Response to friend

Contents

On genuinely seeking peace/avoiding war
On Putin's wealth & how he is viewed by some on the right
Regarding fascists/fascism

On genuinely seeking peace/avoiding war¶

a couple months ago, you said something like 'a leader who genuinely cared about ending college debt would find a way to end all college debt.' by that logic, wouldn't a leader who genuinely cared about world peace and human welfare find a way to not invade a country and get thousands of people killed?

\(\enspace\)What attracted me to Marxism was the focus on concrete material analysis. Scientific socialism, as opposed to utopian is focused on understanding the historical context of a situation, the workings of the dominant systems, and the possibilities resulting - not simply wishing for things to be a certain way.

World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."¹

Refugees from Ukraine going to Russia
\(\enspace\)Re: student loan debt Biden could have used executive order² or the Fed could buy up the debt³, to implement a plan that isn't limited and means tested⁴ ⁵, instead of spending years acting like even the meager act he ended up passing (now held up in court)⁶ wouldn't be possible⁷. Now if I said the same thing about, say, healthcare instead of student loan relief, I realize there would be much more work to do (though a leader who genuinely cared would at least be campaigning/pushing for something like Medicare for all, popularizing the idea and calling out people in the way of getting something passed). But assuming such effort was clearly put in and obstructionism or w/e outside forces still got in the way, I would understand it was beyond the ability of the President to simply make it so.

\(\enspace\)Regarding Ukraine, an excellent article from 2014 by John Mearsheimer lays out steps the West could take to avoid a crisis (all ignored) while laying out the consequences otherwise and how that would be a disaster for Ukraine.⁸ One needs to consider US pledge in 1991 to not expand NATO an inch in the East and the multiple times that had been disregarding in the years since, leading up to talks of Ukraine joining NATO. There's the US backed coup in 2014 putting far right nationalist gov in place. The subsequent attacks on civilians.⁹ ¹⁰ It is important to remember that Russia historically has suffered great losses from forces entering their territory through the region of Ukraine. Joshua Cho writes:

World War II is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, because approximately 26 million Soviet citizens died in the conflict, while around three-quarters of all Nazi wartime losses came from fighting the Red Army (Washington Post, 5/8/15). But there are other historical memories that drive Russia’s perception of threats coming from the West. Another fact seldom recalled in US media is that Russia was invaded by the US and 14 other nations in 1918, who were intervening on behalf of the White Russian Army against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War (National Interest, 9/3/19; Consortium News, 7/18/18).¹¹

Seeking to avoid being colonized is a genuine concern of Russia's, particularly in the context of the decline following the fall of the USSR. In Dominico Losurdo's words:

The end of the Cold War, with the West and the United States triumphant, once again put Russia at risk of becoming a colony. Massive privatization was not only a betrayal of the working classes of the Soviet Union and Russia, it was also a betrayal of the Russian nation itself. The West was trying to take over Russia’s massive energy deposits, and the US came very close to acquiring them. Here Yeltsin played the role of “great champion” for the Western colonization effort. Putin is not a communist, that much is clear, but he wants to stop this colonization, and seeks to reassert Russian power over its energy resources.

Therefore, in this context, we can speak of a struggle against a new colonial counter-revolution. We can speak of a struggle between the imperialist and colonialist powers — principally the United States — on the one side, and on the other we have China and the third world. Russia is an integral part of this greater third world, because it was in danger of becoming a colony of the West.¹²

\(\enspace\)The attempt at peace via the Minsk agreements. The initial failures leading to the Steinmeier Formula¹³ in 2016 calling for elections to be held in Donbass and potential self-governing status depending the results. All this time, the people of Donbass pleading for Russian military aid while Ukraine continues to assault indiscriminately, leading to more than 14,000 deaths while Putin declined intervention, seeking a working agreement. ¹⁴ Yet it seems the West never intended on any agreement holding, instead seeing such talks as buying time while Ukraine could build up its forces. ¹⁵ When asked if he agreed with Angela Merkel's assessment that the Minsk negotiations were intended to buy Ukraine time rather than seeking a stable arrangement, former French president François Hollande replied "Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point."¹⁶

