SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]

it’s more fun to have your own, very specialized definition and conception of communism and socialism and repeat them for a few decades than to read boring books for a few weeks and have your misconceptions cleared up.

“my ignorance is as good as your knowledge”, but not in a bad stupid American way, but in a good virteous down-to-earth proletarian who doesn’t need the work of fancy shmancy professors way

India is a good example of how economists believing that the labor theory of value isn’t true doesn’t actually make it false.

They can make government and economic decisions that ignore or at least sideline the growth and development of labour under the assumption that entrepeneurs and investors are the real motive force of society, but when tens of millions of people enter poverty every year in your country, education is underfunded, roads and railways for the workers to use are underfunded, and employment is underdeveloped, your growth will simply be stunted. You can scream from the rooftops that billionaires create value, not workers, in the hopes that some god will hear you, but it doesn’t change reality.

Every media organization can report, mostly hopefully and without real basis, that surely India will be the second largest economy in the world in 50 years (behind the good old US of A, of course! We will never be overshadowed!) and that surely China, with their unorthodox views of how to create a stable and good economy for the working class, will collapse any minute now, and us here can lean back and relax with the certainty granted by studies and Marxist theory that as long as the Chinese leadership doesn’t betray their communist values - and I don’t see why they would - China is and will remain the best performing economy on the planet for the foreseeable future. We don’t have to give a shit about the opinions of Jerome Powell and so on.

Also a great piece by Michael Roberts on how and why India simply will not ever be able to meaningfully compete economically with China.

There’s a lot of factors at play but I think the most compelling one is simply that if most of the state’s resources are going towards the enrichment of the 1% and not even trickling down towards the billion+ people in the 99%, economic growth will be stunted in the long term. Especially as Modi is simultaneously so dominant and also the avatar of this exact problem, so it’s not as if an alternative is ready to appear.

And China will almost certainly refuse to give up their manufacturing base and so efforts from Western corporations to shift from China to India/Vietnam/etc, such that they even exist (many, many corporations are fine with China) are mostly ill-fated too. In Vietnam it could work, but for India, the state and billionaires aren’t expanding their infrastructure fast enough. because it costs them money that they could spend on pleasure megayachts. Chinese state investment in infrastructure is virtually (if not actually) unparalleled, which is why corporations love working with China so much - they don’t have to sink potential profit into railways and roads.

As for India’s GDP figures, as Roberts explains, they are actually largely made-up (even given the standards of GDP figures in the West, which are also largely made-up but in a different way).

To the point that there is a lot of footage of the people of Iran cheering in the streets.

we’re really doing this propaganda again? can we please get more interesting stuff than the “my people yearn for freedom from this tyrant”?

The vestiges of the imperialist system will probably continue for decades to come but it seems plausible that with mounting crises and contradictions, we’re looking at a meaningful collapse of hegemony within the next 15-20 years. I think it can be very easy to understate what’s been going on for the last couple years if you’re a liberal “It’s just a war in Ukraine, a trade war against China, and a fragmenting Israel versus half a dozen heavily armed militant groups - nothing that threatens the United States!” but one can also overstate what’s going on without an understanding of how deeply rooted most countries are in terms of debt and monetary flows to and from the United States, and just how many military bases there are, etc. These aren’t intractable problems but the easiest problems are being solved first (dedollarizing between two countries that are already being sanctioned) and the harder problems, like actually creating the alternative institutions that most of the world’s countries would be happy with ceding a portion of their sovereignty to, are indeed very hard.

It’s very encouraging that US military might already seems so undermined and ineffectual, though, as being militarily challenged is a really big first step towards the end of empires. The usual people will keep spending billions on American weapons, obviously, but the mere concept that there are indeed problems that America cannot simply bomb or overthrow out of existence (e.g. Ansarallah blocking the Red Sea) is a massive shift from the high-point of the 1990s, especially as America has no other tools in its toolbox except for sanctions, which are becoming less effective by the day. And the fact that America has to send Israel billions in weaponry every few months is encouraging in the sense that such massive volumes are clearly required for Israel to merely stay afloat, as they don’t seem to be, say, going to war against Hezbollah with them or anything. The monetary values are meaningless, the US would have no qualms with printing a quadrillion dollars for Israel if that was what was needed, it’s the resources being taken out that are the real prize here. You can’t bomb people with dollar bills, nor could Israels eat them under siege.

in totalitarian communist North Korea, the regime disseminates propaganda assuring their brainwashed citizens that being hungry is actually beneficial due to their failed communist agrarian policies

those four oblasts are looking awfully annexed for a “failed annexation”

It does honestly feel like people - on both sides of the war, I will freely admit - put way too much focus on individual events and are unable to see the bigger picture of logistics and equipment produced and so on.

