A class analysis of Putin’s Russia

The Ukraine war is not a war between two empires. We can argue this in “common sense” terms. The USA rings the planet with 800 military bases, outspends on weaponry the next ten spenders together, has been at war for its entire history and has slaughtered millions – by bombs, invasion, murderous ‘sanctions’ and terror unleashed – in this century alone; mostly in far off lands. In what universe can that be said of China or Russia?

Or we can argue it in terms of dialectical materialism. We can point out that those Marxists who say China and Russia are empires have not backed with empirical analyses their view of either as defined by hyper-financialisation, the export of monopoly capital and repatriation of profits.

Ukraine Take 2  [edited]

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A question uppermost in my thoughts is how to see the empire as it truly is: neither overstating it as a monolith, against which resistance is futile, nor understating its capacity to play the long game and learn from success and failure to adapt its methods of reasserting global hegemony as China, Russia, DPRK ¹ and now Iran refuse to submit. Avoiding both errors – which I likened six days ago, pace  Brian Berletic, to seeing evolving US strategy as the seizure or forfeiture of pawns, bishops and rooks on a global chessboard – was the theme of my June 19 post, the first and so far only instalment in the series, US control of global energy?

(Primacy of place in that last was given not to Brian but Nel Bonilla. She too is anti-imperialist, in her case not a former US Marine analyst but an academic who draws on a different analogy – the formulation, implementation and, in light of encountered realities, adaptation and iterative modification of urban planning policy – to arrive at a similar set of conclusions on the need to avoid on the one hand fatalistic attributions of unerring power to the US hegemon, on the other taking each strategic or even tactical setback as heralding its imminent collapse.)

A different but related question concerns the nature of the Russian state and current leadership in light of a war, four and a half years and counting, imposed on it by Washington designs set out with remarkable candour in the 2019 Rand Report, Extending Russia. That question being how to acknowledge that the Russian Federation, its leadership seeking for years – even after Putin succeeded the drunkard who’d allowed IMF disaster capitalism to ravage an ossified top-down economy, withdraw all safety nets and send living standards and life expectancy into a freefall ² – to join the West as a partner was provoked, sneered at and underestimated by the same. And to do so without making the mirror opposite error of attributing genius bordering on the preternatural to the Russian leadership as it turns, even now with wistful backward glances, to face eastward where, as many within Russia and without have long insisted, a brighter future beckons.

Both mistakes are easily made given on the one hand the cluelessness of liberal and even self-avowedly Marxist attacks on “Russian aggression” in Ukraine; on the other the calibre of men like Putin and Lavrov as compared to the mediocrity at best of their Western counterparts. (The latter a reflection not of innate Western inferiority but a moribund parliamentary ‘democracy’ captured by rentier capital to the extent that compliance with its agendas outweighs – witness the Starmers, Macrons, Von der Leyens and Merzes – excellence or even competence as the one truly indispensable qualification. ³ )

But only the uneducated many get a free pass. Marxists, who in theory accord primacy of place in their analytic toolkit to the methods of dialectical materialism, have no excuse.

Thanks are therefore due to steel city follower Gerald, who in a comment below my June 26 post – Did Trump play a credulous Putin? – alerted me to the first of a series of podcasts by a person not known to me, Alexander McKay, representing an outfit not known to me, Liberation News Network. A few hours later I was watching, raptly attentive.

Seventy two minutes long, it applies five analytic frameworks – from Lenin, Mao, Marx, Gramsci and (implicitly) Marxist geographer David Harvey – to the contradictory ‘semi peripheral’ and ‘Bonapartist’  ⁴ nature of the Russian state, and how that constrains Putin’s prosecution of the war. While this might sound offputtingly professorial, Mr McKay’s application of theory in light of the concrete conditions of the Ukraine conflict confer a refreshingly practical dynamic …

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1. I’ll post soon on a cartoonishly maligned Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
2. For a copiously documented yet highly readable account of Russia’s post Soviet and IMF prescribed demolition in the Boris Yeltsin years, see chapters 10-11 of Naomi Klein’s, The Shock Doctrine.
3. I don’t say parliamentary democracy was ever other than an instrument of class rule. Just that the ascendance post Thatcher and Reagan of finance capital, i.e. the changing make up of the ruling class, has made that fact both more toxic and, to a growing minority now opening its eyes, more obvious.
4. ‘Bonapartism’ has very specific meaning in Trotskyism. Looking to the counter-revolution formalised by Napoleon Bonaparte’s coronation as emperor, it refers to an elite premised on revolution but able neither to advance the same nor, since revolution gives that elite its sole claim to legitimacy, roll it back. Trotsky reapplied the term to Stalinist bureaucrats he saw as having the same frozen and parasitic relationship to the property gains of 1917. Some, regardless of their views on Trotsky and Stalin, might look askance at McKay’s use of the term in the context of post-Soviet Russia but hear him out. As neither imperialist nor imperialised, today’s Russian Federation is a paradox few analytical approaches are better suited than Marxism to decipher.