“Tankie is when you bring up that Nazi anti-communist propaganda about rapist soviets isn’t scientific”
“Blaming NATO for the invasion of Ukraine is when you say NATO isn’t good and there should be a European military alliance instead while you condemn primarily the Russian Government for the invasion”
“Genocide denial is when you compare the treatment of minorities in the US and in China”
Grow up
profit margins will continue to get thinner and thinner as competition increases
Competition doesn’t increase under capitalism, it decreases as a consequence of economy of scale, consolidation of markets, corruption and many other reasons. Tell me how competition fosters when Amazon, Google, Walmart, Apple, Uber and the rest of big firms control all their respective markets.
Your second paragraph is a senseless utopian dream not based on reality, I won’t even bother arguing against it.
I’m fully aware, I never said workers are free under capitalism
As I said, I know they willfully joined, I’m saying they shouldn’t be allowed to join a military alliance with NATO, the same way I would want China not to create a military alliance and then incorporate Mexico and Canada, even if Mexico and Canada wanted to. Joining a military alliance isn’t a human right.
Accepting the existence of class mobility doesn’t imply freedom. Freedom to exploit your fellow workers and become a class traitor isn’t freedom. It’s just a fact that social mobility has increased significantly
Primarily the Russian government’s fault, but of course NATO is partly at fault. Belonging to NATO isn’t a human right, and the expansion of NATO further east than Germany shouldn’t have taken place. If European countries wanted a military alliance, they should have made their own. I don’t believe I need to preface every comment saying “I wholeheartedly condemn the actions of the fascist Russian government in Ukraine”, which I do, as much as I don’t preface my comment saying “I wholeheartedly condemn the actions of NATO in Iraq”, which I also do.
China doesn’t have an active genocide against Uyghur unless you’re willing to argue that the US has an active genocide against black people, if you want to compare any metric.
China isn’t threatening Taiwan, Taiwan is recognized as a part of China by the US and basically all of the international community since decades ago. What Taiwan has are US bases. Imagine if China had military bases in Cuba and routinely had navy maneuvers between the island and Florida.
The US has no more semblance of democracy than China again by any metric, the decisions made by the US government don’t correlate with the will of the overwhelming majority, and quite literally yesterday the supreme court ruled absolute immunity for the president in all official acts. The farce of the two-party system isn’t convincing anyone anymore, and it may very well stop existing altogether if one of the two parties wins the elections.
China has no comparable history of violence, oppression, colonization and destabilization as the US does, and saying otherwise is purely and simply American exceptionalism. The examples are endless. Afghanistan, Iran, Vietnam, Korea, Bolivia, Chile, Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, Guatemala, Philippines, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela… China simply doesn’t even come close to the level of destabilization, dictarorship, misery and death imposed by the US in third countries.
If you don’t open or shift the overton window, no change is possible.
the point of capitalism is to make it so that there’s no longer a reason to have profit.
That’s gotta be the stupidest take I’ve seen in the whole 28 days I’ve been in Lemmy, congratulations. The whole point of capitalism is the revalorization of capital, i.e., a capitalist owner having $1mn, and investing it into a company or finance or housing to turn it into more than $1mn. In what universe is the objective of capitalism to eliminate profit??? It’s the polar opposite…
I want to abolish private property, as in “private ownership of the means of production”. I don’t want to abolish personal property such as your house or your toothbrush, neither does anyone, which is proven by the home ownership rates in communist or post-communist countries hovering or being above 90%, compared to the sad 50% of Germany and slightly higher values in the US or UK.
I don’t consider Capitalism as having anything to do with governance
Then you don’t know what capitalism is because you haven’t cared to educate yourself about it.
Capitalism is a market system
No, it’s not, it’s a social system which defines class relations, and markets are only part of it. There were markets in late feudalism but there was no capitalism. Markets are a necessary condition for capitalism, but not the only one.
Capitalism is the system where the means of production are owned by private individuals called bourgeoisie or capitalists, and they’re worked on exchange for a wage worth less than what they produce by other private individuals called workers or proletariat. The class relations are by means of legal and theoretically voluntary contracts enforced by a government, as opposed to, for example, the god-given right of a king to put his peasants to work during feudalism.
that uses competition to drive efficiency of creation of satisfaction of needs and luxuries both
It doesn’t “use” competition, competition is sometimes a condition, but capitalism works actively against competition. Free markets and competition initially mean that some companies will fare better than others, and of those which fare better, some will invest more in increasing their productive capabilities and their efficiency, through technological means and through economy of scale. The foundation of capitalism is that capital has to revalorize itself, which is equivalent to saying bigger companies will necessarily either become bigger or die. This ends up in monopolies, oligopolies, trusts and cartels, as we see in the case of Google, Amazon, Walmart, car manufacturing, computing, or basically every single sector of the economy at this point.
