freagle

They absolutely have a coherent message. That message is “Before you bomb anyone, you have to ask our permission and we’ll give it to you”

Also completely garbage take that relies entirely on ignoring reality and psychologizing perceived enemies

But it must be underlined that the Russian and Chinese governments respond, not as anti-imperialist forces, but rather with their own plans for control and dominance.

There is no evidence of this. China is not merely weaker imperialism than the US. China has not dropped a single bomb in 35 years. That’s not a Portugal to Spain. That’s an entirely different class. China is not “carving up a sphere of influence” in the imperialist sense, nor is Russia. That phrasing emerged to describe the behaviors of Portugal, Spain, France, The Netherlands, England, and the US in their globe spanning military adventures to literally subjugate entire chunks of the world and bring the subjugated peoples’ wealth into the economies of the subjugator. There is literally no equivalent analysis for China and Russia.

But even more ridiculous is that we must oppose NATO expansion by focusing on improving living conditions. What the actual fuck? The only way to oppose military expansion is by stopping that expansion. In 4 years of conflict against a smaller weaker opponent, Russia has not made any attempts to expand into Ukraine and take it over and extract its wealth. Including the 2014 invasion of Crimea, it has only ever responded to its security assessment of NATO expansion. Unfortunately for people with actual national security responsibility, opposing NATO by voting for peace and focusing on living standards is not a real option and anyone who says that’s the only legitimate way to oppose NATO is no better than an advocate for NATO expansion.

And I mean that literally. If you watch a transnational nuclear military running live-fire simulations of invasions of foreign countries and say that the only legitimate opposition to it is non-violent, you’re on their side.

Garbage Western Marxist. Multipolarity is not an ideology. It is a description of a world system. There is no path from the unipolar world to a socialist world without first going through a multipolar transition.

The reason Great Power Rivalry does not factor in to contemporary Marxist analysis of geopolitical is because Russia and China are not yet great powers. The context of Great Power Rivalry during the period when the Marxist analysis of imperialism first emerged was a context in which multiple European war machines had already sailed clear around the globe and committed various genocides to claim entire populations as their subjugated peoples and were actively extracting their wealth to maintain their empires and war machines. It was not merely an analysis resting on big militaries but rather big imperialist states fighting with each other.

Russia and China do not meet the standard of Great Power in this sense. If you take England, Spain, and France and scale them up to 21st century standards, Russia and China do not measure up.

If Russia and China had, say even 100 foreign military bases each, while they wouldn’t be as strong as the USA’s 700, they would rightly be seen as imperialist Great Powers and thus engaged in inter-imperilaist conflict. But they do not have such an empire. They are almost entirely confined to their own long-standing geographical space. In short, “big military” is not equivalent to Great Power and to argue that they are simply because they have a big military and a capitalist arrangement of production is a complete misunderstanding of materialism and an adherence to idealist conceptions of imperialism. Which is what Western Marxists are consistently criticized for doing and which this author fails to avoid.