US empire as international dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
The key thing to understand about Ukraine — as with China, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc. — is that powerful people in the US-aligned "exile diaspora" will happily sacrifice actual Ukrainians, because they see themselves as the "real" ones waiting for their triumphal return.
America" is best understood not as a nation in the classic sense, but rather as an "International Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie." No matter where you're from or your ethnicity, if you're a willing comprador they'll "help you get your country back"!
Roderic Day · Jun 18, 2022
Related to the above, US puppets are necessarily terrible/corrupt because anything that would make them genuinely popular would involve standing up to US interests too much - the appropriate sell outs end up being fully dependent on US support.
I think Lenin is correct to call out Kautsky (and Hobson), particularly re: peace, but I think Losurdo and Jiang are also correct to point out that the U.S. has in fact succeeded, for decades now, at fashioning and leading an "International Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie."
The error would be to follow Kautsky and Hobson in imagining that this arrangement does away with war and peace prevails. On the contrary, the imperialist bloc coordinates and wages endless war on adversaries, as intense as any past war. It's also not an unbreakable bloc.
The imperialist bloc will unravel. However, the US seems to have managed something that Lenin appeared to think was beyond the coordinating capabilities of the capitalists of his time. Which makes sense: it was only made possible by his equally unprecedented socialist success.
US imperial system leads the world in 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."1