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Shit Reactionaries Say @lemmygrad.ml
Anarcho-Bolshevik @lemmygrad.ml
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‘I think if a definition of imperialism excludes the EAST INDIA COMPANY, something is fucked up’

So like does the user not think Russia is imperialistic? Why talk shit about the US Empire but eat up Russian Empire shit? Obligatory anarchist “states bad”

The ML definition of “imperialism” is “an advanced form of capitalism”. It conviently [sic] excludes anything Russia has ever done. It also excludes the British East India Company, but they don’t think about that.

Edit: if any of you tankies want to post that I’m making shit up again, then you ought to read more from Uncle Joe Steel. Not my fault his shitty propaganda made a huge definitional blunder.

I think if a definition of imperialism excludes the EAST INDIA COMPANY, something is fucked up

I mean, the East India Company was literally a company. It was capitalist as fuck.

Yes but it was early capitalist not advanced capitalist.

YOU’RE NOT A [sic] ANTI-IMPERIALIST YOU JUST SUPPORT THE OTHER EMPIREMe whenever I run across these self proclaimed “anti-imperialist” tankies

Removed by mod

No, I actually read shit.

“Marx did in fact concede that possibility, and he had good grounds for conceding it in regard to Britain and America in the seventies of the last century, when monopoly capitalism and imperialism did not yet exist, and when these countries, owing to the particular conditions of their development, had as yet no developed militarism and bureaucracy.”

  • Foundations of Leninism, ch 4

If imperialism hadn’t existed in the 1870s, then the definition couldn’t have covered the East India Company in its hayday.

Some seem to not be able to hold the idea that two things can be wrong at the same time. Others see Russia or China as lesser evils. Obviously those have their own “Monroe Doctrine” but nevertheless. Not my opinion, just elaborating on the why from my interactions in .ml.

(Source.)

I know that MeanwhileOnGrad is an easy target but this is a good opportunity for me to expand your vocabularies:

While the invasive and exploitative practices of precapitalist empires might not have been imperialist in the strictest sense, they were certainly proto-imperialist. This is a term that has been in use since the twentieth century and has some currency among historians. Here is one example from Bernadette Andrea’s The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture, pg. 13:

Concomitant with this focus on English women writers and their multifaceted relations to women from the Islamic world, I investigate the subaltern agency of indigenous women — from Central Asia and what is now Canada — who were transported to England as a result of the elusive search for the northeast and northwest passages to “Cathay” from the mid-1550s through the 1570s.

In addition to establishing the basis for England’s proto-imperialist project, these ventures marked the beginning of a two-way, if not necessarily equal, flow of travellers, including from the Islamicate regions between Russia and Iran.⁶⁵

Here is a briefer example from Austin Schmidt’s The Final Crusade: A Study of the Crusades in Isis Propaganda, ch. 2:

In this theory the First Crusade was a proto-imperialist expedition for the nearly wealthy and powerful to make names for themselves.

(Emphasis added in both cases.)

I could offer more instances but I am sure that you get the picture. Even if we somehow lacked a word for this phenomenon, that would not inhibit us from recognizing these empires’ practices as harmful to the lower classes. Misogyny is not (always) imperialist, for example, but that does not make it any less wrong.

Finally, if you be as opposed to Imperial America as you pretend, I recommend brushing up on the NATO and how it made the Russo-Ukrainian war inevitable. You don’t have to like the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine, but condemning it over and over again accomplishes absolutely nothing and won’t deepen your understanding of the conflict one iota.

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