I am a Marxist in China
Orthodox Marxists in the Chinese internet community often view Russia and Iran as weak links in imperialism, rather than as anti-imperialist forces .However, in the view of Chinese Marxists, opposing the global hegemony of the United States takes precedence over opposing secondary imperialisms (Iran, Russia).
The person in the picture is Yang Heping, a US citizen with a Chinese green card, and he is the most popular orthodox Marxist-Leninist-Maoist self-media figure on the Chinese internet (with 3 million followers on Tiktok and 800,000 on Bilibili). Yang Heping advocates that whether it’s Ukraine, Russia, or Iran, “the truth is on the side of the proletariat, not on the side of any government or capitalist.”
In China, those who unconditionally support Iran and Russia are usually nationalists or national leftists.
I wonder if the differences between the left-wing in Europe and America and the left-wing in China are really that significant?
Did the ethnic cleansing happen? Is there a historical precedent of Lebensraum? Has that been effectively attempted to be continued with NATO? What slowed /stop the ethnic cleansing from happening? Does Russia like the US and Europe here have an extensive history of colour revolutions and regime change? If not, why flatten their claims?
Authorship of those making the claims, whether the claims are happening and historical precedent can help guage what’s happening. It makes the abstract more concrete.
(Furthermore, as marxists when considering nations we should consider nations of peoples rather than just the bourgoisie border that encloses them.)
还有一点必须指出的是，我知道在欧美“民族”与“种族”强绑定，但是在中国不是这样的，“中华民族”并不是指“汉族”，而是56个民族合并起来的多元化民族体系，比如“旗袍”，旗袍是满族服饰现代化而来，但是任何中国民族主义者都会将其自豪的视为自己民族服饰。
汉族主义者（皇汉）有自己的种族认同感，他们极端排斥蒙古族、满族传统和服饰，也排斥中华多元民族这个概念。
如果没有中华人民共和国改变旧中国的封建传统和分配秩序（通过阶级斗争），中华民族这个概念可能就会解体
I meant in the sense as: the indigenous americans or the descendants of slaves in the US could be considered nations of peoples within the US. As a marxist, I would centre nations of peoples in class dynamics so for example the above would be in the context of US settler colonialism.
Nations and races are social constructs so deconstructing them can be useful in understanding concrete property relations.
For example, the settler nation of the US allows some people of colour to join and share in its loot actively suppressing both indigenous peoples (some reservation areas have a life expectancy of 40yo) and the plurality of black folks (the world’s largest incarceration system ever is primarily designed to lock up black folks to (1) remove labour competition from the settler nation (2) provide a rural jobs programme in terms of priaon guard labour (3) stifle the revolutionary threat against the capital order.
我必须提醒你，世界上并不是只有顶级霸权国家（美国、德国）才能成为法西斯主义国家，“无产阶级民族”（Proletarian Nation / Nazione proletaria）理论同样也是意大利法西斯、日本法西斯核心理论，这两个国家都是半农业半工业国，在二战爆发之前似乎看起来“楚楚可怜”。特别是日本法西斯，日本入侵中国的一个核心理由就是打击身为英美资本傀儡的国民党政权、将东亚从英美殖民统治下解放出来，这在大屠杀发生之前一切都看起来很“正当”
列宁提出工人贵族理论，本意是解读为什么一战工人没有反对战争，他强调，被帝国主义超额利润收买的只是工人阶级中的“上层、少数和特权阶层”，而不是沙俄无产阶级应该对抗德国无产阶级，列宁一直希望德国革命可以支援沙俄。
总得来说“无产阶级民族”（Proletarian Nation / Nazione proletaria）是一套非常危险的理论，使用他时应当谨慎再谨慎
I would consider the fascist nation as one whose external colonies are insufficient so to maintain its Herrenvolk Democracy so it turns the tools of imperialism inwards to then kickstart the engine of being able to colonise further land, resources and peoples outside of its nominal borders.
