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volodya_ilich

@volodya_ilich@lemm.ee

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volodya_ilich ,

Your comment portrays a lack of reading of Marxist literature. Lenin, as far back as 1916, talks about this surplus being reallocated to workers through political pressure. He describes the leftists who pursue this as "opportunist socialists", and explains why this is only possible in imperialist countries which exploit the resources and labor of other countries. It's why basically all socialist revolutions have taken place in less developed countries, whether it be democratically like Chile under Allende or Spain and its second republic and Iran under Mosaddegh, or a coup as happened in Libya, or a bloody revolution as in the USSR or Cuba.

volodya_ilich ,

This isn't good historical analysis. The feudal class society, with its aristocracy, church and peasants, was highly rigid in terms of class mobility. Peasants stayed peasants and aristocrats stayed aristocrats. The current dominant class, the capitalist owners, exert their power not by god-given rights over the population, but by legal control of the means of production. The current exploited class, the workers, aren't tied to a lord anymore and pay tributes in kind on exchange for land and protection, but instead are "free" to work where they want for a payment in cash, and unable for the most part to have ownership of the means of production they themselves work.

Kings have disappeared, classes in society haven't

volodya_ilich ,

That's why there's been an entire century of revision to that model to incorporate more democratic forward values

How is a representative election every 4 years in a system where mass media are owned by the capitalist class more democratic than the ideas of Marx? The Soviet Union started out as the name implies, as a union of republics in which soviets, or worker councils, had the decision power. The fact that international interference and civil war (such as 14 countries invading the USSR militarily and many more sponsoring the tsarist loyalists or the anti-revolutionary Mensheviks) didn't allow for a high degree of work democracy without extreme risk to the stability or the country, has more to do with the material and historical conditions of the USSR than it has to do with the ideas of Marx and Lenin.

volodya_ilich , (edited )

They've described the opposite. A collective, grassroots, democratic institution in which people can freely discuss their thoughts and political opinions and direct the policy of their country in that way, is less reminiscent of top-down political parties with representatives voted every 4 years as in liberal democracy, and more reminiscent of worker democracy or direct democracy as anarchists or communists defend.

volodya_ilich ,

The only thing stopping people from ending the system is lacking the knowledge that they should end it, and lacking the knowledge that they can collectively end it. Pushing for hope towards the end of the system is positive

volodya_ilich ,

You can always move to Senegal and enjoy capitalism!

volodya_ilich ,

I don't consider Capitalism as having anything to do with governance

Then you don't know what capitalism is because you haven't cared to educate yourself about it.

Capitalism is a market system

No, it's not, it's a social system which defines class relations, and markets are only part of it. There were markets in late feudalism but there was no capitalism. Markets are a necessary condition for capitalism, but not the only one.

Capitalism is the system where the means of production are owned by private individuals called bourgeoisie or capitalists, and they're worked on exchange for a wage worth less than what they produce by other private individuals called workers or proletariat. The class relations are by means of legal and theoretically voluntary contracts enforced by a government, as opposed to, for example, the god-given right of a king to put his peasants to work during feudalism.

that uses competition to drive efficiency of creation of satisfaction of needs and luxuries both

It doesn't "use" competition, competition is sometimes a condition, but capitalism works actively against competition. Free markets and competition initially mean that some companies will fare better than others, and of those which fare better, some will invest more in increasing their productive capabilities and their efficiency, through technological means and through economy of scale. The foundation of capitalism is that capital has to revalorize itself, which is equivalent to saying bigger companies will necessarily either become bigger or die. This ends up in monopolies, oligopolies, trusts and cartels, as we see in the case of Google, Amazon, Walmart, car manufacturing, computing, or basically every single sector of the economy at this point.

