>Leftypol goes down>Immediate "anti-campist" posting on /GET/, .net>>1942594>Consensus cracking>>1942650>Reddit NAFO memes>>1942605>Openly admitting you're only here to trollIt should be clear by now what is going here. And it's not "good-faith discussion by regulars who just happen to have some disagreements with multipolarity"
We saw this shit in the early days of the war. Anyone active elsewhere will have noticed the same lines being posted on reddit, twitter, even non-anglo board (dvatch).
The "anti-campism" promoted in these threads is misinformed at best. Revolutionary defeatism should be applied in a specific context as described by Lenin, by an organized mass movement of workers, in favor of triggering a revolution. It has never been about the adventurism of blowing up random federal buildings or
>all bourgeois wars are imperialist>all bourgeois states are imperialistWhich was never Lenin's argument. Go ahead, quote the exact book, paragraph, line where he said it. You can't.
Russia isn't AES, Putin isn't a communist. But it doesn't make the dissolution of Ukraine as
ethnostate any less progressive. We live under a global system of apartheid (as described by various leading Marxists, including those in the global south like Nkrumah back in the day). And dissolving these national divisions should be cheered on. Just like they were in South Africa, just like it should be in Palestine. So that what are now national struggles become purely struggles between workers and capital. So that capitalists, Capital, cannot exploit the divisions of workers along ethnic lines, and treat some as second class citizens. As seen not only in the west, but also with Central Asian workers
in Russia, south Asians in the UAE and Qatar, etc.
Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, were able to analyze bourgeois conflicts and recognize some were historically progressive (in the Marxist) sense. To deny this in favor of quote mining Lenin in order to maintain the status quo is
reactionary.The dissolution of Ukraine is progressive regardless of the bourgeois character of the Russian state, regardless of the reactionary rhetoric in favor of the war, just like the end of the Bantustans was progressive, even as South Africa continued to exist as a bourgeois capitalist state.
To deny this, and misconstrue "workers have no country" (We should have no loyalty to bourgeois states) as "workers should oppose their countries even when they're acting in a progressive manner" is reactionary wrecking.
Nationality continues to matter. And unfortunately so. It shouldn't.
But it does. It does for Palestinians in the occupied territories. And even those who have lived for decades now in Arab states as second class citizens or outright stateless nonpersons.
It does for eastern European seasonal workers. It does for central Asians employed in Russia. It does for South Asians treated as slaves in the Gulf States. It does for Thai and Philippine workers treated the same across the middle east. It does for undocumented migrants in the US.
These developments should happen and have happened under socialist leadership. But they remain progressive even when orchestrated by bourgeois powers.
If you want to oppose this because you're a pacifist, that's fine. But don't pretend this stance is Marxist or Leninist. And don't pretend this one specific instance implies the Russian state should be uncritically supported in everything. (like the crackdown in Kazakhstan, mobilization of workers as seen in 2022) Because that was never the argument.