• emizeko [they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    59
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage Of Capitalism dug a quote out from Cecil Rhodes (a disgusting colonial piece of shit) who said:

    I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism… My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

    The imperialists have understood for a long time to prevent socialist revolution they must by all means have new lands, new markets, new pools of cheap labour to rinse to placate the workers in imperialist nations.

    • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      10 months ago

      it’s what the phrase “Britons are made for empire” referred to the empire was the outlet for the local lack of social mobility or opportunities

      when we got rid of it we had to replace that social function with education

        • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          edit-2
          10 months ago

          Fair point

          with India no longer a colony and the suez crisis imperialism has changed so much as to be a different organisation now and the Americans run it now as well. The third world is exploited but through debt traps more than the direct colonial governance I was talking about.

          And the giving up on India as a colony was at least in part a result of British political desire to do so. If Churchill had been reelected he would have probably fought a war over it

          • LeZero [he/him]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            10 months ago

            I was kinda facetious, the British Empire as it existed is indeed gone, but unfortunately neocolonialism is still going pretty strong

            I also think it was a cost calculation on the part of colonial empires which got rekt during WW2, just too expensive to deal with the unrest when the economy is in the shitter, the Brits actually understood that much more than the French, who sent a lot of men to die in the jungle of Indochina and the mountains of Algeria

            Agree on Churchill tho, considering his revolting opinions on the colonised people