Yeah historically we’ve used them a ton for collaborations in space architecture. I can’t share too much but my team has worked with them, before my time, and they refused to make any advancements in certain systems. Since then collaboration has been incredibly difficult but not because of Russia’s engineers.
The Soviets were also the only ones to successfully put a lander on Venus, and accomplished this in the 70s. They were a powerhouse when it came to unmanned missions: even with more primative control systems they had to work with.
Of course with the fall of the USSR all the smart people behind those successes could leave, so …
Engieneers are mostly competent(even with salary of about 50k ₽/mo or 550$/mo), but managment… Incompetent managmemt is best you can hope, because Rogozin is much worse.
Production and quality control is so terrible that “accidentaly” much cheaper solder may be used, that later will cause A HOLE in ISS.
Also this particular mission was rushed. “Won’t be ready for another year? Launch now!”
Yeah, brain drain is real. Every Russian I know from IT sphere has left. Many left after 2014 , everyone else left in 2022. Every person with a brain doesn’t want to associate with the regime in any way and doesn’t want to suffer.
Among his injuries were nine broken vertebrae, a ruptured spleen, broken hand and a collapsed lung. [...] "We're just lucky we're bringing our kid home [to North Dakota] in a car in the front seat instead of in a box."
... I'm not sure that's the best way to transport someone who was just diagnosed with nine broken vertebrae.
I was thinking there must be younger siblings in the back, so he had to travel in front. But now I realize both parents were there, so that means one of the parents is in the back seat…
I think they meant that they will drive him home in the front seat. The article seems to be written within the same week as the accident, I can’t imagine he’s been released from the hospital yet.
Oh shit yeah! That kid totally learned from his parent that violence was a solution to emotional issues. That kid is fucked for life (which is highly likely to be incredibly short) if at age six they already associate lethal violence as an appropriate solution for dealing with emotions.
That kid will learn the lesson of fuck around and find out in a life-altering/ending way soon enough. If it's starting at age six, educating that out of him is going to be a near 90° uphill battle. And that parent squarely put that mentality into him.
… I’m not sure “90°” means what you think it means… 😅😶
edit: Apologies, I’d assumed it was a compound phrase and not a janky one — as in, “opposite direction and also uphill” (therefore, 180°) rather than “describing a vertical surface as an incline”. My bad. 🤷🏼♂️
Is there a way to jump instances and bring all your content/moderation with you? I really didn’t sign up for tankie voat, but I have growing communities in this instance.
Unfortunately not right now, maybe in the future. You can make the community on the new instance, stop all posting on the old one and pin a link to the new one so users are forced over, but that might not work and you could lose a largish portion of your userbase.
The term tankie comes from the 1956 hungarian revolution/counter-revoluton (depending on who you ask) which split the British communist party, those that supported the Soviet Union suppressing it with the military were called tankies.
The video of the man in front of the tank column related to the June 4th incident did not result in the man standing in front of the tank dying, and those tanks were leaving the area where the violence occurred and is not where the word tankie comes from like I believe you are suggesting.
No, I was suggesting that tankie came to describe USSR supporters (which modern apologists project onto Russia, as if the wall never fell). I am aware of the origin of the term.
My comment was a reply on people supporting whatever Russia and China do. It takes a jab at both.
No, I was suggesting that tankie came to describe USSR supporters
No, it started that way? Do you mean started to be more all encompassing? I literally explained the origin of the term one comment ago. Also, I dont see how this
" Imagine thinking Chinese workers own the means of production, or not even knowing where the term “tankie” comes from. "
-can mean what you say you meant.
(which modern apologists project onto Russia, as if the wall never fell).
Anyone who has researched the USSR enough to cut through capitalist propaganda knows Russia is now a neolib-ish bourgeois democracy.
No, it started that way? Do you mean started to be more all encompassing?
So, didn’t the term come to describe people who support the USSR imperialist practices by rolling into countries with tanks?
Anyone who has researched the USSR enough to cut through capitalist propaganda knows Russia is now a neolib-ish bourgeois democracy.
Have you ever seen anything written by the average lemmy tankie? They will defend Russia because it’s not the US.
If the US invades a middle eastern country because of “terrorists”, the true motive is oil (which I don’t disagree with). But if Russia invades Ukraine because they could potentially become a competitor petrol state in Europe more aligned with the EU, then it’s actually “nazis”.
Have you ever seen anything written by the average lemmy tankie? They will defend Russia because it’s not the US.
