He said "supporting uncritically". There's such a thing as critical support. No nation that isn't an AES state deserves more than that, and it's part of leftist critique that we openly can criticize errors of other socialists as long as we do that in good faith and in a context where it does not feed into NATO propaganda narratives. This goes doubly for political actors who are not even most remotely socialist. We are on hexbear, not on reddit. You can be critical towards a target of US imperialism here without getting applause from a bunch of nazis with shiba inu avatars. You can say "this and that decision of the Russian government is bad" without a choir of people who take it as a justification to send the nukes flying. Everybody here understands the context of such a critique. It's fine. And it could happen in a lot of places besides this board.
When i talk to people about the Ukraine war offline, i see a lot of opposition to it and it's coming from all over the political spectrum really. I do live in a global north country, but not in the US, and people here have more complex takes on this subject than Amerikans. And none of these people need to support Putin uncritically to arrive at their position. Some do, but they are also the ones most removed from an actual anti-imperialist, material critique of the war, they are in fact the ones running on pure ideology. It's just not liberaldemocratic ideology, but reactionary ideology.
What i'm getting at is: I don't see any opposition, particularly not a radical opposition to Amerikan empire amongst people who support Putin uncritically. Maybe you're an exception, that's possible and i want to keep this a good faith argument without shitflinging - but if you are, you are the first person like that i've met. This becomes even more pronounced online, where i see a lot of vocal and uncritical support for Putin, not opposition to Ukraine, not a recognition of Russia's vital interests as a state, but personal support for Putin, and it is realiably coming from people who are just run of the mill reactionaries who don't care about imperialism one way or the other, have never said a single remotely leftist thing in their entire life and only support Putin for idealist reasons - because he's a neoliberal homophobe tough guy meathead like them, and because they are so painfully uninformed about anything going on outside of the northwestern EU or the US that they project their idea of a white ethnostate on Russia. I'm sorry if you're not that kind of guy, i'm sorry if that offends your political sensibilities, but i'm only describing the discourse i encounter day to day and just don't see that kind of genuinely anti-imperialist uncritical Putin support out in the wild. That does not happen. The GOP or the AfD aren't anti-imperialist parties. All the leftists i see that oppose support of Ukraine and demonization of Russia have more nuanced takes than uncritically supporting that clericofascist, nationalist pig. If we want to have opposition to the war that cannot be correctly framed as a largely reactionary, right-wing project, we need to revive the old leftist classic of critical support. There's no way around that. We need to establish a position that is in opposition to the war, but not explicitly putinist.
In fact, uncritically supporting Putin if you are a reactionary or reactionary-adjacent is a permissible, pseudo-taboo opinion in my country. It serves to frame the discussion of the war as a simplistic good vs evil thing. It creates guilt by association and makes it easy to lump everybody who is anti-Ukraine in with the nazis, something that normally should not be possible given that they are a state that has fully aligned itself with supporting neo-nazism and clean wehrmacht myths. But this is what is going on rn. And it can go on because Putin support instead of anti-imperialism is our version of controlled opposition. Useful idiots who feed into the narrartives circulating about this war and play the role of the bad guys that liberals need to run into to make this a personal thing for them. We need critical support to break that up. We need something that falls outside of the liberal matrix, that is not within their frame of reference, that they cannot reflexively reject without scratching their head for a moment, and uncritical support for Putin is none of that. It is exactly what the imperialist block needs the libs to hear.
I do not want that to happen. I do critically support Russia. I support Russia's rights as a sovereign nation to exist without existential threats at their borders. ofc i do that. They're basically my neighbor, i have no interest in war with them. I oppose arms shipments to Ukraine, i oppose the sanctions, i particularly oppose the USA blowing up a pipeline that is partially owned by my country to ensure we do not enter negotiations with Russia, i've also always fully opposed the eastward expansion of the EU and NATO after 1990. Same for the US under Trump breaking the SALT II treaty with Russia. There is no material cause the west has brought forth against Russia that i am not in opposition to, and i absolutely share the analysis that the US and its allies have been provoking Russia constantly for 30 years and what we see now is ultimately a result of that.
