quite correct as mentioned also by Vijay Prashad in his article.
Russia isn’t going to lose. The Ukrainian counteroffensive has been a complete failure, and Ukraine’s Western patrons are already at the stage of acceptance. Of course, Russia won’t agree to freezing the war, like what happened at Korea, because they have all the leverage.
Folks over at hexbear seem displeased with this take
Yeah it’s still a bit divided over there on opinions of the big two communist parties over in the RF.
I believe it’s a case of either believing the KPRF is the Russian equivalent of the Yankee CPUSA in the negative connotations that’s normally associated with cpusa, that the KPRF is a boomer social luncheon party to spend days in nostalgia for the CCCP, or that the KPRF is objectively captured by the Russian capitalists under Putin and are controlled opposition.
And I’ve seen some takes dismissing the RCWP-KPRF as being a patsoc party on the grounds of their chauvinist LGBT+ views. But the few people that did hold that view that I knew of haven’t shown their face for a while so the RCWP’s more or less an unknown existence
It becomes even worse if you point out that a preemptive invasion of a weaker nation due to a fear of attack is the same justification that the USA used for the invasion of Iraq.
The difference is that in the case of the US that was a lie. And Ukraine being a US proxy is not actually the weaker party in this, Russia is because they don’t have the full backing of an alliance like NATO behind them. So Russia was entirely justified in feeling threatened by a militarized russophobic Nazi regime, not on the other side of an ocean but right on their border, wanting to join a hostile military alliance who openly declare that their principal enemy is Russia.
People who try to draw superficial comparisons between Ukraine and Iraq are lying by omission because literally everything about this is different.
So if Ukraine couldn’t defend itself due to US support, then the comparison would have been accurate?
Someone remind me which party isn’t the mainly opportunist one?
KPRF is the old-school Marxist-Leninist communist party and the one which is most principled anti-imperialist. It’s also by far the biggest one, in fact it’s the second biggest political force in Russia behind Putin’s liberal United Russia party.
The other “communist parties” that exist in Russia are insignificant fringe groups of Trotskyists and ultra-leftists who hate Putin so much that they would rather side with the imperialists and help them destroy Russia thinking they can do another revolution after this government is toppled kind of like Trotskyists thought that they could have a second revolution if Stalin was defeated by the Nazis. It is no coincidence that some of them are outright funded by the West…
The KPRF are not old school Marxist Leninists. They are liberal shills and at best a controlled opposition party. They bend to every one of Putin’s whims, (minus a few pointless disagreements for appearances).
Their leaders receive absurd funding and “gifts” from United Russia, and the higher leadership is so corrupt you would have thought you were in American Congress.
I just wonder how United Russia works? Yeah that’s totally I have observed. There are “leftists” in Russia who were cheering for the bombing of Kerch bridge and who thinks Russia is an imperialist state. Not that I know KPRF that much but it seems they have conservative social views (it’s not so much different than in Pakistan/India and many parties in Africa and middle East). Regarding SMO and others, I think they should have their own viewpoint and we shouldn’t think it as a similar situation like in Iraq and Afghanistan. KPRF is a coherent party and not some anarchist masturbating for Azov.
There are a ton of genuine and principled communist parties around the world especially in the global south which hold on to at least some social conservative lines. We need to accept that contradictions like this are a fact of life, it is to be expected that many communist parties, at least those that are not astroturfed from the outside, will in some way reflect the dominant social mores and attitudes of their country. After all, their members come from the general population, they are not above them but part of the people and will share some of the same prejudices inculcated in them by their upbringing.
Of course we would like to see their attitude change in a more progressive direction but this is not something that we have the power to enforce on them, and to attempt to do so would be viewed as cultural imperialism. They need to come to the right conclusions on their own. In the meantime we must not allow such secondary contradictions to be exploited to break our international solidarity with them, or indeed with most other forces that share our principled opposition to imperialism. Imperialism and not social conservatism is the primary contradiction of our time and the main obstacle to socialism.
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