Just because they aren’t very weak doesn’t mean they don’t benefit from greater strength

I love how people who think they are so smart believe me the solution to poverty and struggle is entrepreneurship.

I don’t think China needs to puppet Russia here. If the US attempts to operationalize its resource rights in Ukraine, it will be deploying logistics, mercenaries, and security forces directly under US command. Some Ukrainian forces will continue their connection with ISIS and become stochastic threats in the region, requiring US military escalation. This will be just another way to field an active military on Russia’s most vulnerable border, and Russia cannot allow this, which was the whole reason for Russian aggression in Ukraine in the first place.

So without China at all, Russia has every incentive to prevent the US from landing extractives operations in Ukraine and may need to fight all the way to Kiev, which is incredibly risky for Russia. Based on that, it may actually be Russia asking China for support because it fears over extending itself.

So the analysis is that it’s because companies spent more on imports trying to race against the tarrifs? And also that domestic investment has grown significantly?

I guess we’ll see.

Prediction logged.

Theory: US can’t afford for the fascists in India to lose control to the communists, so they need a hot conflict that will galvanize Indian society behind “war-time leadership”. It also creates chaos, mobilization, and production that will benefit the US in a war with China.

Buckle up.

Think about that for a second. Consumer confidence is as low as it was when entire countries were shutting down their air travel, locking citizens down, cancelling school, and people weren’t sure if going to the mall could kill them or their kids or their parents.

I’m not predicting a full secession. I am predicting an ambiguous balkanization - one where the federal government stays in place but much reduced in both size and control, essentially becoming domestically symbolic. It would maintain the military for international adventures, but it would probably reshuffle its domestic bases based on operational conditions. There would be skirmishes between states and between states and the feds and states or even regions would establish travel checkpoints, first to stop “drugs and illegals” but quickly to enforce abortion bans, transitioning bans, etc.

I don’t think we will see the USA dissolve to secession, but rather that balkanization will be functional and partial, not formal and absolute.

There was literally a stand off between the federal national guard and the Texas state militia during Biden. It’s not as far fetched as you think.

Nah. Balkanization can easily be part of moneyed interests. Imagine the Florida and Texas state militias marching across the South deporting people and enforcing arbitrary shit and a bunch of other states banding together to stop it. The federal government would still work, but balkanization would still begin in earnest

as per every communist state in the past

How educated are you on this topic if you thought socialism was taxes? Can you really hold this position? You need to educate yourself on history instead of arguing from ignorance.

Administration is labor. It’s work that needs to be done. None of the administrative functions in communisn are unaccountable. All electeds are subject to recall. Hell, the USSR’s constitution established the full legal right of every member state to secede from the union on the basis that it’s not freedom if you can’t choose to walk away.

In Cuba the amount of democracy is just incredible, with workers groups, local political groups, and the participatory boards that deal with specific local issues. China is the same way. The USSR was the same way.

Just read about this stuff and you’ll see you’ve been taught a bunch of very shallow lies your whole life and basic research about the actual workings of these countries cuts through those lies quickly.

The one trick we all have to deal with in our research is the problem with the USSR. Kruschev oversaw the slow dismantling of communist principles in favor of liberalization that allowed for exactly what you’re talking about - accumulating power and wealth, which is what led to the USSR abandoning communism all together, dissolving itself, and creating the liberal capitalist Russian Federation that exists today. It was, in fact, becoming more like the West economically and ideologically that resulted in wealth accumulation like the West, which when framed that way, is totally unsurprising. We just need to get past the propaganda.

Remember, the West oversees the worst wealth inequality, the worst dynasties, the worst atrocities, and the worst military invasions in all history, so anytime they say “communism results in wealth hoarding by the few” they are projecting their own outcomes on their ideological enemy and hoping you fall for it

Let’s fucking goooooooo!

We can use socialism and communism interchangeably.

Engels wrote:

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat [the working masses, the 99% of the world]

Some people say, based on paraphrasing of larger works by Marx and Engels:

Communism is a stateless, moneyless, classless society

But for you and me, we can just say this:

Let’s define “productive forces as”: all factories, construction projects, natural resource extraction and processing, financial systems, large-scale farming and food processing, and all other major productive activities that create the goods and services that people in society use.

“Socialism” is the administration of society to move all of those productive forces under the sustainable democratic control of the largest portion of the population and eventually the entirety of the population.

What that means is the end of the legal concept of ownership of, for example, a factory, and the dictatorial control that owners have over that factory. In the olden days, you might have one person who owned the whole company. That person could decide literally anything and any employee who disagreed was fired. They could choose to paint the floors sky blue, or swap all company cars with motorcycles, or manufacture safety pins instead of bobby pins. They were in control. Nowadays, most of these things are owned by shareholders and the minority of the population controls 100% of productive forces and whatever THEY decide is now the law within those companies. So, they can choose to exploit a loophole in the law and dump toxic waste wherever, or they can ban employees from using equipment to detect radiation or other poisonous or hazardous conditions. They can lock people in rooms and propagandize them. Etc.

Essentially what we have is a dictatorship of the opulent minority the spans the entirety of “productive forces” in society.