\(\enspace\)Regarding the eventual Russian decision to intervene, frequently described as "unprovoked" in Western media, Chomsky claims "Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion."¹⁷ Of course he is clear to note that this is not a justification, though what steps/response Russia could have instead taken is less clear. Russia long sought assurances over Ukraine membership in NATO to no avail.¹⁸ In the eight years since Mearsheimer's 2014 analysis, he contends the West is still at fault for the crisis¹⁹. From the very first weeks of Russia's intervention (distinct from "the start of the conflict", as that goes back to 2014), Russia has stated its openness to peace talks, while the US focus has simply been to inflict as much pain on Russia as possible²⁰ (Ukraine be damned)²¹. In mid-March, reports indicated progress towards a 15-point peace deal between Russia and Ukraine²². Later, Western powers (specifically, a visit from Boris Johnson in April²³), advised Zelensky against any such moves.²⁴ Of note, the rationale given for scuttling talks involved much-repeated media depictions of Putin as a crazy, irrational madman incapable of being reasoned with or of being trusted to hold to any potential agreements²⁵. Although prolonged conflict certainly will result in Russian losses, the benefit Ukraine could get from holding out is unclear - on the contrary their position will continue to deteriorate in all likelihood. Indeed, NATO seems content on fighting Russia down to the last Ukrainian²⁶

\(\enspace\)Do you understand the historical situation facing Russia, and the concerns they have voiced repeatedly over the years, to no avail? What option outside of military action was available to stop the continued slaughter of the people of Donbass? Putin tried for years to seek a workable agreement (a move he now regrets) while the West admits it was merely to buy time for Ukraine to strengthen itself. After Russia saw no path but to engage in a military operation, multiple attempts to reach agreements have been signaled from the Russian side. This may seem silly if Russia (personified as "Putin" in Western minds) is seen as having always intended to invade Ukraine to seize as much territory as possible in addition to whatever other diabolical plans. Seen as a rationally acting state, however, the best hope following eight years of seeking to avoid conflict would be for the use of force to help bring about a settlement as quickly as possible. For the West, however, the priority is not saving Ukrainian lives, minimizing damage, or finding a path to sustainable peace - it is to damage Russia as much as possible²⁷.

\(\enspace\)If you believe there's a reasonable alternative path Russia could have taken to address its concerns (even if you don't believe such concerns to be legitimate, the fact remains they are key Russian concerns), by all means lay out what such actions may have entailed. If you simply wish there was no fighting involving Russian forces starting in 2022 (remember, Donbass has faced 14,000 deaths since 2014) because that would seem nice, please reassess your preference in light of reality.

On Putin's wealth & how he is viewed by some on the right¶

isn't he a multibillionaire?

\(\enspace\)I don't have figures for his net worth, but regarding him being a billionaire - no. That seems to come from Bill Browder of Magnitsky act fame, who said Putin has a 50% stake in all state enterprises or something. Absent any other sources I'll assume that's entirely made up given how other claims he's made have turned out under closer scrutiny.²⁸ ²⁹ Straight up taking state assets under his possession as if the state was his personal fiefdom is the only way he could be a billionaire, as before coming to leadership he spent time in the 90's driving cabs. Such a claim is suspiciously similar to those made regarding other "authoritarian" leaders³⁰

does it bother you at all that years before ukraine he was championed as a "solid leader" by the fascist american right?

\(\enspace\)No. American conservatives/fascists may try to project a certain image on to him, but he isn't courting them to my knowledge. Being socially conservative and a practicing Christian, people may think he's trying to build a Christian state, and/or based on their perceptions of Russia (ignoring the diversity of people), a white one at that. I'm sure you can appreciate how some people may view Japan from the outside vs its reality. I'm also guessing attempts to play up some Trump/Russia connection and demonizing Trump based off of that led to a reflexive increase in positive opinion of Russia among some Trump supporters.
\(\enspace\)What would be more concerning to me is if he had widespread support among fascists in Russia, and if that that support was courted by extreme rightwing statements. That sounds more in line with the Western darling of the Putin opposition, Alexei Navalny, who in a 2007 video described himself as a "certified nationalist" who wanted exterminate "flies and cockroaches" while bearded Muslim men appeared in cutaways³¹. Amnesty International at one point revoked his designation as a "Prisoner of Conscience" due to discriminatory statements made that could be considered advocacy of hatred (a decision later reversed).³²

Regarding fascists/fascism¶

From Roderic Day's excellent essay, Really Existing Fascism:

capitalism can be understood as a mode of production with (at least) two concurrent operational moments or aspects: violent expropriation — necessary whenever either big fortunes or desperate propertyless workers are lacking from the equation — and the “non-violent” regime of “voluntary” exploitation more often associated with “advanced” capitalist countries. Primitive accumulation never stops: at the same time that some in America live contented middle-class lives and millions of others get exploited by Amazon as contract workers, the United States uses its police forces to brutalize rebellious Black communities and its military forces to invade nations that haven’t sufficiently integrated into its market system. Capitalism expresses itself as voluntary exploitation in its core, and involuntary expropriation in its periphery (including its internal colonies).³³

