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weighing BRICS
Germany is also imperialist. The countries that rely on imperialism have higher metrics by plundering the global south. It's kinda like looking at life expectancy of the rich vs the poor in any one country, the better metrics of the top come at the expense of the bottom.
Political Economy is complex. What GDP aims to measure is overall production, it's an explanation of wealth, however it paints a very uneven picture as it overvalues financial transactions and undervalues raw productive capacity. As a consequence, imperialist countries are overvalued (like the US), while production-focused countries are under-represented.
GDP is often pushed by liberal, western countries as it makes them look good. A more honest look, however, is multi-faceted and takes into account other metrics like social services, which often run into negative "profitability" or break even, as they aren't producing for profit. There's also the fact that the US doesn't outproduce in non-physical goods either. The US certainly has popular media and software, but it doesn't have overwhelming productive capacity in these areas.
The point of focusing on BRICS is because if you remove the financialized, almost ficticious look at capital as displayed by GDP, BRICS is more economically strong and significant, and this better reflects the real world, not just US-based self-perception.
GDP is a terrible measure of genuine economic output, especially considering that it doesn't center production, but transaction and currency. A system highly financialized like the US, in reality, produces far less than China does, yet the US GDP is larger due to the dollar.
Plus, people still show up to argue all the time.
Horse is a Lemmygrad.ml account. Their comments arw invisible when viewing this post from Lemmy.world, thanks to Lemmy.world censorship.
...why?
.world has Lemmygrad.ml and Hexbear.net blocked, not Lemmy.ml. If .worlders could not see Lemmy.ml posts, they would not be able to see OP, OP's post, or the community we are commenting in.
Coincidentally, dbzer0 blocks Lemmygrad.ml as well.
Lemmy.ml is more broadly federated than sh.itjust.works, its users get exposed to more broad viewpoints and a more complete vision of the broader Lemmy. Its admins and a large portion of moderators and users may be Marxists, but it's less of an echo chamber than instances that align with western consensus and ban dissent against that consensus.
Most users on Lemmy.ml can't escape the liberal viewpoint even if they tried as hard as they could, while most users on the more liberal instances can comfortably live their lives without ever engaging with Marxism.
I also have no idea why you expect this article to be downvoted because it's on Lemmy.ml, genuinely.
Hopefully, as US influence wanes, relations between the DPRK and ROK can move in a positive direction. Korea is one nation with two governments. One people. President Lee Jae-Myung seems to be interested in boosting ties with the DPRK and PRC, and being less reliant on the US and Japan, so this genuinely seems like a positive shift after President Yoon's impeachment.
I hope to one day see the resurgance of the PRK (1945-1946, one unified country over all of Korea.
Good to see solidarity between socialist nations. Hopefully Cuba's contemporary struggles post-COVID can be overcome and they can get back on their feet, steadily progressing.
People will defederate from Lemmy.ml because someone posted a news article going over oreshnik? I think if people want to genuinely understand the millitary balance of power in the modern era, a firm understanding of missile production and technology is a key aspect of that. Oreshnik, as the article suggests, blurs the line between ballistic missiles and tactical (not strategic) nukes, without going nuclear, which is why it's significant. Other countries with competent missile programs likely have similar technologies, but we haven't really seen many revealed to the public like oreshnik has been.
Lemmy.world blocks Lemmygrad.ml, unfortunately, so they can't see Horse's comment.
To be fair, anti-communism is the opposite of progressive, though I get what you mean, lol. Companies will always take advantage of social issues to get profit.
What you're getting at is more accurately identified as class struggle. There, over time, becomes a sharpening conflict between the revolutionary classes and reactionary classes, and this pushes towards revolution. Marketing pretending to support broader social change is a pressure valve for the system, one of many.
Kinda? Communism is about satisfying the needs of everyone through sound economic planning and collectivized production, what you are describing is someone getting vast riches for free just because they own stuff. I'm being nitpicky, I'm aware.
That's not "pseudo-communism," though, that's just capitalism for the bourgeoisie.
No, this is wrong.
- The Soviet economic system was federated and planned. The political control in Moscow wasn't absolute by any stretch.
- The various Soviet Republics were not colonies, not by any stretch. Resources and goods were shipped around the whole system as needed, not just imported into Moscow.
- There was no forcible cultural assimilation. There was a huge effort to cultivate a soviet identity, but there wasn't an attempt to erase cultural identity. The famine in the 1930s was caused by natural causes, not "demographic engineering," grain was re-allocated to Ukraine once it was known that there were famine conditions. There was forcible re-allocation of various ethnic groups like Koreans, which did exist, but this isn't the same claim you made either in scope or character.
So no. The USSR was not imperialist, not by the correct concept of imperialism as a form of international extraction, nor the vague "Soviet Bad" thing you tried to make it out to be.
The US is absolutely an Empire, it practices imperialism, by which it extracts vast wealth from the global south. The USSR didn't do that.
Further, I'm absolutely focused on economics. The Soviet economy slowed, but was still growing. The dissolution of the USSR was multifaceted, complex, and not boiled down to one failure. Further, its conditions are entirely different from the US, which is a decaying Empire, the fruits of imperialism are diminishing and disparity is rising.
I'm a Marxist-Leninist, economics are core to my analysis.
The US has always been a settler-colony, but it became more Imperialist after World War I with the inter-ally debts. It became world hegemon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however.
The USSR wasn't an Empire, which played into that. Further, the reforms it introduced weren't because it opened up too late, but because they played against the socialist system of planning. The PRC's approach to economic reform retained full state control and is focused on unity, rather than disunity, which is why it's working.
They don't, really. Russia has like 6 of the world's top 500 companies, it couldn't rely on the same financial expropriation even if it wanted to simply because it utterly lacks the financial capital to do so. China is a production-focused economy, and the large firms and key industries are state owned. Even if we took the ideological aspects of Marxism-Leninism completely out of the picture, China is more economically incentivized to build up multilateralism so it can sell its products to the global south, and not rely so much on the US to offload its production to, as the US is constantly unreliable due to it wanting more capital penetration into Chinese markets (which the state rejects).