Image Transcription:
An 8-panel Phoebe Teaching Joey meme.
The first panel is Phoebe from Friends saying "Russia".
The second panel is Joey from the same show replying with "Russia".
The third panel is Phoebe saying "has invaded".
The fourth panel is Joey repeating back "has invaded".
The fifth panel is Phoebe saying "Ukraine".
The sixth panel is Joey repeating back "Ukraine".
The seventh panel is Phoebe saying the completed phrase "Russia has invaded Ukraine".
The final panel shows Joey proudly proclaiming "NATO just started a proxy war".
Ok, so I need to think bigger, ok:
The invasion has shifted a lot of power in Europe back into NATO and the MIC.
If russia gets anything out of this, it will only demonstrate that challenging borders by force is worth it to all authoritarians out there (even the ones you don't like). Keeping unilateral border change taboo is one of the most effective ways to prevent wars, by removing the long-term economic incentive at the short-term cost of lives and working class suffering.
If russia gets what it wants, expect more nuclear proliferation and a more unstable political landscape.
Humiliating the UN as a mediator and multilateralism by adopting an offensive realist perspective where the strong impose and the weak suffer...those are some working class values right there.
All of these are major working class losses, but keep dreaming about how russia's violence is going to bring about your working class utopia on these foundations of violent bullshit.
Those are very good points, and I agree with most of them. Overall I think this invasion is detrimental to the international interests of the working class. The only part where I disagree with you is that I think bringing about a more unstable geopolitical order (a side effect of the path the conflict has eventually taken) is beneficial, as it will weaken the mechanisms holding together imperialism. I might be wrong though, and I would like to discuss this more in depth to hopefully understand what options I should support. But I fully reject the argument expressed by this meme and some of the people in this thread, as such simple (even emotional) reasoning tends to give me paranoia that I'm being manipulated by ideas created by propagandists. Is it okay if we continue this conversation in the dms?
The assumption that "a more unstable geopolitical order" will "weaken the mechanisms holding together imperialism" seems incredibly flawed, to put it in charitable terms.
By stability I mean we're not going back to russia's beloved 17/18/19th century many-player politics with wars happening everywhere all the time.
With nuclear weapons on the table, you have 2 options: a hegemon "world police" or a bipolar order (US and China).
If you want a true multipolar order and decentralised power, first you will need strong international law and institutions, not more of this imperial crap.
Ok, I'm done.
Your first mistake here is assuming that imperialism is only when the West does it. If Ukraine is forced to give concessions to Russia in any form, any wannabe imperialist now knows they can now chip away other countries' land if they are willing and capable of enacting enough violence, whether that country is Western or not, and they might get away with it. Unstability weakens multilateralism; multilateralism disincentivizes unilateral aggression.
Multilateralism is the exact opposite of what would happen if the US manages to fend off Russia and China. The only way multilateralism can truly emerge is a confrontation between two or more blocks where there is no clear winner and thus big countries need to offer more autonomy to small countries in order to win them over. The US sparking wars to keep poor countries sending raw materials home, leveraging the dollar and nuking from orbit anything that even remotely looks like socialism as they've been doing right up to this point is the worst case scenario, and the global events that are weakening this should go on as much as possible. The best case scenario is that a revolution becomes easier due to instability, and cooperation between socialist powers appears as a new stabilizing force.