#(and russia is imperialist in the economic sense. does not require to be part of the imperial core)

[straightlightyagami]

you cannot in fact “critically support” putin communistly. in my opinion. you should not support the murder of innocent people for absolutely nothing

[donewithcapitalistfrayers]

excellent statement overall.

Three notes:

The US congress aims to triple military aid to Ukraine this year to $1.2 billion including more than $500 million worth of foreign military financing to sell excess weapons, $200 million worth of drawdown authorization for the US president to transfer war matériel in US stockpiles to non-US militaries, and other measures. The US has already allowed its NATO allies Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to send US-made weapons to Ukraine. The US, furthermore, has offered a $1 billion sovereign loan guarantee and support from the International Monetary Fund to secure its puppet regime in Ukraine.

By flooding Ukraine with weapons, the US aims to stoke the war of its puppet Ukrainian government against the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic in the Donbass region (west of Ukraine), and press for the re-annexation of Crimea, in the hope that this will further provoke Russia. Such aggressive action violates the Minsk II Agreement which gives the Donbass region a special status in Ukraine.

No mainline US-based "anti-imperialist" org statement i've seen so far references this the "flooding" of weapons — and which are contested by some european powers in a serious inter-imperialist conflict that are in small part referenced in the statement — and on the level of specificity required to actually disrupt (not a peacenik rally that means nothing does nothing). There are concrete measures that must be concretely condemned and opposed. Or at least acknowledged and analyzed since there is no possibility of actually stopping these imperialist operations given their scale.

The statement doesn't say this, but analysis from other places such as the Events in Ukraine guy have made the strong (and obvious) case for the loans as conditional on so-called "anti-corruption" purge of judiciary which are required in order to consolidate and expand refeudalization of the Ukrainian countryside. If Ukraine is to be a proper neocolony, then it's land must be controlled with a suitable property regime. This is a core aspect of US-led imperialism's agenda which is why it is correct to characterize this as not just a potential war on Russia and a fascist war on Donbass, but primarily an imperialist war on all of Ukraine in a struggle over the economic colonization of the country by only the US-led imperialists.

Which leads to the next part:

It cannot be an 'inter-imperialist rivalry because Russian firms do not compete with US-led capital. This statement lists Russian actions, none of which fall under imperialism in a comprehensible Leninist sense, only to conclude in a note about "Russian bullying in Ukraine." Russia is indeed "bullying", i.e. military exercises not in (excluding Crimea, where afaik there haven't been reports of major military exercises anyways) Ukraine but in neighboring Russian Oblasts to raise the issues listed in the piece:

Russia is pushing for renewed negotiations to reaffirm previous agreements surrounding the Donbass region, explicit prohibition of the eastward expansion of NATO to Ukraine and other countries, and a ban on US and NATO intermediate-range missile in countries within striking distance of Russia.

So the slip to "in Ukraine" is misleading. But it's likely connected to the necessity of remaining in the 'US-Russian inter-imperialist conflict' mode of analysis. This is a miss.

Next, to the paragraph on Ukrainian history, in broad strokes it's OK but:

Ukraine was reduced to an appendage of imperial Russia as a supplier of grains during the period of capitalist restoration under modern revisionism from the late 1950s onwards

I really want to know where the analysis in the bolded part is derived from since Soviet Ukraine only became more industrialized over time in relation to the other federated nations of the USSR including Russia, not less.

[mitigatedchaos]

@ libfas like & pals

[right-wing migration post]

@yesbloodyhell

There would be no Syrian/Muslim migration if there were no USA/EU airstrikes or USA/EU funding of terrorists for their imperialist warmongering So suck it up and happy Christmas 

me

Bees are great.  Bees do all sorts of useful things.

You shouldn’t go around smacking beehives with baseball bats.  In general you should leave beehives the fuck alone.

But if you do smack a beehive with a baseball bat, then surely you shouldn’t compound your stupidity by bringing the hive full of angry bees into your house?

The best course of action was of course not to get into this situation, but that’s now in the past.

Additionally, how did Western politicians justify this warmongering?

