https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2135509
this is practically a child’s view of the world. good guy vs bad guy. Russia = bad, NATO = good. plus, someone should tell her she has it completely backwards: ending russia is kinda natos entire thing
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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If we can support Syria and Iran critically, we can do the same for Russia in its fight against American imperialism.
amen. emphasis on critically tho. too many liberals think “critical support” means “super extra support”. all of us here understand that Russia is capitalist and pretty horrible on LGBTQ rights (not rlly worse than amerika tho). the difference is that NATO represents western empire: an institution that suppresses most of the world and extracts $10 trillion every year from the global south. Russia’s imperial ambitions are strictly regional, thus much easier to curtail by AES states. the global empire is infinitely more harmful to the proletariat of the world than a regional empire. im preaching to the choir here but i hope lemmy libs read this and understand
I agree on all your points except for the existence of Russian imperialism. By Lenin’s definition—correct me if I’m wrong—imperialism is when finance capital is consolidated enough in a given country for that country to begin exporting capital abroad. This might have been the case before the war since so many Russian oligarchs had their billions stashed in western banks, but the contradictions of imperialism itself—its need to grow and consume itself from the inside—now mean that this is no longer the case. Those Russian billions are either frozen or withdrawn as far as I know. Russia’s alignment with China and the BRICS, its long history of fighting for the global south (consider the images we’ve seen for years now of African protestors waving Russian flags), suggest to me that Russia is not actually imperialist and that it is indeed fighting for its life and existence (as it says). Putin is an opportunist appointed by Yeltsin (himself appointed by Clinton!), but opportunism can sometimes point in the right direction because there is no other way for it to survive. (The current president of South Africa is a criminal who likewise deserves our critical support due to his alignment with the BRICS, although none of us are going to be complaining if the EFF takes over next year.) All of us likewise know that a NATO victory in this war will just begin another nightmarish chapter of imperialism in eastern Europe, while a NATO defeat will present opportunities for workers around the world to throw off the American yoke.
they certainly are fighting for their existence. but part of the existence they are fighting for is their status as an imperial power. their ability to partake in imperialism has definitely been diminished by the recent sanctions, but they still hold on to imperialist practices. check their foreign investments. they have certainly been forcibly divested from the western sphere of influence, but they have responded by increasing investments in wealthy eastern countries and the eastern global south
I don’t understand this line of logic, is China imperialist then? A lot of countries invest in other countries.
The post-1971 world is arranged in such a way that every other country is subservient to a single, super-imperialist power that is the US empire.
This condition did not exist in the pre-WWI “multi-polar” order between the European imperialists. Previously, the global imperialist hegemons (e.g. the British Empire) were net creditors to the world, today, the hegemon (the US empire) is a net debtor to the world. It literally just prints dollar out of thin air to control the world. This is the major difference.
Today, the US controls key global financial institutions that dictate the economic policies of the rest of the world.
The US controls the IMF - which uses monetary imperialism to control the fiscal and monetary policies of other countries (the Russian Central Bank, for example, is particularly obedient to the IMF recommendations even to this very day - which is why you see the ruble depreciated, an act that only benefited Western imperialism).
The US dollar comprises 85% of the world’s transaction - the world runs around dollar, like it or not. There is not a single country, not even China, can compete with the US on financial capital.
Russia’s finance capital is a drop in the bucket in a sea of global capital dominated by the dollar. If you look at what the Central Bank of Russia is doing, it is literally helping the US with its monetary policies (rate hikes, ruble depreciation) and a direct antagonism Putin’s nationalist policy that focuses more on the real sector (industrial capital).
The US controls the World Bank - which controls the agricultural policy of the developing world and forced them to invest in export crops that can be sold cheap to Western consumers, rather than food for self-sufficiency. If you do not obey their policies you can be cut off from importing essential goods (like energy).
The US controls the WTO - which controls the trade policy (and thereby the economic and industrial policy) of the developing world, forcing countries to lower the wages of their labor in order to become competitive exporters and allowing Western capitalists to enter their market for exploitation.
