The world really is revolving faster than I had anticipated. I thought that the decline of USD hegemony would gradually occur over the span of two or three decades, but it might occur in just a few years. This year, 2023, isn't even over, yet 21 countries—BRICS+ and ASEAN—have agreed to remove USD as the middleman in cross-border transactions.
At risk of coming across as a lib, I am super skeptical of Russia, but more in an Imposter Amongus sense than a “Russia bad!” sense.
Like their desire to attack NATO is based asf, but I don’t trust a capitalist country to be a good member of an international socialist coalition for long
So this is good, but North Korea should probably watch their back in electrical
What has helped me frame these ideas is the concept of primary vs secondary (and tertiary and so on) contradictions.
Imperialism, specifically US led imperialism as there are no other imperialist forces at the moment, is the primary contradiction of our time. Russia, along with other capitalist nations such as India and Brazil as a part of BRICS, are contributing to the coming end of the imperialist contradiction. The ruling classes of these countries are our allies on this today, even though they are our class enemy tomorrow.
Once the primary contradiction is dealt with, a formerly secondary contradiction becomes primary. That will likely be the monopoly phase of capitalism. In that phase the capitalist nature of states such as Russia, India, and Brazil (just to name the examples from above) will be challenged and brought to an end.
And then we focus the struggle on to the next primary contradiction and so on. Such is the practice of a communist. I think that the struggle against dealing with contradictions is asymptotic, as in always approaching but never reaching a finished state, but that doesn't mean it's not worth fighting to make people's lives better.
Us vs Them mindsets are always horrible frames of reference to take. Especially when every actor here has their own unique goals, motivations, and reasons for acting. Russia is not the Soviet Union anymore, they are a liberal capitalist disaster that is a shadow of the Soviet Union. It makes sense to be wary.
We can only hope that this leads to good outcomes, but again, until we see actions and results, we don't have much to go off of.
Yes but Russia is still sussus amongus
Just because there is no choice but to accept the sussus imposter as part of the group doesn’t mean they’re not a sussus amongus
Well in the past Russian government was trying to cozy up to the west, which meant condemning the "enemies" of the west. Plus there was the matter of DPRK nuclear tests near the Russian border. But now, well, there's not a whole lot of options left
Plus there's little use befriending the international pariah, sadly enough it just causes more harm then good when you have other options. But now? There's no reason not to.
I forget who said it but they said that this is mutually beneficial. DPRK gets to sell some of their massive stockpiles of artillery and rockets, Russia gets someone reliable to buy weapons from now that they’ve been sanctioned by like half the world