Absolutely! We must fervently oppose the imperialist powers of the United States, UK, and France who invaded and violated the territorial integrity of Nazi Germany during the Second World War!
You do know that any time one country attacks another, it’s not automatically “imperialism”?
The US government is bad
The Russian government is bad
The Ukrainian government is bad
The United States is imperialist
Russia is not imperialist
Ukraine is not imperialist
Imperialism is a specific word with a specific meaning, it’s not “When a Bad Country declares war on a Good/Innocent Country and occupies them”. Imperialism creates an exploited and exploiter, with a stark difference in the conditions of the imperialist and their new possession. For example, the European powers were imperialist during the Scramble for Africa because they occupied that territory and then created colonies were the native population was regarded as an inferior class to slave away (whether literally or figuratively) while the typically white population occupied higher positions and thus were exploiters.
It’s why, for example, the argument that the USSR was imperialist (at least in the specific case of eastern Europe) is so obviously just liberals learning the word “imperialism” and then implying it to every situation that they think was bad, as they do so very often with leftist vocabulary, and in actuality have literally no idea what they’re talking about. The eastern European nations were not exploited by the Russians, and USSR massively increased the quality of life and infrastructure of the people living there - which is why the later shock of capitalism was such a complete disaster. That was the point in which eastern Europe was conquered by an imperialist - the United States - because they were treated as an inferior people to be exploited (and so their quality of life and life expectancies plummeted).
Sure, the Americans are imperialist. But the Russians are even more so given that they’re trying to take over a sovereign nation.
By my previous explanation, you can now hopefully see why this statement is wrong. As the United States is the hegemonic capitalist power, they are able to manipulate the world via institutions like the IMF and World Bank to create debt crises and force countries into subservience. They force countries to cheaply export their resources abroad, and take special care not to allow them to create food agriculture, instead making them focus on cash crops like coffee, which has the dual effect of increasing the value of exploitation and making it so that those countries are reliant on food imports (usually from the United States) to survive. If all that fails and the country still wishes to rebel, the United States maintains 750 military bases around the world in lots of different countries. The threat of violence is implicit.
The United States doesn’t need to physically occupy foreign territory if those countries are already within its orbit and doing its command, either because the leadership is in ideological agreement (e.g. Europe) or because they cannot rebel without being overthrown by coups or even invasions.
No one country has a monopoly on imperialism.
This is technically true, but the United States far and away is the dominant world hegemonic power and so is by far the largest imperialist power on the planet. We aren’t talking “The United States is a little more imperialist than Russia”, I’m talking one, two, maybe three orders of magnitude.
No, critical support for Russia is anti-imperialist.
I didn’t write the following, but it is a good summary as to why it should be the position of Marxists and leftists in general to critically support Russia especially with respect to the SMO. It was a response to someone else naively saying they just didn’t like war in general and this war is just one capitalist state fighting a proxy war against another. While it’s understandable to feel that way, given the amount of propaganda we’re force-fed in the west, it is not materialist and it is completely failing to see the bigger picture. The person who wrote the response is @SimulatedLiberalism@hexbear.net.
and this struggle is between two capitalist empires which both want to do more capitalism, so there’s no benefit to either side winning
I keep seeing this take cropping up in online Western leftist circle and to be very honest, I always consider this to be the laziest takes on war for people claiming to be on the left.
This is no different than saying that there is no difference for the left when it comes to whether the North or the South wins in the American Civil War because neither of them was socialist. Well, would it surprise you that Marx wrote an entire collection of essays just on analyzing the American Civil War?
To quote Lenin from his Lecture on “The Proletariat and the War”, October 1 (14), 1914:
For a Marxist clarifying the nature of the war is a necessary preliminary for deciding the question of his attitude to it. But for such a clarification it is essential, first and foremost, to establish the objective conditions and concrete circumstances of the war in question. It is necessary to consider the war in the historical environment in which it is taking place, only then can one determine one’s attitude to it. Otherwise, the resulting interpretation will be not materialist but eclectic.
Depending on the historical circumstances, the relationship of classes, etc., the attitude to war must be different at different times. It is absurd once and for all to renounce participation in war in principle. On the other hand, it is also absurd to divide wars into defensive and aggressive. In 1848, Marx hated Russia, because at that time democracy in Germany could not win out and develop, or unite the country into a single national whole, so long as the reactionary hand of backward Russia hung heavy over her.
In order to clarify one’s attitude to the present war, one must understand how it differs from previous wars, and what its peculiar features are.
We can write entire essays about the war in Ukraine, and it is anything but “a war between American and Russian capitalists”.
For one, if this is about Russia expanding its capital, why is the Russian Central Bank doing everything it can (including rate hikes and devaluing the ruble) to undermine Putin’s effort to achieve economic self-sufficiency in the face of unprecedented sanctions, and directly aiding the Western imperialist cause? If anything, it is stifling the expansion of Russian capital.
Such narrative crumbles at the slightest inspection of what is actually going on within the Russian political and economic structures, and points to a more fundamental division that Michael Hudson had pointed out regarding the conflict between finance vs industrial capitalism.
And we’re not even getting to the wider geopolitical implications of the war in Ukraine yet - what does it mean for Western imperialism? The anti-colonial struggles of the Global South? The effects on global financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO) and the efforts to decouple from such oppressive structures (which is what de-dollarization is all about).
We have to ask ourselves, what would a fascist victory in Ukraine mean for left wing movements in Eastern Europe? What could the total subjugation of Russia - a country that has large scale military equipments, raw resources and minerals, and agricultural products - to Western capital mean for the anti-colonial movements in the Global South?
Leftists who refuse to apply a materialist and historical method to understand the world’s events will inevitably fail to see the underlying currents of the global state of events, and as such they cannot predict where the world is heading and will not be able to position themselves to take advantage of the impending crisis.
After all, it was WWI that resulted in an explosion of socialist movements within the imperialist European states, why? Because the socialists back then actually combined theory and practice (what Gramsci referred to as praxis) to take advantage of the predicament.
Ukraine is the country under attack
Yes, the Nazi-run Ukrainian government started attacking the Donbass region of Ukraine in an attempt to ethnically cleanse that region of the majority Russian-speaking population. Fortunately, Russia eventually entered into that civil war on the side of those people.
supporting the nation that is a direct victim of imperialism is preferable
Then you should be supporting Russia, since it is the country opposing the imperialist US/NATO (which I hope you have a better understanding of, given SeventyTwoTrillion’s response to your other comment). Ukraine is being privatized and sold off for pennies to western the Bourgeoisie even when those same western interests have blocked all attempts at peace at every turn, perpetuating the war as long as they still have Ukrainians to sacrifice.
even if that involves the lesser evil of alignment with the US military.
lol. The US is the greatest evil here, the evil that couped Ukraine’s government in 2014, who has funded neo-nazis there since even before, who has stymied peace over and over, and indeed is the main reason this war even started.