So you end up with, just as a recent example, the Ukrainians going on and on about that Bradley vs tank incident and how “owned” Russia was or whatever (that is managed to keep going for like 5 minutes in constant Bradley fire? sounds like a pretty awesome example of how great Russian tanks are tbh), or that Russian plane full of Ukrainian POWs being shot down by a Patriot, or now this boat being sunk. But none of this actually matters. What’s really going on here is that the pro-Ukraine crowd is seeing these events and drawing absolutely massive conclusions from it. “Aha, see, we can now destroy all Russian tanks with just our infantry carriers! Aha, see, we can now shoot down every Russian plane with our air defense! Aha, see, we can now sink every boat in the Russian fleet!” Russia has thousands of tanks, its planes are routinely not shot down by Ukrainian air defense because of how depleted it is and the Russian countermeasures (flying low, etc), and honestly, sinking the Russian Black Sea fleet would be an L but it would be very far from war-ending, given that Ukraine has no navy for it to fight anyway and Russia obviously has inland missile launchers. But the pro-Russian side like Rybar tends to take these narratives and feels the need to address them because they’re just as caught up in these narratives as everybody else, when they could just ignore them and watch as they’re forgotten in a week.

Wars are determined by systemic issues and, most importantly, the capacity for the warring nations to overcome those issues. Neither side is permanently locked into its state of affairs (in most cases; e.g. WW2 Germany had problems the whole war with getting enough fuel due to simple geography). Not being able to see how a military could make up for its deficiencies is what lead to the Kharkov surprise for the pro-Russian side who didn’t understand that Russia went into the war with too few troops to man parts of the front and that Ukraine had been creating brigades in the rear while their frontline army was getting mauled over the spring and summer, and then the surprise of the failure of the counteroffensive for Ukraine, who didn’t understand that Russia had found a way to counter the Ukrainian offensive strategy and thought that the same trick was guaranteed to work twice.

In short, if you’re going to make an assumption that a military is unable to counter a new problem, you need a LOT of evidence for it - not just vibes about how you think the conflict is going to go. Never assume that a military is stagnant unless you have extremely good reasons to believe so. I personally don’t believe that the Ukrainian military is stagnant and totally doomed and they can still probably keep defending for at least the better part of a year and finding new strategies to counter Russia, but the ongoing lack of Western military reindustrialization is my ‘extremely good reason’ to believe that Ukraine will be unable to win unless there is a very sudden change in the economic strategy of the West away from neoliberalism and just-in-time manufacturing.

It’s the classic argument path:

Liberals: “I hate [foreign government/country/corporation/person/etc] for [usually somewhat justifiable reason in a vacuum]!”

Communists: “Okay, sure, but [Western government/country/corporation/person/etc] does that same thing but much, much worse! Why aren’t you talking about them?”

Liberals: “Oh, I hate it when they do that too! We’re just talking about this particular [foreign government/country/corporation/person/etc] right now! Why are you deflecting? Are you trying to defend them? Whataboutism!”

Communists: go to their profile; literally no evidence that they have ever complained about a single Western entity in their lifetime, and may even have expressed support for Western entities that do even worse things

Russia, China, and Iran (the last of which isn’t even on that image) have hypersonic missiles, which effectively mean that aircraft carriers are now pre-sunk artificial coral reefs in a direct conflict with those countries. America does not have hypersonic missiles and keeps failing their prototype tests.

Surprisingly, if healthcare is governed by the profit motive instead of an actual duty of care towards people, then the people in charge of healthcare will focus more on making profits than on providing care.

Never you fear, the disparity between America and Europe will go down. Not because America will improve - god no, it’ll get worse, even - but because the capitalists, backed by fascists, are here to loot European countries and rip the wiring out of the walls as the profitability crisis continues.

they demanded anarchists become MLs if they wanted bullets.

