>>2503204since 1991 socialist working class movements have been irrelevant and ineffective, dead in the water, achieving nothing and basically with no hope of achieving anything. This is due to the victory of unipolarity resulting in a world ruled by a rabidly anti-communist global hegemon.
If a socialist movement takes power anywhere and attempts to abolish capitalist social relations they will immediately be targeted for destruction by the anti-communist hegemon, by the USA and its allies/vassals, not by Russia or China, and that movement will fail and be swept away, or it will be impoverished and crushed so much that it can't improve conditions for the masses while clinging on to power hoping things will somehow improve later (eg, Venezuela). The population will then learn that socialist revolution is a pipe dream, a hard and ultimately pointless fight that only wastes their time and energy and makes things worse, only to be reversed later when it is eventually crushed and the end of history restored.
Only when unipolarity ends - when the anti-communist hegemon loses its power to impose its wishes on the rest of the world - will socialism even become possible again. This may not be what you'd like to believe but it's true anyway.
And levels of development are also important, a poor underdeveloped country trying to build socialism against the wishes of a developed world that vehemently opposes socialism is probably going to get crushed and fail. This is part of why Marx believed socialism was the next stage of history after capitalist development and industrialization.
>>2503217India could try, but it would have to accept that it would be sanctioned and isolated by the West. It would need separate economic allies who would stay with it and not bend to the West. It would also have to contend with destabllization efforts and possibly war with Western proxies (ISIS, Pakistan, whatever). Could or would this succeed? It would depend on the ability of allies like BRICS to replace Western trade and resist their sabotage. Do the Indian masses believe this could work? Probably not (already discussed above).
>>2503204>This is not contingent on X or Y third world capitalist country achieving some arbitrary $20,000 annual GDP per capita.It's contingent upon global south countries having an industrial proletariat (and thus industry) upon which to base a communist movement. It's contingent upon destabilizing bourgeois rule in the imperial core by depriving the imperialist system of superprofits. It's contingent upon there being enough division among the international bourgeoisie that revolutionary forces can play rival capitalist states off against each other to their benefit, as many 20th century communists did including the Bolsheviks.
>What matters is that the country has capitalist social relations dominant and this has already happened everywhere decades ago. India is one of the more developed countries in the global south and rural peasants living under semi-feudal conditions still make up a plurality of the population. Feudal relations are even more prevalent in much of the rest of the world.
>>2503288It's a slow war. Tune out. The only interesting things coming up is the US planning to seize Russian assets to give to Ukrainians, which will likely increase the rate of Treasury dumping by the Chinese.
The war isn't going to see an utter breakdown in Ukrainian manpower for a few more years, charitably to the Russians, after 3 and a half years, the Ukrainians are likely between 900,000 casualties, including non-critical wounded, and 1.1 million.
The kill pace is way too slow, and moreover, if Trump is serious, it's the Russians' war to lose, if Trump transfers Replicator or other parts of the anti-Chinese arsenal to Russia, or if NATO does a direct intervention.
When you come back in 12 months, either Trump will be a laughing stock, Ukraine nearing collapse with Western MSM already pointing fingers, or Russia will be battling a NATO army and trying to get China to bail them out.
Depending on who you prefer, it's either Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" or Mao Zedong 's Protracted People's War on a planetary scale, the implications are the same.
Marxists did not make headway in the global North, because they sound like Reston (home of US gov clearance contractors) or CIPSO. They're subverted into good Trotskyites who get used by liberals to batter conservatives and fascists, pointing to the KPD as to what happens when they aren't good liberal / succdem running dogs, when KPD's strategy was in fact successful and the survivors formed SED and took power in East Germany. Then their critiques of capitalism get read by the ex-trots at CIA, FBI, and other anti-Communist security agencies for both strategies of negation and to reform capitalism to become more resistant to revolution.
However, in the global South we actually have AES, even if many of their forms are non-traditional (Dengist), and the AES states have considerable power, capable of resisting Western capital.
The PPW / Christensenian strategy is simply to use the peripheries of AES to either conduct revolution in the semi-periphery, where state apparatuses are weaker, or to directly support their development, hoping that they will eventually overthrow capitalism within the world system and reach FALC on their own.