But it does not follow from that i need to uncriticaly support a neoliberal fossil fuel shill reactionary who makes the lives of people like me in his country unlivable because he's too much of a boomer idiot to find another scapegoat but LGBT people. Doing that is just purest cringe on par with gloating about Azov nazis, and it's Big Man bs to center support of Putin, the individual, over support of Russia, the collective and geopolitical actor. It's the contrarian mirror image to the individualist, idealist garbage of believing that Putin is the second Hitler. I do not need that. I'm able to seperate the actions of individuals from the actions of states and other institutional actors and from processes that have systemic causes, because that is a necessity to understand geopolitics, which in turn is a necessity to arrive at a principled and effective anti-imperialism that can argue based on material circumstance instead of a veneration of or opposition to individuals.
Because that is what has been lost in the western public: Leftism as a tool to understand material reality. Leftism that deconstructs ideology and narratives and cults of the individual. If we cannot offer that, if we cannot put that back on the map, we are useless.
I should be more clear, because I do not believe in great man theory, that when I say “someone like Gadaffi is a progressive force” what I mean to say is the cumulative regime of power behind him. The current arrangement of the national state and its interests.
It really doesn’t matter if Putin thinks himself good, or evil, or anti-imperialist, or building an empire. It only matters what the cumulative regime of power actually does and its composition in terms of class relations. It doesn’t matter if he chose to be anti-imperialist or was forced into it by being backed into a corner by imperialists. Intentions. Do. Not. Matter.
The geopolitical, world-historical actions that these nations (Syria, Libya pre-collapse, Russian federation) do are objectively anti-imperialist, regardless of the ideology of their supporters or even the ones carrying out the actions. As soon as Russia starts acting as an imperialist, I will be the first to turn on them. But they simply aren’t. They don’t have an imperialist economy, and all of their military actions have been to defend against belligerent western imperialists and stabilize the regions around them.
I also disagree with calling Putin a fascist, the Russian government is not fascist. They are closer to something like Assad or Gadaffi. The actual fascist is Navalny and western-backed neoliberals who want to loot and balkanize Russia further.
It doesn’t really matter or not if Hexbear users are “critical” or “uncritical”. We are not in control of any significant amount of power or influence to even matter. It’s just different posting flavors. “Critical support” is for communist states and organizations, and as you can see DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela and PRC all support Russia. DPRK supports them uncritically in this conflict. China, Venezuela and PRC publicly support them critically, but I think it’s clear from their actions that they support them uncritically in a military sense, just wish they would hurry it up or do it more discretely for PR purposes.
I agree it is shitty of Putin and Russian reactionaries to use LGBT issues as a culture war bludgeon in their propaganda. It undermines their true critique of the Ukrainian state being Nazis and genocidal freaks far more reactionary than Russians. Putin speeches are a wild rollercoaster between him making cold, objective material analysis and talking about colonialism and imperialism and fascism in Ukraine & weird unrelated tangents about traditional values, Christianity & reactionary bigotry. He does this because he’s trying to hold together a bourgeois capitalist state filled with contradictions to maintain his regime of power, but also Russia’s national interests as a whole because Russia and its neighbors are constantly destroyed, colonized, pillaged and destabilized by the imperialist West. So he has to appeal to old Soviet pensioners who care about imperialism and had a nephew killed in Donbas and all their uncles killed in the Patriotic War & also traditional orthodox reactionaries and nationalists. All the things Russian society is now filled with, all the contradicting positions of their citizenry under capitalism. International audiences in the global south will like one narrative or the other, places like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Africa will like the right-wing angle while China, DPRK, Cuba, Latin America, parts of Europe will like the anti-imperialist Marxist angle.
It is shitty but it makes sense why Russia would use both narrative appeals to different audiences they pragmatically want to appeal to - it’s just very stupid of them to do it together in the same speech when they contradict each other. It’s the dialectical reaction to the woke-imperialist phenomena of the West, which is its own contradictory narrative synthesis.
