this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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What is imperialism?
Man, you should probably already know if you wanna be having these conversations lmao.
To dumb it all the way down, when a soveriegn nation marches over an internationally recognized border to try to take their land/resources, that's imperialism.
When Israel occupies Palestinian lands and lobs bombs at their hospitals and food supply and settlers seize territory, that's imperialism.
When the US meddles in the Middle East or South America to fund right wing death squads to topple governments that's imperialism
When the Soviet Union did the exact same thing in the exact same places, that was still imperialism
When China took over Hong Kong and tries to take islands in the Phillipines, that's imperialism
When Trump threatens to takeover Canada and Greenland, that's imperialism
When Russia invaded Ukraine, that was imperialism
It's pretty easy to spot the imperialist, they're the ones crossing the internationally recognized border with tanks and armies
So imperialism is just a synonym for invasion?
Was the Soviet Union imperialist when they marched into Berlin?
yeah the nazis had a right to self-determination, just like the Chinese nationalists of the ROC
No, the first thing I said was that I was dumbing it all the way down
I'm not sure i understand your thought process here. They were the ones who got invaded.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa
I personally choose to distinguish between the country invading another and the country getting invaded itself but then going on to not lose the war.
Does this distinction seem reasonable?
Your distinction isn't really reasonable because you're still just saying all invasions are imperialist (now with the qualifier that this is only the case if you didn't get invaded first).
Was Abe Lincoln being imperialist when invading the Confederate states? China liberating Tibet? What about if China invaded Taiwan right now? I mean, that one actually wouldn't even count as imperialist under your own very broad definition given that there's an international consensus that Taiwan is part of China.
Which invasions do you want to praise as "non imperialist"?
Read up on the Battle of Fort Sumter.
...yes. China annexing Tibet was absolutely imperialist.
Would China be upsetting the understood international "status quo" by doing so?
I genuinely feel my above answer should've been super obvious but alright.
Once again, I don't have an overly broad definition. I broke it down to simple terms. I think the problem here might not be with the specific definition but any definition.
I'm sorry if this is a misread but it really feels like you're trying to just nitpick the definition endlessly as some sort of exhausting rhetorical tactic to keep me constantly backtracking so that we can't actually talk about this blatantly obvious invasion in front of us.
Like, Russia marched soldiers and parachuted into Kyiv trying to assassinate the president to overthrow it.
How honestly do you rationalize that as okay behavior for a state power while arguing against imperialism?
Not really? You haven't addressed the Leninist definition. The reason I've been nitpicking yours is that it makes anti-imperialism non-actionable. It's like if I decide to be a communist and I don't like social classes because class conflict creates violence and oppression, it means I must condemn when socialist states use state organs to oppress capitalists. It's ahistorical and fails to inform a productive course of action.
The way you readily call the Chinese invasion of Tibet imperialist shows my point. By what means should the serfs have been liberated? Was it incorrect for the new socialist state to liberate them, because there was a "legitimate" Tibetan state that had a justified claim to the land? Are the class relations, the material conditions, all irrelevant to our assessment of the situation because Mao had no "right" to do that?
I understand that I'm being annoying, and it probably just feels like I'm going out of my way to contradict you when the intuitive definition of imperialism would show that the invasions I'm talking about were indeed imperialist. The point is to get you to see why we like the way Lenin put it, because it is a lot more actionable and gives us a plan to strategize around. The vibes based approach doesn't give us a way to defeat imperialism, only to condemn away.
No one offered me a Leninist definition. You asked me what imperialism was and then I guess tried to Socrates method me into it.
Feel free to link anything and I'll give it a read.
I dont understand why you say this definition is non-actionable when it is the reason i say we must act to stop Putin from invading Ukraine.
There's a lot in here. How are they being oppressed?
Is the socialist state oppressing them by arresting them without trial and sending them to death camps? Because without due process how do we know these are actually the capitalists they're accused of being?
If they sent you to a death camp as a "capitalist" without evidence is it okay if I reserve the right to speak out on your behalf?
I think there are some types of brutality and human rights abuses that are so awful it transcends "team sports" and should just be off limits for everyone. That's sort of where the genocide in Ukraine crosses the mine.
Honestly? I don't know.
Was life better for the serfs because of Mao? I regrettably know as much about that part of history so I don't want to talk out of my ass just to win a point.
What I do know is that when the US liberated France, they gave France back to the French. That sort of sets the ideal for what liberation should look like.
