On Sat, Jan 11, 2025 at 7:58 AM Julian Samboma via groups.io <jlsamboma= [email protected]> wrote:
Michael Karadjis, If you cannot recognise a US proxy war when one is biting us right on our rear ends, then you have no reason calling yourself a Marxist. I'll go one better for you Julian - in general, the concept of "proxy war" is a non-Marxist concept, how's that? Even better - the entire category of so-called "colour revolutions" does not even exist, it was nothing but a tankie concoction to slander any peoples movement against any bloody capitalist regime that they had decided was somehow "anti-imperialist" or on the side of Russian imperialism or whatever they decided, often based on nothing very much. It was an amalgam of completely different movements that often had little in common, but each may have had more in common with other movements against allegedly "pro-imperialist" regimes. In contrast to anti-Marxist concepts of "proxy" war, Marxists discuss class, and class conflict, and how this relates to wars, civil wars and uprisings. Now of course one might object that there can be "elements" of proxy war in various cases, and sure, most conflicts are a combination of different factors. So if we are just using "proxy war" to mean that some imperialist or powerful capitalist state is backing one side for its own interests, and in doing so attempts to "proxify" parts of the leadership of a struggle, then that's fine, but that does not necessarily change the nature of the conflict itself. So when you say that your "Kindergarten Dialectics" in 2018 revealed the true nature of the so-called "Arab Spring" as a CIA-MI6 manufacture midwifed by Open Society Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy and other US "democracy"-promoting NGOs", well that's when I know I was absolutely correct to ridicule your Kindergarten dialectics and insists that that is exactly what they are. If you are happy to write off the millions of Arabs that rose against repressive capitalist dictatorships throughout the decade from 2011 onwards as "proxies" of nefarious agencies, then I am not about to convince you otherwise on an email list today, millions of words have been written, especially from people from the region, that show otherwise, so we can just agree to disagree. Ukraine? Citing one of your "brilliant" informants, the guy that destroyed the Russian economy thereby creating the Putinism that he now shills for, you ask: "Do you disagree with, for eg. Prof Sachs's position that Ukraine in Nato (with attendant military bases) would be equivalent to Chinese or Russian bases in Mexico?" Well, no, I don't disagree with that. However, for most Marxists I know of, if there were Russian or Chinese bases in Mexico, we would declare that to be Mexico's own business - whether or not we thought it was a good idea - and definitely not the business of the USA! We would definitely not support a US invasion of Mexico to remove the "security threat", we would definitely be spending our time creating excuses for years for that US invasion; isn't it brilliant that tankies manage to give us tired arguments like this one which actually go against what they are trying to argue. But not when you realise the argument has its origins in "critical" voices from the US ruling class like Sachs. Should we argue that when the USSR put missiles in Cuba and the US threatened nuclear war, that this was just a "proxy" conflict and the US had a right to be concerned about its "security"? I would have thought Marxists would look at the Cuban revolution and consider the class-based reasons US imperialism wanted to overthrow it and defend its right to protect itself any way it chose, even if we happened to think the Soviet missiles were not a good idea. Likewise, Ukraine also has the right to defend itself from the gigantic imperialist power on its borders which has annexed territory, semi-invaded since 014 and then launched a full-scale invasion and annexed one fifth of its territory since 2022. It is no "proxy" to want to defend itself from its former colonial ruler, any more than Algeria would be someone's "proxy" if its former French colonial master decided to re-invade the country. Besides, you also ignore the fact that Ukraine had not joined NATO, had no bases in its country, had not even been given a Membership Action Plan to join NATO since applying in 2008, had its membership permanently vetoed by Germany and France, was considered by experts to be 20-25 years away from meeting requirements even if it were ever given a MAP, offered before the Russian invasion to scrap its NATO membership if Russia did not invade (but Putin ignored it), made the same offer a month into the war and Putin responded with the Bucha massacre and so on. The US and Europe support Ukraine for their own imperialist reasons of course. You might say there is a "proxy element" like in most wars. But to call the Ukrainian people's war of self-defence from Russian imperialism a "proxy war" is simply an insult to the millions of Ukrainians who have mobilised against Russian imperialist conquest. The term implies that, if these powers were not backing Ukraine, the Ukrainians would be quite happy to be under Russian conquest and colonisation. The Russian war against Ukraine is a classic imperialist war of conquest. Russian wants Crimea, the Black Sea coastline, with its strategic waterways for its navy and its rich hydrocarbon reserves. It has nothing to do with a non-existent “NATO threat” which actually did not exist. And indeed the main reason many Ukrainians, and many throughout eastern Europe, want their countries to join NSTO is precisely the existence of what they perceive to be a threat, based on real history, from the grand imperial power to their east. Putin’s achievement? 1. The annexation of one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory, and 2. The expansion of NATO to Sweden and Finland, in Finland’s case doubling or tripling NATO’s actual border with Russia (previously, NATO’s entire border with Russia was on two of the three tiny Baltic states). > > > _._,_._,_ > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34529): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34529 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/110506717/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