Russia does not and will never have control of these global financial institutions. In fact, the goal for Russia is dedollarization, which means to weaken the hold of the financial institutions on to their own country and the world, such that they can take actually a breath after being choked by neoliberalism for almost half a century.
Even if they have the ambitions, Russia has to realize that there is no way to become an imperialist power even after they succeed in dedollarization (and that’s a big IF). Nobody can really afford to get rid of the dollar, and in order to convince them, you actually have to offer real, tangible benefits - and this means the Global South will have a lot to say in shaping new multi-polar order. Russia cannot survive the sanctions without deepening cooperation with the Global South, and in this process, the rest of the world will ensure that not a single country can exert their imperialistic ambitions like the US does today.
great comment and very solid points! i concede that calling Russia imperialist is arguable, but as western hegemony has been faltering in the past couple decades, Russian capitalists have picked up a lot of slack (see their relationship with Syria and Turkey; its hard to argue that their support goes beyond expanding the foreign interests of Russian capitalists). and surely you see the problem with comparing foreign investment of Russia vs China. Russian investments are privately held and aim to produce profit. investments from China are a mix of public and private, and they are demonstrably focused on mutual prosperity
Can you provide sources? The share of SOE in Russia in terms of market cap and % of GDP are variously estimated at ~30%, which is already higher than most countries and only comparatively lower than China’s.
Having said that, yes there is a lot of corruption in SOEs and that includes in both Russia and China.
sorry, i was talking to family. this is a great discussion tho!
SOEs is another topic. it’s a good sign that Russia still has plenty of these, but the state is still under the control of capitalists. and as a capitalist state Russian foreign investment is in practice imperialism via unequal exchange. Russian private foreign direct investment was worth $385 billion in Q2 of 2020. while the Russia’s sovereign wealth fund is valued at $10 billion
additionally, as a bourgeois state, Russian “public” foreign investments operate to carry out the will of Russian capitalists
of course these pale in comparison to amerika’s private FDI of over $5 trillion! there is no doubt the west’s empire is a greater threat to the workers of the world than Russia. and thats why i maintain critical support of Russia
The values there seem to be from before the war? They were investing mostly in the Cayman Islands (lol), and my guess is that that money has either been withdrawn or stolen at this point, although I honestly don’t know.
there are enough values updated during the war to draw some conclusions. yeah, the money moves around so much its impossible to know the extent of how this affects Russian capitalists. this recent hit to Russian capital is great tho, increases the chance of revolution to take hold there
Hasn't Russia's war on Ukraine done more to reinvigorate NATO than anything else in the past decade? If the goal is the diminishment of NATO, then Russia's war on Ukraine is definitely bad for that goal.
allowing Ukraine to join NATO would be much more invigorating. denying them the oblasts east of the Dnieper River means NATO loses out on a ton of industrial and agricultural capacity
plus, this war is tearing NATO apart. many Europeans are not content with becoming even more subjugated to amerika so global capital can keep expanding its hoarded wealth
I don't think that's true. I'm an eastern European, and speaking anecdotally, support for Ukraine and consequently NATO is absolutely surging. Looking at polls, it seems that 85% of people in my country have a positive view of NATO atm.
thanks for the context! looking at the wealthier countries further from Russia (Germany, France) they seem to oppose NATO support for this conflict. only 46% of Germans support sending weapons
Germany is a special case for this. Post WW2, they've had a strong pacifism streak. It was absolutely shocking at the time that they decided to send offensive weapons at all. Would have been unthinkable 2 years ago.
Personally I still don’t think Germany should even be allowed to have weapons in the first place
Yeah, but people love to hate Russians, and does it really matter if the people like or dislike nato? I've got a suspicion that working people in your country have as little influence on nato actions as the workers anywhere else in Europe.
Completely agree that it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. Politicians will use polls that are useful to them and ignore those that aren't. I was replying to the point that this war is fomenting anti-NATO sentiment, which I don't think is true.
I also think you're right.
The war with nato was always going to be "reinvigorated" whenever it chose to start a war with Russia. There's nothing Russia can do about that. They just need to win. Also, it's not as if the war wasn't inevitable. There's so much money to be pulled out of Russia while the nato armies are on their way to China. There's no way the richest westerners were just gonna leave it on the table.
