11 Comments
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Michael Hindley's avatar

Wow, as a former lecturer in stylistics I appreciate this fine example of language I thought was long dead. It brought back memories of Australians reading the news on Albanian radio.

Duncan Chapel's avatar

We aim to please Michael. Only by the proletarian stacking of cadences can the vanguard learn to break from the revisionism of 21st-century orthography and return to the liberatory vernacular of irreconcilable revolutionism.

Michael Hindley's avatar

You write Marxist-Leninism as if it were your mother tongue, you could have been a proof reader for Progress Publishers, Moscow. Hasta La Victoria Siempre !

Dr Larry O'Hara's avatar

Duncan new to this substack lark: want to send you a private message but can’t seem to be able to. I can be contacted via X (@nfbmagazine) or via our website www.borderland.co.uk Thanks

Duncan Chapel's avatar

I have followed you, so now you can message me

Michael Hindley's avatar

So a correct “left” perspective on Putin’s invasion would be for Ukraine to have surrendered ?

Duncan Chapel's avatar

No, the correct left perspective on Ukraine is the perspective of the left in Ukraine: to oppose the invasion, and to oppose the attacks of the state (in Russia and Ukraine) on the working class.

Michael Hindley's avatar

And what’s the left perspective on Putin ?

Duncan Chapel's avatar

Putin heads a capitalist oligarchic state that emerged from the bureaucratic degeneration and collapse of the Soviet Union; he is no friend of the working class in Russia or anywhere else. The bureaucratic left's apologetics for Putin, rooted in nostalgia for the USSR and a crude "enemy of my enemy" logic, represent a bankruptcy of anti-imperialist analysis that confuses opposition to NATO with support for a rival imperialism. A principled left position condemns Putin's invasion of Ukraine as imperialist aggression while simultaneously opposing NATO expansion: the task is to defend Ukrainian self-determination, not to pick a side between Washington and Moscow. The real dividing line on the left is between those who grasp this and those who, by treating multipolarity as inherently progressive, end up providing cover for Great Russian chauvinism.

Bob Goupillot's avatar

He's an antii working class authoritarian Russian nationalist