Stalin literally gave them hundreds of tanks

Personally, I think that someone leading insurrections against institutions that have overwhelming popular support due to actively working to give people healthcare, food, etc. is clearly a counterrevolutionary prick and an anarchist who opposes a project that feeds the children for the first time in centuries because it’s not a syndicate is being myopic at best, but that’s just me.

If we were in a hypothetical revolutionary situation led by anarchists that was genuinely and successfully challenging state capitalist power here in the UK then I, as a Marxist-Leninist, wouldn’t be like “Erm, guys, you haven’t sufficiently considered Lenin! Aren’t you aware that the hijacking and reconfiguration of the state for socialist purposes is a necessary transition period towards communism?” I would get behind the fucking barricades with them.

There’s a difference between opposing lesser evilism in the context of Western capitalist electoral politics between two bourgeois parties, and like, being anti-ML or anti-anarchist in actual revolutionary situations (and not stupid fucking hypothetical internet arguments) because “it’s not doing communism right.” Unless there were like, REALLY fucking big problems with what the group is doing, I would just shut up and not weaken the overall movement. As Awoo stated, this is literally what ML groups are doing in Palestine as we speak.

Key Events in the timeline of X Bad Communist Country:

• Previous government which had some issues but could have been worked out through dialogue, debate, and reforms, is brutally overthrown by violent ideological communist terrorists
• Those terrorists evilly steal and pillage the institutions of that previous government and brutally loot the businesses of hard-working citizens, giving them to the lazy, inferior, unwashed masses
• As a consequence of this, the country falls into abject poverty, with breadlines and freedom of speech brutally repressed for decades.
• We put sanctions on them AFTER this. ABSOLUTELY 100% AFTER. I cannot stress enough that the sanctions did NOT cause the former thing to happen, it was only AFTERWARDS. But it’s also fine if they did cause suffering because those people are bad and inferior anyway.
• Protests from people yearning for freedom in this brutal communist regime occur and are brutally crushed, brutally. Thousan-- tens of tho-- HUNDREDS of thousands of people are murdered by state forces and their bodies washed into sewers so there’s no evidence of this happening, but it did definitely occur. Five million people are killed in this genocide, which claimed twenty million lives over a 20 year period; this truly awful crime of humanity killed fifty million people, and-- ah, this just in, that genocide actually killed seventy million, more than previous estimates from seven seconds ago, and-- did I hear eighty million from the gentleman in the back? 85 mil-- 90 million! Going, going-- a HUNDRED MILLION, to the fine person in row 5, going, going, and… SOLD!
• Eventually, the communist regime collapses due to corruption, mismanagement, and a lack of respect for basic human nature. We help them institute democracy in the aftermath and restore those hard-working businessowners to their rightful position above the masses who destroyed their country out of lack of work ethic / This communist country is a mere 5 days from complete collapse because none of the people in charge have any knowledge of even Economics 101, and are too stupid to figure out how to save their economies via privatization.

Winter offensive is very likely because the Grande Armée is getting French winter gear and Russians are getting… whatever they get, so they’ll probably freeze.

Part of that equation, for my point of view, includes the ability for people to think and speak freely without fear of reprisal by the government

This is like the people who say “We’re freer than the Chinese because I can call Trump a peepee poopoo pants on Twitter without being arrested!” when that doesn’t actually do anything at all

but if you try and protest and change conditions materially and meaningfully, you can absolutely bet your ass you will be disappeared like the horror stories you find on reddit about “totalitarian regimes”. The only reason why Americans don’t think it doesn’t happen in the West is either because it’s so completely internalized that it becomes memeified (“Haha, I hope the FBI agent watching me through my camera is having a nice day!”) or none of the media that they engage with reports on it.

