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?
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Plekhanov was right to a degree about stagism but Lenin superceded him because the latter correctly understood that Plekhanov’s paradigm was too mechanistic and passive in its approach; a dictatorship against capital would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!