Lose influence in WHAT negotiations? Like Israel had something the USA wanted? If the US has just stopped sending arms, munitions, and intelligence to Israel, what do you think Israel would have done “in the negotiations”? Tarrifs on the US? Like, what the fuck do you think is actually happening here?
Wow, taking a page right out of Trump’s playbook - Biden failed while he was in power because of Trump when Trump wasn’t in power. You really are Blue MAGA
It’s not just Biden. A lot of the legal tools Trump is using were put in place under Clinton.
LOL, you think conservatives are worried about Democrat morale being so high that it might make them effective at something? Jesus you people are just so wrapped up in your own bullshit fantasy. The Republicans do not care about hurting the morale of Democrat voters. The Democratic party, it’s leaders, and the elected officials that adhere to it destroy voter morale all on their own without any need for assistance.
Essentially, the Republicans are following this aphorism - Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.
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
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.
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.
You don’t have to stan China to look at the actual numbers.
Capitalism is literally a liberal system - it is fundamentally predicated on the foundation of liberal philosophy which is power through private property, private contracts governing behaviors not covered by law, individual rights (to privatize, sell, extract, produce, and waste) over communal rights (to access, maintain, heal, and survive). So you’re deeply confused if you think any system could possibly be capitalism but not liberal.
You think the Democrats and the Green party could stop the Republicans from becoming totalitarian because they could be voted in?
So extreme heat is extreme cold? It just wraps around? The bigger you make cars, eventually they become small cars? Like, in what universe do extremes exhibit circularity?
Entrepreneurship is the process of discovering unmet needs. You do not need capitalism to do that. Capitalism uses the profit motive to incentivize this activity, which means the ONLY unmet needs that get met are the ones that are profitable. There are MANY unmet needs that are not profitable to meet - like feeding the hungry, stopping domestic violence, ending police killings of black people, or housing the unhoused. Literally all of those needs are present, they have been identified, the resources exist, and the techniques exist, but, no profit, no movement.
Think about how weird it is to need profit to incentivize this behavior anyway. There is literally unmet need. People are experiencing it. What’s the problem? They don’t solve it themselves. Why? Because they don’t have the power to do so. Why not? Because of the consequences of a society that privileges the ultraminority over the ultramajority. What’s the solution? Stop doing that and people will have the power to actually address the problems they have. How? Democratically by raising their problems and working towards a solution.
The alternative is that the only problems that entrepreneurs solve are the ones that rich people make profit from - the least democratic way of solving problems ever.
High taxes is not socialism
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
Show the “clear attempts to stop the genocide”. Please. Back your bullshit up. Bonus points if you match it up with the arms deliveries and other material support of the Israeli war machine. I certainly won’t expect you to read between the lines when you show milquetoast rhetoric juxtaposed against arms deliveries, but we can do that together.