This is why China and Russia matter, if Russia loses, China will be exposed because Russia is a secure overland energy and minerals hub away from the USN for China. If China goes down, we are in worse circumstances than 1991, wherein there no longer exists a Marxist power, and you can expect perfected AI liberalism to make you satisfied with walking into organ harvesting plants.
>>2503283my problem is with the every-day gains, towns and names. so many of them are repetitive, I learn about one town, next month I see it again and I question if last month was a lie or Russians were pushed back, and turns out it's just a different town with the same name.
so I don't bother with small to medium size towns, except if they go to above the 10k population (before the SMO).
First, they say that Russia is imperialist, then they contradict that claim, stating that it is a peripheral and dependent nation, and finally they conclude that NATO is a defensive anti-imperialist alliance.
The worst thing is that, like all Western organizations and their foundations, they have the means to spread their influence in dominated countries through sponsorships.
We are used to archaic people who see domestic monopolies and the export of capital as the main features of imperialism, but we have not yet seen such duds that have no idea what imperialism could be.
Comrades, imperialism is - simply put - an international form of capitalist organization characterized by the transfer of values from poor to rich countries. This transfer is carried out primarily through unequal exchange, but also through many other mechanisms that enable monopolies over technology, control of global finances and access to natural resources.
In that structure, Russia belongs to the semi-peripheral (middle) sector, which acquires value in relation to the periphery, and loses value in relation to the center.
Imperialist are those countries at the top of the global hierarchy where most of the transferred value is realized.
The semi-peripheral sector can be divided into clientele (the one that supports this transfer) and autocentric (countries that restrict this transfer).
That is the basic economic reason why Russia has been under attack from the West for years.
Of secondary importance for this issue is the internal modality of distribution of such a state (if it is non-socialist, it must again strive for a mixed economy and progressive foreign trade and foreign policy alliances if it wants to gain capacity for resistance)
It is solely polemical and not meaningfully marxist to talk about some kind of military imperialism.
Imperialist countries (or alliances) intervene militarily and diplomatically (sanctions) where the transfer of values on which the global structure rests is prevented (socialist countries) or limited (nationalist countries of the periphery and semiperiphery).
This time, they ran into too much, because not only did Russia inherit the Soviet military infrastructure, but it also developed its productive forces to a level that could withstand a certain degree of isolation, and built international alliances that would make it even easier.
With these "leftists" all roads lead to imperialism.
>>2503326there's always money for war. just rn the US moved to Doha the same number of heavy airplanes than they did when they attacked Iran, glooming another strike on Iran, plus the war drums on Caribbean seas.
the only that could disrupt anything is heavy protests, rioting clashes even, from the federal employees that are left without the labubu chexs. but I have never seen government shutdowns having such an impact.
>>2502137>a few state owned industriesstrategic industries. very different from a few. energy sector, telecom, banking, mining (oil and gas including) and the military, and retook control of the pension system.
neolibs have a few. see the prime examples of neolib states: Spain: national telecom sold, repsol is not owned by the government, UK, similar case, the US super prime example of neoliberalism, etc.
>I remember someone told me that Russia is still communistnot communist, but reversed the 90s plunder of the state.
>>2503337I think Russia will use that as a precedent, the same way Russia used Yugoslavia as a precedent for
undoing hoholand.
>>2503337>They're probably going to get rid of the Ayatollah and Maduro (by coup or by air attack)… while Zelensky is free to do his goblin walk around the globe.Once the Palestine deal is closed, with all the gulf compradors and very important hidrocarbon producers freshly disciplined, tackling Iran is less likely to backfire in oil prices. MENA oil producers take it as part of the new deal with NATO that they gotta take this one in the chin, forfeit profit and keep oil prices acceptable while the US deals with Ian.
Then blockading or otherwise impeding Venezuela's trade with China(and Iran) is a double whammy that hurts both and rewards NATO.
>>2503334The American voter cares more about jobs, paychecks, and food than they care about the permawar. This has been demonstrated in polls.
