...A Marxist dissident explains what the left gets wrong about Russia

[DonViejo]

“We should recognize that there are other imperialisms”: A Marxist dissident explains what the left gets wrong about Russia

Socialist activist Ilya Budraitkis tells Salon that it's time to abandon illusions about Putin's Russia

CHARLES DAVIS

Russia today is not as depicted on Russia Today, the English-language news network established by the Russian government in 2005 that paints a capitalist state led by a right-wing nationalist in pseudo-left colors: the anti-America, almost, where the poor are always fed – not just shot dead by racist police – and foreign policy is motivated not by cynical self-interest, but a dogged, one might even say principled determination to stand athwart U.S. imperialism and yell “stop!” The critiques the network airs of poverty in the United States and Washington’s bloody wars abroad are an amusing, completely fair rejoinder to the State Department’s habit of pointing out the human rights hypocrisy of everyone else, but the implication that things are any better in Moscow is no less amusing to leftists in Russia who are aware an Occupy Red Square, like Occupy Wall Street, would be crushed with all the skull-cracking efficiency a state can muster.

Russia is also not the Russia we read about in the West’s corporate tabloids, its long-time leader, Vladimir Putin, cast as an irrational psychopath bent on eliminating all who oppose him, at home and in Eastern Europe and maybe even the United States too if he wakes up cranky. The truth, as is so rarely the case, lies somewhere in the middle: The truth is Russia is a nation-state and an imperial power that may not be any better than the United States, but also isn’t really any worse. When it comes to being terrible, the competition is actually pretty close: The only country that sells more arms to repressive regimes than Russia is the United States of America, though the former has actually been stealing some market share by capitalizing on the instability caused by the latter (they also frequently arm the same people). When it comes to imprisoning the highest percentage of its own population, the USA is still number one, but Russia is again number two.

The United States plays up its devotion to “liberty,” appealing to Russian liberals whose Skype conversations with Western NGOs are recorded by the NSA, while Russia appeals to Western leftists (and Eastern Ukrainians) by capitalizing on nostalgia for the Soviet Union and the idea, more propagandistic than realistic, that state capitalism is markedly superior to the liberal variety. Too often, however, this is what defines the debate: each state’s propaganda machine, with patriots believing their own country’s talking points and dissidents believing the other’s, obscuring what out to be the glaringly obvious fact that neither nation-state is motivated by any principle in domestic or global affairs more honorable than “what’s good for our oligarchs,” who even live in the same parts of Manhattan.

If there is to be a new Cold War, the left should reject the temptation of reducing evil in the world to the actions of one’s own government and recognize that imperialism, like capitalism, is a global phenomenon for which one can blame more than one villain. Are there differences between the powers? Sure, just as there are differences between Republicans and Democrats – and they are significantly less profound than the partisans of either faction would have us believe, having more to do with who has power than what one does with it. Russia sending billions of dollars worth of weapons to the Assad regime in Syria, for instance, is no less evil, nor fundamentally different, than the United States arming the brutal regimes of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. We on the left can explain why imperialists do what they do and how it’s not irrational but makes total sense according to the logic of capitalist nation-sates, but we shouldn’t confuse an explanation with justification or accept that logic as our own. We should focus on the crimes of the empire we know best, perhaps, but we shouldn’t just dismiss the crimes of others or else we’ll find we lost our moral credibility and swapped mindless patriotism for useful idiocy. The left is at its best when it doesn’t allow skepticism and solidarity to stop at a national border – and just applying a cookie-cutter analysis to events abroad, it actually communicates with its comrades in other countries.

more
http://www.salon.com/2015/04/06/we_should_recognize_that_there_are_other_imperialisms_a_marxist_dissident_explains_what_the_left_gets_wrong_about_russia/

[betterdemsonly]

1. I do think funding Isis is worse than funding Assad

Lest we not forget most of the money for Boko Harem and Al Shabaab probably comes from the Saudis.

These groups all engage in radical misogyny and religious intolerance. That is far worse than Assad. It just is.

The only reason they hype the crimes of Assad is to protect settlers in Golan Heights.

The neocons are more than capable of funding phony lefty groups. They still run Social Democrats USA.

Obama should have purged the neocons from the state department and the cia as soon as he took office. They are dirt dumb stupid and wrong about everything.

[NuclearDem]

2. That was a good read.