Thank you for this. If I hear one more Putin-supporting Canadian so- called lefty rant about how Ukraine is led by Nazi-sympathizers I will have this article blasted out of megaphones into their bedrooms after midnight.
Seriously your research and analysis much appreciated.
Thank you for this valuable work, Duncan. The left needs to get its head together and stop being Putin apologists. The man is a vile dictator. The current plutocratic, fossil fuel oligarch-controlled Russia has nothing left within it which is even vaguely reminiscent of a workers' state. Ukraine, on the other hand, is at least a democracy. Some city and town councils have even been holding citizens' assemblies - during wartime! The situation of LGBTQI+ people is also far better in Ukraine than it is in Russia or would be if Russia took control of Ukraine. Trans people especially are persecuted in Russia. Support for Russia against Ukraine does not compute with support for trans rights. See my Substack on this: https://deborahwafoulkes.substack.com/p/beware-the-pitfall-of-false-anti?r=1f2ej0&utm_medium=ios
"The campist interlocutor will object: Ukraine was not a ‘colony’ in the USSR, which was not imperialist. Stalinist chauvinism was a different phenomenon. This distinction is barely defensible, even technically, and politically evasive."
Absolutely agreed; but this is an admission that a "workers' state" can be imperialist, which opens a whole can of worms.
I have no time for the view that the Kremlin can be called imperialism only if it's 'upper case Imperialist', exactly as Lenin described it. There's imperialism, with a lower case i, which predated capitalism and then there is what Lenin described in his book Imperialism as the expansionist policy of finance capital. The 'upper-case Imperialism' doesn't need to exist for us to describe 'lower-case imperialism'. I discussed this in October: https://redmole.substack.com/p/when-socialist-states-suppress-national
Ukraine does have far-right currents and anti-labour pressures, as does Russia, but inflating that into a blanket Nazi narrative helps state propaganda and weakens solidarity with ordinary Ukrainian workers
Thank you for this. If I hear one more Putin-supporting Canadian so- called lefty rant about how Ukraine is led by Nazi-sympathizers I will have this article blasted out of megaphones into their bedrooms after midnight.
Seriously your research and analysis much appreciated.
Thank you for this valuable work, Duncan. The left needs to get its head together and stop being Putin apologists. The man is a vile dictator. The current plutocratic, fossil fuel oligarch-controlled Russia has nothing left within it which is even vaguely reminiscent of a workers' state. Ukraine, on the other hand, is at least a democracy. Some city and town councils have even been holding citizens' assemblies - during wartime! The situation of LGBTQI+ people is also far better in Ukraine than it is in Russia or would be if Russia took control of Ukraine. Trans people especially are persecuted in Russia. Support for Russia against Ukraine does not compute with support for trans rights. See my Substack on this: https://deborahwafoulkes.substack.com/p/beware-the-pitfall-of-false-anti?r=1f2ej0&utm_medium=ios
"The campist interlocutor will object: Ukraine was not a ‘colony’ in the USSR, which was not imperialist. Stalinist chauvinism was a different phenomenon. This distinction is barely defensible, even technically, and politically evasive."
Absolutely agreed; but this is an admission that a "workers' state" can be imperialist, which opens a whole can of worms.
I have no time for the view that the Kremlin can be called imperialism only if it's 'upper case Imperialist', exactly as Lenin described it. There's imperialism, with a lower case i, which predated capitalism and then there is what Lenin described in his book Imperialism as the expansionist policy of finance capital. The 'upper-case Imperialism' doesn't need to exist for us to describe 'lower-case imperialism'. I discussed this in October: https://redmole.substack.com/p/when-socialist-states-suppress-national
Check out some of Marta Havryshko’s writing!
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/nazis-in-ukraine-military/
Take a look at
https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/20/the-myth-far-right-zealots-run-ukraine-is-russian-propaganda
Ukraine does have far-right currents and anti-labour pressures, as does Russia, but inflating that into a blanket Nazi narrative helps state propaganda and weakens solidarity with ordinary Ukrainian workers