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So like does the user not think Russia is imperialistic? Why talk shit about the US Empire but eat up Russian Empire shit? Obligatory anarchist “states bad”
The ML definition of “imperialism” is “an advanced form of capitalism”. It conviently [sic] excludes anything Russia has ever done. It also excludes the British East India Company, but they don’t think about that.
Edit: if any of you tankies want to post that I’m making shit up again, then you ought to read more from Uncle Joe Steel. Not my fault his shitty propaganda made a huge definitional blunder.
I think if a definition of imperialism excludes the EAST INDIA COMPANY, something is fucked up
I mean, the East India Company was literally a company. It was capitalist as fuck.
Yes but it was early capitalist not advanced capitalist.
YOU’RE NOT A [sic] ANTI-IMPERIALIST YOU JUST SUPPORT THE OTHER EMPIRE
Me whenever I run across these self proclaimed “anti-imperialist” tankies
Removed by mod
No, I actually read shit.
“Marx did in fact concede that possibility, and he had good grounds for conceding it in regard to Britain and America in the seventies of the last century, when monopoly capitalism and imperialism did not yet exist, and when these countries, owing to the particular conditions of their development, had as yet no developed militarism and bureaucracy.”
- Foundations of Leninism, ch 4
If imperialism hadn’t existed in the 1870s, then the definition couldn’t have covered the East India Company in its hayday.
Some seem to not be able to hold the idea that two things can be wrong at the same time. Others see Russia or China as lesser evils. Obviously those have their own “Monroe Doctrine” but nevertheless. Not my opinion, just elaborating on the why from my interactions in .ml.
(Source.)
I know that MeanwhileOnGrad is an easy target but this is a good opportunity for me to expand your vocabularies:
While the invasive and exploitative practices of precapitalist empires might not have been imperialist in the strictest sense, they were certainly proto-imperialist. This is a term that has been in use since the twentieth century and has some currency among historians. Here is one example from Bernadette Andrea’s The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture, pg. 13:
Concomitant with this focus on English women writers and their multifaceted relations to women from the Islamic world, I investigate the subaltern agency of indigenous women — from Central Asia and what is now Canada — who were transported to England as a result of the elusive search for the northeast and northwest passages to “Cathay” from the mid-1550s through the 1570s.
In addition to establishing the basis for England’s proto-imperialist project, these ventures marked the beginning of a two-way, if not necessarily equal, flow of travellers, including from the Islamicate regions between Russia and Iran.⁶⁵
Here is a briefer example from Austin Schmidt’s The Final Crusade: A Study of the Crusades in Isis Propaganda, ch. 2:
In this theory the First Crusade was a proto-imperialist expedition for the nearly wealthy and powerful to make names for themselves.
(Emphasis added in both cases.)
I could offer more instances but I am sure that you get the picture. Even if we somehow lacked a word for this phenomenon, that would not inhibit us from recognizing these empires’ practices as harmful to the lower classes. Misogyny is not (always) imperialist, for example, but that does not make it any less wrong.
Finally, if you be as opposed to Imperial America as you pretend, I recommend brushing up on the NATO and how it made the Russo-Ukrainian war inevitable. You don’t have to like the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine, but condemning it over and over again accomplishes absolutely nothing and won’t deepen your understanding of the conflict one iota.
That’s the kind of analysis that metaphysical thinking leads you to. They refuse to take into account that the world system has evolved since the times of East India Company to the times of World War I, and again evolved since World War I till today.
You can absolutely consider the East India Company to be (proto-) imperialist and at the same time recognize that Russia and China aren’t.
Imperialism, like anything, is not a static metaphysical category, but a dialectically evolving one.
You’ve really pinpointed the problem here. A static world view. An inability to conceive of changing systems and changing material conditions. A stubborn insistence to view every period of history through one and the same lens. The Western obsession with universalizing. Misapplying analytical frameworks designed for a specific time and place to fundamentally different conditions. Moralism instead of dialectical materialism.
TIL that there is a lemmygrad fanclub out there.
It’s the type of people to overuse words like “fascist” and “nazi” until they loose all meaning. A state need not be either of those or imperialist to be shit. If we’re thinking in the abstracts, as these people love to.
If we’re thinking about our real world, I have a list of problems with my government, with Iranian government and, le gasp, I have them with China, but there is no both-siding this shit when the US and sattelites Inc. is so much more agressive and harmful to humanity.
two things can be wrong at the same time
new lib rhetorical innovation just droped
Tell me you haven’t read beyond the title without telling me you haven’t read beyond the title.
There are actually more words in a book, including Imperialism by Lenin that explains the Thesis hinted at by the title.
Is it hard to consider that the period when capitalism was conquering and forcibly opening new markets is different to the period where the world has already been entirely divided up between capitalist nations to the point that finance capital operates on a global scale and the bourgeoisie is united globally?
It’s like redefining fascism to exclude America and Israel.
I suspect part of what’s going on is people are being resistant to their capitalism-designed oversimplified view of history being challenged. The view of history that goes something like: “Throughout history, lots of nations have been mean to each other and fought wars and some of them were empires. Then capitalism came along and it’s the end of history. Yay! [Pay no attention to the wars that the biggest capitalist power keeps conducting, we’re totally not trying to normalize the idea of war because we do it so much, haha.]”
To adopt an ML-style view of imperialism, to dig into historical materialism in general, means discarding the “inevitability” worldview of endlessly repeating oversimplified historical themes that cannot be stopped and instead recognizing why certain dominant systems have been the dominant systems and why they developed into something else over time; the ways in which those systems are different not “just cause” but because there were scientifically observable dynamics going on that caused them to be different. Doing this, however, is often not an easy task where you can slap a universalizing label onto any given historical event. Not unless you’re well-versed in the time period and even then, it could be oversimplifying.
So like, MLs use the definition of imperialism that they do precisely because they’re trying to have a more complete understanding of historical development. To reduce Russia, China, and the US to all belonging to a same category of “empire” requires ignoring a lot of substantial differences and distorting or exaggerating similarities. A person could make up a definition that technically includes all three, but definitions should have clarifying purpose to them, not come from misleading oversimplification. A definition that puts all three of them in that category is only beneficial to the machinations of western capital. Russia and China gain nothing from being lumped in with a power that has been terrorizing the world for decades since the end of WWII with hot and cold wars. But the US is I’m sure fine with the psyop confusion induced from implying that interest in peaceful coexistence and a track record of peace (China) is the same as being in endless wars (the US), that a larger power making trade deals with a smaller power (China) is the same as a larger power making coercive and predatory deals with a smaller power (the US), and that reacting to a proxy (Ukraine) of an endless wars country (the US) on your doorstep (Russia), one that sabotages peace deals and forces your hand, is the same as manufacturing excuses to conquer with atrocity propaganda (the US).
In short, oversimplifying definitions and reducing historical events to nothing more than cartoon representations of historical themes that have supposedly been going on “forever” benefits the western empire, so that’s why it is pushed for.
