A matter of perspective, I suppose. When you’re a military contractor, any war is a guaranteed win.
Paraphrasing Lenin, I think: never forget that, for capitalist countries, war is profitable.
Unless you’re a German one.
Yes, German industry was famously wiped out by the wars. That’s why you can’t buy any Audis or BMWs these days, or get pharmaceuticals from Bayer, or get a loan from Deutsche Bank, or…
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Is it? WWII set back Europe by like a decade. The constant warring between UK/France led to financial problems that led to revolutions in both countries. Iraq/Afghanistan doesn’t seem like it worked out for the US financially.
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A lot of people think military expenditures prop up the American economy. I guess I’m naive, but I think they could do the same thing fixing the roads and bridges and decarbonizing.
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IIRC Lenin thought that colonialism was a natural consequence of capitalism ideologies because if profit fell you need to expand to steal more resources.
Frankly, pressure to expand to acquire more shit is not something exclusive to capitalist systems. Not a strong argument from Lenin imo.
My hopes for cooler heads ultimately prevailing here are largely based on:
-Trump can declare victory based on nothing but lies and be totally at peace with that
-Iran knows a full scale war doesn’t go super well for them and probably results in the current IRGC leadership not being in charge on the other side of that
-Israel knows that American opinion of them is fading hard the more they get out of line and they Jeopardize the actual support that allows them to exist if they spark up the war again
-China now feels very involved as a negotiating entity and can give Iran enough security and economic guarantees to get them to back down and take a deal
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Other systems can expand to acquire more shit. Capitalism must.
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A lot of people who are critical of the left hear capitalism and they just pretend like it means any kind of private industry or any markets at all. At least half of all value of everything in the United States is owned by stockholders or bondholders or some sort of completely disinterested party whose only involvement or interest in the underlying activity is a return on investment. In such a society, everything has to grow all the time. Nothing is sustainable.
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Ah yes, I forgot about how magnanimous the US was following the war. Should have probably Sherman’d Europe.
Like the general public’s interest in an educated populace.
Based on real world data, that’s a far easier thing to say about Communism.
Rome and Great Britain had territories but only one empire had satellites
Crazy talk. Russia, China, Vietnam and Cuba had revolutions. Their communism was home grown. The USSR’s imperialism (Eastern Europe and North Korea?) was tiny compared to The Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, USA and just multinational corporations everywhere.
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I don’t know whether to say “huh?” or “so?”. You didn’t really present a full thought here, but I think the problem is that you’re kinda using “return on investment” as a metaphor and that’s causing what you’re saying to not make sense.
I mean, that’s a dumb post and you should probably recognize that. I mean tiny in comparison. Should we post pictures where one of us posts 20 million pictures of people and the other posts like 4 billion pictures of people? If I just post a picture of Gandhi does that still count as just one person?
Just England controlled India for a long time and China for a while. That’s a hell of a lot more than the USSR ever did.
Russias imperialism, at a minimum, was on the scale of all of those countries individually. Nor was a lot of those countries imperial eras remotely capitalist.