However, by the time of the 21st century the “fascist nation” is redundant - liberal democracies have got so good at using the tools of fascism within their frameworks that the distinction between fascism and liberalism outside of nominal electoralism largely only matters whether is one is a beneficiery of such a Herrenvolk Democracy or its victim.
I am not a fan of pigeonholing proleterian=good non-proleterian=bad because it obfuscates one of the profound discoveries of marxism and devolves it into workerism, which can be reactionary and easy class calloborator with petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie fascists. One of the profound discovery of marxism is this: under capitalism the labour is already socialised but it is the surplus value that is privatised, as Stalin put it there is a mismatch between the forces of production and relations of production and a socialist state helps accelerate the correction of that mismatch.
Plekhanov was right to a degree about stagism but Lenin superceded him because the latter correctly understood that Plekhanov’s paradigm was too mechanistic and passive in its approach; a dictatorship against capital would help accelerate the timeline towards communism.
Circling back to Russia, I therefore have no use for the proleterian-nation-theory that was mentioned to explain imperialism; it strips anything meaningful to be understood and then actioned in the concrete world. We don’t need to force a triangle to fit in a square hole.
Russia, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, tried its hardest to join the Western imperialist order and was roundly rejected - there is no more of the world that the US and its vassal statez are happy to share - they want Russia for themselves. Putin, with his Tsarist sympathies, stumbled into aligning with anti-imperialist block because there was no other mode of survival for Russia as a nation. The autodynamism that produced this sovereignity was because of the legacy holdover from the Soviet Union, backed by the socialist fortress that is China.
(By the way, I have not tried even a little bit to simplify what I am saying for translation as I figured AI translation has got good enough that it should be fine. But if anything I said needs clarifying then please let me know. Thanks for sticking with me so far!)
我基本理解你的意思了。但是我认为“普京对沙皇制度的认同”和“不得不选择与反帝国主义阵营结盟”并不是一个强关联内容。
我认普京很大程度上依然继承了“苏联解体的意识形态路线”——“反共民族主义”，证据就是普京2022年2月21日那个著名的演讲：“那么，我将从现代乌克兰完全由俄罗斯创造这一事实开始，更准确地说，是由布尔什维克、共产主义俄罗斯创造的。这个过程几乎是在1917年革命后立即开始的，列宁和他的同志们用了对俄罗斯极其残酷的方式做到了这一点——通过分离、撕扯掉属于俄罗斯历史领土的一部分。 当然，当时住在那里的数百万人民，谁也没有问过他们的意见。” ………… “而现在，乌克兰的‘感恩后代’拆除了列宁的纪念碑。他们称之为去共产主义化。你们想要去共产主义化吗？好吧，这非常适合我们。但正如人们所说，不要半途而废。我们随时准备向乌克兰展示，真正的去共产主义化对它意味着什么。”
普京很大程度上只是因为北约的巨大威胁，被迫与中国、朝鲜、伊朗绑定在一起反对美帝国主义，当然俄罗斯现在成为反对美帝国主义的势力已经是一个既定事实，但是我丝毫不怀疑俄罗斯寡头资产阶级如果有机会就会想要再次成为帝国的野心
I will clarify as it is either a translation error or I did not say it clearly enough: Putin is no communist or socialist, and his Tsarist sympathies are certainly not the reason for aligning with the anti-imperialist camp; he aligns with the anti-imperialist camp because of multiple failed attempts at joining the western imperialist order and it is the only way for Russia to survive against Western belligerence.
Having said that, Russia are head and shoulders above European countries, and Russia certainly has more sovereignity over their land than the Europeans have with theirs.
There are many occurences in history of capitalist countries aligning with the anti-imperialist block; eg India following independence of the formal British colonisation.
We are not supporting Russia for their capitalism (and India is an excellent example of why being anti-Western imperialism is not enough, you still need a dictatorship against capital) - we are giving critical support to Russia for their role in anti-imperialism and standing up meaningfully against Western Hegemony.
