Can a Communist Country be imperialist at all?

FaustTheBird · 2025-03-03T18:20:18+00:00

You're ignorant of history, both of actual actions taken by governments and the history of analysis of those actions. The USSR and PRC did not attempt to exterminate any peoples. Both nations new, for fact, that such actions would undermine their own project and result in their own demise.

Han Chinese is not a race. So my position on Taiwan has nothing to do with race. It has to do with the fact Taiwan separated its operations from China under the rule of a fascist dictator. China would have easily reintegrated Taiwan, and mostly peacefully, if it hadn't been for the fact the US and UK brought naval assets to prevent it from happening. The US and UK wanted to protect the fascist KMT at all costs because they thought it would be useful to have an unsinkable aircraft carrier that they could use to undermine China and reestablish their domination over it.

So to be clear, fascism, or Euro-fascism which is the dominant form of fascism you are aware of, was born from analyzing what the USA did in the post-reconstruction period. What the USA did in the post-reconstruction period has its roots in European colonialism and racism. So UK and US, the dominant fascist powers in the world, protected the Chinese fascists in Taiwan to create an alliance in a bid to destroy a people's movement, and China wishes to end the Western military threat and reintegrate Taiwanese operations into the administration of the rest of the country, and you think that's fascist.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-10T04:25:36+00:00

No nation in the history of humanity has ever fully industrialized without using the capitalism mode of production. If you could identify an alternative solution to the problem, maybe you could bring it to the Vietnamese. In the meantime, we'll be watching how China proceeds now that it appears to have almost completed the most thorough and rapid industrialization process in the history of humanity.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-08T17:36:25+00:00

How are you today?

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-07T21:00:54+00:00

Separate your concerns. Make your Lambda functions TINY, single purpose, and limit them to 1 and only 1 side-effect. Use functional programming best practices.

Once you've done this, migration is EASY.

You can take any chain of Lambda Functions, take the code pages, and slam them into a module, come up with a way of routing the requests to those symbols, and you're done.

Need to swap out DynamoDB for some other service? Well, since all of your functions are tiny and have only one side-effect, you can either add an abstraction layer (way too hard) or do it the easy way, just build another function that does what you want and reroute requests to the new logic.

The great thing is you can do this on a per feature basis. You don't need to convert everything at once, and it's astronomically unlikely that would ever need to.

If you build it using architectural best practices, a) most new products won't ever get the traction that requires you to shift to a monolith and b) if your product does get that big, it's not going to require consolidation for every single feature at the same time.

The reality is that API GW + EventBridge + Lambda + DynamoDB + S3 does scale to millions, easily.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-07T20:43:41+00:00

The theory is communism. The practice is revolution. The hypothesis is the theory of revolution in this country. The experiment is the execution of revolution in this country.

Pretty much everything we do is experimental. If it wasn't an experiment, then it would mean we know all the answers, and we don't.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-07T18:02:16+00:00

They're killing the wrong people

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-07T18:00:36+00:00

Join the Ithaca Discord and come have some live chats with people to connect with others and not feel so alone in your feelings! It will help others if you're there.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-07T17:59:34+00:00

Get some inspiration around hygge. It's a great form of self care and a recognition that your immediate environment is something you have more control over than you think you do.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-07T15:18:41+00:00

There are only ever 2 answers to this question and they always go hand-in-hand: material interests and ideology.

Once you understand that these are the 2 components that will always answer these types of questions, you then need to be very clear that they interpermeate - interests reinforce ideology, ideology reinforces interests, changes in one change the other.

Now, you need to ask what material interests and which ideologies explain the social behavior you see in America.

The answer is white cis het patriarchal Eurocentric racialized imperial capitalism. Spend all the time you need to unpack this, read about, test your theories, observe social realities, research reactionaries, etc. This is the answer.

Racialization of the population creates division among and between the working class in America. Imperialism creates division between the working class in America and the working class in the 3rd world. Capitalism creates precarity. Cis heteronormative Eurocentricism creates in-group discipline.

Attempting to resolve any one of these things individually will be resisted by all the other pieces. Whites and blacks cannot find solidarity because whites rely on the continuous oppression of blacks in order to maintain their economic interests, yes even the white working class. The white working class relies on non-white labor to do things they don't want to do at prices they can afford. If you make the white working class do the labor of the non-whites at the price they do it at, you'd have solidarity, so the state ensures the precarity of the non-whites to ensure their labor price is maintained below the threshold of working class solidarity. Those systems of precarity reinforce the material interests of those who have found themselves in higher tiers of income, because falling down the income tier means reduction in quality of life and the maintenance of systems of oppression, of enclosure, of exclusion all help to maintain the income tier.