If your democratic system of laws is being leveraged by highly efficient non-state entities

It is, because they can lobby politicians and corrupt them, and because the media are owned by these powerful owners of capital.

then you should really fix that shit, but fixing it doesn't require abolishing private property

Ok, any other historical solutions that have worked? Progressive democratic movements such as Salvador Allende in Chile, or the Spanish second republic, or the Iranian secular progressive government of Mosaddegh (I could go on for 500 lines citing examples but you get the point), were historically ended by fascism when the owners of the means of production see that their profits are going to diminish in favour of the majority. More recent examples are the lawfare cases against Lula da Silva in Brazil, or against Podemos in Spain, or the coup in Bolivia against Evo Morales. Can you propose a realistic and historically proven method of preventing this from happening other than workers organizing (as socialists defend) and leftists taking control of the institutions?

nor would that end corruption.

Nobody claims it would end corruption, the fight against corruption is permanent, and the best ways to deal with it are the highest possible degrees of transparency and democracy. Private companies aren't democratic by their nature, and aren't required to be transparent. In fact corruption in most cases isn't even defined in private companies. Nepotism isn't a crime, it's my company I'll hire whomever I want. I need a renovation in my building, I'll pay my friend to do it even if it's more expensive because I owe him a favour, it's my company. So yeah, can't have corruption when it's legal right?

volodya_ilich ,

I want to abolish private property, as in "private ownership of the means of production". I don't want to abolish personal property such as your house or your toothbrush, neither does anyone, which is proven by the home ownership rates in communist or post-communist countries hovering or being above 90%, compared to the sad 50% of Germany and slightly higher values in the US or UK.

volodya_ilich ,

the point of capitalism is to make it so that there's no longer a reason to have profit.

That's gotta be the stupidest take I've seen in the whole 28 days I've been in Lemmy, congratulations. The whole point of capitalism is the revalorization of capital, i.e., a capitalist owner having $1mn, and investing it into a company or finance or housing to turn it into more than $1mn. In what universe is the objective of capitalism to eliminate profit?????? It's the polar opposite...

volodya_ilich ,

If you don't open or shift the overton window, no change is possible.

volodya_ilich ,

Accepting the existence of class mobility doesn't imply freedom. Freedom to exploit your fellow workers and become a class traitor isn't freedom. It's just a fact that social mobility has increased significantly

volodya_ilich ,

I'm fully aware, I never said workers are free under capitalism

volodya_ilich ,

profit margins will continue to get thinner and thinner as competition increases

Competition doesn't increase under capitalism, it decreases as a consequence of economy of scale, consolidation of markets, corruption and many other reasons. Tell me how competition fosters when Amazon, Google, Walmart, Apple, Uber and the rest of big firms control all their respective markets.

Your second paragraph is a senseless utopian dream not based on reality, I won't even bother arguing against it.

volodya_ilich ,

do you know why?
Because we are fucking assholes; corruption, nepotism and populism would still run rampant and we (mexicans in general) would still enable them

I understand you're probably Mexican, but you're just being racist towards Mexican people. There's nothing inherent about Mexican people that makes them corruptible, tolerant to corruption, or assholes, or nepotists. The reality is Mexico is part of the global south, and so the global north basically forces it to adopt free trade agreements which allow companies from the global north to open factories and businesses there with misery wages and bad working conditions, and to export these goods and services to the global north at much reduced prices. This perpetuates a cycle in which the labor of the global north is consistently priced much higher than that of the global south, and there's a wealth extraction called "unequal exchange".

In the meanwhile, every effort is made so that there's no labor organization in the exploited country, and that elected leaders don't apply protectionism or even nationalizations.

