had to escape Venezuela after Maduro took power

they’d become rich under the old system

… They didn’t flee from Chavez? What’s the timeline here?

Venezuelan communes and participatory democracy is flourishing. In addition, massive social programs have been implemented, focusing on housing, food security, and poverty eradication

I think this really needs to be stressed. Venezuela is a country building Socialism. Maduro and the PSUV is in power because of a genuinely incredible mass movement of communes, neighborhood committees, and other organs of grassroots democracy. This is qualitatively different from say, any of the Gulf oil monarchies

I highly recommend the books Building The Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela, and Commune or Nothing: Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project, for a look at these aspects of Venezuelan politics, because it’s often papered over in discussions about the country.

Marxist does not get to exclusively define what imperialism is

Marxism isn’t the only analytical lens out there, no. But the people you’re arguing with are working with that definition, which is why I took the time to clarify. Thank you for appreciating my effort post though lol

The Marxist definition of imperialism is more specific than just “big country invade small country”.

In, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin lays out five aspects of what makes Imperialism:

1. the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;

2. the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy;

3. the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance;

4. the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and

5. the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.

The question of “Is Russia Imperialist” isn’t a moral one, it’s a technical one. So if Russia were do to something that we all agree is morally reprehensible, that’s a separate concern from whether Russia is imperialist.

The technicality revolves around whether Russia has developed an oligarchy of Financial Capital, such that its invasion of Ukraine or other flexes of its influence, perpetuates the export of Russian finance capital around the world.

As it stands now, I don’t think that’s currently the case, but with Marxism being a dialectal philosophy, I do wonder if this war will accelerate that merging of Bank and industrial capital that Lenin discusses. It’s a Bourgeois states, and there’s financial capital in there somewhere that absolutely has an interest in forming a Russian imperialism.

So when people say “Russia isn’t Imperialist”, this is what’s being referred to. You can take it or leave it, but it’s worth getting into the weeds a bit, so we aren’t all talking passed each other

The largest civil conflict in the United States, since the Civil War, were the Coal Wars in Appalachia, and those Socialist coal miners were pretty fucking rad

The only Libertarians I fuck with are Libertarian Socialists. Otherwise, Ayn Rand types are cringe as hell