People who claim that they did the fucking reading: Imperialism didn't exist until capitalism. Lenin said so.
Lenin in that book that everyone claimed to have fucking read:
Colonial policy and imperialism existed before the latest stage of capitalism, and even before capitalism. Rome, founded on slavery, pursued a colonial policy and practised imperialism. But “general” disquisitions on imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background, the fundamental difference between socio-economic formations, inevitably turn into the most vapid banality or bragging, like the comparison: “Greater Rome and Greater Britain.” 5 Even the capitalist colonial policy of previous stages of capitalism is essentially different from the colonial policy of finance capital.
Ie imperialism existed before capitalism but obviously looks different under modes of production different from capitalism just like every other facet of society. Way to expose yourself for not actually reading the text lmao
But “general” disquisitions on imperialism, which ignore, or put into the background, the fundamental difference between socio-economic formations, inevitably turn into the most vapid banality or bragging
Just the fact that the interview in question has a professor of medieval middle eastern studies say “you could argue…., but we will save that debate for another day” And that some poster is like “YOU CAN NEVER ARGUE THAT YOU IDIOT” reminds me that even the left is full of people that have no respect for experience or even conversation.
I genuinely feel that some people get frustrated seeing too much cooperation in a discussion and have to throw a wrench in it somehow. Guess it's a selfish instinct most contrarians have.
everyone on the internet is a dumb asshole until proven otherwise, regardless of their politics
Death to America
This is more productive than the olive oil struggle session tbh
Umm, excuse me did you just call Rome an "Empire?" As if it was doing an "imperialism?" Acktually, it doesn't fit this specific definition of "imperialism" I'm using, therefore QED ergo it wasn't
Ontology was a mistake - more and more people are saying it!
It's how you view the natural world when you've been raised on a diet of cartoons and deterministic psychiatry
What if we had brontology and it was just for the fellas?
Lenin’s definition is imperialism in the capitalist era. Prior periods of development had similar phenomena of groups invading others to exploit them for labor, resources, and wealth and send those exploits back to some core area. I think it’s fair to use the colloquial form of the word when analyzing those events
I'm always waiting on the sidelines desperately hoping for the chance to yell, "mercantilism!"
liberals already think "imperalism is when war" and I'm not going to muddy the word to help them
Conquering neighbors to establish relationships of tribute was extremely common across the world during the medieval period. Do we call that tribute a part of imperialism?
All this shit is on a continuum. The Europeans just "won" in the current epoch because they happened to be the ones that first figured out that you could burn coal and use it to run water pumps in deep mines to be able to get more coal, the first instance of industrial capital which would come to replace the primitive accumulation that you see in the Crusades and other wars of conquest.
But weren't the places being invaded roughly as powerful as the crusading countries at the time? Doesn't Imperialism have to be a higher power attacking a lower one?
How far back does it go? Arabs, Romans, Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Akkadians?
It probably goes back to the Neolithic Revolution, although the first cities (Çatalhöyük for instance) appear to have been classless. Expropriation comes in many different flavors (different modes of production), but it's always present whenever class society is present. "The first slavery was the slavery of women." It probably begins with the invention of writing, which was itself invented to keep track of all the stuff belonging to the Sumerian ruling class.
These copper merchants...folks, these copper merchants are not nice people. They're crooked liars. They're so crooked that we had to invent writing just so we could warn everyone about these not very nice people. They say we're in a Neolithic era, but all I see is hard working people being cheated when they go to buy copper. Nothing new there. Joe Biden loves these crooked people. Copper Joe loves them. He loves them!
when the first parasite desided that someone elses active labour belongs to him and formulated a narrative for that..
wasn't the crusades just some exercise in idealism where they sent a bunch of literal children into the Levant and they got BTFO
