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Imperial rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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Too many reports for the comments of this post so I'm locking this

[-] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 hours ago

Nation states are designed to divide the human race into more easily managed chunks.

[-] DerKommissar@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

"The pure (libertarian) socialists ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted.

Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed." - Michael Parenti, "Blackshirts and Reds"

[-] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 31 points 21 hours ago

I'm anti-imperialist and pro-metricist.

[-] Objection@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It's kinda unavoidable that if one major power loses influence, another will benefit from the vacuum. You can't really oppose your own country's imperialism without making the case that other countries taking advantage is an acceptable risk.

This is more or less the story of WWI. With the increasing tensions and military buildup, socialists of countries across Europe formed the Second International and agreed in the Basel Declaration, which said that they would use the crisis to rise up simultaneously against every imperialist power and put an end to both the war and to capitalism:

If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.

In case war should break out anyway it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.

But once the war actually broke out, most of them found reasons to rally around their country's flag. German socialists pointed to the conditions of serfdom under the Tsar and pointed to the massive colonial empires of Britain and France, while British and French socialists argued that Germany undemocratic under the Kaiser and had more responsibility for starting the war. They mostly agreed that both sides were bad, but they said they were only fighting to safeguard their countries "against defeat" rather than for victory, but regardless, for all intents and purposes it was the same thing. Of course, in all of these countries, there was considerable political pressure and propaganda pushing them to fall in line and to regard the enemy as worse, and many people did what was personally advantageous regardless of what they had said previously.

There was only one exception, where the socialists took advantage of the war to overthrow their government, without regard for the possibility that it could help the other side, and they did end up ceding a fair bit of land too, but they were able to put a stop that that theater of the meat grinder everyone was being fed into.

[-] PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 31 points 23 hours ago

The way I understand the meme, it's not saying anti-imperialism is wrong. It's saying that being a tankie, i.e. simping for china and russia doesn't qualify as anti-imperialism.

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[-] AntiOutsideAktion@lemmy.ml 5 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Listen, I'm as anti-imperialist as the next guy. But realistically if the core of capital that has nearly unopposed dominion over the entire world recedes, another entity that deserves the moniker of 'empire' completely equally will step in to fill the void! And if that's the case, we should just support the most morally righteous empire. Ours >:-D

[-] NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 hours ago
[-] AntiOutsideAktion@lemmy.ml 7 points 10 hours ago

Turtle Island managed to not have white people using such logic for thousands of years just fine

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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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