ve been ground down your entire life, toiling for 12 hours a day in the sun for a small barely subsistence wage. Your parents were born as colonial subjects in a European colony. Your grandparents were essentially slaves. Your great grand parents were formally slaves. After decolonization, the CIA backed a coup in your country that installed a brutal dictator that terrorized your people and chopped up your parents for having been involved in the decolonial struggle.
You find out about a subversive political group that’s been preaching everything you know intuitively but could never articulate. They say that your labor is exploited, and the reason your pay is so low is because a cut gets sent to the West where white people will get to use it to live lavishly. The group is your local Communist Party.
You get educated through free classes by the Communist Party and eventually become a member. You risk imprisonment for just being a member and the ruling regime has been known to disappear and torture Communists. You don’t care, it’s worth it. You’ve now read virtually all of Marx and Lenin and Mao and Fanon etc despite never having attended school. Your involvement in the Party over the years gets you into influential positions within it.
You attend an international meeting of Communist Parties as a representative from your country. It’s an extreme honor to work with comrades from all around the world. You hear their stories and realize that their struggles are the same whether they’re in Africa, the Middle East or Latin America. The group sets out to work on a principled anti-imperialist line to help liberate all these comrades from the grip of imperialism and eventually capitalism. You understand that socialism is impossible in your country until the aggression and exploitation from the West ceases, so this is very important to you. You and your comrades have decided that despite many of their flaws, you should support Russia as a counterweight to US Imperialism which has utterly decimated your peoples, as well as DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and China, which have all always stood by your comrades when they fight Western occupation and exploitation.
On the other side of the world, sitting in an air conditioned suburban home that is worth more than all the homes and possessions of all the people in your village combined, is the infamous western anarchist (or democratic socialist, whatever they’re going by at the moment). He’s 28 and recently laid off from his job as assistant manager at pizza hut. He’s not a millionaire or anything but he never has to skip meals, has electricity, clean running water, and owns a catalog of video games worth more than your annual salary. He’s never had to work more than a 10 hour shift baking bread sticks. He’s been living off his parents who are both retired and receive generous pensions funded by collecting dividends from companies that exploit your village. The western leftist looks at his laptop made with rare earth minerals from your country (three of your cousins died in the mines) and is also worth enough to feed your children for three years.
He sees on Twitter dot com that an international group of Communist Parties has released their Anti-Imperialist line in support of Russia. The western leftist reads it as he sips coffee that was made from beans grown in your comrade’s home country, where his mother, father and aunt and uncle were all killed by CIA-backed death squads. The western leftist reads the article and is incensed. “How could they do this? How could they be this stupid? Fucking tankies, don’t they know you can support oppressed people without supporting authoritarian dictatorships”?
(Taken with slight modifications from an old post on CTH, that place had the occasional gem)
We need to agree on some first principles if we’re going to discuss further. Imperialism is the end stage of capitalism, reached after financial capitalists have taken over and the principal characteristic of the economy is the export of capital rather than raw materials or finished goods. Russia is not nearly at this stage yet. I couldn’t even name a single Russian bank. Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism where finance capitalists export capital rather than commodities and these capitalists become the most dominant.
Some people have a wrong idea that the capitalist class is a unified entity that works in opposition to the domestic working class and imperialised peoples around the world. This is true when taking a high-level view, but it breaks down when looking into the capitalist class and motivations of state actors in detail.
There’s many different capitalist interest groups, but the one that is by far the most powerful and dominant in global politics are the financial capitalists. This group of capitalists always come to dominate over all others, most capitalists require access to financial capital to expand their businesses, or to weather difficult circumstances in the marketplace. Financial capitalists gradually gain control of all industries through being able to see the movements of each industries and them being the spider in the web, put simplistically. Then they reach out beyond their borders and often team up with other financial capitalists through mergers etc. This is called imperialism, the final stage of capitalism. All capitalism eventually ends up here. Russia will too, but not yet.
The major capitalist interest group in opposition to the finance capitalists are the always shrinking group of industrial / national capitalists. These are private owners of domestic industries who mainly derive most of their profits from operating within the borders of a particular country (or the EU or whatever). Donald Trump would be an example of one of these, and he’d be in political alignment with many other industrial capitalists, Denis O’Brien and the like another smaller version, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos too. Their politics tend to be libertarian in nature, the social conservative aspect of their politics is just a front they put up to gain the electoral support of naïve socially-conservative people and exploit them. They don’t really care about religion or guns or anything like that. They like traditionalism because it provides them with a reliable exploitable source of labour. They would have opposed women in the workplace until they realised they could exploit them too without risk. Same with LGBTQ+ stuff, they used to be opposed but are now less so. A lot of conservative politics comes from this group.
Financial capitalists live above, on the backs of industrial / national capitalists through their control of access to capital. Mainly in the form of private banks, through ownership of financial instruments, through the sale of insurance, or through extraction of economic rent from workers, who are mostly employed by national capitalists of various sorts. Their goals are to control states using political instability, which they accomplish by overthrowing governments hostile to their interests in order to control the financial underpinnings of as many countries as possible. They want constant expansion of this power and control over nation states, and they want to eliminate any competition when it comes to other powers that exist outside their sphere of influence.
Russia is a prime example of a country that stands opposed to western financial imperialism. In that country, national industrial capitalists are largely in control of their economy and government after western financial capitalists pillaged Russian industry after the fall of the USSR. This is upsetting to western finance capitalists, which want to destabilise Russia and would love to install a government that is friendly to western finance so they can pillage it again. it slipped out of their grasp with Putin, they want it back.
Through this lens the world becomes a lot clearer. You can understand that Italian fascist Meloni ranting about family values etc as something typical of a national/industrial capitalist, at odds with the financial imperialism of the EU represented by Von Der Leyen et al. Likewise you can see Trump as a representative of industrial capitalism versus the big banks he was ranting about trying to break up etc. Or again you can understand what’s happening with Ukraine. It’s western finance capitalist imperialism versus Russian industrial capitalism. Putin is the Russian industrial capitalist’s godfather.
Russia’s industrial capitalists have already been raped by the US twice before now, which is why they trust Putin as their administrator. He lets them do what they want as long as they don’t fuck over Russia. He’s a far right wing capitalist dictator, but one that prioritises a strong and functional Russia over one that collapses to be strip-mined and sold off by NATO. Given the lack of real alternatives (the Communist party was outlawed for a time), Putin has clearly been the only real option for Russians for most of the past two decades. They will not be pillaged a third time, hence this completely predictable Ukraine reaction. Also hence Trump’s sympathies with Russian industrial capitalist oligarchs versus international finance. He hates the bankers, he understands the industrial oligarchs. Russia is nowhere near being able to do imperialism at any scale worthy of calling it that.
Again, the point of them getting you to repeat the line that Russia is imperialist is to give you a magic word to use to dismiss America’s igniting of the war.