Russia has only 6 of the top 500 companies in the world. It physically cannot compete in the realm of imperialism due to being largely industrial and not at all financialized. You are arguing for an expansion of NATO and a strengthening of the unquestioned imperialist hegemony. This is not anti-intellectualism, it’s a principled ML stance.
How many of the 500 companies does Sri Lanka have? I have consistently labelled Russia a smaller imperialist. You have now given some quantification of how much smaller. The claim that Russia is not financialized is bizarre for a country that actually exports capital to places like Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, etc. Again, it’s not Wall Street. It’s weaker, smaller. But it’s …doing its best.
And, accusing me for arguing for NATO expansion is bringing us back to the dishonest rhetoric devices of EmmiLee, trying to paint my position as something it isn’t. Just when I thought we were having a conversation.
If anything NATO already expanded in Scandinavia BECAUSE of Putinist imperialist adventurism. You assume the outcome and work backwards towards a line. That’s not principled anti-imperialism, that’s … campism.
The absurdly tiny level of capital export in the case of Russia is critically important for understanding how it exists within a global system of imperialism. Damn right it’s trying to become an imperialist power, but it physically cannot, and the proof of this is in how little finance capital they actually contain. They are best described, at most, as a regional power that cannot run its economy based on capital export. Imperialism is not any export of capital, it’s the dominance of finance capital.
The reason this circles back to arguing for NATO expansion is because, in your misidentified label of Russia as a “smaller imperialist” and therefore placing the correct stance as opposition to Russia and support for Ukraine, this is an unquestionably pro-NATO stance, achieving NATO’s aims of weakening Russia. A weakened Russia is not going to weaken the nationalist control of Russia, it will only service the imperialist encirclement.
The actual path to socialism for Russia is not through balkanization. It’s through worker organizing and a continued sharpening of contradictions within an encircled nationalist controlled economy. They cannot export their contradictions to the global south (itself not a term for the literal south but instead the systemically underdeveloped nations), and so contradictions sharpen domestically, bringing more to socialism.
Small is not the same as absurdly tiny. We are not talking about Andorra or Cyprus, we are talking about Russia. A regional power is a power like Turkey. And it’s very clear that Russia is more than that. Turkey does not have satellite states (ok, fine, the TRNC), the way Russia dominates eg Belarus or the way it threw around its weight in the former Soviet sphere until they shot their own foot due to putinist adventurism. Russian finance capital will very well resume this role the moment the current “disagreements” between them and the Western imperialists get settled.
I don’t make any grand claims to know what the path to socialism is. But to bring back my Imperial Germany analogy, I don’t see why the encirclement of one imperialist by another should force any socialist’s allegiance, it’s just not normative.
Russia has far more hard power than most regional powers, but it has practically no finance capital. Your continued vulgarization of imperialism is why you continue to conflate Russian regional influence with the total international domination of the west.
At what point did “total international domination” become the threshold for imperialism? The inequality of imperialist powers is why we have imperialist antagonism in the first place. Or are you claiming we have transcended imperialism itself??
And maybe I’m not a guru of Leninism but the fusion of banking with industrial capital was already happening in Russia, with things like Gazprombank.
Basically, I don’t understand why small imperialists get to be labelled non imperialist.
Imperialist economies are oriented around imperialism itself as the foundation of the economy. Russia materially has a drive to become imperialist, but through encirclement cannot become so. This is why contradictions sharpen domestically, rather than being exported. This is why Russian finance capital is so small, even if it is at a monopoly nationalist stage, it has no room to grow. The US Empire and the west form an imperial hegemony that is weakening day by day, while Russia still cannot expand. Russia is accelerating the decline in imperialism.
But you are factually wrong! Pre-war, Russia indeed had a peripheral hegemony of countries it was exploiting to feed its economy. It was growing. That peripheral hegemony is now weakened, eg., when Russia was unable to protect its assets in Armenia, but that’s precisely because it played the imperial antagonism game. It’s now a losing imperialist, not an anti-imperial power.
Edit:
And for goodness sake, what is this aberration?
Russia is accelerating the decline in imperialism.
Imperialism is a system. If US imperialism loses, that means a different element of the system wins. That doesn’t mean socialism, it means reconfiguration.
You keep expressing this as “regional hegemony,” but it isn’t the same as imperialism. Russia simply has a stronger economy and thus has regional counter influence towards western imperialism. Russia’s economy is not oriented around capital export and isn’t imperialist. You say you aren’t a Leninist guru, and I think you should use this as an opportunity to both revisit Lenin as well as read up on modern analysis of imperialism. The idea that a regional power can meaningfully establish an imperialist presence in a world of western domination isn’t a Marxist line, and it causes you to see regional influence as equivalent to total global hegemony.
