Bunch of idiots out there trying to pick their favorite capitalist state.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GOOD STATE.
At best, you have transitionary ones run by MLs, which I get from a Marxist perspective, but those can go south real fucking fast too.
We’re the ones who suffer and die in war. Not the rich, not the capitalists, not the land lords. The workers are the ones fed into the macerator.
It is good to acknowledge that workers pay the price in capitalist wars and to not downplay the lopsidedness of the conflict by leaving it at an analysis that both sides - and "picking a side" - is simply bad.
It is also important to frame criticism in terms of the audience and what they might be able to actually do about it. This site is full of Westerners that inhabit NATO countries - the countries that have been stoking this war for literal decades and killing even more Ukrainians (in Donbass). In that context, Hexbears generally interact with imperialist-propagandized people and their labor supports NATO. The thing they can do is to consistently oppose NATO and avoid feeding into hate directed at its targets.
Obviously this doesn't mean uncritical support for another capitalist state or simply picking a side. But it does mean that "both sides bad" won't actually land how you intend it to. The folks that already think Russia is bad will hear that and think, "yeah, fuck them! Nuke the barbarians!" because they're literally genocidal and their consent is used to justify the horrors your country does to others. This is roughly the Trot-to-neocon pipeline where they end up supporting the destruction of other countei e by the hegemonic imperial power because hey, those other countries suck, right?
I know that your point is subtler than that and that some of the things I'm criticizing aren't in your post. I want to be super clear that I'm not writing a takedown or anything like that. I just want to emphasize that an empathetic and socialist understanding of this conflict between two capitalist states (capitalism and states both being bad) can and should lead to a seemingly one-sided approach for propaganda purposes. Libs will take the olive branch of "sure, Putin sucks" and run with it waaaay too far, defeating the purpose. And we all have a liberal we need to kill inside of us...
This is too many paragraphs for me to read on a Friday night (too stoned now), but assuming you didn’t bury the lead, we agree that a reductive “both sides bad” is bullshit.
I’m not going to cheer on either of them. I get why it happened, that it’s based on NATO aggression, and the Ukraine is swarming with nazis. I also get that Putin is a far right capitalist that has murdered tons of Russian communists and anarchists who have gotten in his way.
I will continue bullying any lib who tries to put words in my mouth about supporting putin or, alternatively, US military invasion. Death to imperialism. Death to the state. Power to the people.
:anarcho-sickle:
But in the case Russia is bad. And Russia is not doing anti-imperialism. It's doing imperialism. Let's remember that it has been an empire long before the USA was even a country and tha the Soviet era is a very brief episode in that history.
And what Putin is doing is no different from what the us did in say Chile, or Guatemala. They simply cannot allow a viable alternative to their type of regime in their background and the current regimes they like running are objectively worse than even the western neoliberalism. Sovereignty doesn't matter to Russia anymore than it does to the US.