There’s a fundamental difference between the character of the revolt that Russia experienced last month (in which a PMC leader turned against the government), and the uprisings which are increasingly impacting NATO countries (with France being the first one where it’s turned into permanent destabilization). Like with the other crises that the clashing capitalist states are mutually experiencing, internal unrest has a distinct type of effect within Russia as compared to within the borders of Russia’s enemy states. With Russia being able to handle these crises vastly better.
In Russia, the economic shocks and social instability are pressuring the government to become more serious about waging the war. Which is causing the country to take better advantage of the vast strategic strengths it has within this conflict. Thereby, Russia is putting itself in a better place to come out of this crisis in a more stable state than its adversaries. Which can only react to the internal disasters they’re experiencing by furthering the same policies (austerity, investment in arms, police militarization, enabling of price gouging, engineered economic disruptions) that have already put their societies in such chaos.
The only direction Russia can go in, especially after making Ukraine’s victory mathematically impossible and after neutralizing the rogue PMC threat with such ease, is towards a greater ability to gain benefits from the emerging multipolar world. The only direction the NATO countries can go in is towards being further hurt by the rise of multipolarity. Which wouldn’t be true if these countries were socialist, but as long as they remain under bourgeois rule, they’ll largely continue to isolate themselves from the trade and development opportunities which Washington’s rivals are offering the world.
This is because whereas Russia is fighting to accelerate the anti-imperialist historical trends that are in its national interests, the NATO countries are fighting to reverse history. To restore Washington’s status as the undisputed hegemon. When entire countries orient their economies, political cultures, and discourses around a goal as impractical as reversing history, they inevitably do ever-growing damage to themselves. What kind of government would take away its own people’s ability to afford basic necessities so that it can pay for a war it actively chooses to prolong? A government that’s based around maintaining a dying international order, and that’s willing to cause global destruction in the hope of bringing this order back. This is a description of not just the U.S. government, but that of the other imperialist powers, obviously including France.
When a police murder of an ethnic North African provoked France’s latest wave of unrest, it represented blowback from every facet of the crises the country has been creating for itself during the era of imperial decline. The destruction of living standards due to austerity; the increase in the country’s immigrant population due to imperialism’s wars, which French police have reacted to by growing more hostile towards people with dark skin; the recent shipments of weapons of war into Europe, with International Accuracy Rifles that the U.S. sent to Ukraine ending up in the possession of France’s police departments after being seized from criminals. For this conflict to emerge between France’s racist police and African diaspora communities after African countries have been expelling French NGOs, and punishing illegal French troop deployments, illustrates the colonial context behind this development.
There’s a reason why the equivalent combination of destabilization risk factors doesn’t exist in Russia, letting Russia absorb its recent crisis: whereas the NATO countries are focused on furthering the world’s chaos and violence, Russia is focused on ending these horrors the dying hegemon is engineering.
When Russia decided to dismantle the military of the fascist Ukrainian NATO coup regime, its goal was to make the country’s conflict able to end by taking away the aggressor’s tools for violence. To stop Kiev from any longer being able to shell the Donbass, which had lawfully broken away to escape the regime’s discriminatory policies against Russian speakers. Putin’s hesitant attitude has made the full destruction of the regime’s resources harder, yet with the pressure the PMC revolt has placed on his government to execute the war better, he could be prompted to correct his strategy. For this to happen at the same moment when NATO’s full humiliation has been getting closer than ever, with Ukraine’s absurd attempt at a post-Bakhmut “counteroffensive” failing, has created the perfect conditions for Russia to leverage NATO’s growing weakness. A weakness that events like the French riots could exacerbate.
Whether the unrest hurts NATO’s operations depends on how well the revolutionaries of the NATO countries build vanguards that can turn the spontaneous outrage into coherent efforts towards workers liberation. Should the protests solidify into a cohesive front with concrete demands, what will come out of this is a threat to international capital that doesn’t come from the natural transition towards a post-American world. It will come from work done by the proletarians to assert their class interests.
We’ve already been seeing a version of this revolutionary effort in the USA, where an anti-NATO movement has emerged to challenge imperialism’s psyops. This represents progress within the class struggle, both because it threatens the hegemon’s ability to hold on to its remaining influence and because it empowers our workers movement to break away from the liberal reformists. That’s why fighting the information war against NATO is the most impactful thing we can do at this stage.
This is what we in the core of imperialism need to prioritize as we go into the 2024 election, and the liberals try to pressure us into supporting their cultural hegemony: words and actions that harm this hegemony, that work to discredit the narratives which let liberals continue defining our discourse. As the neoliberal Macron oversees a country whose working class is rising up in righteous rage, the liberals are trying to maintain their perceived credibility by diverting attention towards Russia’s supposed evils. This rhetorical tactic doesn’t work on the majority of people in the imperialist countries, who lack the economic comforts which the labor aristocrat minority has. Most of us see no reason to care so much about Russia’s real or alleged sins. We in the NATO countries see our own governments committing evils all the time, whether as visible as murders by police or as banal as lowering wages via inflation. The majority of the people are compatible with the anti-imperialist perspective should they get exposed to it, because the majority of the people aren’t well-off liberals.
This is the great potential base of support for the working class cause that we can connect with, and use to carry out a mass mobilization effort. An effort that can defeat the state while it intensifies its repression, which is inevitable given the path that the liberals have chosen. Because they refuse to accept the decline of American dominance, our ruling elites have created the conditions for perpetually intensifying chaos. Which we in the core may see next year, when the election encourages another potential wave of political violence.
The liberals seek to use this risk of right-wing terrorism as a pretext for further dismantling civil liberties, as shown by their attempts to criminalize anti-imperialist solidarity work. Should they succeed at breaking movement-building efforts, any unrest will only bring about a more militarized society. We have to do the work to infuse these spontaneous uprisings with a revolutionary character.
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