If Tibet isn't it's own country they didn't really "liberate" Tibet. They just took it. They annexed it.
When you put it that way i now feel like the annoying one. I appreciate the explanation here cause it does clarify.
I joined the .ml community completely arbitrarily because I read the devs were on it and as a programmer I like open source software stuff. Bet I've been dropping some painfully lib comments for ya guys.
I will better inform myself on these perspectives.
Oh I'm sorry, I thought you would have seen it elsewhere in the thread. Miz wrote a nice short summary.
The reason I am so ardently opposed to that position is that in practice it translates into supporting European militarization and the expansion of the American Military-Industrial-Complex. Is there a world where Ukraine defends itself without strengthening western imperialists? That's the whole reason NATO supports the war.
So either you have an actionable definition of imperialism that tells you that you need to join a revolutionary organization and focus your efforts on countering American hegemony, or you have a non-actionable definition that would have you in a picket line together with union machinists from Lockheed Martin.
This is an absurd jump. I don't think there is a genocide in Ukraine, although there have been many civilian casualties and that has included events in which Russia targeted civilian areas. That's a very, very far cry from death camps.
What I mean more specifically is something like when China sentences a billionaire to death because of corruption. I'm morally opposed to the death penalty, but I recognize why China is using it against people who took decisions that cost lives and livelihoods in a massive scale. The fact that they are a proletarian state and are advancing the interests of the working class means that I don't think it's productive to condemn China for using the death penalty. That's what I mean.
I think if you annex a country and make it an autonomous province with vastly superior social conditions compared to the previous order of things, that's liberation. I'd recommend Michael Parenti's Friendly Feudalism as a source here.
I appreciate your willingness to learn!
https://redsails.org/why-marxism/
https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/
https://taiyangyu.medium.com/productive-forces-b24877d0110c
https://taiyangyu.medium.com/no-you-cannot-be-an-anarchist-and-a-marxist-4d196640c5d7
suuuuuuure you will
Thanks for the sources and then no thanks for unnecessarily poisoning the well with sarcasm.
Its nice of you to take the time to give me some helpful recommendations in the most obnoxious way you could possibly come up with.
Real duality of man stuff.
—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx's Capital (1879)
You also entered this discussion misgendering one of our comrades. You don't really have a civility/politeness leg to stand on, and you're lucky you didn't have your comments removed for that.
I didn't gender anyone in this discussion. I may have used colloquial figures of speech that are common here in Canada.
I wasn't calling anyone a "man" in the same way that when I say "God, I'm hungry" I'm not calling you god.
That being said, if my usage of "man" or "dude" bothers a person let me know and I will apologize and correct it.
If Babs feels misgendered I would apologize to them but they didn't signal they had any issue with it and you've been the only one offended on their behalf.
If my use of a vocative was misunderstood, then I need to apologize to them, not you.
check her pronouns please
Still a useless definition. Essentially all wars are imperialist under this definition, unless it's the most insignificant little border skirmish.
When the hell did the Soviet Union fund RWDS? I live in latam and the only influence of the Soviet Union I know is supporting national liberation movements. The US has only done the same when the movements were corrupt and put landowners' interests on top of the peasantry's (i.e. those who wanted to keep colonial relations but under a new flag).
Because Hong Kong being a satellite state of the West used to destabilize the only remaining major communist power would be so much better? Like it wasn't just blatantly stolen Terra Nulius style by the British to traffic opium into China?
England takes Hong Kong, that's imperialism.
China takes it back, also imperialism i guess.
Exactly! A country should belong to the people who live in in and not to neighboring empires who call dibs on someone else's home.
This view is typically called anti-imperialism.
Then you should be supporting the people of Donbas in their anti-imperialist struggle against the neo-nazi Ukrainian regime that had been trying to ethnically cleanse them and seize control of all their resources to sell off to western private interests. Just as you should be cheering on the Russians who came to their aid and prevented them from being wiped out by said nazis. But instead you've confused anti-imperialists for imperialists and mixed up the nazis with the victims because you have swallowed the western narrative.
If everything you said was factually true, then you're right I should be.
Well then you should educate yourself as to what is factually true because everything I said was just that. You seem aware enough that you should know that one can not trust western sources if they want to have any idea what is really going on. Yet your responses here seem to indicate that that's exactly what you've done: trusted the propaganda put out by the imperialist world hegemon.
