queermunist she/her

I wonder how Trump will actually respond to this. He can’t just “make a deal” so will he become belligeren/vengeful towards Russia for humiliating him or will he lose interest entirely?

I expect him to lose interest, he doesn’t care about geopolitics, but predicting Trump is a fool’s game lol

That’s literally multiple people conspiring in secret to achieve an illegal goal.

And it’s just not necessary.

We’re more alienated and isolated than pretty much any time in history, they really could just tell their base “go arrest your neighbor for woke and await further orders” and they would do it. There’s just no need for a conspiracy to manufacture riots, their loyalists will happily kill their neighbors. They can just do this whenever they want.

The cruelty is certainly the point, though, and that contradicts your own conspiracy theory. They aren’t trying to manufacture riots per se, they just want to make people suffer. Even if there are no riots they get what they want.

manufactured riots come hell or high water. “marshall” law by mid-terms, mark my word.

This conspiracy never makes sense to me.

If they want martial law they can just do it. Just lie and say there are riots, boom. There’s no need to manufacture actual riots.

If lab grown teeth give me better reception then I’m all for it!

People are being sent to concentration camps.

Without revolution, things stay the same. Risk death on your feet or live on your knees.

Sometimes you can get lucky and avoid revolution, and we should always strive for those peaceful alternatives, but sometimes there’s no other choice.

It’s called revolutionary optimism.

I’m right where I need to be.

Yes, their decision helps their government stay stable and in control and it puts Western-backed counter-revolutionaries at a disadvantage. They have to do this or, again, they’re going to have to deal with political violence as people get radicalized by Western governments and billionaires.

I generally agree with China’s firewall, of course I’m not going to criticize it that much. I like it when my enemies are silenced, because I’m not a liberal and I don’t believe my enemies should have a right to speak. 😊

The world isn’t roses and sunshine, after all.

Well either they sell them at a loss or they just let them sit on lots forever.

Tesla would rather recoup some revenue than just scrap all their remaining inventory.

That’s a specific incident, I don’t think it shows some kind of widespread colonialism from China. This doesn’t compare to Belgium at all, their colonial behavior was well documented and systematic.

As for China’s firewall and their regulation of criticism, they have to protect themselves from propaganda that gets endlessly pumped out by Western billionaires and governments. There’s a material reason for these laws, they aren’t just evil totalitarians that hate freedom.

This sometimes results in people getting caught in the crossfire, and that’s not good, but what else can China do? If they just allow endless Western meddling they’ll have unrest and terrorism as people get radicalized by billionaires, far right factions, and the US State Department.

Cynicism. I think it’s important for people to know that these people all belong in prison.

Okay, but you said “doesn’t sound too bad”

Insider trading sounds pretty bad, regardless of the fact that it is normal.

Oh yeah, after Congo got independence from Belgium. Their purchasing power reduced to not even 10% of what it was at 1960 at the time of 1979.

Yes, and that was revenge. Countries were punished for winning independence.

But these railroads and trains are still being used today.

Those railroads are just supply lines that ship from resource extraction points to seaports. The railroads don’t connect cities or provide infrastructure for actual people or act as part of the supply chain for internal production. They were built to be purely extractive. That’s not real development, that’s underdevelopment. The railroads ship out cobalt and ground nuts and the people of the DRC are deprived of access for their own civilian or industrial uses.

Colonizers did not develop Africa. This is a lie spread by colonizers to hide their crimes against humanity.

In Congo, any Belgian was forcibly deported and many were murdered.

Yeah, because Belgians raped and tortured and murdered so many Congolese people. The sick shit colonizers did in Africa rivals the Nazis.

The west developed China.

No no no, China developed itself by fooling the West (into selling them the rope, get it?) because the West never develops anything by choice.

Look, if revolution can be avoided that’s great! Venezuela managed to do it and they’d be doing quite well if it weren’t for imperialist meddling from the US. I’m not saying that revolution is the only option, only that the abolition of capitalism must be the end goal. I say “end goal” because it’s not realistic to just abolish markets and commodity production and wage labor instantly and expect it to work. The abolition of capitalism will take time.

But if your goal is to keep capitalism alive forever you are not a leftist. Deal with it.