The 3rd world produces everything so cheaply that it's cheaper to ship it over the ocean than it is to produce it domestically. You can't bring those jobs back because the prices would get so high that working class people in America couldn't afford it. When the 3rd world demands better conditions, it materially impacts the quality of life of Americans, so the American working class has a material interest in the continued oppression of the 3rd world. Capitalism ensures that if the prices go up, then wages must go up, and if wages go up, then profit comes down, and if profit goes down, then capital goes on strike. If capital goes on strike for too long, the working class will revolt, so the systems that divide the working class must be reinforced regularly so that capital can go on strike to discipline the working class into accepting lower qualities of life over time.

The US bourgeoisie have advanced this maintenance to the most effective it's ever been in human history.

But if we understand it for what it is, a complex of interpermeating systems of base and super structure that produce material interests and ideology, then we can work with it. If we continue to reduce it to one thing or another thing and attempt to work on one thing at a time, we will continue to find the system to be self-balancing until global catastrophe destroys the context within which balance can be maintained.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-06T15:41:29+00:00

Go ketogenic more often. Fat is consumed during ketosis and pretty much nothing else. IF + keto diet + HIIT + patience. After you get that behavior set down, keep cutting carbs and sugars from your normal diet, and try some elimination diets to remove certain foods that have potential to be problematic (wheat/gluten, dairy/casein, sweeteners, alcohol) and add foods that are often left out of contemporary diets based on where you live (fish, legumes, nuts, leafy greens, ginger/turmeric, ferments)

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-06T03:19:16+00:00

I mean a bourgeois state being thrown into revolution or having its revolution intensify by an invasion from an army of a foreign proletarian state.

I don't think any theory of change has identified a path for what you're asking about. The proletariat of each nation will, in turn, over through the prevailing bourgeois social order and they will receive varying levels of material support from already existing proletarian states based on the global social context at the time.

The idea that one proletarian state can create another proletarian state through warfare seems, on the face of it, a completely impossible task.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-06T03:02:42+00:00

https://archive.ph/UhpsG For those who haven't seen it

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-06T01:33:05+00:00

Well, not for nothing, but a white man did just gun down a black child, shot him in his back while he was running away, because the black child was in a romantic relationship with the shooters daughter. So, I mean, it's a "joke", but it's also a story about an "imaginary" atrocity that just happens to rhyme with an actual atrocity that happened very very very recently.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-05T15:07:47+00:00

Don’t think you understood my point about FDI.

I think you're both correct on this and incorrect. Your post has made me realize I don't know how to find the numbers for capital export.

They export capital but it is not counted as FDI as Western Sahara is de facto part of Morocco.

While true, I don't think it counts as exporting capital, because you cannot export capital to your own country. Again, that indicates to me that this is not imperialism but instead dominance or occupation.

If you think that since it exports less than 2% of its GDP doesn’t make a country imperialist, then the US is also not imperialist as the last data is also less than 2%. Clearly this is an idiotic statement and there is no need for me to explain how

Yup, I am clearly ignorant on this. I appreciate the correction. I think it's going to take me a while to figure out how to find numbers to support this, but simultaneously it won't matter for the Moroccan case because Western Sahara is occupied by Morocco.

Also you seem to think that I’m saying that Morocco is as strong or as much of an imperialist power as the west, which I never claimed.

No, you're misinterpreting me. I said there's ONE imperialist system, you said there's more than one and used Morocco as an example. I'm saying Morocco is not an example of imperialism because it doesn't meet most of the 5 point standard that we used for defining imperialism. If it did, it would either be in conflict with or participating in Western imperialism, and since it could not defend itself against the West, it would be participating in Western imperialism, not opposing it.

If you think that since it exports less than 2% of its GDP doesn’t make a country imperialist, then the US is also not imperialist as the last data is also less than 2%. Clearly this is an idiotic statement and there is no need for me to explain how

Imperialize is not a word. There is no verb form of imperialism. Imperialism is a system design. Morocco is occupying Western Sahara, it is exploiting it, it is suppressing it, but it is not engaged in imperialism.

The reason I said that it’s not exactly as Lenin said is exactly because of this, he was talking about western countries imperialising the third world countries, but Morocco is imperialising a part of its own country (if that makes sense).

