Breno Altman: we are not facing an inter-imperialist war.

Opera Mundi - In the program 20-MINUTE ANALYSIS This Tuesday (01/03), I answered a question that has been asked in light of the conflict in Ukraine: Is Russia imperialist? 

For many, the current situation is the result of a confrontation between two imperialisms, the Russian against the American. For others, more sensitive to the Russian attacks on Ukrainian territory, it is a Russian imperialist aggression against the sovereignty of Kiev.

However, if we consider the historical trajectory and current profile of the country led by Vladimir Putin, my answer to the question is: no, definitely not. 

Russia is certainly a capitalist country, and its state has been undeniably bourgeois since the end of the Soviet Union thirty years ago. While finance capital is hegemonic and there is some export of Russian capital, this is certainly not the main pillar of capitalist accumulation in Russia. After all, in the modern economy, finance capital is dominant in almost all countries, but this does not mean that all countries are imperialist, although many also export capital. 

It is worth remembering that the modern definition of imperialism, as synthesized by Lenin, goes far beyond military power or colonial dynamics of conquest and occupation of territories, being an economic process that emerges in the most advanced capitalist countries.

For Lenin, imperialism would start from a high degree of economic development, in which production would be concentrated and centralized, leading to the emergence of monopolies. These monopolies, unable to obtain profitability solely within their national territory and generating a huge surplus of financial capital, seek new markets, new sources of raw materials, and new supplies of labor. 

They establish new factories and companies in countries where raw materials and labor are cheaper, to increase profits, and where new consumer markets can be formed. Furthermore, these new companies in third countries serve as export platforms. To defend the interests of monopoly capital beyond their borders, competing against capital from other countries, bourgeois states build enormous military, diplomatic, and financial capacity. 

Thus, in order to assert that a particular state is imperialist, it would be necessary for the export of capital to be structural to that country's capitalist accumulation and for the state to be structured for that function – for example, with military bases spread around the world, gigantic maritime fleets, and long-range weaponry.

After World War II, however, imperialism ended up changing its configuration. It ceased to be merely a process and transformed into a system to which all imperialist states became subordinate to the financial, military, diplomatic, and cultural hegemony of the United States.

In the struggle against the socialist bloc, the capitalist bloc came to have American central command, international institutions under its control, the effective subordination of all armed forces to the US military, and so on. NATO emerged precisely to consolidate this situation. 

From 1945 to 1991, this system was countered by a socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union, although there were anti-imperialist states that were not socialist – such as the pan-Arabism of Nasser, Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad or the Islamic Republic of Iran.

From 1991 onwards, this imperialist system called the shots in the world, in what is called the unipolar order. 

Russia's military reaction against the United States and NATO in Ukraine since 2014 may represent the last episode of this unipolar world, which is now being economically and militarily challenged by the alliance between Russia and China.

Russia: State capitalism

Russia is far from being imperialist. In fact, it has a profile similar to Brazil's: currently it is an extractive nation, its main exports being oil and its derivatives, as well as gas, metals and timber. 

The Russian bourgeoisie is practically nonexistent in the capitalist world, although it has some influence in the former Soviet economies. Its economy, in addition to the export of commodities, is fundamentally geared towards the domestic market, with a strong regulatory role for the state, something defined by some scholars as state capitalism.

Russia's exceptionality lies in the fact that, although capitalist, it is not integrated into the imperialist system under US hegemony, against which it has made significant demands since breaking with the pro-Western orientation followed by Boris Yeltsin between 1991 and 1999. 

Putin's government is not leftist, but nationalist, Great Russian. In many respects, it is a conservative and even somewhat undemocratic government, but it is an anti-imperialist government, against the imperialism that actually exists, the imperialist system under the hegemony of the United States. Of course, it can become imperial or aggressive against non-Russian populations and states, but it is not possible to agree that this is the dominant process in Putin's domestic or international policy.

Its anti-imperialism is not consistent, however, and tends towards structural instabilities, precisely because of the capitalist nature of its economy and the bourgeois character of the State. But it would not be correct to identify Russia as an imperialist power or the Ukrainian conflict as inter-imperialist. It is a classic confrontation that pits a peripheral capitalist nation against the imperialist center, in the territory of a third country that has lent itself to being cannon fodder. 

But we are talking, of course, about a peripheral nation with enormous military capacity, for which the imperialist system did not have a policy of integration, but of subjugation, fragmentation and domination, for geopolitical reasons. 

This is what fundamentally explains the situation. Russia, besides not being imperialist, has been pushed towards anti-imperialism by the expansionist logic driven by the United States, the most dramatic symptom of which is the current Ukrainian crisis.

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