If your democratic system of laws is being leveraged by highly efficient non-state entities
It is, because they can lobby politicians and corrupt them, and because the media are owned by these powerful owners of capital.
then you should really fix that shit, but fixing it doesn’t require abolishing private property
Ok, any other historical solutions that have worked? Progressive democratic movements such as Salvador Allende in Chile, or the Spanish second republic, or the Iranian secular progressive government of Mosaddegh (I could go on for 500 lines citing examples but you get the point), were historically ended by fascism when the owners of the means of production see that their profits are going to diminish in favour of the majority. More recent examples are the lawfare cases against Lula da Silva in Brazil, or against Podemos in Spain, or the coup in Bolivia against Evo Morales. Can you propose a realistic and historically proven method of preventing this from happening other than workers organizing (as socialists defend) and leftists taking control of the institutions?
nor would that end corruption.
Nobody claims it would end corruption, the fight against corruption is permanent, and the best ways to deal with it are the highest possible degrees of transparency and democracy. Private companies aren’t democratic by their nature, and aren’t required to be transparent. In fact corruption in most cases isn’t even defined in private companies. Nepotism isn’t a crime, it’s my company I’ll hire whomever I want. I need a renovation in my building, I’ll pay my friend to do it even if it’s more expensive because I owe him a favour, it’s my company. So yeah, can’t have corruption when it’s legal right?
You can always move to Senegal and enjoy capitalism!
The only thing stopping people from ending the system is lacking the knowledge that they should end it, and lacking the knowledge that they can collectively end it. Pushing for hope towards the end of the system is positive
They’ve described the opposite. A collective, grassroots, democratic institution in which people can freely discuss their thoughts and political opinions and direct the policy of their country in that way, is less reminiscent of top-down political parties with representatives voted every 4 years as in liberal democracy, and more reminiscent of worker democracy or direct democracy as anarchists or communists defend.
That’s why there’s been an entire century of revision to that model to incorporate more democratic forward values
How is a representative election every 4 years in a system where mass media are owned by the capitalist class more democratic than the ideas of Marx? The Soviet Union started out as the name implies, as a union of republics in which soviets, or worker councils, had the decision power. The fact that international interference and civil war (such as 14 countries invading the USSR militarily and many more sponsoring the tsarist loyalists or the anti-revolutionary Mensheviks) didn’t allow for a high degree of work democracy without extreme risk to the stability or the country, has more to do with the material and historical conditions of the USSR than it has to do with the ideas of Marx and Lenin.
This isn’t good historical analysis. The feudal class society, with its aristocracy, church and peasants, was highly rigid in terms of class mobility. Peasants stayed peasants and aristocrats stayed aristocrats. The current dominant class, the capitalist owners, exert their power not by god-given rights over the population, but by legal control of the means of production. The current exploited class, the workers, aren’t tied to a lord anymore and pay tributes in kind on exchange for land and protection, but instead are “free” to work where they want for a payment in cash, and unable for the most part to have ownership of the means of production they themselves work.
Kings have disappeared, classes in society haven’t
Your comment portrays a lack of reading of Marxist literature. Lenin, as far back as 1916, talks about this surplus being reallocated to workers through political pressure. He describes the leftists who pursue this as “opportunist socialists”, and explains why this is only possible in imperialist countries which exploit the resources and labor of other countries. It’s why basically all socialist revolutions have taken place in less developed countries, whether it be democratically like Chile under Allende or Spain and its second republic and Iran under Mosaddegh, or a coup as happened in Libya, or a bloody revolution as in the USSR or Cuba.
if the orange idiot succeeds in dismantling NATO and imposing sanctions on US trade, China will def be the new leading superpower.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not particularly fond of the Chinese government, but it’s HARD for them to become worse than the US in terms of international policy, destabilizing progressive countries, and outright promoting coups against leftist governments. China has no Vietnam carpet bombing history, no Chile or Iran coup support history, no banana-republic support history… If China were to become the new leading superpower, there is definitely much more hope for renewed strength in leftist movements around the globe compared to the current state of affairs
It’s so funny to me as a European that, to explain evil to US citizens, all you need to do is to swap “US” for “Russia” and suddenly everyone understands
Source?
Free to do so, for sure, I’m not claiming illegality, I’m claiming it’s wrong. It leads historically to escalation, not to mitigation of tensions. Remember the missile crisis
Again, you’re not understanding me for some reason. I’m not putting the blame on those countries, I’m putting the blame on NATO itself. It’s not that these countries shouldn’t want to join a pre-existing military alliance, it’s that a supposedly defensive military alliance shouldn’t incorporate member countries ever closer to the declared enemy of the US of A.
I would have immense problems with China fostering military relations with the neighbouring countries of their geopolitical adversary, and if you don’t, I think you should rethink that.
I don’t want any countries to ally militarily with Russia. I fully understand that Russia has a fascist aggressive government and I’m glad I don’t currently live next to it as a Spanish citizen. My whole point is that NATO isn’t a “purely defensive military alliance of independent countries”, it’s an organization subservient to the interests of the USA which has shown no remorse to act on foreign countries which didn’t threat military action against member states of NATO, as was the case in Libya and Yugoslavia, and unofficially in Iraq.