So yes, it's fair to blame the US and the rest of the global north for the lack of development of most regions in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

volodya_ilich ,

I seriously recommend you to read about imperialism. Imperialist nations (i.e. late stage capitalistic, industrialized nations, with sufficient accumulation of capital and sufficient development of monopolies, trusts and cartels, to the point of the most profitable action being the export of capital to other, poorer nations, with or without the consent of the locals), clash with each other in these attempts to expand their sphere of influence. This happened in WW1, WW2, and we're seeing it again with the Russian-NATO conflict which led to the Ukraine invasion.

volodya_ilich ,

It's so funny to me as a European that, to explain evil to US citizens, all you need to do is to swap "US" for "Russia" and suddenly everyone understands

volodya_ilich ,

if the orange idiot succeeds in dismantling NATO and imposing sanctions on US trade, China will def be the new leading superpower.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not particularly fond of the Chinese government, but it's HARD for them to become worse than the US in terms of international policy, destabilizing progressive countries, and outright promoting coups against leftist governments. China has no Vietnam carpet bombing history, no Chile or Iran coup support history, no banana-republic support history... If China were to become the new leading superpower, there is definitely much more hope for renewed strength in leftist movements around the globe compared to the current state of affairs

volodya_ilich ,

China doesn't have an active genocide against Uyghur unless you're willing to argue that the US has an active genocide against black people, if you want to compare any metric.

China isn't threatening Taiwan, Taiwan is recognized as a part of China by the US and basically all of the international community since decades ago. What Taiwan has are US bases. Imagine if China had military bases in Cuba and routinely had navy maneuvers between the island and Florida.

The US has no more semblance of democracy than China again by any metric, the decisions made by the US government don't correlate with the will of the overwhelming majority, and quite literally yesterday the supreme court ruled absolute immunity for the president in all official acts. The farce of the two-party system isn't convincing anyone anymore, and it may very well stop existing altogether if one of the two parties wins the elections.

China has no comparable history of violence, oppression, colonization and destabilization as the US does, and saying otherwise is purely and simply American exceptionalism. The examples are endless. Afghanistan, Iran, Vietnam, Korea, Bolivia, Chile, Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, Guatemala, Philippines, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela... China simply doesn't even come close to the level of destabilization, dictarorship, misery and death imposed by the US in third countries.

volodya_ilich , (edited )

Primarily the Russian government's fault, but of course NATO is partly at fault. Belonging to NATO isn't a human right, and the expansion of NATO further east than Germany shouldn't have taken place. If European countries wanted a military alliance, they should have made their own. I don't believe I need to preface every comment saying "I wholeheartedly condemn the actions of the fascist Russian government in Ukraine", which I do, as much as I don't preface my comment saying "I wholeheartedly condemn the actions of NATO in Iraq", which I also do.

volodya_ilich ,

As I said, I know they willfully joined, I'm saying they shouldn't be allowed to join a military alliance with NATO, the same way I would want China not to create a military alliance and then incorporate Mexico and Canada, even if Mexico and Canada wanted to. Joining a military alliance isn't a human right.

volodya_ilich ,

Actually that is a human right

Source?

Countries are free to ally with whatever country they want pending any previous agreements

Free to do so, for sure, I'm not claiming illegality, I'm claiming it's wrong. It leads historically to escalation, not to mitigation of tensions. Remember the missile crisis

Eastern European countries made zero promises and had zero obligation to not join NATO

Again, you're not understanding me for some reason. I'm not putting the blame on those countries, I'm putting the blame on NATO itself. It's not that these countries shouldn't want to join a pre-existing military alliance, it's that a supposedly defensive military alliance shouldn't incorporate member countries ever closer to the declared enemy of the US of A.

I wouldn't have a problem with Mexico or Canada willfully joining an alliance with China

I would have immense problems with China fostering military relations with the neighbouring countries of their geopolitical adversary, and if you don't, I think you should rethink that.

Maybe if Russia wasn't such a shitty, untrustworthy neighbor, more countries would be willing to ally with them

I don't want any countries to ally militarily with Russia. I fully understand that Russia has a fascist aggressive government and I'm glad I don't currently live next to it as a Spanish citizen. My whole point is that NATO isn't a "purely defensive military alliance of independent countries", it's an organization subservient to the interests of the USA which has shown no remorse to act on foreign countries which didn't threat military action against member states of NATO, as was the case in Libya and Yugoslavia, and unofficially in Iraq.

volodya_ilich ,

"I think we need a balance between the system that wants to oppress workers to maximise profit, and the system which wants workers to control their own lives"

volodya_ilich ,

Protesting what exactly?

