Comrade Birb

See, the thing is, I can certainly turn the tables on this and ask you if your post is in good faith. Because let’s face the facts, this is a textbook imperialist conflict. It doesn’t matter one bit if Russia’s doesn’t meet every criterion for being an imperialist hegemon right now. Imperialism is capitalism in decay and every sufficiently developed capitalist state will turn outwards to become imperialist eventually. What’s actually important is the class character of the states or blocs involved and Russia is a bourgeois state that exploits and represses its working class. This conflict has done nothing so far to strengthen the positions of either the Ukrainian or Russian working class in their class struggle and neither side represents actual liberation from the capitalist hegemony.

I agree that this situation has been a blow to the US-led western hegemony and that these are certainly interesting times with a new multi-polar world order appearing… But I fear this is just the prelude to a bigger conflict on the horizon where the actual consequences for the international class struggle are not foreseeable.

I don’t think that this is a realistic scenario right now. What is even the probability of a real “toppling” of the Russian state in the current situation? That would pretty much need a full invasion and occupation by western forces or a true proletarian revolution.

I think it would be more likely for some sort of western-led color revolution to occur and in the light of a color revolution it’s just not sensible to talk about revolutionary defeatism, since all the systems of a bourgeois state would already be in place. The means of production are either part of state-owned firms or firmly in the hands of the Russian bourgeoisie. It certainly wouldn’t be anything like the “shock therapy” after the fall of the USSR. The state would stay the same, its class character unchanged, just with different capitalist factions with different interests in power. It would lead to more capital movement from the west into Russia, state firms would get privatized, profits moved out of the country. For the Russian working class it would worsen all the effects of capitalism. Funnily enough it would probably be a lot like what has happened to the Ukraine. It would be the regular mundane evil of the current imperialist world system.

All in all I don’t think that the current situation actually strengthens the position of the Russian working class in their class struggle. The Russian state has only become more repressive during this war. Additionally, a strong, independent Russian economy with a big public sector will potentially ease the contradictions of capitalism and thus placate and capture the working class (cf the history of western European social democracies).

Is it really that important to know whether or not Russia is imperialist right now to analyze the nature of this conflict? Russia is a capitalist bourgeois state and given the right conditions and opportunity it will become imperialist since imperialism is just the eventual higher form of capitalism. Additionally I do think that this current conflict is very much imperialist in nature. The very reason for this war is to secure the Russian territory from encroachment of western influence and militarization, i.e. the territorial division and redistribution of the world among the big capitalist powers. In the case of Ukraine this redistribution has been going on since 1991 and it’s only now escalating because Russia has become increasingly powerful and is in a position to fight back.

I guess for me it was wishful thinking and I am more surprised by the speed of escalation than really shocked by it. In retrospect there was no reason to believe that Ukrainian aggression against the DPR/LPR would stop. And now that I have been thinking some more about it, it was highly naive to expect any sort of diplomatic or peaceful resolution to this conflict that was smoldering for the past eight years. There simply was no interest in that from the western side. Ukraine was basically talking about the possibility of getting nukes again and there was a steady stream of foreign military aid coming into the country.

This whole situation just sucks and I hope that the Ukrainian people don’t have to suffer. Maybe this is actually what will bring stability back to the region… but right now I am not very optimistic about that.

Them having the “best” vaccine allowed them to secure a lot of orders, while still scrambling to actually fulfill the orders because of the complex and novel production process. This led to delays which is not a good thing when it comes to a critical vaccine…

Thanks for introducing me to this channel! Seems like Tom has some very interesting looking videos I need to dive into.