No, they will defend Russia’s actions because they understand the lead up to the war. The coup, the ceasefire violations, the waves of ethnically russian ukrainian refugees. And because they understand that the west expending itself on unfavorable terms is good for multipolarity and for the people the west would have otherwise used those weapons on.
Taking this at face value, that is still extremely different from “defend Russia because they believe in the intrinsic merit of the Soviet project” as you suggested before. The liberal mobsters who took over Russia tried to join the NATO club but were rejected, and the current situation is in many respects a consequence of that.
Imperialism is the final stage of capitalism. Finance capitalism takes over from industrial capitalism and seeks out markets abroad, having exhausted the internal ones. It teams up with other finance capitalism to become a global force, the export of capital becomes the most prominent feature of the economy rather than the export of raw materials or finished goods. The states they come from tend to become fascist in nature, or as some people put it, “fascism is imperialism turned inward”.
Even if China was a capitalist country as some people claim, it still wouldn’t be at that stage yet. Russia might wish to one day be there, but it too has a long way to go.
Because you need to get to imperialism via capitalism.
Socialism’s goal is to provide for its people; in theory, why can’t it engage in colonialism to bring in resources to benefit its people?
There is definitely no other way.
Its obvious how capitalism leads to imperialism, but it’s definitely not obvious how that would be the only way to arrive there.
Any elaboration you can provide would be great because you’re acting as if it should be obvious why what you’re saying is true but it absolutely is not.
Socialism’s goal is to provide for its people by moving past a society based on exploitation. This is why it wouldn’t engage in colonialism.
I think you’d need a different word to use to describe your socialist-colonialist state. Imperialism doesn’t mean, “when you invade”.
Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism where finance capitalists export capital rather than commodities and these capitalists become the most dominant.
There’s many different capitalist interest groups, but one is by far the most powerful and dominant in global politics, the finance capitalists. This group of capitalists always come to dominate over all others, most capitalists require access to financial capital to expand their businesses, or to weather difficult circumstances in the marketplace. Financial capitalists gradually gain control of all industries through being able to see the movements of each industry and by them being the spider in the web, put simplistically. Then when they’ve run out of domestic exploitative growth opportunities they reach out beyond their borders and team up with other financial capitalists through mergers etc. This is imperialism, the final stage of capitalism. All capitalism eventually ends up here. Russia will too, but not yet.
The major capitalist interest group in opposition to the finance capitalists are the always losing group of industrial / national capitalists. These are private owners of domestic industries who mainly derive most of their profits from operating within the borders of a particular country (or the EU or whatever). Donald Trump would be an example of one of these, and he’d be in political alignment with many other industrial capitalists, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates… “industry leaders”. Their politics tend to be libertarian in nature, the social conservative aspect of their politics is just a front they put up to gain the electoral support of naïve socially-conservative people and exploit them. They don’t really care about religion or guns or anything like that. They usually like traditionalism because it provides them with a reliable exploitable source of labour. They would have opposed women in the workplace until they realised they could exploit them too without risk. Same with LGBTQ+ stuff, they used to be opposed but are now less so. They still are in Russia, indicating their capitalist immaturity. The western capitalists have grown beyond this stuff to some extent. A lot of conservative politics comes from this group. The Finance capitalists are less well known. You know the names of many western finance companies but probably not nearly as many outside the west.
Russia is an example of a country emerging from a primitive stage of capitalism that stands opposed to western financial imperialism. They are largely in control of their economy and government after western financial capitalists pillaged Russian industry after the fall of the USSR. This is upsetting to western finance capitalists, who desperately want to destabilise Russia and would love to install a government that is friendly to western finance so they can pillage it again. it slipped out of their grasp with Putin after Iraq, they want it back.
It’s western finance capitalist imperialism versus Russian industrial capitalism. Putin is the Russian industrial capitalist’s thug godfather. If any of the oligarchs step out of line and try to sell out mother Russia, they’ll find themselves defenestrated quick sharp. If he falls then they all need to quickly put someone else in place to rule over them and protect them from each other. If the US gets a foot in the door again they’re all fucked. It’s constantly knocking.
