The author and maybe website are a bit too Maoist in my opinion, but there’s some good information and analysis in the article.
This line in particular made me chuckle, especially with the one current thread here about centrists just being conservative liberals.
When it comes to nationalism, why should electors choose weak, liberal versions when they can vote for the real thing?
Yeah the article itself is decent when it’s not hitting the limits of ultra-leftism with regards to geopolitics.
There’s some real stinkers on the website though: https://lefteast.org/wagnerization-how-putin-degraded-the-russian-state/
A democratic transition in Russia, which is not accompanied by the disorganization of the state similar to the 1990s, will be a real miracle. And yet, only a democratic transition can ultimately lead to the emergence of a strong, capable state in Russia. Putin’s model of authoritarian state-building showed its results after 23 years: the bombing of the highway near Voronezh, the dead pilots, the Deputy Minister of Defense, being scolded by a former criminal who now leads the army of criminals. “Russia needs a strong state power and must have it.” … Ilya Matveev is a researcher focusing on Russian and comparative political economy. His academic work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Journal of Labor and Society, Europe-Asia Studies, East European Politics and other journals. He has contributed to Jacobin, openDemocracy and other media outlets. He is a member of the Public Sociology Laboratory, a group of Russian social scientists studying post-Soviet societies from a critical perspective. Ilya is also an affiliate of the Alameda Institute, a new research network of left-wing intellectuals.
It’s a pretty fascinating juxtaposition between that article about how liberalism deindustrialized Kyrgystan and only to then see this republished article concluding there is a need for even more liberalism to be applied again to the Russians written by someone with a background compatible with liberalism.
Their About page mentions how important toeing their ideological line is for potential contributors. After reading the Kyrgyzstan article I thought they were Ultras/MLMs, but I guess their ideology is whatever OpenDemocracy and Co. figure is left enough to bamboozle some baby leftists while ultimately serving reaction.
It’s not coincidental that Lefteast keeps on publishing a ton of nonspecific leftists and liberals. It’s not a coincidence that their “anti-war” tag is filled up with results applied to Russia yet never Ukraine or their Western backers. Their loyalties are wholly with the West especially when they publish an article petitioning for even more effective economic warfare and color revolutions: https://lefteast.org/invasion-should-change-sanctions/
The article calling Kirgizstan “the only democracy in the region” was already a massive red flag considering that Kirgizstan of all countries in the region is the most heavily infected by liberalism and the various NGO tentacles of imperialism, but to see that they also call for a so-called “democratic transition” in Russia - which is code for liberal regime change - instead of a socialist revival really seals the deal in my mind of who they are and what their agenda is. Russia is a bourgeois state and no bourgeois state can be a democratic representative of the proletariat, but all things considered it is more democratic than most western countries, their government has one of the highest approval ratings of any bourgeois democracy and for fairly good reason, though the oligarchs have not been eliminated they have been seriously reigned in by the state over the past 20 years, and conditions enormously improved from the disastrous '90s period. Their talk of the need for a strong state rings particularly hollow because Russia already has that, it could not have done the things it has if it didn’t: it exerts significant control over the economy through a state owned military industrial sector and state owned resource extraction, not to mention state predominance in the banking sector. What Russia needs is for that state to become a proletarian one again.
Of course reading the author’s “credentials” it becomes clear why they talk this way. “OpenDemocracy” in particular should raise huge warning signs for anyone, it is another one of those “democracy and human rights” billionaire funded liberal orgs that propagandize against the enemies of western imperialism.
What these sorts of people want is for all states to be structured like western liberal democracies because that is the structure that is maximally adapted to enable smooth control of all facets of society by the bourgeoisie while maintaining the facade of “democracy”. It demobilizes radicalism like no other structure that has even been invented.