It's very easy to say "they just need to win!" when you have no skin in the game. Eastern Europe knows what it's like to be under Russian subjugation, and no amount of anti-NATO critical support will change that fact.
I meant for Russia, whenever this war happens (which is now), all they can do on their end is win. They can't control how other European countries direct nationalist sentiments. Also, my "support" is literally just musing on this website.
I've always mixed with a lot of eastern Europeans in the US, and trying to figure out if Russia was really a bogeyman that was a dark cloud over their lives has always been really murky. I've known jews that had to leave when the USSR was collapsing and rightwing nationalists were becoming terrifying.
I known a lot of Polish workers that had their lives upended by rightwing nationalists as the USSR collapsed. They came to the US trying to scrape a living together.
Of course people process the experience in all kinds of ways, arriving at coherent and incoherent conclusions.
The one universal is that unless they agree everything is the fault of Russians and absolve all of their country's rightwing opportunists and collaborators from 1917 on, their stories aren't part of the broader media narratives.
I guess what I'm getting at, when I talk to people in the diaspora, the relationship with Russia might be highly contingent on class and heavily colored by ethnic nationalism.
Thank you for this comment. I mean that very honestly. Far too many people see countries as monoliths, and I fall into that trap when trying to make a point from time to time.
About the overarching media narratives, the most rabidly anti-Russian atm are Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, just fyi.
I was really worried about saying well ackshually to someone actually living in eastern Europe. Here in my part of the US the wildest anti-Russian media narratives also center on Poles and Lithuanians.
I'll never fault anyone for talking about facts and their experiences. Even (especially!) if they contradict mine, I'll always appreciate someone talking to me in good faith.
It's depleted NATO's stockpile, armed a new generation of radicalized right-wing mercenaries (who will definitely not sit quietly in Europe after the war ends) and has deindustrialized Europe through the energy crisis
It hasn't benefited NATO countries, it's benefited the US momentarily, until it blunders into another foreign policy mess
Of obsolete equipment that was just sitting in storage costing the US money. Other countries are looking at this as an opportunity to modernize cheaply by getting the US to replace what they're sending with better gear.
No comment. You might be right about that, remains to be seen.
Absolutely not true. The EU has managed to recover from the pipelines turning off, and have built up LNG terminals to keep on chugging without issue. It cost and will cost a lot of money, but the industry will flow. If anything, the big loser in this is the global south who might not have the cash to compete with the EU buying up LNG, not Europe.
It's not just obsolete equipment, in most NATO countries it's the only equipment these countries have, and there's no definition of "obsolete" that includes Himars, patriots, strykers, Bradleys, Ceasars, Leopards, Challengers, those are the mainstays of western armaments, and there is no such thing as "cheap" modernization, especially not when it comes to the US arms industry
What you're asserting simply isn't true, https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europe-facing-costly-winter-without-enough-long-term-lng-deals-2023-04-06/
https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-germany-weather-european-union-9b1e7c90542b8dd6ab5b9bae47c65d95
The German manufacturing PMI index has sunk to 38.8 (50 is supposed to signal recession), that's the lowest level since 2020 at 32.0 during the height of the Covid depression
And that's the top performing economy in Europe right now
The number of modern systems in play is tiny. The vast majority of the aid has been old systems. 4 HIMARS and 50 Bradleys are hardly going to deplete US supply, let's be real here.
About the various links, none of that contradicts what I'm saying. I didn't say that this had no cost, quite on the contrary. I said that EU funds buying up supply will hurt more than the EU, and the EU does have the cash to afford this.
About the PMI, your own link does not connect this to the energy sector. It connects this to weaker demand for goods. Comparing and contrasting with Italy, France, Czech Republic, Poland and Romania shows a similar story: companies are dropping production due to expectations that demand is dipping as people are tightening their purses.
Bro what are you talking about?