I will remember to search for news on "the neo-nazi Ukrainian regime" in the future for unbiased information lmao.
Then what do your responses indicate?
I will fully admit it is possible I've been exposed to too much western propaganda, but you're clearly not the one to talk here when it comes to depropaganzing ourselves.
Russia has propaganda too.
Unless you live in Russia, it's basically impossible for someone's views to be determined just by Russian propaganda. We are submerged in Western liberal hegemony. Any kind of worldview we develop is going to be related to that liberal hegemony and the narratives it presents. At worst, we might overreact to the propaganda by deliberately swallowing the Russian narrative, but I think that it's also not true that we are uncritically following the Russian narrative (even when it's a lot closer to the reality I've surmised than the Western liberal narrative) where Russia is the beacon of traditional Western value against the woke, perverted West. That's also trash. We prefer to stick to analyzing material reality and the facts on the ground, not vibes.
Also, in my own comments I think I've done a good job of showing that there has been, indeed, a fascist coup of Ukraine in 2014, that was ethnically cleansing Russian speaking minorities and threatens all the same minorities that nazis always threaten. I showed you that while primarily citing liberal Western media like CNN, NBC, and the BBC. If those sources are too pro-Russian, then what sources can we use to get a level-headed assessment of the situation?
Perfect. Yes and I will take the opposite for myself. At worst I might swallow the mainstream western narrative but its not true that I think uncritically and I fact I actively seek out alternative information just like in this conversation.
When we went through it, the people you had claimed were being ethnically cleansed from what I saw turned out to be armed Russian proxies who had been fighting in Donetsk for 2 years (2014) before Ukraine bombed them (article from 2016).
You've provided evidence there was collateral damage when Ukraine was fighting a separation/civil war instigated by the Russian invasion in 2014. Not that minorities were targeted or that ethnic cleansing took place.
You didn't provide evidence there was a fascist coup, in fact the opposite? You suggested there was an American backed coup to install American friendly people in power (Victoria Nyland)?
And btw, everyone padding adjectives into everything is driving me nuts.
Sometimes the discussion breaks down to "The neo nazi Ukrainian regime pulled a fascist coup and you're too propagandized to see it"
Can't you just say "the Ukrainian government pulled a coup"?
Is America's hold over my state imperialist? Is Germany occupying Berlin imperialist?
I'm going to move 2 steps ahead here and just say that the position that's being argued for here is some platonic ideal Hong Kong that would be independent of both American and Chinese influence.
Are movements in your state to democratically organize a secession movement violently suppressed?
Same question. Germany could only start to be considered as "occupying" Berlin if Berlin doesn't want to be part of Germany.
So if there is a secession movement, it should always be supported? What of the people of Hong Kong who supported further integration into the mainland? Do they not matter?
How about the neonazis trying to turn the Pacific Northwest of America into their "Northwest Territorial Imperative". Should we support those secessionists?
Your thought process is very unique haha. Not sure how you connected those dots together, but it seems like you spotted the issue with it.
So different people who make up a single state have different policy positions? Hmm.. how might we resolve that conflict?
One solution that's been commonly used is democracy.
Instead of forcing people to "always support succession" for some unknown reason or to have your state always supress succession (like Putin does), we could strive for a middle balance where people are free to speak and support whichever secession movements they want, form parties, and these issues are then put to vote.
Think how Brexit, as dumb as it was, wasn't a civil war. It was just a referendum.
No one has to die changing the government.
In a democratic sense you should support the secession movements you agree with and not support the ones you don't agree with.
So why are you asking me? Ask yourself if you support turning the Pacific Northwest into a Northwest Territorial Imperative?
The problem with Hong Kong voting on it is the same as when Crimeans voted on secession. There's obvious external pressures at play. Hell, there's even internal pressures in all elections that will show that there is no such thing as an ideal democratic process, only real democratic processes that are influenced by internal and external contradictions. I'm not familiar enough with the history of the Hong Kong integration to tell you exactly what the calculus the politicians of China and local rulers made, but it is at least fairly clear from a basic understanding of how the world works that holding a poll in Hong Kong asking them how they feel about independence is like asking a bank teller who's currently being assaulted by 3 separate robbers how they feel about the concept of finance. The forces at play, between the legacy of British imperialism, currently existing American imperialism, and the Chinese threat to the existing mode of social organization in the island, means that (as with all things) a vote would only be a show of class power.