Edit: I didn’t post the following quotes to say he’s a communist. He’s pivoting to centre-left positions with his rhetoric and 6 year plan. He called for reducing poverty by 2% in 6 years and for progressive taxation on the rich.
The true elite are all those serving Russia. Workers and soldiers, reliable, trustable, who have proven their devotion to Russia, the worthy people.
“The very word ‘elite’ has largely been discredited by those who, having no merit to society, consider themselves to be some kind of a caste with special rights and privileges. I specifically mean those who, in previous years, filled their pockets through all sorts of processes in the economy of the 1990s. Those are definitely not the elite,” the president said.
Eh this is just him coopting populist rhetoric.
He doesn’t believe this shit obviously.
My point is that we must be careful not to represent Putin as some sort of pro worker revolutionary, despite his antagonistic relationship to western imperialism he’s still just a reactionary revanchist.
This isn’t even socdem. This is typical populism and liberal posturing. Where is the legislation? Where are the labour unions?
This is empty rhetoric.
For the first time he named the priorities for 2030, planning 6 years in advance, he bought up the point for progressive taxation of the rich, a social democratic policy and outlined the money he’d spend on housing and education. Reducing poverty by 2% in 6 years.
He nationalized foreign businesses in 2023 and starting from 1999 he took back the power Yeltsin had given the oligarchy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjrlTMvirVo
While he’s known for his United Russia endorsement, he’s also endorsed by the 21st century socialist party/ social democratic party (A just Russia - For Truth) and has helped them pass their policies which wouldn’t be passed otherwise.
Putin is a christo-fascist. The wholesale criminalization of queer folk alone should be enough for that label.
The claim is wrong. Queer folk aren’t criminalized, this isn’t Saudi Arabia.
Putin says LGBTQ people are party of society albeit he has conservative takes, his only request is that minors aren’t targeted. Adults can do whatever.
https://www.rt.com/russia/587507-putin-unexpected-lgbtq-thing/
When he was asked by about his gay propaganda law (This only concerns homosexual material from being given to minors) and the role of the church. He reiterated being gay would not be banned and that there’s a seperation between Church and State in Russia. There are many rabid Russian Orthodox Christians who want gays out, Putin isn’t one of them.
Russia is more tolerant than most of the global south. LGBT organizations aren’t allowed since they tend to be aligned with the west but no one is sent to prison for simply for being queer. The government even updated their documents to make it easier for trans people.
In Saudi Arabia and other global south countries, you don’t need to be showing homosexual material to minors to be in trouble.
Calling him a revanchist is falling entirely for western lies. Reactionary, yes (being a lib, and his “conservative” politics), but even then it’s rather dishonest to group him in with the typical racists, revanchists, imperialists, ultranationalists, warmongering neocons, and economic neolibs.
Anyone with sense can see that if anything- his hand was forced in Ukraine, after repeated naive attempts at peace and trying to negotiate semi-autonomy and basic rights for the ethnic, indigenous Russians in the region. That’s not revanchism- if anything, the opposite.
I mean he definitely sees Ukraine as part of Russia, and I didn’t mean that in the way you assume I did but in the very literal sense. I meant that part as a neutral statement, national boundries and border lines shifting outside my control really doesn’t concern me.
If Putin had wanted the Donbass part of Ukraine, he wouldn’t have given them back to Ukraine via Minsk and stupidly waited 8 years to realize that the Ukrainian fascists had no intention of honoring Minsk at all.
Giving back Crimea is out of the question for any Russian leader, left or right, but Putin clearly didn’t want to deal with the shit happening in Donbass. It was the communists who continued to materially aid the Donbass militias and citizens throughout the entire truce period.
The Ukrainian fascist coup regime refused to honor Minsk because it explicitly forbade them from committing ethnic cleansing in the region. Apart from that, they were not going to lose anything apart from Crimea. It was an exceedingly generous peace terms from Russia.
By refusing to honor Minsk and continuing the genocide, they literally forced Russia to intervene militarily. I guarantee you that if Russia had been run by socialists, they would have taken actions against Ukraine far sooner than Putin would have.
I have generally found your comments as a great contribution, however I would contest any statement that indicates Indigenous peoples in Russia enjoy a generative relationship with the state. It’s possible you only meant “Russians” by your statement, but then that is potentially seen as a nationalist statement that erases Indigenous peoples and prioritizes a specific group of Russian peoples.
As far as I’ve seen- indigenous people do seem to have a generative relationship with the Russian state, though. The history of Russia ultimately derives from imperial Russia (though even then their methods of managing indigenous peoples tended to differ considerably from that of the west Europeans and Anglo-colonials), yes, but the relations with indigenous peoples in the present day are inherited from the Soviet Union instead, with the state organized as a federation with various constituent republics and other entities- and to my understanding, similarly to China, the indigenous semi-autonomy that these entities receive is substantial, and incomparable to the treatment of indigenous peoples and most ethnic minorities in any Anglo or western country.
Modern Russia has many issues, but to my awareness its treatment of indigenous peoples is not one of them (FWIW I’m not Russian and have never been to Russia, though- I only know what I’ve heard or read online to go on). Even the various marginal Siberian tribes have their own republics and oblasts and seem to have considerable leeway in determining their own domestic policies. The Chechen republic in particular is notorious for their reactionary Islamic governance and extremely homophobic policies (I’m not sure to what extent the claims of concentration camps for gay men are true, but let’s just say that things are bad- and no, it’s obvious on the other hand the rest of Russia is not remotely similar), and even have their own military/paramilitary units who are presently involved in Ukraine.
