Yeah, he would know about that.
The USSR was the world’s single greatest anti-imperialist power throughout its history. Lenin would know about imperialism, considering he wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, the single most important Marxist work on analyzing capitalism’s imperialist stage. In this quote, he is addressing the Kautsky-ites that tried to disentangle imperialism from capitalism, written here more clearly:
It is clear why imperialism is moribund capitalism, capitalism in transition to socialism: monopoly, which grows out of capitalism, is already dying capitalism, the beginning of its transition to socialism. The tremendous socialisation of labour by imperialism (what its apologists — the bourgeois economists — call “interlocking”) produces the same result.
Advancing this definition of imperialism brings us into complete contradiction to K. Kautsky, who refuses to regard imperialism as a “phase of capitalism” and defines it as a policy “preferred” by finance capital, a tendency of “industrial” countries to annex “agrarian” countries.
Kautsky’s definition is thoroughly false from the theoretical standpoint. What distinguishes imperialism is the rule not of industrial capital, but of finance capital, the striving to annex not agrarian countries, particularly, but every kind of country. Kautsky divorces imperialist politics from imperialist economics, he divorces monopoly in politics from monopoly in economics in order to pave the way for his vulgar bourgeois reformism, such as “disarmament,” “ultraimperialism” and similar nonsense. The whole purpose and significance of this theoretical falsity is to obscure the most profound contradictions of imperialism and thus justify the theory of “unity” with the apologists of imperialism, the outright social-chauvinists and opportunists.
Would you mind elaborating? How can a man who liberated the peasant and working class from serfdom and empowered them and uplifted them from poverty and Tsarist oppression, and wrote extensively on Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, be considered an Imperialist?
Just ask the Estonians. Or the Latvians. or the Lithuanians. Or the Georgians. Or the Azeris. Or the Uzbeks. Or the Armenians. Or …
Of course the answer will be negative if I were to ask the young residents who did not live under actually existing socialism (AES) and whose only knowledge of the Soviet era is through heavily propagandized media by rich capitalists. Conversely, the older population who lived through that epoch has a mostly positive opinion about the USSR. Why do you think that is the case?
The majority of people that lived in the USSR want it back. The USSR wasn’t imperialist, it did not run on extraction of the global south like the global north does. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the soviet economy functioned, they did not run on private profits but oriented production for the purpose of fulfilling the needs of the people as best they could. The USSR fought against colonialism and imperialism for its entire existence, and was targeted by the west for it.
I think it would be useful to learn leftist perspectives, rather than just parroting right-wing talking points from the McCarthy era.
Propaganda brain.