We must never equate Russia to the West here because if we do we are then (1) minimising the violence of the West with this false equivalence (2) we are minimising the ethnic cleansing of eastern Ukrainians by western proxies for which the only real material support for them was with Russian intervention (otherwise we should have to offer a concrete alternative not abstract idealism. We cannot simply say Russia should not engage in war, as dialectical materialists we have to say what realistic alternative there was in stopping the ethnic cleansing).
Hope that helped!
我同意在巴勒斯坦、美洲原住民、美国黑人身上使用“无产阶级民族理论”，但是俄罗斯？正如我所说，俄罗斯处于灰色地带，俄罗斯的攻击性远甚于中国、伊朗，俄罗斯现在与其他被压迫民族是盟友，并不意味他真的具有无产阶级性质
“种族清洗真的发生过吗？历史上是否存在“生存空间”的先例？北约是否曾有效地延续过这一理念？是什么减缓/阻止了种族清洗的发生？俄罗斯是否像美国和欧洲一样，有着丰富的“颜色革命”和政权更迭历史？如果没有，为何要否定他们的说法？”
俄罗斯当然有颠覆政权的历史，格鲁吉亚、克里米亚、德左。而如果你首先要考虑民族而不是资产阶级性质，那么这就完全是一个站队的问题，取决于你相信谁的说法。
如果站在这些被颠覆政权民族的一边，那么就是他们在“自由”的基于民族意愿加入北约，是俄罗斯在种族清洗；如果站在俄罗斯的一边，就是对北约扩张的防御性攻击、以及保护俄罗斯族的免受这些国家的种族主义迫害。
中国则是另一个很好的对照组，西方对中国新疆的质控完全是基于口供的阴谋论式闭环，一个涉及百万人的事件没有任何图像证据足以证明其指控的荒诞，中国从来没有以“防御性进攻”为理由进攻任何一个国家，哪怕像印尼真的爆发了血腥的种族屠杀
There are those who claim to be pro-palestinian and then say the israeli proleteriat and the gazan proleteriat should get together overthrow their bourgoisie together. They say in doing so they are centring class dynamics over ethnic lines.
The above paradigm is a load of nonsense. In doing the above they are not centring class dynamics but flattening them instead. The israeli proleteriat collaborate with the bourgoisie against palestinians of various classes; the class dynamics and relations of settler colonialism shouldn’t be erased in favour of some idealised form of class. This serves noone except the genocidaires.
Another example of this was noted by Marx and Lenin on how the English proleteriat has been “bourgeoisified”. Remember, class is primarily a relation to property. It is explored further in Lenin’s labour aristocracy and we have a century of marxist science thereafter examining imperialism and nations as classes.
Western proleteriat are effectively a class of labour aristicrats in relation to the global south and it is partly why true international solaridity has been difficult to develop in the west - western proleteriat benefit from a slice of imperialist profit superexploited from the global south.
If one then flattens this difference between Western and Global South proleteriat we then erase the class dynamics of imperialism! Imperialism is not just the relations between elite bourgoisie but all the cogs in the system that make it happen.
When we zoom out we understand the primary global contradiction is imperialism of which the height of capital control sits in the US. Every example you gave has western involvement in destablisation, why would we equalise Russia and US here?
Marxism is not workerism. The proleterian are considered the most revolutionary because they were considered propertyless but as dialectics teaches us a group’s characteristics are not immutable, we have to understand any given group’s relations to property in the concrete form not just an abstract generalised way.
Going back to Russia, the Western bourgoisie want to balkanise and extract superprofits in labour and resources from Russia - it is an extension of Hitler’s Lebensraum, which itself was directly inspired from the US Manifest Destiny. It is in that context the west is funding, arming and giving political cover for Ukrainian Nazis against Russia. When one chastises Russia in this context then one needs to give a concrete alternative on how the ethnic cleansing in East Ukraine was to be stopped. Remember the West broke two Minsk agreements before the war broke out.