You should read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, capitalism didn’t help them at all. They were intentionally deprived of industrial and intellectual property that would allow them to build up their own means of production – underdeveloped by capitalism — and intentionally kept at a lower stage of development to superexploit the workers and extract superprofits.

Flag independence and so-called decolonization didn’t mean freedom to develop either, now under neocolonialism the same underdevelopment takes place. Libya and Syria are just more examples of the same neocolonial agenda, to underdevelop nations and force them to be subservient to the imperial core. Those weren’t revolutions, they were Western dirty wars: coup the government, pour in weapons to fuel whatever terrorist groups are willing to work with the West, sanction the people to make the economy scream, etc. etc.

So, no, capitalism wasn’t the best way to develop any of those countries.

The reason China needed to use capitalism to develop was solely to fool the West into doing business. There’s a saying attributed to Lenin; “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” That’s all China has done. Not only did the capitalists sell them the rope, the capitalists also sold them the rope factories and outsourced every step of rope production.

China was never capitalist. They’re communists wearing the flayed skin of capitalism to trick it into lowering its guard.

Capitalism also isn’t developing the imperial core anymore. We have reached a stage of deindustrialization, where now instead of building up infrastructure and production capacity we’re letting capital strip the wiring from the walls to maximize cost cutting without actually developing anything. There is some development that still happens thanks to government grants and public institutions, but now neoliberalism is cutting those too to “save money”. Thanks to rampant privatization and austerity everything is worse.

And of course there’s no popular support for a communist revolution here in the West, this is the imperial core. We grew fat and rich off of the superprofits from imperialism, revolution would mean a redistribution of wealth from the imperial core to the periphery. That means Europe and Canada and the US will have to pay repairations for what they have done to the world. I don’t expect that to be popular here!

In both Cuba and the DPRK they’ve been under a brutal siege war from the United States since the revolution, don’t pretend like they struggle for no reason. There are certainly problems, but they can be laid firmly at the feet of the US empire and its proxies.

But the US won’t be around forever and BRICS is opening the world economy to them. They endured a near century of humiliation and its finally coming to an end, I’m excited to see how they develop without a US boot on their necks! Aren’t you?

As for China, I was skeptical about the Dengist reforms. It’s like you said, they boosted private sector development and investment. The created billionaires. They allowed for heightened exploitation of workers. They suppressed Maoists.

They proved politics are still in command with Zero COVID, though. Ever since China’s heroic pandemic response I am optimistic that the private sector is subordinate. They’re willing and able to tell their billionaires “no” and force them to obey.

See, the purpose of the Dengist reforms was to develop China’s economy as fast as possible while avoiding Western retaliation, like what happens to every other communist country that becomes the subject of endless siege and proxy warfare, and it worked. Unlike under capitalism where the anarchy of the market dictates production, China has its productive capacity firmly under the control of the government. They still issue marching orders to the private sector and they centrally plan their development.

China is now a world leader in technological innovation and is critical to the global supply chain as a key node of production. As much as Trump wants to do a trade war he’s more likely to hurt the US than to actually hurt China. China is still dominated by the capitalist mode of production, like you said, but since the Party remains in command they’ll be able to abolish the market entirely without fear of Western retaliation. Capitalism is just a stage of development, after all.

Also, don’t ignore Vietnam. They have been on a similar trajectory as China, developing their economy and integrating themselves into the supply chain, and now they’re growing closer with China with every new idiot tariff imposed by Trump.

I find that “”“social democrats”“” are just pessimists. You think revolution never works and communism always fails, and so you retreat into reformism and liberalism. I still have revolutionary optimism, though, which means I don’t even need to win this argument. I’m certain that you’ll see that I’m right soon enough. ☺️

Do you want to abolish capitalism? Not just reform it, but completely abolish it.

That’s the bare minimum.

At some point prices will get so low that it’ll make sense to buy a Tesla and rework the body so no one knows it’s a Tesla.

I’m constantly arguing with liberals, the whole reason I’m on .ml and not one of the defederated instances is because I want to talk to y’all instead of stay in an echo chamber of people that agree with me.

Also liberals aren’t leftists 😘

Hardly an echo chamber, then. Echos don’t argue, they just repeat the same stuff back.