Socialism removes the legal basis by which this dictatorship works - it removes/changes the laws around ownership so that shareholders do not own companies and cannot unilaterally decide what to do with those companies. It instead moves those productive forces under some democratic form of control. You could imagine many different models for this, and there have been many different models in history, but which model is used is not important for what you and I are discussing. We may disagree that the USSR’s system was sufficiently democratic for you to call it democratic, but there was grassroots democratic decision making that systematically rose up through representation and decisions that ultimately made the decisions for productive forces. We can disagree that China’s model is sufficiently democratic given the allowance of private enterprise and common stock, but we can see the grassroots democratic aspects of decision making that makes it all the way to the center of power and extends outward into every office.

But we also need to understand socialism not as a “state of being” by a “movement of action”. As I said, Socialism is the administration (active verb) of society to move all productive forces under the sustainable democratic control of eventually the entirety of the population.

Taxes don’t do that. Taxes are primarily about redistribution of money flows, not even redistribution of wealth, but of where liquidity exist in an economy. Taxing workers doesn’t redistribute their wealth, it redistributes the present availability of liquid cash. Taxing profits doesn’t redistribute wealth, it redistributes the present availability of liquid cash. Redistribution of wealth requires at minimum the seizure of wealth - say upon death ALL of your wealth is taken by the state and you can’t hide it. But that’s just redistribution of the wealth of a single person and the people controlling the state decide where it goes. If, for example, the wealth 0.001% of the country controls the state, then when they take wealth from one rich person and distribute it to other rich people, there’s no wealth redistribution happening at the class level. That is to say, even under taxation regimes and even under death tax regimes, if the wealth stays primarily concentrated in the upper minority, there is no wealth redistribution happening.

Socialism has no problem seizing wealth from areas where it has concentrated or been hoarded if it turns out that the majority of society is suffering because of it. Taxes under socialism are used to smooth out CASH distribution systems, but wealth seizure - seizure of lands, factories, and hoards - aren’t taxes, they are uses of force under the mandate of the masses to do what is best for society.

The doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the working masses - liberation from the demands of the ultraminority on their time, their health, their eviction for failure to comply, their mass layoffs, their unsafe working conditions, their child labor, their indoctrination, their ability to evade justice, their wage theft, their psychosocial abuse, etc. Freedom for 99% of the world from the 1% who would oppress them so they can have fancy balls, hunt endangered animals, build palaces, and wage wars.

That’s what socialism is. And what it requires is the elimination of the legal basis for the ultraminority to have dictatorial control over the “productive forces” that all of society relies on. Because when they have that control, they can and do hold society hostage.

Non-profits either 1) live off of someone else’s profits, or 2) they raise grassroots funding. 2 is incredibly difficult to pull off, and worse, if there is enough demand in the market, then a for-profit entrepreneur is going to come in and do it with private equity and dominate because they’re incentivized to do it.

But more to the point, even if you are wildly successful with grassroots funding, you will be part of less than 1% of all entrepreneurial endeavors in the history of capitalism. Just because some people can grow small batch heirloom plants in tightly controlled environments doesn’t mean that’s what phenomenon of agriculture is. The phenomenon of entrepreneurship is what I described and I wish you good luck trying to do what many failed non-profits have tried to do before and your success cannot possibly be enough to contradict the vast majority of entrepreneurship.

Wow. They could just print money to bail all of these banks out, but instead they’re going to create revolutionary conditions

Narrator: the boys in the Whitehouse don’t know it yet, but their cortisol and adrenaline levels are about to go sky high and panic is about to grip “la familia”

I gotta get me a Cypriot air bnb and call it “The Prison” and collect bank from the government for giving people a vacation for a few weeks

I once moved a bunch of firewood away from a retaining wall only to discover the wall was rotting from the bottom and had to be completely ripped out and rebuilt from the ground up. That’s sorta like what this is.

Capitalism is based on private property. Private property is a state-organized system of lethal force to produce conditions of deprivation of the many on behalf of the individual. By establishing my private property rights to a parcel of land, the state enforces my ability to exclude all 8 billion people on the planet today, and every single person who will ever be born afterward, from ever being able to use my land even to simply exist on it. When that system underpins your society, you can easily see how capitalism is based on taking advantage of the poor to the point of killing them directly or indirectly en masse.

For example, I establish private property rights over a large portion of the country. How? The state literally gave it to me. Then, I subdivided it up and sold it to many people. They individually build fences on the land and now animal migration paths have fundamentally changed, water downstream is now undrinkable, and everything on that land is completely inaccessible to anyone unless the owners each make profits on it - even that means people starve. Don’t like it? Get a job! From whom? Well, the people who own the land have work for you to do and they can pay you because they hoard the resources under private property law. In fact, basically everyone has to work for someone who owns private property. That’s why the path out of poverty and to “financial independence” is by acquiring “assets” (private property) that generate “revenue” (profits) like rentals. Because you own and they don’t, they have to pay you to live. Renters have no choice but to rent from someone who owns something, and owners will always charge more than it would take for the renter to live there by themselves, because the owner must make a profit or they will let the would-be-renters be unhoused and die in the street.

This is the foundation. Mass deprivation enforced by state violence. There’s a reason sheriff’s departments exist to evict tenants but not to recover stolen security deposits. There’s a reason cops will gun you down for running away from a shoplifting scene but won’t take a police report for stolen wages. All of capitalist society is organized around the mass deprivation that is private property and the protection of the owner’s “right” to profit simply by owning something and they will send the FBI to imprison you for downloading music and movies but nothing can be done with a corporation that knowingly causes lead poisoning in millions of children.

Capitalism cannot be reformed. Private property must be dismantled for society to advance and without private property, capitalism ceases to exist.