Could it be that a combination of the same Multiculturalism-as-Ideology with Democracy-as-Ideology lead to refusing to forcibly enact the (painful!) reforms that would be necessary for stable, flourishing (or at least okay-ish) states to emerge after knocking the previous dictatorships down?

@yesbloodyhell

The EU is controled by businessmen who want to employ migrants for low wages. So they WANT the bees A stable third world is against American economic interests so they WANT to destabilize those regions Multiculturalism is propaganda to appeal to hippie liberals and has nothing to do with policy

(Before I start, I’d like to make it clear that the “fucks” and similar words are directed at the rulers, not you.)

You know what would be in the interests of the American ruling class?

Not having the database of just about every American security clearance application get hacked by Russia or China.  (Probably China.)

But they couldn’t even manage that much.  They couldn’t even manage a single fucking software project, nor have the guts to keep it airwalled if they couldn’t be arsed to secure it properly.  They cut the budget and the IT admin was effectively outsourced to, if I remember correctly, some guy in Brazil.  

This doesn’t make sense - clearly they are not averse to wasting hundreds of billions of dollars, as demonstrated by their regular activity.  And China potentially knowing who many of your spies are gets in the way of coup d’etat bullshit you might want to pull, in addition to infiltrating their own agents better.

From what I understand, prior to the Iraq War, there may have been an idea within the American military establishment or among the NeoCons that you have to throw a tinpot country against the wall every ten years or so to “prove you mean business,” and from there came some institutional support for the Iraq War.

Now, when your military is perhaps the most expensive in terms of equipment that it has ever been, or at least highly leveraged on equipment and technology over manpower relative to previous eras, what kind of dumbass thinks this is a good idea?

I’ll tell you who.  Someone overconfident that actually believes their own ideological bullshit.

It’s entirely consistent with someone who has massively overestimated the odds that their ideological plans will work out, and the amount of power that they can project.

Wasting such an enormous amount of money may have allowed some groups to capture some of it, but it seriously cut the ability of the United States of America to credibly threaten people - when, under that reasoning, being able to effectively threaten people is the major point of doing it in the first place!

Now, on to the economics.

Under Imperialistic forms of Capitalism, it can make sense to initiate coups in other countries in order to keep them as part of the Capitalist system.  In other words, to keep them from nationalizing resources that you would like to acquire cheaply as material inputs.  (This can also take place under non-Platonic Ideal Communism.)

However, this is very different from general instability.

General instability is terrible for factories, including sweatshops, and for general economic development.  After all, someone you don’t like could come to power in the instability and nationalize all the factories you just built, or bomb them over a fight with a rival ethnic group.  You can keep them fighting rival ethnic groups instead of fighting you, but because that fucks up the infrastructure, it still limits the amount that you can extract.

Businesses can manage burdens which are predictable, but it’s much tougher for them to overcome the unpredictable.  Truly amazing returns on investment are required to justify this.

Your ideal for exploitation is much closer to a friendly dictator than it is to a civil war.

And the economics of the migration in Europe?

Well for one, there’s a question of whether they really are getting the productivity they expected, especially after the surveillance state measures and so on are taken into account.  Yes, concrete blocks to stop truck attacks are cheap, but the hits taken by economies after terrorist attacks are significant.

Not all the countries in the area have such low birthrates.  If they were so competent, they could take more action to ameliorate their own shortfalls before bringing imports.

So again, what does it resemble?  Some guy who thinks he’s Mr. Bigshot Rule-The-World but who actually sucks at it, and who also believes in key ideological elements.

But that misses the biggest question of all.

Why would a country with a GDP per capita of $40,000 need to do much of anything to attract immigrants from countries with per-capita GDPs of $4,000?

They could have roughly the same number of people coming in for the low, low price of $0, filtered by actual desire to emigrate.  

Why destabilize those areas with expensive and scarce war machinery for billions more in cash that could be issued as tax cuts?

If the reason is that they need to manage the popular expectations, then whether the population believes in multiculturalism-as-ideology and democracy-as-ideology actually matters, and by challenging it, the ability of elites to act in this manner can be undermined or even destroyed.