Tankies can only imagine a world in which NATO acts and Putin reacts. But they can’t envision a world in which Putin acts and NATO reacts. For a tankie, Russia is infantilized and Putin has no free will: his actions are purely determined in reaction to what NATO does. The actions of NATO, however, are treated as a free, independent variable that determines Putin’s actions, but never the other way around.
For example, they often claim that NATO expansion caused or provoked Putin into invading Ukraine. That is possibly true, it is indeed likely that if NATO didn’t expand so much, Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. But the reverse is also true: just like NATO expansion caused Putin to be imperialist, so did Putin’s imperialism provoke NATO into expanding. They are in a dialectical relation to each other. The claim that Putin was provoked into a corner into taking Ukraine hostage in order to negotiate better conditions for Russia’s security against NATO can be completed with the claim that NATO was provoked into a corner into expanding by Putin’s invasions and imperialist ambitions. Can we really blame countries like Ukraine for wanting to join NATO in order to be protected against Russia, despite NATO’s imperialist projects in Kosovo, Lybia and Afghanistan?
Neither NATO nor Russia are agencies without free will. NATO expansion increased the probability that Russia might invade Ukraine, but Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was nevertheless a choice. And Putin’s imperialist ambitions in Crimea, Georgia, Chechnya (and now, the full-blown invasion of Ukraine) may have increased the likelihood that NATO would expand faster and further, but again, this was a choice. Putin could have chosen not to invade Ukraine and NATO could have chosen not to expand.
By focusing the causal chain in only one direction, campist MLs forget the very core of dialectical materialism. Despite common belief, dialectical materialism is not a determinist theory or framework. It does not deny the agency or free will of actors involved. Instead, it explains how history is moved by contradictions in the social order. The contradiction between NATO and Russia is the driving motor of geopolitical history at the moment, because Putin wouldn’t have existed without NATO and NATO wouldn’t have expanded without people like Putin. This doesn’t mean that the two imperialisms are ‘equivalent’, since NATO imperialism and Russian imperialism has different forms. NATO is an alliance of mostly liberal-democratic states which is used as a force of US hegemony all around the globe. Russia is a quasi-fascist dictatorship who outright denies the legitimacy to exist of other countries but only around its border.
Recognizing mutual causality should not lead to flattening differences. Dialectics is not symmetry.

Posted by: Lastrevio | May 19 2025 1:43 utc | 201