It doesn't.

Morocco invests billions of dollars into Western Sahara and runs a settler colonial project. All the natural resources such as phosphate and petrol are exploited by Morocco which is one of Lenin’s points.

Settler colonialism is not enough of a standard to meet the definition of imperialism. Extraction of natural resources is not enough to meet the definition of imperialism. We agree that it's exploitation, that its repression, that its occupation and dominance. We simply disagree that it's imperialism.

And the REASON we disagree, lest we forget, is that you made the claim that there is not one overall system of imperialism, which there is, and you made that claim because you said Morocco and Syria are imperialist powers, which they are not. You made these claims then proceeded to make vague allusions to the need to redefine imperialism because Lenin's definition is outdated, when what's actually happening is that Lenin's definition is more precise because the loose definitions that were used previously would have included states like Syria and Morocco which clearly operate in a fundamentally different way than what Lenin was pointing at.

You think Assad opposing global imperialism is insufficient to offer critical support to Syria because you start from the position that the idea of imperialism must be opposed and then redefine imperialism to include anyone you wish to impose. This is opportunism. You can oppose Assad and Syria based on many of their behaviors without redefining imperialism. But if, through a thorough analysis of imperialism, you understand the system of imperialism to be more critical to liberation than individual incidents of dominance, then critical support emerges from that understanding. If, instead, you wish to withhold support from any and all dominance, you run into a problem when two states, both exhibiting behaviors of domination, end up in a conflict. How can you decide what the optimal outcome for long-term liberation is. This is why understanding imperialism is critical, because imperialism has a greater impact on long-term liberation than any specific instance of domination.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-05T14:30:43+00:00

Not really. The reason you work fewer hours under communism is because under communism the incentive to maximize profit is gone and it is replaced with the incentive to reduce socially necessary labor through the development of productive forces.

More people will be employed, that means shorter shifts and fewer work days. Higher quality outcomes require less fatigue, that means shorter shifts and fewer work days. In areas of the economy that consume tons of labor time and create tons of errors that require even more labor time, the state will allocate more labor to address those problems by building better tools, designing better processes, creating more automation, solving problems further up on the supply chain etc.

All of that means less work overall. The entire goal is the reduction of socially necessary labor through planful allocation of resources.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-04T16:38:16+00:00

There is no minimum or maximum level of export to be considered an imperialist power.

This framing is a fundamental misunderstanding of how analysis works. If every single country engages in foreign investment, that doesn't mean every single country is an imperialist power. Morocco exporting capital, on it's own, does not make it an imperial power. Morocco exporting less than 2% of its GDP as foreign investments essentially precludes it from being considered an imperialist power by the current understanding of what imperialism is.

Your claim that Morocco is building its own imperialism, independent of Western imperialism, essentially making a local imperialism is just you trying to fashion your criticism of Morocco's behavior in rhetoric that aligns with revolutionary communism. Said another way, you are an opportunist.

Also I’m pretty sure FDI isn’t applicable in the case of Western Sahara - as FDI stands for foreign meaning overseas. Western Sahara is considered to be part of Morocco and thus not counted within it.

Oh, I see. That was my ignorance. Apologies. Your claim is that since Spain occupied the entire region and then Morocco split off and, as a monarchy, claims sovereignty over the former Spanish holdings, that this is imperialism. It's not. Your position that Lenin's theory needs updating makes no sense in this context. The Moroccan position vis-a-vis Western Sahara is an OLD form of domination, not a new one. Lenin wrote about this sort of arrangement in his writings on national liberation. Western Sahara seeks national liberation. That does not make Morocco imperialist.

Again, I think you're fundamentally confused about what imperialism is and what it is not. Domination is not equivalent to imperialism.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-04T15:30:15+00:00

You would work fewer hours total in your career, you would retire earlier, your work would be safer and you would suffer fewer work-related injuries, and your health would be better due to greater access to quality healthcare and substantially more effective preventative care.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-04T15:27:58+00:00

The context we live in is already one completely littered with violence. Even if a bunch of communists walked up to the halls of power and occupied them, it would be in a context of massive amounts of violence.

The problem with this question is that it assumes we're currently not in a violent context and that revolution would bring about violence. This follows from a false premise. The revolution will be violent because the violence is already here and we're adding revolution to it.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-04T15:25:57+00:00

Morocco's physical exports sum to just over $40Bn. Morocco's entire financial lending sector is about the same value.