Russia’s industrial capitalists have already been raped by the US twice before now, they trust Putin as their administrator. He lets them do what they want as long as they don’t fuck over Russia. He’s a dictator, but one that prioritises a strong and functional Russia over one that collapses to be strip-mined and sold off by NATO capitalists. Given the lack of real alternatives (the Communist party was outlawed for a time), Putin has clearly been the only real option for Russians for most of the past two decades. They will not be pillaged a third time, hence this completely predictable Ukraine reaction they’d hoped for after constant provocations, the last one being the Nazi led coup and overthrow of Ukraine’s democracy by the Right Sector Nazis and others. The one thought experiment that no lib can answer is what the USA would do it the shoe was on the other foot and Russia was arming nutcases in Mexico.
You’re hearing “imperialism” a lot right now because it’s been inserted into the discourse as a wildcard term to con people into explaining away the motivations behind Russia’s invasion, instantly dismissing thought of all of NATO’s provocations. It would probably take Russia decades more to become Imperialist, maybe I’m wrong, maybe it would take less time but it’s not now, and “imperialism” is not the reason for the invasion by a long stretch.
I don’t think you’re doing a very good job of attempting to answer the very direct confusion I’m having. You’re doing a lot to make sure it’s obvious how capitalism can and does result in imperialism, which frankly I’m mostly in agreement with. My issue is that you’re asserting that socialism can’t lead to imperialism. You’ve still given no reason that this is to be the case except for this attempt:
Socialism’s goal is to provide for its people by moving past a society based on exploitation. This is why it wouldn’t engage in colonialism.
And I agree that, by definition, it’s a society based on the betterment of its people. Stress should be applied there to its people. I’m not justifying imperialism at all, but it’s a pretty obvious argument that by subjugating other nations/peoples and exploiting them, you can make the lives of your people better. Perhaps you’re trying to say that the type of leadership and ideology that creates and maintains socialism would also be ideologically against imperialism, but that seems more pragmatic than theoretic. You’re saying socialism can’t engage in imperialism by definition but the most I’d give is that it doesn’t engage in imperialism in practice.
That guy has zero interest in being persuaded, he was just trolling and trying to waste my time. I’d already replied in detail and he pretended not to understand.
Because you need to get to imperialism via capitalism. There is definitively no other way.
You have more than zero point, but this is an excessively modernist way of viewing development that Marx explicitly refutes in his later writings after facing spurious accusations of supporting such views.
Thank you, I’ll look at that. It might be my misunderstanding of a technical term, but I don’t see the logical sequence that makes it apparent that socialist countries can’t engage in imperialism/colonialism.
The very short answer is that imperialism requires very specific economic systems and incentives. Those systems are not going to occur in socialist States because socialist States develop different economic systems than capitalism because the profit motive is absent, which impacts short term and long term economic development plans in many significant ways. For an extreme example look at Juche’s emphasis on self reliant socialism within an internationalist socialist order. They cannot do imperialism because all of their economic planning is built around a stable self sufficient economy. An extractivist economy isn’t just something you can graft on, it has to be a central part of an economy to make economic sense.
For an example of socialism not being imperialist when it has the opportunity to, you can look at China forgiving loans. It doesn’t do so out if the charity of its heart, it does so because it is incentivized to because damaging other nations self determination through financial coercion actively harms its project. It wants strong neighbors with close economic ties, it doesn’t want to suck the marrow out of their bones because that is destructive to China in the long term, and socialism is able to plan in the long term unlike capitalism which has to be more short term oriented because of the way its incentives function.
Imperialism is actually a very costly affair (in many cases it costs the home country and only benefits specific lobbyists within that country) compared to mutual cooperation and always rebounds on empire, it only happens because of market failures that do not happen under socialism.
They’re saying if Communists do it, it’s not Imperialism even if it looks exactly the same.
They are willfully committing an equivocation fallacy, using their definition of “Imperialism” as being necessarily related to Capitalism. The textbook definition of Imperialism does NOT necessarily relate to capitalism, so you are indeed in the right.
a policy of extending a country’s power and influence through diplomacy or military force. -Imperialism
A non-capitalist country most certainly can do that definition. And Russian and China have both done that quite unambiguously.
So you’re in the right. But you’ll never win an argument against them because lies are truth.
These are Leninists who believe that socialism cannot do imperialism because socialism is ideological manifest destiny. Nevermind that this was more or less one of the original debates between Trotsky and Lenin on how do do “global communism.”
They like to redefine words to carry whatever ideological weight they want, because it’s much easier than introspection. Like how they will carry the “Nazi means anti-Russian” banner to unironically defend mass deportation children from Ukraine. "Obviously it can’t be the UN definition of genocide, because you can’t genocide Nazis.
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