this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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There's a concept called "critical support", which most "tankies" are practicing. You have criticism of a side but its the lesser evil so you support it despite your criticism. You won't hear much of that criticism publicly though because that's counterproductive.
Like if I want the US to recognize the DPRK as a sovereign state so we can at least begin discussing Korean reunification, why would I bother mentioning my criticism of Juche?
I would avoid saying "lesser evil" for critical support cases, because revolutionary defeatism exists for lesser evil situations where nothing is progressing against the primary contradiction. It's more a recognition that a shitty thing can be progressive/forward moving relative to its opposition. Russia winning/getting a peace deal with Donbas and Crimea out of Ukraine gets us much closer to ending global imperialism than Ukraine getting it's land back or worse.
We want the larger capitalist empire to loose to the smaller capitalist empire because that leads to better outcomes. Saying otherwise is telling half truths at best.
No. Both are bourgeois states and yes I prefer the weaker one winning in this case, but the framing of "big vs small" is very ignorant of any reason to support something critically
Please elaborate because as far as I see you just dont like that framing because you think its counter productive messaging, not because its wrong.
Because its not relevant. It HAPPENS to be the case now, but it's in no way a defining feature. Sure, I'm absolutely fine with that detail being described so, because it's true. But you minimized the analysis to that. "Framing" is ambiguous and I'm ignoring that, I guess you could call it framing, but your framing is irrelevant to my analysis
It IS relevant because its the fundamental reason why we can say we'll get positive outcomes from this case. It was even baked into your explanation "ending global imperialism".
Fair enough on the framing, just meant that I ignored it for the first half, otherwise the reply was not engaging with you up to that point, but I wrote sloppily.
But you did not originally say "bigger and smaller IMPERIALIST" you said capitalist empire. It's a totally different discussion which is where we started speaking past on another. I still don't think that's correct, because I don't think a new analysis like Lenin made of imperialism would find Russia as materially equivalent in form or content of imperialism at all (maybe requiring a new word for the type of imperialism done by the US/NATO like super-imperialism or so. That's why I still hold the point that it's not just "bigger v smaller" that matters, but the Qualitative difference that then arose from the quantity of Imperialism performed/exported capital and coerced labour. They should be understood as 2 phenomenon at this point, not a big and small