IMO, this entire point is just a liberal ideological bludgeon, a condition that can be applied at-will to any government they want to criticize because no government will be good enough all of the time. it’s one thing if you’re an anarchist and oppose every government equally for not fulfilling that condition, that I can understand and respect, it’s quite another when you’re like “Oh, no, I hate authoritarianism! That’s why we need to constantly criticize a country on the literal other side of the planet 99.7% of the time, and then only criticize our own country when somebody calls us out on it by saying ‘Oh, yeah, America also does bad things too!’” Especially when America’s role in the world for the last century at least, and more accurately really since its conception, has been a source of capitalist reaction across its whole hemisphere and later the whole planet, with hundreds upon hundreds of military bases and tens of millions directly and indirectly killed in wars. Criticizing, say, Cuba or DPRK for these sorts of things is effectively zooming in on a single corpse in righteous indignation while ignoring the seas of blood spilled by America behind you.

the only people trivializing fascism are those who see fascism symbology like the swastika, Black Sun, various nordic runes, etc on the soldiers they’re egging on and go “doesn’t look like anything to me!” while advocating for the double genocide theory

this can be true, but a lot of the time, because the author has the ability to write anything and not be constrained by reality, what they write often isn’t a critique of a real situation so much as it is a reflection of their own internal biases and internalized propaganda about that real situation.

the example that most immediately jumps to mind is Rowling’s house elves being slaves and also liking being slaves and actually you’re a bad person if you don’t want them to be slaves anymore. I mean, sure, it could just be an entirely made-up fantasy race that likes being enslaved, but it could also be internalized propaganda about other races, especially considering that she was born in the decaying/fallen British Empire.

So I would argue that the books in the thread image are, obviously unintentionally, actually more about how propaganda about “authoritarian” states during the Cold War influenced the authors of that time, rather than those books saying anything about the Soviet Union.

I think it’s generally best to not rely on fiction when trying to make a point to others who don’t already agree. It can be a nice bonding moment between two people that already agree - we could talk about how Don’t Look Up if we both agreed about humanity’s role in climate change and how many people don’t give a shit because they think they’re invincible or already got theirs, but bringing up the film to a climate change denier just isn’t going to go well unless approached very carefully.

Which referendums are you referring to and does any country besides Russia or North Korea accept the results?

literally the consent “isn’t there somebody you forgot to ask?” meme but with America

but this is also a very funny way of imagining how self-determination and independence movements work a lot of the time. Imagine a world where a newfound country breaks free from an existing one and then that newfound country sees that 90% of the UN, including the country they just broke free from, doesn’t recognize them for doing that and they’re just like “Well, shucks. I guess we’re going back and re-joining the country again, because these people aren’t ready to accept us yet!”

the problem isn’t necessarily pointing out the problems with any particular country, that can be done as a legitimate discussion, what gets really fucking annoying is when people only talk about the problems with a certain country and then when questioned, are like “Oh, no! We also hate it when America does this thing! We’re just talking about X country right now!” when that’s clearly false. like, you say “Fuck China for having mass surveillance” on reddit and you get 100k upvotes, 20 platinum awards and some dude’s firstborn son, whereas if you say “Fuck America for having mass surveillance” you’ll get “Hm, well, you see, this is a complicated topic, because on the one hand…” or even just “Yeah, but it’s nothing compared to China though!”

the problem is also when what you’re talking about is necessarily a comparison because no action exists in a vacuum free of context. if I say “The US is an awful, imperialist country that has invaded all these nations, and NATO has also invaded and destroyed nations, and we should not support them even if Russia is doing a bad thing because Russia’s death toll is so much lower than the West’s” then all I would get on most lib platforms is “That history doesn’t matter! What matters is the here and now, when Russia is doing a bad thing and NATO currently, at this precise moment in time, is not! Bad things are bad things! You can’t wave them away through context!”

but the question isn’t “Is Russia doing a bad thing”, I don’t think anybody would deny except the most fervent Russian nationalist that Russia has done at least some bad things in Ukraine, the question is “Who should we support in this war” and so the fact that NATO and the US has killed tens of millions of people within the lifetime of the current president and doomed hundreds of millions more to backbreaking labor in mines and plantations and sweatshops, and Russia, well, hasn’t, is a perfectly pertinent point to make when asking who to support. This is also why liberals are so utterly gobsmacked when third-world countries don’t come out against Russia, because they have been on the receiving end of this campaign of carnage that the US has wrought around the world and so, logically, think Russia is the lesser of two evils. can’t they see that Russia is evil! can’t they see that Putler is the devil doing a genocide!? they must be brainwashed by Russian disinformation propaganda! we must up our efforts to spread Correct Information!