He said "supporting uncritically". There's such a thing as critical support. No nation that isn't an AES state deserves more than that, and it's part of leftist critique that we openly can criticize errors of other socialists as long as we do that in good faith and in a context where it does not feed into NATO propaganda narratives. This goes doubly for political actors who are not even most remotely socialist. We are on hexbear, not on reddit. You can be critical towards a target of US imperialism here without getting applause from a bunch of nazis with shiba inu avatars. You can say "this and that decision of the Russian government is bad" without a choir of people who take it as a justification to send the nukes flying. Everybody here understands the context of such a critique. It's fine. And it could happen in a lot of places besides this board.
When i talk to people about the Ukraine war offline, i see a lot of opposition to it and it's coming from all over the political spectrum really. I do live in a global north country, but not in the US, and people here have more complex takes on this subject than Amerikans. And none of these people need to support Putin uncritically to arrive at their position. Some do, but they are also the ones most removed from an actual anti-imperialist, material critique of the war, they are in fact the ones running on pure ideology. It's just not liberaldemocratic ideology, but reactionary ideology.
What i'm getting at is: I don't see any opposition, particularly not a radical opposition to Amerikan empire amongst people who support Putin uncritically. Maybe you're an exception, that's possible and i want to keep this a good faith argument without shitflinging - but if you are, you are the first person like that i've met. This becomes even more pronounced online, where i see a lot of vocal and uncritical support for Putin, not opposition to Ukraine, not a recognition of Russia's vital interests as a state, but personal support for Putin, and it is realiably coming from people who are just run of the mill reactionaries who don't care about imperialism one way or the other, have never said a single remotely leftist thing in their entire life and only support Putin for idealist reasons - because he's a neoliberal homophobe tough guy meathead like them, and because they are so painfully uninformed about anything going on outside of the northwestern EU or the US that they project their idea of a white ethnostate on Russia. I'm sorry if you're not that kind of guy, i'm sorry if that offends your political sensibilities, but i'm only describing the discourse i encounter day to day and just don't see that kind of genuinely anti-imperialist uncritical Putin support out in the wild. That does not happen. The GOP or the AfD aren't anti-imperialist parties. All the leftists i see that oppose support of Ukraine and demonization of Russia have more nuanced takes than uncritically supporting that clericofascist, nationalist pig. If we want to have opposition to the war that cannot be correctly framed as a largely reactionary, right-wing project, we need to revive the old leftist classic of critical support. There's no way around that. We need to establish a position that is in opposition to the war, but not explicitly putinist.
In fact, uncritically supporting Putin if you are a reactionary or reactionary-adjacent is a permissible, pseudo-taboo opinion in my country. It serves to frame the discussion of the war as a simplistic good vs evil thing. It creates guilt by association and makes it easy to lump everybody who is anti-Ukraine in with the nazis, something that normally should not be possible given that they are a state that has fully aligned itself with supporting neo-nazism and clean wehrmacht myths. But this is what is going on rn. And it can go on because Putin support instead of anti-imperialism is our version of controlled opposition. Useful idiots who feed into the narrartives circulating about this war and play the role of the bad guys that liberals need to run into to make this a personal thing for them. We need critical support to break that up. We need something that falls outside of the liberal matrix, that is not within their frame of reference, that they cannot reflexively reject without scratching their head for a moment, and uncritical support for Putin is none of that. It is exactly what the imperialist block needs the libs to hear.
I do not want that to happen. I do critically support Russia. I support Russia's rights as a sovereign nation to exist without existential threats at their borders. ofc i do that. They're basically my neighbor, i have no interest in war with them. I oppose arms shipments to Ukraine, i oppose the sanctions, i particularly oppose the USA blowing up a pipeline that is partially owned by my country to ensure we do not enter negotiations with Russia, i've also always fully opposed the eastward expansion of the EU and NATO after 1990. Same for the US under Trump breaking the SALT II treaty with Russia. There is no material cause the west has brought forth against Russia that i am not in opposition to, and i absolutely share the analysis that the US and its allies have been provoking Russia constantly for 30 years and what we see now is ultimately a result of that.
