the title
That didn’t stop the poor, exhausted, overworked, concerned with more pressing material issues workers of Haiti, the Central African Republic, Mali, and Ethiopia from waving Russian flags. The Global South doesn’t need to have big-brained analysis of pampered Westerners to decide that yes, Russia is the lesser evil to the point of not being all that evil. They are tired of the West’s bullshit and want the West to gtfo by any means necessary. That’s why Mali told the Danish and the French to gtfo while inviting the Russians in. Even the most uneducated members of those countries recognize this simple truth. If anything, it’s the petty bourgeois NGO-brained members of their society who’s mentally colonized and think the West can show them neocolonial mercy.
You’re obviously 100% correct if everything you’ve said regarding revolution. People make their revolutions, not the ruling classes or the middle classes, petit-boug, or bougies who claim to represent them. If I didn’t think that to my bones I wouldn’t be a communist. I’m not disagreeing. But on the point of explicit support you’re actually mainly referring to the states of those countries. The average urban or rural worker is not following the geopolitical minutiae of this conflict closely. Ofc, there are far more comrades outside the West than inside of it, and their opinions and analyses are in general more concrete and interesting of those western comrades. But we are still a political minority outside the West and have a range of reactionary domestic forces to compete with.
Yes people outside the west are generally far more more aware of the fact that the West and recently especially the US has been structurally ruining their lives for centuries and are contemptuous of Western liberal obliviousness this. That’s why they don’t give a fuck if the US/Ukraine loses, and I get and have the same immediate emotional reaction to people talking about it. But that’s different to a colder, consequentialist geopolitical analysis where I think it the positive consequences for the global working class would outweigh the negative in the long run. Most people in the world are not radicalized and therefore not theoretically developed to the point of taking that view. The rest of the world still struggles with reactionary ideology, much as a direct resort of the imperialism and exploitation they have suffered at the West’s hands.
Again, I don’t even disagree that if I were forced to answer the question, I’d probably say with a decent amount of confidence that I think the overall consequences would be better if Russian got the edge rather than the West. What makes me uncomfortable is that how that seems to easily to slide into a kind of nihilistic gloating and tbh explicitly positive championing of Russian interests, whereas the fact that we want US hegemony to collapse does not imply that I have to want Russian nationalist imperialist interests to spread across Eastern Europe on the historical pattern which anyone who actually follows and studies the politics of the region is fully aware that Russia would like to do given its geopolitical status. Like do people here actually think that the Wagner company in Africa are doing good, humanitarian work? Evidently they’ve never met mercenaries.