Imagine that you’re a landless peasant from a poor country in West Africa:
You’ve been ground down your entire life, toiling for 12 hours a day in the sun for a small barely subsistence wage. Your parents were born as colonial subjects in a European colony. Your grandparents were essentially slaves. Your great grand parents were formally slaves. After decolonization, the CIA backed a coup in your country that installed a brutal dictator that terrorized your people and chopped up your parents for having been involved in the decolonial struggle.
You find out about a subversive political group that’s been preaching everything you know intuitively but could never articulate. They say that your labor is exploited, and the reason your pay is so low is because a cut gets sent to the West where white people will get to use it to live lavishly. The group is your local Communist Party.
You get educated through free classes by the Communist Party and eventually become a member. You risk imprisonment for just being a member and the ruling regime has been known to disappear and torture Communists. You don’t care, it’s worth it. You’ve now read virtually all of Marx and Lenin and Mao and Fanon etc despite never having attended school. Your involvement in the Party over the years gets you into influential positions within it.
You attend an international meeting of Communist Parties as a representative from your country. It’s an extreme honor to work with comrades from all around the world. You hear their stories and realize that their struggles are the same whether they’re in Africa, the Middle East or Latin America. The group sets out to work on a principled anti-imperialist line to help liberate all these comrades from the grip of imperialism and eventually capitalism. You understand that socialism is impossible in your country until the aggression and exploitation from the West ceases, so this is very important to you. You and your comrades have decided that despite many of their flaws, you should support Russia as a counterweight to US Imperialism which has utterly decimated your peoples, as well as DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and China, which have all always stood by your comrades when they fight Western occupation and exploitation.
On the other side of the world, sitting in an air conditioned suburban home that is worth more than all the homes and possessions of all the people in your village combined, is the infamous western anarchist (or democratic socialist, whatever they’re going by at the moment). He’s 28 and recently laid off from his job as assistant manager at pizza hut. He’s not a millionaire or anything but he never has to skip meals, has electricity, clean running water, and owns a catalog of video games worth more than your annual salary. He’s never had to work more than a 10 hour shift baking bread sticks. He’s been living off his parents who are both retired and receive generous pensions funded by collecting dividends from companies that exploit your village. The western leftist looks at his laptop made with rare earth minerals from your country (three of your cousins died in the mines) and is also worth enough to feed your children for three years.
He sees on Twitter dot com that an international group of Communist Parties has released their Anti-Imperialist line in support of Russia. The western leftist reads it as he sips coffee that was made from beans grown in your comrade’s home country, where his mother, father and aunt and uncle were all killed by CIA-backed death squads. The western leftist reads the article and is incensed. “How could they do this? How could they be this stupid? Fucking tankies, don’t they know you can support oppressed people without supporting authoritarian dictatorships”?
(Taken with slight modifications from an old post on CTH, that place had the occasional gem)
Imperialist conflict just works to redistribute the colonys among the different imperialist. Russia is in no way anti imperialist, they just fight to be to become the bigger imperialist.
Just like a cop who arrests a fascist for stealing something isn’t anti fascist.
You’re wrong. Russia is by virtue of action(s) anti-imperialist broadly in their foreign policy. They also do not fit Lenin’s criteria for imperialism. In other words, please check your liberalism (CIA propaganda), this is a Marxist instance. What they would like to do is irrelevant. What they can do is at hand. They would like to have joined the club of NATO as an equal partner to France, Britain, Germany, they were refused. The western bourgeoisie refuse to share and so the Russian bourgeoisie have no choice but to seek profit where they can in arming the disaffected, the victims of imperialism, their friends from the days of the Soviet Union who still have good relations with them.
They are capitalist yes. But they cannot become an imperialist bloc like NATO. It’s just not possible. All that’s possible in the near term is either continued reign of imperialist terror by NATO hegemony continuing unchecked OR multi-polarity in which Russia cannot possibly act fast enough or with enough willing partners (their largest ally China is a Marxist-Leninist state working to free countries of the shackles of the west via better loans, infrastructure and investment as we speak so will not aid them in such an endeavor) to simply become a similar hegemon.
The current imperialist order is not built next to the skeleton of European colonialism it is built directly on its foundations. Hundreds of years finally coalescing in the post World-War-2 era with the US troops already occupying their countries, the bourgeoisie of those European nations taking the knee and pledging their fealty to it against communism. The neo-colonialist regimes of international institutions built off that post-war consensus and kept meaningfully powerful through US dollar hegemony. The roots of such exploitation and coercion of the global south going back to compradors whose families served the old colonialist regimes as well as new movers who were trained in schools of the Americas, with the US military, etc. Many revolutionary activities suppressed to this day through the continued work of UK/French/American intelligence having power over those regions and interests in their continued exploitation and subjugation. Laws, debts, etc that favor this western-european sphere and which cannot be simply resurrected in Russian flavor overnight. You propose that the Russians will do in years or a decade what is in fact the work of centuries and without the cooperation of western Europe who would actively fight and resist them in such an endeavor and without the help of China who likewise would undercut them with fair investment.
Propagandized, idealist nonsense.
While I do agree with you that Russia is nowhere as big an imperialist as the US, NATO or China. This doesn’t mean that Russia is not imperialist and certainly not anti imperialist. I must also critic you on your way of discussing, while I disagree with you it would be entirely wrong to call either of us liberals. This is nothing more than name calling.
I have limited time to lay out my argument so if you’re interested in why I want all imperialists out of Ukraine not just those who come from the west but also those who come from the east and why I define both as such I would recommend this article https://www.marxist.com/imperialism-today-and-the-character-of-russia-and-china.htm while I have my critiques of it, it is sufficient.
You should ask yourself why someone went to absurd lengths to tie themselves in knots making a terrible false equivalence argument.
This is just terrible. Kautsky and Trotsky…
In the above quoted passage, Lenin describes its essential features: monopoly, the domination of finance capital, the export of capital, the development of international monopolies, and territorial division. Is this definition correct? Yes, it is very correct. *But it is correct as a general statement. *And like all general definitions, it does not necessarily cover every single case.
This part stood out as the shark jumping moment.
The reason these spoofers are so desperate to label Russia “Imperialist” is because they then get to dismiss all of the US/NATO provocations of the war. Russia invaded cos imperialism, nothing more. This article is designed to fool you.
Russia is an industrial capitalist nation, not a finance capitalist one. It cannot be imperialist, not for a long time yet.
