It's interesting how you didn't respond to the second half of my first comment in this chain.
Allow me to pose a different question: How can you distinguish between anti-imperialism and countries trying to make plays for being an empire? For example, after the end of Japanese isolationism in the 19th century, by way of US Gunboat Diplomacy, a common position among those with political power in Japan became that the country needed to become an empire in order to avoid becoming a colony.
If we can't make the distinction between the two then we're just going to fall into conflating being against a specific empire with anti-imperialism more broadly. Iirc one of the lines of thinking of German Social Democrats in supporting the war effort during World War I was that a German victory was preferable to the triumph of the at-the-time dominant British Empire, which was the center of global finance capital. I think we want to avoid a mistake like that being repeated.
The world is unipolar and the empire is hegemonic. We are not in a multipolar, multi-empire world of competing imperialists. We are in the late stage of monopoly imperialism. Capital has globalized and become a single imperialist bloc, the anglo-American empire is the only empire in existence.
Therefore your example about imperialist Japan is irrelevant and no longer applicable to our world.
I can understand being skeptical of the anti-imperialist bonafides of capitalist Russia at first but they have proven themselves in Syria, Belarus and Kazakhstan. They have aligned themselves with the anti-imperialist bloc and forged alliances with AES.
A world being uni-polar doesn't mean it remains that way. Uni-polarity and hegemony can be broken by forming smaller imperial poles. That's the issue of conflating anti-imperialism with opposition to a specific empire, and why I think the example of Japan is relevant.
It can be, but it hasn’t been. I don’t exist in a hypothetical world I exist in the real one. We face the current contradiction of global monopoly imperialism. Face reality
You haven't shown how the world transitioning from uni-polar imperialism to multi-polar imperialism is impossible. You're just repeating your assertion without substantiating it.
I never said it was impossible. I said it’s not currently the case. The current case is monopoly imperialism. Deal with reality not your ideas of what “might” be
What conditions rule out Russia becoming an imperial pole as a strong possibility?
They're a highly developed capitalist economy being isolated from the main imperial pole. What other routes do they have without a revolution? How do they sustain their economy as the rate of profit continues to fall and the west seeks their destruction?
Russia has the economic make-up of a developing 3rd world nation.
Imperialism is the export of massive amounts of capital and the extraction of resources and labor value via ownership.
A nation must have a surplus of capital that it can no longer profitably invest at home to become imperialist. Russia, since the collapse of the USSR, has been notoriously low capital. They have to borrow everything from western banks and the IMF. Even to this day Russia has one of the lowest amounts of capital in its banks of any major nation.
The economy of imperialist nations tends to be financial, service sector & technological. The economy of colonized nations tend to be resource extraction, tourism or manufacturing with low fixed capital tech and high labor.
Russia’s economy resembles that of a colonized nation. They do not have sufficient capital to export it, they still have plenty of areas to invest domestically and are in a much earlier and less developed stage of capitalism.
This, and their alliance with China and other AES, will prevent Russia from becoming an imperialist in the same manner as the anglo-American empire has - at least in the short term.
You could very well ask “what’s stopping Palestine from becoming an imperialist if war is fought on their behalf”? It’s just useless imperialist handwringing
I've yet to see any possibility of you having any sort of threshold of "if this is true then some conclusion I previously arrived at is wrong". You started at a conclusion and worked backwards, in part to flatten nuance and frame Russia in a way that lets you be uncritically supportive. This is clear given how you make bold statements and then refuse to ever actually even say "well, that might've been an overstatement" or "that's a good point that I hadn't considered before that highlights the complexity of our situation".
You just stick to your guns regardless of what others say, resorting to name calling when nothing else is left. Your crusading is unprincipled moralizing and quite literally undialectical.
The way you're "sticking to a line" is unprincipled 'anti-imperialism' considering how you choose to flatten out all nuance. You can't even admit when you're slightly wrong about something. (This is NOT to overlook how people also try to hide behind 'nuance' to also take an unprincipled stance, as many radlibs have done recently regarding Ukraine.)
You've refused to reckon with the clear contradiction in your reasoning that I pointed out in the second half of this comment: https://hexbear.net/post/198201/comment/2494868
You also refused to even accept that your original statement about Russian media coverage was too strong. I wouldn't give someone trouble for making a self-correction like that in most instances. Overtstating things is often an honest mistake made in the moment. But you haven't yet taken the opportunity to do this even though I explicitly presented it to you: https://hexbear.net/post/198201/comment/2494909
I don’t see this as a contradiction. Westerners should primarily be focused on destroying their own empire and avoid joining any chorus that villainize the target of their own empire. Outspoken criticisms of enemies only serves to empower the imperialist narrative and framing.
We should of course use critical thought and Marxian lens to suss out the truth, and the truth appears to be that Russia is winning this war and that it is heavily damaging the empire. Using a historical materialist lens we can see that Russia has the economy of a colonized developing nation and not that of an advanced imperialist state (resource based economy, low capital, high amounts of foreign capital and compradors). We can see that Russia is aligned with AES states almost universally. Their position as a target of the empire has forced them to become anti-imperialist to continue to survive.
It’s only a “contradiction” if you already assume Ukrainian sources are true, Russia is getting destroyed and also being very evil. I don’t think we should suppress the hidden truth of Ukraine victories and imperialist Russia, because it simply isn’t the truth. I used 2 rhetorical tactics in that thread, first trying to reason using anti-imperialist principles and second, bludgeoning them as chauvinists and social imperialists when they refused to budge
Thank you. Your positions are now much clearer to me. There are some parts of this I agree with and others I dispute to some lesser or greater extent. I'd like to respond properly, but it may be some time before I do since I have other things I need to do.
Russia has also undermined their "anti-imperialist bonafides" with how they've let Wagner Group mercenaries operate in Mali, Sudan, and the Central African Republic.
It's interesting how you didn't respond to the second half of my first comment in this chain.
Allow me to pose a different question: How can you distinguish between anti-imperialism and countries trying to make plays for being an empire? For example, after the end of Japanese isolationism in the 19th century, by way of US Gunboat Diplomacy, a common position among those with political power in Japan became that the country needed to become an empire in order to avoid becoming a colony.
If we can't make the distinction between the two then we're just going to fall into conflating being against a specific empire with anti-imperialism more broadly. Iirc one of the lines of thinking of German Social Democrats in supporting the war effort during World War I was that a German victory was preferable to the triumph of the at-the-time dominant British Empire, which was the center of global finance capital. I think we want to avoid a mistake like that being repeated.
The world is unipolar and the empire is hegemonic. We are not in a multipolar, multi-empire world of competing imperialists. We are in the late stage of monopoly imperialism. Capital has globalized and become a single imperialist bloc, the anglo-American empire is the only empire in existence.
Therefore your example about imperialist Japan is irrelevant and no longer applicable to our world.
I can understand being skeptical of the anti-imperialist bonafides of capitalist Russia at first but they have proven themselves in Syria, Belarus and Kazakhstan. They have aligned themselves with the anti-imperialist bloc and forged alliances with AES.
A world being uni-polar doesn't mean it remains that way. Uni-polarity and hegemony can be broken by forming smaller imperial poles. That's the issue of conflating anti-imperialism with opposition to a specific empire, and why I think the example of Japan is relevant.
It can be, but it hasn’t been. I don’t exist in a hypothetical world I exist in the real one. We face the current contradiction of global monopoly imperialism. Face reality
You haven't shown how the world transitioning from uni-polar imperialism to multi-polar imperialism is impossible. You're just repeating your assertion without substantiating it.
I never said it was impossible. I said it’s not currently the case. The current case is monopoly imperialism. Deal with reality not your ideas of what “might” be
What conditions rule out Russia becoming an imperial pole as a strong possibility?
They're a highly developed capitalist economy being isolated from the main imperial pole. What other routes do they have without a revolution? How do they sustain their economy as the rate of profit continues to fall and the west seeks their destruction?
Russia has the economic make-up of a developing 3rd world nation.
Imperialism is the export of massive amounts of capital and the extraction of resources and labor value via ownership.
A nation must have a surplus of capital that it can no longer profitably invest at home to become imperialist. Russia, since the collapse of the USSR, has been notoriously low capital. They have to borrow everything from western banks and the IMF. Even to this day Russia has one of the lowest amounts of capital in its banks of any major nation.
The economy of imperialist nations tends to be financial, service sector & technological. The economy of colonized nations tend to be resource extraction, tourism or manufacturing with low fixed capital tech and high labor.
Russia’s economy resembles that of a colonized nation. They do not have sufficient capital to export it, they still have plenty of areas to invest domestically and are in a much earlier and less developed stage of capitalism.
This, and their alliance with China and other AES, will prevent Russia from becoming an imperialist in the same manner as the anglo-American empire has - at least in the short term.
You could very well ask “what’s stopping Palestine from becoming an imperialist if war is fought on their behalf”? It’s just useless imperialist handwringing
Damn, I'm saving this for being a concise and easy to understand outline of imperialism
Your description of Russia actually makes it sound more like Japan's modernization period.
However you twist history around to justify your eternal westoid hate of Russia is up to you.
I've yet to see any possibility of you having any sort of threshold of "if this is true then some conclusion I previously arrived at is wrong". You started at a conclusion and worked backwards, in part to flatten nuance and frame Russia in a way that lets you be uncritically supportive. This is clear given how you make bold statements and then refuse to ever actually even say "well, that might've been an overstatement" or "that's a good point that I hadn't considered before that highlights the complexity of our situation".
You just stick to your guns regardless of what others say, resorting to name calling when nothing else is left. Your crusading is unprincipled moralizing and quite literally undialectical.
My stance is principled anti-imperialism and sticking to a line, instead of the unprincipled moral purity obsession of the west.
The way you're "sticking to a line" is unprincipled 'anti-imperialism' considering how you choose to flatten out all nuance. You can't even admit when you're slightly wrong about something. (This is NOT to overlook how people also try to hide behind 'nuance' to also take an unprincipled stance, as many radlibs have done recently regarding Ukraine.)
Please point to the place where I said something incorrect
You've refused to reckon with the clear contradiction in your reasoning that I pointed out in the second half of this comment: https://hexbear.net/post/198201/comment/2494868
You also refused to even accept that your original statement about Russian media coverage was too strong. I wouldn't give someone trouble for making a self-correction like that in most instances. Overtstating things is often an honest mistake made in the moment. But you haven't yet taken the opportunity to do this even though I explicitly presented it to you: https://hexbear.net/post/198201/comment/2494909
I don’t see this as a contradiction. Westerners should primarily be focused on destroying their own empire and avoid joining any chorus that villainize the target of their own empire. Outspoken criticisms of enemies only serves to empower the imperialist narrative and framing.
We should of course use critical thought and Marxian lens to suss out the truth, and the truth appears to be that Russia is winning this war and that it is heavily damaging the empire. Using a historical materialist lens we can see that Russia has the economy of a colonized developing nation and not that of an advanced imperialist state (resource based economy, low capital, high amounts of foreign capital and compradors). We can see that Russia is aligned with AES states almost universally. Their position as a target of the empire has forced them to become anti-imperialist to continue to survive.
It’s only a “contradiction” if you already assume Ukrainian sources are true, Russia is getting destroyed and also being very evil. I don’t think we should suppress the hidden truth of Ukraine victories and imperialist Russia, because it simply isn’t the truth. I used 2 rhetorical tactics in that thread, first trying to reason using anti-imperialist principles and second, bludgeoning them as chauvinists and social imperialists when they refused to budge
Thank you. Your positions are now much clearer to me. There are some parts of this I agree with and others I dispute to some lesser or greater extent. I'd like to respond properly, but it may be some time before I do since I have other things I need to do.
You're kinda coming off a bit reddit here tbh
deleted by creator
Russia has also undermined their "anti-imperialist bonafides" with how they've let Wagner Group mercenaries operate in Mali, Sudan, and the Central African Republic.
You mean the ones invited by the African nations to assist them in ridding themselves of European colonizer paramilitaries?
Was it also imperialism when Syria invited Russia in to assist them in destroying NATO backed jihadists? How is this any different?