Not even true, Russia was an imperialist country and the Bolshevik movement was a movement of the Russian proletariat—not a peasant movement. Germany nearly had a socialist revolution in the 20s and the KPD was objectively bringing the proletariat close to communist revolution—which caused the capitalists to bring Hitler to power. The GDR was an enormous accomplishment of socialism as well.
It remains to be proved really that social democratic reforms are so expensive that they can only be paid for with imperialism. Really, imperialism happens with or without said reforms, so there is the question of whether it makes a difference. The fact that social democratic governments have worked to some degree in the third world (in the few places where they actually come to power) would seem to show that capitalism can accommodate worker mass dissent/discontent to a limited degree even without imperialism
Third Worldists think in a very zero-sum manner about these things
False and I would really be here all day if I had to give a full history lesson about every reactionary movement the peasants formed the key mass base of. Peasant worship in 2019 is very weird to say the least, you’re talking about a group with a petit-bourgeois relationship to the means of production with a primitive religious traditionalist mindset in general. Peasants (like most farmers) often suffer from the delusion that if the price of wheat is $1.10 instead of $1.00 they will be wealthy—for a surprisingly poor group of people, they disproportionately suffer from the temporarily embarrassed millionaire syndrome.
It’s ironic to me that Maoists and MTW still place so much emphasis on the peasantry since their in decline everywhere. The world is now majority-urban and even if the near 100% urbanized first world skews things it still doesn’t change the fact that the peasantry is dropping rapidly as a percentage of the population even throughout the third world