This last year’s escalations in international conflict have accelerated the transition into a multipolar world order, and therefore the global class conflict as well. To understand why, one must understand the fundamental purpose behind Washington’s Ukraine proxy war. When the U.S. provoked Russia into taking action by couping and militarizing Ukraine, it was about more than gaining military-industrial complex profits, or unifying the NATO powers, or getting an opportunity to demonize Russia. Those were the secondary purposes. The primary aim was to bring the collapse of Eurasia, which speaks to the underlying reality behind all imperialist wars: that though these wars involve more surface-level motivations like war profiteering and resource control, they’re foremost waged to try to maintain the geopolitical influence of the empire.
In the case of Ukraine, Washington intended to achieve this by using its Kiev puppet regime as a cudgel against Russia. The plan was to weaken Russia so much that the Russian Federation would be broken up into a series of imperialist client states, like how the imperialists dismembered Yugoslavia. Then, when China’s most important international friend was made nonexistent, Washington would be able to subdue Beijing in the new great-power competition. This would have stopped the PRC’s project to provide infrastructural development to the countries exploited by imperialism. A project which threatens the future of neo-colonialism by making the neo-colonies able to become economically self-sufficient, and therefore invulnerable to imperialism’s debt traps. Like every other one of modern imperialism’s provocations, Washington’s instigation of war in Ukraine had the ultimate goal of reversing China’s rise.
In 2018, when Russiagate was the narrative angle the new cold warriors were using in this effort, Caitlin Johnstone noticed this hidden anti-China component that’s at the center of why Washington has been waging war against Russia:
Imagine what would happen if, instead of promoting the Russiagate narrative, the faces of the consent-manufacturing machine known as the mass media began telling mainstream America that in order to ensure that the US will remain capable of dominating the other countries on this planet, there’s going to have to be an aggressive campaign to re-inflame the Cold War with the goal of disrupting and undermining China and its allies. That would be a very different narrative with a very different effect, wouldn’t it? But that’s exactly what’s going on here, and if the US power establishment and its propaganda machine were in the business of telling people the truth, that’s precisely what they’d say.
Now that the imperialists have brought this cold war campaign close to its logical conclusion, with the only way it could escalate further being a third world war, they’ve revealed the limits to the threat they pose. Washington always knew Ukraine would lose, and that’s what’s happened. But Washington, in its wishful thinking, didn’t anticipate that the sanctions on Russia would be so ineffectual at making a Russian destabilization scenario realistic. A quite foolish error in hindsight, because they were quite aware of how weak the Ukrainian side was yet assumed that the U.S. bloc as a whole was sufficiently strong. There’s a difference between doing great harm to Russia’s economy, and making Russia so politically strained that it breaks up. Now the imperialists are seeing this difference, to the effect that their maneuver on the Eurasian geopolitical chessboard has backfired on them.
Eurasian collapse isn’t coming because Russia, unlike in Yugoslavia, lacks a series of internal nations which have a still-painful history of conflict. In Yugoslavia, the imperialists were able to identify Serbia, a nation which less than a century prior had been named by Lenin as an example of a perpetrator of aggression. Through false flags, the CIA inflamed the old tensions between the Yugoslav nations, using Serbia as the one which took the blame for every atrocity the NATO powers committed within the conflict. Because it could exploit those old wounds, the U.S. empire managed to dismantle the last bastion of socialism in Europe. It lacks such an opportunity within Russia, because the Russian people share an unbreakable sense of unity.
Russia committed evils against other nations during its era as an imperial power, but within historic Russia itself, these old hurts have been healed by the Soviet era of socialist international cooperation. Healed enough that in order to turn Ukraine—the location where the Russian cultural identity originated—against Russia, the imperialists have had to promote fascist propaganda that portrays Russia as having committed a genocide against Ukraine in the 1930s. After the U.S. installed a National Socialist regime in Kiev in 2014, this regime began a campaign to make the Nazi “Holodomor” hoax unquestionable. Kiev made the Holodomor and other supposed Soviet atrocities into narratives which are directly put forth by the government, while banning all statements that talk about Bandera’s participation in the Holocaust. This state sanctioning of Holocaust denial made it appear, at least to those invested in anti-communism, that Russia and not Germany has been the one guilty of human rights abuses within Ukraine throughout the last century.
This piece of atrocity propaganda is so inconsistent with the real history of the two countries that even though the imperialists have managed to instigate a war between them, there’s been enough of a counterbalance to Ukrainian fascism on the pro-Russian side that the war hasn’t destabilized Russia. A great social base has existed for the project to fight a separatist war in the Donbass. The rebellion against Kiev has drawn overwhelming support from the vast majority of the people in what was formerly eastern and southern Ukraine, the vast majority of these people voting to become part of Russia. Naturally, a steady supply of fighters for separatism has come from this base, to the effect that Kiev hasn’t been able to win back the fifth of its territory the Russians have won. Washington knew Kiev wouldn’t be able to achieve this goal, but the imperialists hoped Ukraine would at least be strong enough to make it so that Russia collapsed.
With a Russia that’s sure to emerge from this conflict more geopolitically powerful than it started, in contrast to how the U.S. is sure to emerge from it weaker, there’s now a stronger assurance than ever of a unified and stable Eurasia. Russia and China have been driven closer together by Washington’s joint war against them, and now that Russia has committed to the foreign policy path that Operation Z represents, it has less reason than ever to betray China. Russia’s bourgeois government was pressured into taking action in Ukraine by the country’s communists, and that means the country is now set to stay on its path away from the western collaboration which Putin originally wanted. Putin can’t reverse Russia’s transition into being an anti-imperialist force, he’s already made the imperialists so angry at Russia that they’ll never collaborate with it again. Not unless they can install a new puppet there, which they’re going to continue failing to do.
Eurasia has been won by the forces of anti-imperialism. This has sped up the decline of the U.S. empire, which translates to an acceleration of our social collapse. This won’t lead to proletarian revolution in the core, unless we correctly navigate our conditions.
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