• knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    I’d genuinely like to know how Russia’s actions and conditions meet Lenin’s definition of imperialism.

      • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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        11 months ago

        The merging and control of the fossil fuel industry under Russian state ownership is actually the opposite of what happens in the neoliberal West where the economy relies on neo-colonial looting. Russia’s state control over its finance system is one of the reasons why it is able to prevent the kind of hyper-financialization that has devastated Western industrial economies. China does the same but to a much greater extent since it is a socialist state.

        Russia has no territory in Moldova. Transnistria is a de facto independent republic. The idea that Russia extracts some great benefit from this impoverished strip of land that is essentially blockaded by NATO vassal states is absurd.

        You are stuck in a paradigm of imperialism that does not correspond to how imperialism really functions today, via finance and neo-colonial unequal exchange. Imperialism of the late 20th and early 21st century does not operate as it did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The historical clock cannot be turned back, the division of the world between capitalist powers already took place. Today’s conditions and geopolitical dynamics are not the same as those of Lenin’s time.

        There is only one imperialist nexus in the world now and it is centered around US unipolar global domination and their neoliberal hegemony. All actors that work against this hegemony are by necessity anti-imperialist. This new anti-imperialist camp is ideologically and politically heterogenous and includes socialist states like China, semi-peripheral capitalist states like Russia, and peripheral, underdeveloped states in the global south that are rebelling against neo-colonialism.