omg I am so sorry

I try to take care of my health as much as possible because I cannot afford to have a medical emergency.

If you only saw a bear in a circus you would think it’s nature was to ride a unicycle.

Humans have had to live in brutish/nasty conditions; including the present day, where many of us are drowning in debt, two paychecks away from homelessness while a few are trying to make more money than they could ever spend.

The boot of capitalism is on our necks, but I’m not sure my countrymen are worth fighting for. Americans may be too far gone. Maybe I should just leave.

Obligatory: everyone should read The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. (The aforementioned quote is hers.) Science fiction anarcho-comminist community depicted as having tangible benefits/detriments.

The problem isn’t “human nature”. The problem is that, under capitalism, profit must always be increased. Marx talked about the inherent contradiction here, viz, we use the finite materials of nature in a quest for infinite profit. Put simply, if the table company wants to make more money, they’re going to have to chop more trees.

Just as the rise of merchants was an untenable contradiction in the logic of feudalism, the many contradictions within capitalism indicate that it cannot last. It will likely collapse into a technologically advanced socialism or a technologically oppressive fascism.

Human labor transforms the physical materials of nature into useful goods. Humans can decide how to collectively organize their labor.

We don’t actually need money to feed anyone (look at indigenous tribes for example). We have collectively decided to put paywalls on everything we produce. Which is a shame, because we produce more than enough for everyone.

Would you say that gives you … Food for thought?

I supported Bernie but the DNC are not legally required to be impartial. I voted for Obama, twice, but he turned out to be an establishment Democrat (despite the “Change” slogan).

Setting my own voting aside, imagine someone complaining about voting in Russia and you respond with: 1) Either run for office yourself or 2) Vote for who you like. That response completely misses the point. The electoral system is inherently flawed and aggressively suppresses attempts at reform that would actually represent the people.

Unironically typing “repeat the mistakes of the past” with ignoring the history of how we got here displays an astoundingly myopic view of recent events. Both parties serve the same billionaires, which is why the Republicans do what they want and Dems are content with “decorum”. In fact, our two-parties have displayed a remarkable overlap on the Venn Diagram:

• Republicans and Democrats both vote to increase ICE funding every year. 
• Republicans and Democrats in Congress both practice insider trading. 
• Republicans and Democrats presidents both bail out corporations that are "too big to fail" (i.e., Bush Jr., Obama).
• Republicans and Democrats both vote to give corporations subsides (i.e., corporate welfare). 
• Republicans and Democrats both receive campaign finances from billionaires (i.e., legal bribery). 
• Republican and Democrat presidents both order drone strike, resulting in mass civilian casualties.
• Republican and Democrat presidents have both bombed countries without Congressional approval (e.g., Trump, Biden). 
• Republicans and Democrats both kept Guantanamo Bay open for decades. (A precursor for Trump's treatment of immigrants.) 
• Republicans and Democrats both crack down on whistle blowers. 
• Republicans and Democrats both maintain a surveillance state on its citizens. 
• Republican and Democrat administrations both assassinated democratically elected leaders overseas. 
• Republicans and Democrats both fund Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people. 

Trump was not created ex nihilo. Presidential power has been growing for decades. Congress has been blatantly corrupt for decades. We have broken (and supported breaking) international laws for decades. Trump is a symptom of a larger problem: our government functions to serve profit rather than people. The problem will continue long after he is gone, unless the American people demand more.

They will just deny reality. It’s funny how the conspiracy theories always work in favor of their political party.

Which begs the question: how long have they been knowingly sitting on these emails?

That’s helpful, thanks Cowbee. I know socialism is a transitional state but I thought that the bar was much much higher and/or the weeding out of private property/profit would happen faster by necessity. Which isn’t to downplay China’s achievements but it is confusing for someone just reading this stuff.

I genuinely do not understand how the mode of production in China differs from the U.S. In both countries we see commodities with use-vaule/exchange-vaule/value that are produced by privatized labor processes and that are made for profit rather than for direct consumption. Hence the exact same exploitation of the working class must be in place as the workers are paid a fraction of the value that they produce. Surplus-value is being appropriated in both countries.

Call China socialist if you like, the exploitation that Marx describes at the beginning of Capital is still there. On the other hand, here are the 12 points she mentions in the video:

(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc. (ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds. (iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people. (iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state. (v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. (vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers. (vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation. (viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production together. (ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each. (x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts. (xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock. (xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.

Unexpectedly, this roadmap only mentions commodity production vaguely. Someone who has read more please feel free to correct me as I find this discrepancy very confusing.

These memes are way too coordinated to be organic. One minute we’re complaining about gun control, then Trump, then Senate Democrats caving, then back to the Epstein list. Both the internet and the news focus on one topic before shifting to the next. Think its time to get off the internet and touch grass.

edit: People responding are missing the point. News agencies clearly decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore. The internet is feeling the same way these days.

Education in America differs wildly by state (and even school district). Americans often get different instruction on slavery, the Confederacy, Vietnam war, etc.

Micheal Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds” covers way too many examples to list here. A must-read for those attempting to reject Cold War-era propaganda. Here’s an excerpt:

The Costs of Counterrevolution

From grade school through grad school, few of us are taught anything about these events, except to be told that U.S. forces must intervene in this or that country in order to protect U.S. interests, thwart aggression, and defend our national security. U.S. leaders fashioned other convenient rationales for their interventions abroad. The public was told that the peoples of various countries were in need of our civilizing guidance and desired the blessings of democracy, peace, and prosperity. To accomplish this, of course, it might be necessary to kill off considerable numbers of the more recalcitrant among them. Such were the measures our policymakers were willing to pursue in order to "uplift lesser peoples " …

In the name of democracy, U.S. leaders waged a merciless war against revolutionaries in Indochina for the better part of twenty years. They dropped many times more tons of explosives on Vietnam than were used throughout World War II by all combatants combined. Testifying before a Congressional committee, former CIA director William Colby admitted that under his direction U.S. forces and their South Vietnam collaborators carried out the selective assassination of 24,000 Vietnamese dissidents, in what was known as the Phoenix Program. His associate, the South Vietnamese minister of information, maintained that 40,000 was a more accurate estimate. U.S. policymakers and their media mouthpieces judged the war a “mistake” because the Vietnamese proved incapable of being properly instructed by B-52 bomber raids and death squads. By prevailing against this onslaught, the Vietnamese supposedly demonstrated that they were “unprepared for our democratic institutions.”

In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 million in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq;¹ over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the “dirty war” of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust. Official sources either deny these U.S.-sponsored mass murders or justify them as necessary measures that had to be taken against an implacable communist foe.

Ftn 1:The 1991 war waged by the Bush administration against Iraq, which claimed an estimated 200,000 victims, was followed by U.S.-led United Nations economic sanctions. A study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, The Children Are Dying (1996), reports that since the end of the war 576,000 Iraqi children have died of starvation and disease and tens of thousands more suffer defects and illnesses due to the five years of sanctions.

Gotta make sure we protect the Vietnamese from the evils of communism by killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. Another hundred thousand civilian casualties due to dropping Napalm, for their own good

oh neat, horrors beyond my comprehension

It’s fine to discuss one thing at a time, but there is a broader point being made in this post. The missteps of socialism are always taken to show that it could never work, but capitalism is failing and has failed the vast majority of us for hundreds of years now.