That said- my statement wasn’t referring to the indigenous peoples of Russia- not out of neglect, but simply because they weren’t the subject of discussion at the moment. My description of “ethnic, indigenous Russians in the region (Ukraine, and/or former eastern Ukraine)” was in regards to Putin’s attempts at negotiating protections and semi-autonomy for Russo-Ukranians in the Minsk accords and the 2022 peace deal made in Istanbul- specifically, I was calling those Russian minorities “ethnic, indigenous Russians” because they are literally, undeniably indigenous to much of the territory within the borders of modern Ukraine (as are the Ukranians- and the Tatars, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, and many other groups), and the persecutions and suppression they were facing as such was the persecution of an indigenous people.
Lying
What is the purpose of this comm if complete BS propaganda is posted here?
Not sure the difference between propaganda and BS propaganda, but I would hope my comrades could post anything here because we should be able to critically analyze any propaganda from any source.
What’s the point of this community if we blindly parrot anti-russia talking points that everyone to the right of us already says?
@FamousPlan101@lemmygrad.ml, thank you for editing your post to add context/analysis. Without it, I worry people coming here from other Lemmy instances might get the wrong idea.
ah yes, the “true elite” will be hardworking patriotic troops and cops, not the decadent rootless cosmopolitans. such worker, very proletariat.
Even calling this “socdem” is rube shit. this is totally standard socially conservative liberalism. Recognizing the progressive role Russia plays in the current imperial world system shouldn’t excuse wishful thinking about the administration’s domestic politics. Nobody would credit Mitt Romney with a “center left pivot” for saying he prefers a “fair and simple” tax system in which “higher-income individuals pay a higher rate than lower-income individuals”.
Officers doesn’t mean cops, military officers. 1M Patriotic Russians participated in the SMO, a lot of whom are ordinary workers with simple lives before the war.
This was also the system in the Soviet Union where front line soilders occupied key managment positions after the great patriotic war.
The Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union. This is ordinary bourgeois nationalism from the leader of a committed liberal anticommunist party. An insistence on reading secret revolutionary character into ordinary conservative rhetoric comes across as fantastical at best. “Nation, troops, family, flag!” doesn’t mean something different here than it does coming out of Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, or any other head of state since the advent of liberal democracy.
I may or may not make a separate post about discussing this video, but this stream by Garland Nixon just ended (relistening from the start to gather what I missed, now- I entered the stream probably 20-30 minutes in) and covers a great deal regarding this speech.
Here’s it timestamped, specifically where they started talking about Putin’s speech- https://www.youtube.com/live/lRRwnHUi7Uc?si=uJY71CjE5MawuEf4&t=1785
I’ve been watching quite a few YTers/analysts/etc out of personal interest, to see how the war is going, and to see the economic and political changes coming from it- and I feel that from a socialist perspective, it covers the topic of this speech and how it relates to the changes currently underway in Russia particularly well.
Is Putin a communist? Of course not- and it would be wholly incorrect to see Russia’s present system as similar to China’s “socialist market economy”- there is no dictatorship of the proletariat, as far as I know (I wouldn’t know, though I’m open to learning) what organization of labor existed evaporated after the Soviet dissolution, and while Putin has curbed the excesses of the “oligarch era” and shock therapy, the oligarchs (Putin included to my understanding- though I’m no scholar) retain significant influence (albeit somewhat neutered in comparison to the state in recent years due to the western sanctions, funnily enough) and the society at large remains liberal- if retaining some solid foundations from the Soviet era, for instance in regards to the state of public housing, education, healthcare, etc.
But seeing this speech just dismissed altogether in this thread left a bad taste in my mouth- because while talk is cheap, and this is primarily talk, what I’ve seen mentioned and described in blips here and there in channels I watch- not all socialist or even leftist- (the Duran, the New Atlas, Danny Haiphong, Sean Foo, Dialogue Works, Neutrality Studies, Gita Wirjawan, Geopolitical Economy Report etc. come to mind) did seem to combine together to describe some very meaningful, and distinctive changes underway. Not due to ideological reasons on Putin and Russia’s part- but due to pragmatic reasons.
It has been in Russia’s state interests (frankly, like it would be anywhere else) to curtail the influence of the oligarchs, for instance- and that is presently underway. It has been in Russia’s interests to keep its indigenous arms industry under state control, similarly- and this is why they are outproducing the entire west. As western capital and goods have receded from Russia in the wake of sanctions and worse- naturally, there has been a revitalization- with state backing- of the industries that existed in Russia prior to shock therapy and which had been neglected under neoliberal looting. As a state now under siege from the global imperialist order, it has also been in Russia’s interests to rally the people around the flag through providing tangible material benefits, from infrastructural development, social welfare programs (as announced also in this speech), etc… these are not the actions of a socialist state, perhaps, but they are the actions of a capitalist (or perhaps more accurately- nationalist capitalist- rather than comprador capitalist) society reverting to the imitation of tried-and-true Soviet methods of surviving, prospering, industrializing (or re-industrializing), and building a healthy, unified, anti-imperialist foundation for the population.
None of this is insignificant, though I expect that, with no proletarian rule, the necessity of revolution still exists and will rear its head sooner or later. And of course, I believe that we should wholeheartedly support these changes, for anti-imperialism’s sake and the development of multipolarity and revitalization of another economic core from which peaceful Eurasian economic integration will bloom.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: