• ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    When slaves rise up and throw the master out of the house they built, the master's first instinct is to gather his friends and and crush the uprising before it's example can inspire others. If the former slaves want to keep their freedom, and if they don't want their sacrifices to have been for nothing, they need to secure the house, and quickly.

    In 1917, the people of Russia cast off their feudal monarch. In 1918, America and nine other countries invaded Russia to fight for the czar, to crush the worker's uprising and restore the monarch to the throne. They don't teach us about it in school.

    Here's a 2 minute bop set to a Parenti lecture that covers this. The basic fact is that a capitalist empire will never willingly surrender control of an exploitable land where labor and resources can be had for cheap or free, not without a fight. The lecture is at least 30 years old now, but has only gotten more prescient with the genocidal crackdown in Palestine against a liberation movement that threatens America's ability to control the region's trade through it's military outpost of Isreal. To make it even more relevant, there are communist groups like the PFLP fighting the IOF in Palestine at this very moment-this is all very much one struggle against economic imperialism, and against colonialism.

    Just as an aside, we here in the capitalist west are authoritarian as fuck lol, we've just structured our systems of exploitation in such a way that it looks like a million separate companies fucking you over instead of an entire economic model fucking everyone over (and enforced at gunpoint), which is what it is.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
      ·
      8 months ago

      To add, there is only one country on earth with > 800 external military bases, and through an incredibly effective propanda campaign, they've managed to convince the world that its not them, but their enemies that are "totalitarian" and "authoritarian".

    • idkmybffjoeysteel [he/him]
      ·
      8 months ago

      On your last point, if somebody wants an example of how ordinary everyday capitalism is violent, they should imagine what will happen to them if they do not pay their debts or cannot make their rent. These things are enforced with violence.