But it does not follow from that i need to uncriticaly support a neoliberal fossil fuel shill reactionary who makes the lives of people like me in his country unlivable because he's too much of a boomer idiot to find another scapegoat but LGBT people. Doing that is just purest cringe on par with gloating about Azov nazis, and it's Big Man bs to center support of Putin, the individual, over support of Russia, the collective and geopolitical actor. It's the contrarian mirror image to the individualist, idealist garbage of believing that Putin is the second Hitler. I do not need that. I'm able to seperate the actions of individuals from the actions of states and other institutional actors and from processes that have systemic causes, because that is a necessity to understand geopolitics, which in turn is a necessity to arrive at a principled and effective anti-imperialism that can argue based on material circumstance instead of a veneration of or opposition to individuals.
Because that is what has been lost in the western public: Leftism as a tool to understand material reality. Leftism that deconstructs ideology and narratives and cults of the individual. If we cannot offer that, if we cannot put that back on the map, we are useless.
I should be more clear, because I do not believe in great man theory, that when I say “someone like Gadaffi is a progressive force” what I mean to say is the cumulative regime of power behind him. The current arrangement of the national state and its interests.
It really doesn’t matter if Putin thinks himself good, or evil, or anti-imperialist, or building an empire. It only matters what the cumulative regime of power actually does and its composition in terms of class relations. It doesn’t matter if he chose to be anti-imperialist or was forced into it by being backed into a corner by imperialists. Intentions. Do. Not. Matter.
The geopolitical, world-historical actions that these nations (Syria, Libya pre-collapse, Russian federation) do are objectively anti-imperialist, regardless of the ideology of their supporters or even the ones carrying out the actions. As soon as Russia starts acting as an imperialist, I will be the first to turn on them. But they simply aren’t. They don’t have an imperialist economy, and all of their military actions have been to defend against belligerent western imperialists and stabilize the regions around them.
I also disagree with calling Putin a fascist, the Russian government is not fascist. They are closer to something like Assad or Gadaffi. The actual fascist is Navalny and western-backed neoliberals who want to loot and balkanize Russia further.
It doesn’t really matter or not if Hexbear users are “critical” or “uncritical”. We are not in control of any significant amount of power or influence to even matter. It’s just different posting flavors. “Critical support” is for communist states and organizations, and as you can see DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela and PRC all support Russia. DPRK supports them uncritically in this conflict. China, Venezuela and PRC publicly support them critically, but I think it’s clear from their actions that they support them uncritically in a military sense, just wish they would hurry it up or do it more discretely for PR purposes.
I agree it is shitty of Putin and Russian reactionaries to use LGBT issues as a culture war bludgeon in their propaganda. It undermines their true critique of the Ukrainian state being Nazis and genocidal freaks far more reactionary than Russians. Putin speeches are a wild rollercoaster between him making cold, objective material analysis and talking about colonialism and imperialism and fascism in Ukraine & weird unrelated tangents about traditional values, Christianity & reactionary bigotry. He does this because he’s trying to hold together a bourgeois capitalist state filled with contradictions to maintain his regime of power, but also Russia’s national interests as a whole because Russia and its neighbors are constantly destroyed, colonized, pillaged and destabilized by the imperialist West. So he has to appeal to old Soviet pensioners who care about imperialism and had a nephew killed in Donbas and all their uncles killed in the Patriotic War & also traditional orthodox reactionaries and nationalists. All the things Russian society is now filled with, all the contradicting positions of their citizenry under capitalism. International audiences in the global south will like one narrative or the other, places like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Africa will like the right-wing angle while China, DPRK, Cuba, Latin America, parts of Europe will like the anti-imperialist Marxist angle.
It is shitty but it makes sense why Russia would use both narrative appeals to different audiences they pragmatically want to appeal to - it’s just very stupid of them to do it together in the same speech when they contradict each other. It’s the dialectical reaction to the woke-imperialist phenomena of the West, which is its own contradictory narrative synthesis.
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