Fair, and the empire became the empire post-WWII.

Wouldn’t surprise me

Yep, I agree! Thought it was a new article.

Venezuelan tankers are now escorted by the Venezuelan navy, so siezure would likely have meant open war instead of normal crimes against humaniity.

Gonna be honest, I don’t consider the DNC to be opposition, more collusion. The US Empire has always been a genocidal plunderer, at a global scale too.

Very cool and good.

Based, don’t let the Empire bully you.

That would track.

In lots of ways the Russian Federation is behind the USSR, no doubt. Capitalism doesn’t work. That being said, it’s far better than being on the plundered side of imperialism, and that’s why UR has the support it still does. The CPRF rising is a consequence of rising support for socialism.

It’s simple, nationalists want development for greater profits while imperialists want underdevelopment to retain their superprofits.

I follow the Marxist definition, Russian nationalism has nothing to do with it, and moreover we are speaking of western imperialists kicked out by Russian nationalists. Revolution has succeeded on far worse odds.

The US empire is already dying, but it still has hard power. Europe has very little hard power and very little soft power, and as such their relevance on the world stage is vanishing. Cutting their ties with the US like that would result in essentially them getting rid of their support system.

The difference is that nationalists seek internal development for production, whereas imperialists seek underdevelopment to keep wages low and out of the higher “value add” parts of supply chains (that are really only “value add” because the west historically had a monopoly on them). The system isn’t working for everyone though, and as such communists are rising in quantity and the nationalists are forced into trying to claim soviet heritage. This isn’t really working, though, and the CPRF has been rising in support. Modern internal armies aren’t ominpotent, nor does it need to look like the Russian Civil War of the past.

They’d accelerate their demotion from imperial vassals to periphery countries. That’s it.

Russia wants the four oblasts, which they have been accelerating their advance in in the last few months. Cheap and deadly FPV drones force slow movement in general, but in the last few months strings of Kiev-held strongholds are falling left and right. Ukraine can’t field the war much longer either, and the war is becoming increasingly unpopular. What’s likely is that the four oblasts go to Russia, Kiev is forced into NATO neutrality, and their millitary is severely crippled. That’s absolutely a Russian victory.

Which of these do you think Russia will have to compromise on, and why would you consider the compromise to be a loss?

United Russia is the nationalist bourgeoisie, not the imperialist western bourgeoisie that were looting the country. The nationalists stopped the foreign looting and solidified their power base. The CPRF’s support, as well as broader support for socialism in general, is something that UR can’t “eliminate,” it’s far too big of a movement for that. They can try, but it’s an accelerating movement as capitalism isn’t what it was sold as.

China and Russia are not imperialist, they are closer to global south countries in their position with respect to imperialism as a global phenomenon. In order to fight the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, capital either seeks new markets, ie new inventions to flood with capital or geographically new markets, or it seeks to establish monopoly. The former allows for greater profits in absolute terms, the latter temporarily raises the rate of profit. The natural consequence is imperialism, where this is combined by having financial capital dominate the global south, super-exploiting labor for super-profits, and via unequal exchange, where technology and tech development is kept in the global north and thus monopoly prices are charged.

This is also why south-south trade is the path to escape underdevelopment, and is why China in particular has been a progressive force for the global south, as they don’t withold tech knowledge but instead share it through cooperation and trade. China also doesn’t charge the same monopoly prices for tech, which is why global south countries are seeing huge electrification, expansions in EVs, etc.

The west used to have a monopoly on cutting edge tech, they witheld the technology used for creating firearms from African countries for hundreds of years while selectively trading firearms in limited quantities for huge amounts of slaves, as an example. The west forces the global south to rely on them, and forces them into remaining at lower levels of industrial development and refinement. It’s also why countries like the Sahel States are working towards cutting unrefined gold exports and upping refined gold exports, ie moving from unfinished raw materials into more finished goods or ancillary materials, and why porkie is terrified of them.

It isn’t that goods further along in the commodity production process have more valuable labor time at the higher end, it’s that the upper end of the production chain is easier to keep a tech and skill monopoly on. This is what liberals mean by “higher value add” industries, made more naked through Marxist analysis.

Before you start making bets, what do you count as a Russian victory? It’s almost certainly going to end favorably to Russia, so I’m not sure why you’d take this bet.

The “3 day war” idea was not an official millitary or government statement, Lukashenko and an RT editor both said it and the west has been using it as a way to obscure the fact that Russia has been steadily achieving its actually stated goals. I know you’ve read Lenin, have you read Imperialism, the Current Highest Stage of Capitalism? The Russian Federation is governed by nationalists, not finance capital, and Russia doesn’t have a stake in the global financial monopoly. It’s the west that has that. Russia doesn’t really meet the Marxist understanding of imperialism, nor is it acting how we would expect imperialist powers to act.

The CPRF is the largest opposition to United Russia, and has seen tens of thousands of new members year over year for the last few years. United Russia largely has the power it does because the nationalists kicked out the imperialists that plundered Russia during the dissolution of the soviet union, but public opinion is swaying more towards a reversion to socialism. This is a good sign, and if United Russia opposes this then that furthers support for the CPRF.