• Ciderpunk@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    It’s only imperialism if it comes from the West, otherwise it’s just sparkling being an asshole to your neighbors isn’t a winning argument.

    • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.ml
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      21 hours ago

      It’s only imperialism if it comes from the West

      In the present stage of history, yes. No country other than Japan or the western ones have managed to rise to the status of being imperialist powers. The reason is simple. The powers which became imperialist first delayed the development of the rest of the world by literal centuries, preventing any other people from becoming imperialist. Japan happened to escape this fate by geographical luck and developed early, allowing it to join the ranks of the imperialists.

      There is a reason why the most dominant/advanced capitalist countries today are still the same ones that were advanced over a 100 years ago.

      otherwise it’s just sparkling being an asshole to your neighbors

      This has literally nothing to do with imperialism, which is the system by which a handful of the most advanced capitalist countries have consumed unparalleled sums of human labor from the whole of humanity for centuries on end.

    • Grapho@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      It’s imperialism if it has the characteristics of imperialism, wishing it really hard because that’s a word that would be an amazing gotcha isn’t enough. Imperialism is, to really overly simplify it: the extraction of surplus value, often in the form of labor through financial instruments from one country to another. Russia’s position in the world is not that of imperialist extraction (except in the participation prior to the sanctions in the western financial sector) since capital was still consolidating its power over the working class in Russia, given that its capitalist system (another western imposition) wasn’t developed enough to do so, and it was still mostly an export economy.

      Now, I eagerly await for the flat-earth level analysis of “but I see it and I think it is imperialist”.