Fascism is as co-constitutive of capitalism as liberalism is. Liberalism corresponds to the operational aspect of surplus value exploitation in the core, whereas fascism corresponds to the operational aspect of primitive accumulation at its temporal and spatial boundaries.
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Describing fascism as the “death-rattle” of stage four obscures the fact that it has been present from the outset. Fascism is just the operational aspect that the unlucky part of the globe gets to experience capitalism as. We need to expand the model into a second dimension to integrate this understanding.
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Capitalism — Ideological superstructure in defense of individual genius (entrepreneurship, race science, will to power)

Expropriative aspect: Primitive accumulation, fascism.

Exploitative aspect: Wage labour, liberalism.

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This model conceives of the Axis powers as failed fascist experiments in empire-building, and the North Atlantic empires as successful ones. Fascism as an accusation stops relying on a cartoonish depiction of the Nazis as a cautionary tale of a potential future dystopia. Instead, it captures the fact that vicious dehumanizing brutality is co-constitutive of the violent, white supremacist, “freedom-loving” Western worldview.³⁴

US as a nation has always been fascist
Not seen as "classically" fascist cause rest of world bears cost of suffering
Even US liberals facilitate this slaughter
Really Existing Fascism
Russia has had conflicts dealing w/ preventing breaking up of Russia, and supported Syria at request of government

If Western aggression pushed Russia to prioritize sovereign development, that historical process also pushed it into alignment with the broader Third World project . . . . Russia’s response has been to accelerate Eurasian integration—pursuing a vigorous relationship with China, India, and its regional neighbors—while expanding alliances with Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and other states suffocated by the knee of U.S. imperialism . . . . Russia would come to situate both its past and its future firmly within the Third World. “The West is ready to cross every line to preserve the neocolonial system which allows it to live off the world,” Putin said in 2022. It is prepared “to plunder it thanks to the domination of the dollar and technology, to collect an actual tribute from humanity, to extract its primary source of unearned prosperity, the rent paid to the hegemon.”30

The material imperatives shared by Russia and the Third World explain the isolation of the Western powers in their war of condemnation and economic siege against Russia.³⁷

as long as the Western powers can feed in the troughs of Third World labor and wealth, capitalism will continue its destructive march. That path, today, is secured by powerful militaries prepared to trample people and destroy nations.

What does this mean for those of us who live and organize in the imperial core? I would like to put forward three brief theses that follow from the preceding analysis:

The revolution is already in motion. Since the first anticolonial struggles unfolded, the revolution against imperialism—or capitalism in its international dimension—has been advancing along a winding path through the Third World project. By holding the capacity to arrest the flows of imperial extraction that have made our world, the peoples of the Third World are the engines of progressive change for humanity.

Those in the West are not the revolution’s primary protagonists. The European revolution was brutally crushed by a powerful ruling class supported by imperial plunder. Lacking state power, the left in the imperialist states cannot dictate the terms of the tectonic processes taking place, and should not try to direct them in ways that provide ideological cover for our ruling classes. Too much ground has been ceded to the imperialists in the pursuit of narrow electoral gains or parliamentary strategies. No power can be built by targeting our limited political capacities against the official enemies of our ruling classes.

The anti-imperialist left in the West operates inside the monster. The weakness of the Western left is a mirror image of the strength of its ruling classes. At a moment when the Western bourgeoisie faces a historic challenge to its hegemony, the task is not to reassert its power through milquetoast reforms that buttress capitalism against its calamitous contradictions, but to fight for its ultimate defeat. It is an enemy we share with the majority of the world’s people and the planet we inhabit.

Our most important task, then, is to reclaim socialist anti-imperialism as a category of thought and action—working with the grain of revolutionary change rather than against it. This demands nothing less than the recovery of the political audacity we lost at the so-called end of history, when the positions of global socialism retreated and the imperialist ideology proclaimed itself to be as inevitable as oxygen. History has not gone anywhere. Today, it calls on us to be clear in our critique of imperialism, unrelenting in our assault against it, and bold in envisioning an alternative to capitalism that answers the cries of the working classes in our societies—cries that are being met once again by the siren song of the far right.

The stakes could not be greater.³⁸

“The European working class will only succeed in overthrowing the capitalist order once [the source of its profits] has finally been stopped up,”³⁵
"Capitalism cannot be overcome unless the arteries of imperialist accumulation are severed on a global scale."³⁶

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