PLA giving back even 50% of what they take (remember China's military intensity as a proportion of their economy is one half that of the United States) means that the US military is quagmired and Ukrainian.
If the US goes to war with China, the US runs out of money before the Chinese do. It's exactly the countryside surrounding the cities, except it's the countryside (semi-periphery) that does the manufacturing.
>>2503505>the ai bubble will pop in 6 monthsno it won't, even the most pessimistic estimates expect by early 2027, in fact i guarantee it'll be at least a year later.
>Trumps moronic trade policies will then see most of the world in a recession if not depressionthat one i see being relatively unlikely, more like a slow grind to a halt than crash
>The unemployment from that will then likely cause at least a small GFC as people can’t afford inflated mortgages.unemployment is already rising fast and steadily, the most efficient way to rid unemployment is implementing conscription, which they are trying to do, whether it'll work or not is a different question
>>2503523Those estimates are by finance analysts who work for companies all balls deep in AI. They have to acknowledge reality to remain credible but they push out the time line to not be blamed for calling it early.
Most US and Western economic indicators are dogshit and the more Trump tries to fudge stats the quicker he’ll panic the market.
The Trump regime can only be “stable” through constant action. So they’ll attack Iran and/or Venezuela and threaten long term partners and implement more stupid tariffs. People like you want to believe there is still a professional deep state that will regulate him. The reality is the plan is chaos and looting at best, if not an attempt to collapse liberal democracy into fascism.
>>2503561At the end of the day, unfortunately, we're at the mercy of Xi and whoever succeeds him, mainly because Xi has turned out to be the least jackass option of all the world leaders and because China is the least evil of all major powers. Hey, they might even realize higher level communism.
But the fundamental viability for revolution has always been dependent on elite dissention, class traitors (remember who Marx and Engels really were, petite and haute), and security force defection. The situation has to get really bad before the mass bloodshed of revolution and civil war becomes thinkable; rear guardists in the global North should prepare for degeneration, more active individuals should try to figure out how to get rich up north then move south with the cash, or just straightaway move south.
But revolution, as always, is mostly a young person's game, because it'll be decades before the actual revolutionary conditions arrive. By which time, for all you know, Beijing might have achieved FALC and just bribed off the capitalists to stand down instead of being immiserated or killed.
>>2503577Trump's deal is that he constantly stress tests the market in situations of relative growth. The S&P 500 is like P/E 30 (it'll drop soon due to shutdown), but Trump keeps on pulling shit out of his ass to drive volatility to prolong the bubble by subtly deflating it. But eventually, Trump screws up, as he did in 2020, and the thing comes crashing down.
I expect 2028 or 2029, which is why I also expect the Ukraine war to end around the same time. Sloviansk-Kramatorsk in Russian hands, maybe an attack on Kharkiv from the south, and real and substantial war fatigue in Ukraine. 20-25 million Ukrainians who haven't died or relocated left in Kyiv-held territory.
>>2502142>He does have a point about you leaning on Mercouris and also in my opinion Mearsheimer, like does your autism lead you to think because those surnames begin with "M" that it's automatically Marxist analysisI value realists and Westerners self criticizing
>>2502145>The cause of war is russia invading ukraine, simple asThe cause is regression in the imperialist countries that cannibalized bourgeois democracy under globalization. Russia is a mere deflection from this. The war with Russia is one with the American slide into a plutocratic police state leading an international system tightly controlling member stations, as seen lately in Moldova, and dictating to emergent countries outside of it. The regression was seen with the 2014 coup and 2021 NATOization of Ukraine, which demonstrated intent to achieve security of a militarized Europe at the expense of Ukraine's Russians in Crimea and Donbass. Russia sought to freeze the conflict including until the very end, when it was forced to partially mobilize and abandon Europe.
The US drove the crisis with its division of the world that subjected Ukraine's Russians to a hostile dictatorship targeting them as the obstacle to national revision. Don't base liberal democratic global power on reactionary foundations like ethnic supremacy and national division of a former socialist union and this won't happen. Putin demonstrated repeated willingness to work with liberalism where it manifested diplomatically in Obama and Merkel. Now he's just rubbing your face in the war you wanted with Russia all along by destroying the AFU.
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