What’s up with this straight up pro-china and pro-russia stuff on Lemmy lately?
It’s not even praising the people of China and Russia, but rather their gov directly.
Obviously the states have problems, and the EU to a lesser degree, but they at least have some human rights.
Is this some kind of organized disinformation campaign?
I didn’t make up any definition of imperialism. John A. Hobson was the most significant theorist on imperialism pre-Lenin and Lenin’s work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. This is the most relevant definition of imperialism over the last century, and accurately explains the world position today where wealthy elites in the global north offshore production and utilize state power like the millitary, sanctions, and coups to keep a class of compradors in power in the global south. It’s super-exploitation for super-profits. Russia doesn’t do this.
What would be more legitimate is me saying that you have created your own definition. Everyone else that has mentioned imperialism thus far has been following somewhere around what I’ve described, yet you seem to be dramatically unclear, and moreover erasing this process of wealth expropriation so as to minimize the crimes of the west.
As for Russia destroying language and cultures, no, that’s silly. The USSR had no colonies, and neither does the Russian Federation. It would have to be Tsarist Russia to make any sense.
Sounds interesting, I will look into it. Not sure Russia doesn’t do this though. Not by means of capital, but it definitely extracts wealth from the global south, for example by using mercenaries to take over mines.
Trying to change the meaning of a well established concept is not helpful. While the definition you posted above is certainly interesting, it should not try to change the meaning of an existing word (if it even tries to do that, maybe it’s a conscious or unconscious misrepresentation by you).
Russia has an extraction industry, but it doesn’t “take over” mines in Africa. Trade does not equal imperialism, imperialism specifically relates to super-exploitation for super-profits, and Russia doesn’t have the ability to do that.
As for your definition of imperialism, it’s much less useful and is far more vague. It’s entirely unsurprising that bourgeois economists would erase the true nature of imperialism in the modern era by de-linking it from capitalism, and moreover this definition fails to analyze why imperialism happens, and why it happens in greater and lesser extents, and how to end it forever. Lenin’s analysis answers all of that. It is the bourgeois economist that has blunted the theories of imperialism in the modern era, not the Marxist-Leninists.
Again, I re-iterate: it was the bourgeois economists who erased the link between capitalism and imperialism! John A. Hobson had the most popular and coherent definituon of imperialism, which Lenin advanced further, and this definition of imperialism is the one that has guided state policy throughout the last century! Anti-imperialists of the last century have all been adhering to Lenin’s definition, be they from the USSR, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Vietnam, Korea, Latin America, South America, Africa in general, Palestine, etc.
And no, the USSR had no colonies, period. Not overseas, not nearby.
You don’t have the background knowledge necessary to have this debate if you think it is the Marxists that have the less wide-spread definition. Perhaps if you only think western, pro-imperialist discourse is valid, but that’s chauvanism.
LUL. By that logic Brazil is imperialist.
Imperialism is when standardized paperwork
Famously imperialist country, Mongolia.
Also 3 of Switzerland’s official languages are just the language of the closest country, less than 1% of the population speak Romansh.