Cowbee [he/they]

I don’t see what this has to do with Trump or data collected by GPUs.

What does China have to do with Trump?

Even if that were true, it’d be better than spyware tracing everything to the US Empire. What’s China going to do to me when I live in the US?

As far as optics are concerned, it’s important to be honest. As Marx himself stated, when our times come we will not make excuses for the terror. That means not trying to “prettify” the task of revolution, revolution isn’t a tea party. The tools the bourgeoisie uses to manipulate and control society in capitalism will be stripped from them and placed in the hands of the proletariat, and bourgeois property will be gradually taken from them. By rights, this is just, but it is also “authoritarian,” or “oppressive.” Nevertheless, this task must be done, and taken seriously, lest we fall to counter-revolution. At the same time, this will create genuine democracy for the proletariat.

We can continue as much as you want!

I don’t think it’s “cruel” or “unjust,” all it means is that freedom for the bourgeousie will be curtailed, speech will be restricted, and influence will be limited, rather than the proletariat which is oppressed by capitalist states. It’s a flipping of the dictatorship of the bourgeousie to the dictatorship of the proletariat, ie the proletariat will have the political power, and the bourgeoisie will have little to none.

I’m a communist, for clarity, I don’t say this as a knock on socialism and communism. I think you’re putting more of a moral spin on it than a materialist spin.

I’m using it in the same way you likely are, I just think we have a different conception of how the state behaves. Essentially, depending on which aspect of the economy is principle, as well as who is in charge of the state, will determine which class is going to be represented by the state in disputes among classes.

In an economy dominated by private property and a bourgeois state, there is no real democracy for the proletariat. The state is fully under the control of the bourgeoisie.

In an economy dominated by public property and a proletarian state, the proletariat is in charge of where the economy is headed. The proletariat can sieze bourgeois property if it so chooses, the state can support labor unions, etc.

This is because whoever controls the large firms and key industries controls the economy in total, as all depending factors rely on them. As small and medium firms grow, the proletariat can fold them into the public sector, as market mechanics cease to be as effective and central planning becomes far more efficient.

Oppression by the state is what I mean. The bourgeoisie are specifically that class that earns its income through the M-C-M’ circuit of capitalist production. This class will still exist in socialism, it existed in limited factors in the Soviet Union, exists in the modern PRC, Cuba, etc. However, the existence of private property does not mean the bourgeoisie has control of the state. What matters is which class controls the principle aspects of the economy, the large firms and key industries. In the PRC, for example, those are overwhelmingly publicly owned and planned, even if there exists a bourgeoisie, and as a consequence the bourgeoisie is subordinate to the state and not above it.

Super cool! I love resource efficient projects in general.

Good questions!

1. Socialism is the transition from capitalism to communism. Public ownership becomes the principle aspect of the economy, not private. However, classes remain, the commodity form remains in earlier phases of socialism, and so does the state.

2. In communism, after all classes are abolished, there won’t be a proletariat either. Proletarians are people that sell their labor-power as their sole commodity, in communism wage-labor as the capitalist conception no longer exists. Without a bourgeoisie, there can be no proletariat.

The majority of people who lived in the Soviet Union want it back. Your complaints about socialism don’t make any sense, either.

This isn’t quite correct. Governance and economy are too interlinked to be considered distinct, systems aren’t recipes picked out on a page but a material, physical thing. Further, “authoritarianism” isn’t really a thing in and of itself, it just describes the phenomenon where one class oppresses others. In Socialism, the proletariat oppresses the bourgeousie, in Capitalism the bourgeoisie oppresses the proletariat.

The vast majority of people sent to prison by the soviets were criminals, thieves, murderers, rapists, etc. The political prisoners were largely members of the White Army, fascists, monarchists, or were active terrorists against society. For a country that went through a revolution, resistance from the older owning classes is expected, other revolutions were similar in use of force against the monarchy and other ruling classes.

Marxism is anti-utopian, it’s based on analyzing how societies evolve over time. What is deemed “authoritarianism” is the need for the proletariat to exert its control over the bourgeoisie, rather than the reverse, yet bourgeois rule is more authoritarian.

This is utterly disgusting rhetoric, erasing a century of genocide and settler-colonialism. The Palestinians were forced off their lands, slaughtered, had their culture stolen and claimed as “Israeli,” and more. It isn’t a “current” genocide, it was genocidal since the inception of Israel a century ago in the form of an apartheid regime. The violence against settlers is retaliation towards being forced out of their homes, murdered, tortured, dehumanized, and culturally erased.

This is not a complex issue, Palestine has a moral high ground over the fascist settler-colonial Entity. No question. Further, the Zionists are anti-Yiddish, and collaborated with the Nazis.

The founding Zionists were planning their settler-colonial land-grab and the genocide of Palestine before that. Palestine was seen as a nation, but western powers wanted to exert power over the middle east and used “Israel” as a spearhead for that.

Palestine lashed out at “Israel” because “Israel” is a settler-colonial genocidal entity that stole land and culture from Palestinians, murdering them systematically for a century. History did not start on October 7th.

As a response to the genocide of Palestinians and having their land and culture stolen from them for a century. The settler-colonialism of Israel is what begets its own response.

Yep, the reason China hasn’t done it long ago is because it was biding time to build up BRICs and BRI so that it has alternative customers, and thus was more reliant on the US as a consumer. Trump’s strategy likely would have worked in the 90s, but we aren’t in the 90s anymore. Now that the US is destroying economic ties to the PRC, China can respond by severing the US’s ties to Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and SEA. The EU will have to pick either China or the US.

The rug has been pulled many times already, eventually the quantitative buildup will leap to a qualitative shift. Whether the EU lasts long enough for that is a separate question though…

The EU has neither the industrial capacity of China nor the immense finances of the US, so the EU itself will have to choose who to rely on. If Australia pivots to the EU, they will be pivoting towards whoever the EU pivots towards.