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‘We Cannot Win’ Says Top Russian Commander
(www.kyivpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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imperialism isn't "when a country goes into another country", it's a specific relationship of domination and resource extraction and impoverishment of the people living in that country in order to exploit it for the benefit of the imperial core (more often, its bourgeoisie).
it's really disgusting to see people using the language of the left to describe the USSR abolishing homelessness and poverty in their constituent states, and building schools and homes and providing jobs and extremely low costs of living, as if this is even remotely comparable to the horrors that the Europeans and United States have wrought in developing countries around the world, including sweatshop and plantation slavery, forced starvations, and genocides.
"but they did those good things authoritarianly!" a) literally who gives a shit, and b) every government does everything authoritarianly, it's the definition of authoritarian. ripping away resources from the rich landowners and distributing them to the poor is extremely authoritarian and I definitely support doing that
Imperialism is when USSR tells the GDR to send over cars in "fair exchange" for canned fish the GDR has no interest in. End of story. And yes that trade happened.
I'm not sure why you think that's damning, there's some proportional amount of canned fish which is worth as much as a car, right?
In principle yes. But that ignores that the GDR built those cars to use, and has no need for the fish. Nor had it any say in whether to do the trade. The USSR messed up their own planning so they pressured the GDR. Inside the GDR it was a meme that you bought a car for your kid no later than when it got born so it'd get delivered on the 18th birthday but frankly speaking the GDR did produce a fuckton of cars -- but couldn't keep them. Which is why they stopped investing into developing the thing which is how you ended up with the same Trabants being built in 1990 as in 1958.
Other trades were more equitable, including the steady stream of raw materials coming in from the USSR in exchange for industrial machinery. The GDR also traded a fuckton with the west, more or less washing machines, fridges, textiles and industrial machinery, against the Prussian necessity: Coffee. Until they kick-started the Vietnamese coffee industry to be able to afford bananas better but that investment didn't pan out because 1990 came along, coffee plants take something like 10 years to start bearing fruit. The Vietnamese produce excellent coffee, btw.
Main point though is that yes the USSR was treating all the other bloc states as vassals: If they wanted to do a trade, they got it, no matter how insanely lop-sided it was.
Do Germans not eat canned fish?
They ultimately did, though state TV needed to include it in their cooking show as otherwise the fish would've rotted on the shelves -- the cans had Russian labels and while people learned Russian in school that doesn't mean that you know the name of a random fish. People didn't know what it was, what to do with it, so they didn't buy it.
Also you might've noticed that the GDR had a coastline.
In any case, and you seem to be trying hard to not address it: The point is not the fish. And it wasn't always fish, but other random shit. The point is that the GDR didn't have a choice. And the Russians didn't even have the decency to ship the cans with German labels. Probably were sitting in some warehouse collecting dust in Russia in the fist place.
I guess I'm just hard time what point you want me to take away from this when everything you've told me is unsourced and anecdotal. Random stories from random people on the internet don't really mean much to me.
My source is German TV documentaries if that helps.
And details actually are unimportant there's a multitude of ways to establish that the likes of Poland and the GDR were vassals of the USSR. How about Hungary? Yugoslavia wasn't, insert Tito quote about sending a single assassin to Stalin if Stalin doesn't stop sending dozens to Tito.
Well, that's not what the person you were responding to was disputing, was it? Vassal state relations are not necessarily imperialism, by the standard he laid out.
Lmfao
A global system of exploitation exists that starves millions every year and disposses even more.
"But I had to buy fish once in my industrialized country with a high quality of life".
You don't know what imperialism is even though it was just explained to you.
So that wasn't exploitation? How is it any different from trading beads for gold under force of violence?
Yes, the GDR largely had its shit together. Doesn't mean they didn't get exploited. Western workers also tend to have a decent standard of living, yet I bet my arse you wouldn't say that bosses don't exploit us.
I recommend reading my words again and giving a real good think - as difficult of a struggle as that might be - and decide whether you internalized them or just grabbed a piece here and there and plodded along anyways like a child.