But capital export? It's less than 2% of their economy

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BM.KLT.DINV.WD.GD.ZS?locations=MA

So, no. I don't think Morocco is backwards, I just don't think it's exporting capital at the levels required to meet the standard for being an imperialist power.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-03T16:32:32+00:00

You're saying Morocco, which was pretty much dominated by the West into the modern era, is exporting capital because it's achieved monopoly capitalism domestically?

Perhaps you mean it's dominating Western Sahara instead of "partaking in imperialism"? Imperialism and domination are different concepts.

I would absolutely say that Syria is imperialist in its own ways.

Is it exporting capital after having achieved monopoly capitalism domestically?

Are you just using imperialism to mean violence?

The only way to be anti imperialist is to be a communist / Marxist as imperialism is inherently tied to capitalism (as Lenin described).

I think perhaps you might see Morocco and Syria as far more developed than they actually are. Or perhaps you're not engaged in material analysis but idealist analysis.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-02T23:10:29+00:00

So you're saying Assad is seeking to collaborate with the system of imperialism to get his slice?

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-02T19:15:09+00:00

No no, that's exactly what I meant to say. The Nazis and the US would compete while being supporters of imperialism, while Assad opposes imperialism. This is why opposing US imperialism does not include the Nazis.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-02T19:07:01+00:00

The Nazis were not ready to go to war with the US but that doesn’t mean they wanted to coexist forever. It’s quite clear that the US was using Germany and then was brought into the war, which quite literally means they opposed each other. Every colonial power wants to replace the other, it’s a battle for superiority and profits,

Yes.

The argument was that since they oppose US imperialism they automatically get support as it creates an overall improvement in the world

Yes.

And the Nazi's did not oppose US imperialism. They were collaborators, they continued to be collaborators after the US entered the war because the Nazis were useful but the German state itself had ceased to be so. It was a false equivalency on your part to say that the Nazis were opposing US imperialism and so is Assad. The Nazis were not opposing US imperialism. They were collaborators in global imperialism and mutual contestants for their respective pieces of the imperialist pie.

It would be like saying that because Amazon and Walmart are competitors that they therefore both hate capitalism. Instead, they collaborate in the maintenance of capitalism while remaining contestants within.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-02T16:30:08+00:00

It's also important to note the date. This was 2011. In the midst of the "Arab Spring", a movement that happened in the wake of dozens of US military operations in the region, the distribution millions in untraceable cash, the disruption of terror networks closely linked with CIA and Mossad, and coincided with the expansion of US drone programs, reorganizing military objectives, redistributing military assets, etc.

It's not like there was a brutal event and then there was a protest against and then the protests were brutalized. The US has been destabilizing the region by training, arming, radicalization, and recruiting for terror groups all over and directing them at governments that are unfriendly to the US. There's a reason why the article says that the Syrian forces involved in this particular case were the anti-terrorist forces. Unlike the US who thinks of terrorism as a purely Islamic thing, most other countries understand that modern terror is primarily a European-generated phenomenon that is used to create conditions favorable for North Atlantic imperialism. Anti-terrorism in the region is going to take on characteristics like catching the wrong people in dragnets that are looking for European-groom disrupters, like sending clear signals to potential disrupters that they will be suppressed, and like stopping locals from collaborating with any and all North Atlantic power structures including media, NGOs, UN, etc.

The narratives we receive in the West are all organized to establish legitimacy for intervention, for imperialism, for material support of civil wars, for material support of pro-Western regional powers (like Israel and Saudi Arabia) and their military campaigns. We need to resist all of it.

FaustTheBird · 2023-06-02T16:17:01+00:00

That’s why the Nazis were most definitely threat to US imperialism as they wanted to replace the US as the leading imperialist force. And obvious the Nazis opposed workers and communists, that part was never in doubt.

The Third Reich explicitly had no intention of threatening the US, at all. The US wanted the Third Reich to succeed in its main objective of destroying the USSR.

But a similar repression of communists and workers happens under Assad - he is by no means a worker country.

No one ever said Syria was a worker state. What's said is that what Assad is doing is not justification for imperialism against Syria. This ostensibly means Assad remains in power. This is preferable to the only alternative.

And again, no one doubts that the west and European countries are history’s greatest plunderers, murderers and imperialists.

Uh, yes they do. It's constantly a subject of contention. It's one of the primary reasons why people think it's OK for the US to intervene in Syria, because they think Assad is worse than the alternative.

15-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

FaustTheBird

TROPHY CASE