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Wondering about terminology, maybe those more learned on this will be able to confidently say: Would it be fair to say that imperialism (as a stage of capitalism) is essentially neo-colonialism? Or is neo-colonialism something else? I’m not sure how much it matters, but I was wondering about the development of things and how what we call imperialism today evolved in some part out of the colonial tendrils of yesterday. Like it wasn’t as though capitalism came out of nowhere and then imperialism inevitably developed on top of it. And perhaps framing imperialism as something like a marriage of capitalism and colonialism helps clarify more at a glance why it is that, for example, China or Russia is not imperialist; on top of the complexities added by their past (Russia) or present (China) communist history, they did not have colonies to develop it from, so largely lacked the material base and culture with which to steer them toward imperialism.
I’m not well-read on this topic, so take this with a grain of salt. Another comrade might give a better answer.
The answer is no. Lenin wrote that Imperialism is a highly developed phase of Capitalism (“highest state” is a bad translation). Neo-colonialism is defined by Kwame Nkrumah as the following
if you want to read more, read both Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest State of Capitalism and Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism
Nkrumah takes an African perspective on this issue. So I believe it’s important to study the historical context since Africa suffered from both regular colonialism and neo-colonialism.
Interesting, thanks for the answer.
Imperialism is the world wide system of the the bourgeoisie crushing sovereignty wherever they can by any means. Colonialism and Neo-colonialism are the system within a single nation that is used to extract wealth and export it to the colonizing nation. Imperialism is the superstructure which Neo-colonialism is built on.
So Iran’s 1979 revolution was an anti-colonial conflict. The current war is an anti-imperialist war because Iran is not only fighting to keep themselves from being colonized they are also confronting the structures of power used to crush sovereignty of other nations.