One more war nested in the Donbas/Ukraine war: Putin wants to believe this is a civil war.
Despite everything the West threw at revolutionary Russia, despite its own errors and catastrophes, despite the devastation of the Great Patriotic war, Russia emerged in 1945 with a greater landmass than when it kicked out the czars and created the 20th century. Take that sentence as broadly accurate historical generalisation or as the basis for an entire mythology. Either way, in the mind of Putin's faction, Russia is still the union of republics and anyone who leaves is a traitor. Meanwhile: A: the neo-liberal hegemony, fundamentally the USA's hegemony, is entering a phase that looks distinctly like decline (this can take a century - look at Britain). There's no secret the rising hegemon is China. Two questions remain: (1) neo-liberal economics still rules (eg to explain the collapse of successive COP conferences just look at the Fortune Global 500 top ten) but as a political creed it is falling apart. There are many possibilities leading towards a new economics of the commons but I can't see a credible political alternative, certainly not in the PRC. (2) who comes next? By rights it should be India, but Modi may blow it., politically, militarily and - this would be a great place to learn more from better placed nettimers - through https://digitalindia.gov.in/<https://digitalindia.gov.in> which looks likely to exclude the poor entirely from all aspects of civic life. So if he blows it, and Iran has already blown its chances, Putin is smart to place Russia in the pecking order. But ... B: everything else, notably ecological catastrophes in every continent and ocean and the accelerating distance between rich and poor says there's nothing much to win if there's no future to enjoy it in. Add your favourite crisis. I'm fascinated by the suicidal culture war education policies being adopted in the Anglosphere, a recipe for stagnation. ChatGPT is a symptom, not a cause: it triggers panic because AI is coming for white collar jobs [no-one cared much when it only replaced service industry employees]. It is intelligent in the way a job-ready graduate is intelligent: it can perform normative functions (grunt coding, civil service consultancies) that efficiently displace expensive and unreliable humans. What it can't do is create tasks that don't have names yet. Without them, any moment now the whole shithouse, in WS Burroughs memorable phrase, is about to go up. Or rather fall down. This helps explain what otherwise seems so bizarre: that the (un)civil war is not for influence, population or resources. It only has a veneer of ideology (unlike say Modi's undeclared war on Islam). It is a war for territory. This makes it hard to place in relation to other wars, but gives it a comprehensible place in Russia's military history (and brings back the shadow of Theweleit raised earlier in this discussion). This time, however, the entire population of the planet, non-human and human alike, ends up inhabiting Scorched Earth. Pit raises all the right questions. To add: neo-liberal dogma is the only game in town but it is failing economically as well. Accelerationism left or right runs into the same Anthropocene barriers of over-use of energy and over-production of waste (this may be because - as in culture wars against critical humanities – hard labour and job-ready graduates and validated over enjoyable and fulfilling work that leaves metals in the ground) There is the possibility of sharing out the unemployment - but only as soon as we have embraced politically the economics of leisurely survival and creation - and that can only happen if the actuality of accumulation and inheritance stops motivating key political actors in past, present and emerging hegemonic regions. Which suggests - in the hard light of recent seismic events - that we should be manoeuvring away from territorially based hegemon and towards a stratigraphic model: is it cool yet to say we don't need wars between or within hegemons: we need class war? Seán ________________________________ *****************************************
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