The Deprogram Podcast

This is not a good Marxist take.

It plays into liberal equivocation of the US with Russia which is absolutely, categorically false and a lie that must lead to a false overall understanding of imperialism, the role of NATO, even perhaps China's positions in the face of such things.

Let's start with him calling it "deranged". Russia is not deranged in most senses. No more than the US and on foreign policy it's much more reasonable, one might even say being so reasonable has hurt them in their assessments of the west. Time and again they're proposed moderate, reasonable, compromise solutions, they want moderate concessions to a small zone of security around their country not full of nuclear NATO pointed their way. They avoid going fully nuclear, fully anti-American and to this day seek compromise and off-ramps. They are not muddled in some white supremacist derangement and need to be an all controlling hegemonic empire like the US. Yes they have contradictions, reactionary scapegoating of sexual minorities, other issues. They're not progressive but they're not deranged. That's the take of a US hawk who looks at Russia's minor asks and actions in Ukraine and Syria and cannot comprehend why they won't just lie down and be butchered into pieces so US hegemony can be assure for another century. To those vile people they are deranged. To a Marxist mind, to even a reasonable centrist liberal realist mind they are rational and willing to compromise.

Second up is "oligarchy", again this is playing into liberal falsehoods. Let's not use liberal words like oligarchy. If they're an oligarchy then so is the US, so is western Europe, so is the entire capitalist world, a few AES countries aside at which point it ceases to be a useful descriptor. Oligarchy in this sense is better seen as an anti-slavic, Russophobic snarl-word hurled at the "jungle" of the asiatic Russians and their mysterious, inscrutable corrupt ways that are somehow different from the west. It is a leading word used by western propagandists against Russia, quite loaded and should not be used for those reasons.

He continues on describing it much like the US. But that too is materially false. Russia is bound, forced by circumstances of emerging as a capitalist country in the 1990s from being like the US. It does not have a choice, an ability to exercise colonialism or neo-colonialism or imperialism. It does not control global finance. It does not have western Europe in its pockets. It did not inherit the position of controller of the old western colonial empires by invading Europe to stop the soviets from liberating all of it. It does not control the amount of capital the US does and its capital does not exercise control over that of other nations and is very much at constant risk of being subordinated to US capital as western European capital, as all NATO and WW2/cold war vassal nations like Japan, occupied Korea, etc already are. It is dishonest and misleading in the extreme to say this.

If he wants to play coy for liberals he can do this I suppose but he could use less loaded language, could emphasize its capitalist nature and how it doesn't serve its people as well as it should, etc, etc.