That's incorrect it's 38+ Himars and 186 Bradleys so far from the US alone, also I'm not only talking about US stockpiles, I said "NATO countries" and it's not the launcher systems that are in danger of being depleted, it's the ammunition they fire
Yes, weaker consumer demand because the money in those tight purses are going to personnel energy costs which have skyrocketed again despite the summer dip, hence the recession numbers across the board, there's no sector of the economy that doesn't affect the others
Sorry, I was looking at old numbers. 38 HIMARS and 186 bradleys is no danger to US stockpiles either. Ammo though, that's a more interesting question. Arms industries are ramping up production like mad. This is an absolute godsend for arms companies. This isn't hurting NATO, this is lining the pockets of military industrial sectors worldwide.
On the financial front, I'm rapidly reaching the limit of my knowledge. I will concede the point, but warn that at least in the east, people are willing to absorb a lot of financial pain if it means punching the Russian empire in the face. Western Europe may be forced, kicking and screaming, to follow suit for fear of fracturing Europe.
When I say NATO I'm naively including Europe and not simply the United States, US arms companies are indeed making dough and the Euro regimes may even be willing to print out the big bucks for the American MIC, but those countries also have native defense industries that make up a sizable chunk of their national manufacturing sectors, and I'm telling you right now bro there is no way the cheapskate ordoliberals of Europe are gonna pay for two continent wide modernization programs, it's either the Americans or their own local arms companies and the Americans are gonna win out
Translation; the neoliberal regimes of Europe are willing to sacrifice the livelihoods of their citizens to further the ambitions of an American dominated NATO and sow the seeds of future war and the inevitable blowback it entails
It's not only the US industry ramping up. Companies across Europe are expanding existing ammo factories and making new ones. With the blank cheque that Ukraine has been given by the US, they're not doing this for free.
You can cynically look at this as "sacrificing the livelihoods of citizens", and I'm not going to stop you if you want to see it that way, but in some specific countries, any sign of weakness towards Russia by a politician would cause that politician to be thrown out. If not by vote of no confidence, then by mob.
Have they recovered though? Germany especially is stupid because their greens pushed to turn off nuclear plants and won, after they already started sanctioning Russia. Consumer inflation is high in the Nato-sphere because cost of transport and energy went way up.
I guess we'll see if EU pushes for a ceasefire after another winter of expensive natural gas. I'm surprised the nordstream bombing didn't piss off more Germans.
Global south countries seem to be working around how expensive war made some things by trading with Russia directly for stuff instead of paying market rate, which is why all those African countries don't feel like condemning the invasion.
Yeah, very much the case. I feel this every day. It's caused some grumbling, but not many people are linking this with NATO. The tendency seems to be blaming Russia. Again, anecdotally, but still.
No chance. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria would riot. All of the Bucharest Nine are firmly against giving Russia time to rearm, replenish and come back for round two, which is what they expect Russia would use the ceasefire for.
Unfortunately very true. Russia blowing up the grain shipment deal didn't help. Hopefully Turkey can bring them back to the negotiating table.
There are obviously a lot of ways to look at the war between Russia and Ukraine, but if we are looking at it from its geopolitical antagonism with NATO, then it needs to be understood as a conflict that the West has wanted and taken action to foment for decades. Some people speak of Russia invading Ukraine as if it was something done on a whim rather than a military action that was at least viewed as necessary for Russian national security. While the invasion soured Russia's image and has ruined relations with some bordering countries, Russia almost certainly didn't see any other course of action other than invasion due to the threat of NATO encirclement along with the western puppet government of Ukraine. Regardless of the goals of diminishing NATO or not, this conflict was a seemingly inevitable proxy war between NATO and Russia following Maidan. The fact that the war is happening at all is a victory for NATO and the west because it means they've driven a semi-permanent wedge between Russia and Ukraine, at this point its about limiting further NATO gains. I find it deeply tragic that there weren't diplomatic ways to ensure the security of both Ukraine and Russia and wish that the war wasn't deemed necessary, add it to the list of post-soviet tragedies.
All that said, if we are discussing how this conflict relates to the dissolution of NATO. I don't think it does, at least not immediately or directly which is why I think the sooner the war is over the better. Russia is most a threat to the imperial core through providing military support to anti-imperialist efforts like those in West Africa, but they can't ignore dangerous western provocation in neighboring countries either.