Russia has only 6 of the top 500 companies in the world. It physically cannot compete in the realm of imperialism due to being largely industrial and not at all financialized. You are arguing for an expansion of NATO and a strengthening of the unquestioned imperialist hegemony. This is not anti-intellectualism, it’s a principled ML stance.
How many of the 500 companies does Sri Lanka have? I have consistently labelled Russia a smaller imperialist. You have now given some quantification of how much smaller. The claim that Russia is not financialized is bizarre for a country that actually exports capital to places like Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, etc. Again, it’s not Wall Street. It’s weaker, smaller. But it’s …doing its best.
And, accusing me for arguing for NATO expansion is bringing us back to the dishonest rhetoric devices of EmmiLee, trying to paint my position as something it isn’t. Just when I thought we were having a conversation.
If anything NATO already expanded in Scandinavia BECAUSE of Putinist imperialist adventurism. You assume the outcome and work backwards towards a line. That’s not principled anti-imperialism, that’s … campism.
The absurdly tiny level of capital export in the case of Russia is critically important for understanding how it exists within a global system of imperialism. Damn right it’s trying to become an imperialist power, but it physically cannot, and the proof of this is in how little finance capital they actually contain. They are best described, at most, as a regional power that cannot run its economy based on capital export. Imperialism is not any export of capital, it’s the dominance of finance capital.
The reason this circles back to arguing for NATO expansion is because, in your misidentified label of Russia as a “smaller imperialist” and therefore placing the correct stance as opposition to Russia and support for Ukraine, this is an unquestionably pro-NATO stance, achieving NATO’s aims of weakening Russia. A weakened Russia is not going to weaken the nationalist control of Russia, it will only service the imperialist encirclement.
The actual path to socialism for Russia is not through balkanization. It’s through worker organizing and a continued sharpening of contradictions within an encircled nationalist controlled economy. They cannot export their contradictions to the global south (itself not a term for the literal south but instead the systemically underdeveloped nations), and so contradictions sharpen domestically, bringing more to socialism.
Small is not the same as absurdly tiny. We are not talking about Andorra or Cyprus, we are talking about Russia. A regional power is a power like Turkey. And it’s very clear that Russia is more than that. Turkey does not have satellite states (ok, fine, the TRNC), the way Russia dominates eg Belarus or the way it threw around its weight in the former Soviet sphere until they shot their own foot due to putinist adventurism. Russian finance capital will very well resume this role the moment the current “disagreements” between them and the Western imperialists get settled.
I don’t make any grand claims to know what the path to socialism is. But to bring back my Imperial Germany analogy, I don’t see why the encirclement of one imperialist by another should force any socialist’s allegiance, it’s just not normative.
Russia has far more hard power than most regional powers, but it has practically no finance capital. Your continued vulgarization of imperialism is why you continue to conflate Russian regional influence with the total international domination of the west.
At what point did “total international domination” become the threshold for imperialism? The inequality of imperialist powers is why we have imperialist antagonism in the first place. Or are you claiming we have transcended imperialism itself??
And maybe I’m not a guru of Leninism but the fusion of banking with industrial capital was already happening in Russia, with things like Gazprombank.
Basically, I don’t understand why small imperialists get to be labelled non imperialist.
Imperialist economies are oriented around imperialism itself as the foundation of the economy. Russia materially has a drive to become imperialist, but through encirclement cannot become so. This is why contradictions sharpen domestically, rather than being exported. This is why Russian finance capital is so small, even if it is at a monopoly nationalist stage, it has no room to grow. The US Empire and the west form an imperial hegemony that is weakening day by day, while Russia still cannot expand. Russia is accelerating the decline in imperialism.
But you are factually wrong! Pre-war, Russia indeed had a peripheral hegemony of countries it was exploiting to feed its economy. It was growing. That peripheral hegemony is now weakened, eg., when Russia was unable to protect its assets in Armenia, but that’s precisely because it played the imperial antagonism game. It’s now a losing imperialist, not an anti-imperial power.
Edit:
And for goodness sake, what is this aberration?
Imperialism is a system. If US imperialism loses, that means a different element of the system wins. That doesn’t mean socialism, it means reconfiguration.
You keep expressing this as “regional hegemony,” but it isn’t the same as imperialism. Russia simply has a stronger economy and thus has regional counter influence towards western imperialism. Russia’s economy is not oriented around capital export and isn’t imperialist. You say you aren’t a Leninist guru, and I think you should use this as an opportunity to both revisit Lenin as well as read up on modern analysis of imperialism. The idea that a regional power can meaningfully establish an imperialist presence in a world of western domination isn’t a Marxist line, and it causes you to see regional influence as equivalent to total global hegemony.