Protesting monster trucks becoming the default go-to vehicle to go run an errand or drive to work. You don't need a "child-destroyer-3000: now Electric!" taking 3 lanes of width, weighing 20 tonnes, and occupying 4 parking spots, to go to your bakery or pick up the kids from school.

What exactly is moral about vandalizing these cars?

If certain vehicles end up costing more to manufacture/protect/repaint than the revenue upon sale, the company will stop manufacturing them. Same idea as deflating SUV wheels which are parked on the street: make lives for SUV drivers inconvenient so people won't want an SUV.

Also this notion that protests are only effective if they're disruptive is a myth. If that was the case then the George Floyd Riots would've led somewhere or the pro Palestinian encampments would've led somewhere or all those climate protesters damaging historical monuments and art would've led somewhere or all those animal rights activists blocking streets would've led somewhere... but they haven't. All they've done is lead people to resent them.

"What did the resistance to Nazi occupation by the Polish people lead to? It didn't work, genocide happened anyway, and all they did is making Nazis resent them".

I'm sure you're aware that people engage in challenges they don't know for certain they can achieve, right?

volodya_ilich ,

Communism is when you perpetuate the class relations of your country in an authoritarian manner. Oh wait, or was it backwards...

volodya_ilich ,

Why the need to compare to China though? People can understand that mass surveillance is bad without resorting to "China bad". Go ask Snowdon if China is the mother of all surveillance.

volodya_ilich ,

How am I defending china? I just don't see the need to go "oh look like X country" whenever the EU or the US do something bad. We're plenty bad ourselves

volodya_ilich ,

How's that related to this post

volodya_ilich ,

Again, how is that relevant to EU surveillance

volodya_ilich ,

I bet I'm at least as much of a leftist as you are, but taxes don't pay for public infrastructure. In fact taxes don't pay for anything. In the EU, taxes are paid in Euros, the same currency that the European Central Bank can create at will. Why would the European states need to collect taxes denominated in the currency the EU creates? They don't.

Taxes have many purposes. Most importantly they define the area where a given currency is used (if you tax in a given currency, you force the people to earn it to be able to pay for it). But they also serve to disincentivize certain behaviours (tax on alcohol or tobacco), to remove money from the economy to prevent macroeconomic imbalances (if the state creates too much money without removing enough through taxes, there might be some problems), or simply to reduce inequality by charging more taxes to wealthier people or companies.

This is an important point, because it shifts the framing of taxes from a made up "we all need to contribute" mindset, to a more realistic "ok where do we want to remove money and by how much, what do we want to disincentivize, and how can we reduce inequality". And it also shows that states can pay for things without the need to collect taxes for this, for example we saw this during COVID, when sizeable amounts of money were created to give an impulse to the economy and to the people who temporarily lost their income sources.

volodya_ilich ,

I'm sorry, but that's empirically proven false time and time again. That's not to say we should be creating as much money as possible, but for example I'm an EU citizen. Do you have any idea how much currency was created between 2010 and 2020? Look up any measure of the M2 or M3 monetary aggregate for the EU in that period, and look at the inflation rates for the period.

If you're a US citizen, I beg you take a graph of inflation for the USA since WW2, look at the inflationary periods, and tell me: what happened in those periods? Consistently, inflationary periods have been caused by external events such as oil crises, or wars like the current one in Ukraine, or such phenomena. Money creation is a very poor predictor for inflation

I know the neoliberal dogma has poisoned the public discourse for decades and it seems obvious and common knowledge that money creation leads to inflation. But it really, REALLY, hasn't been historically the case, and this has been proven empirically time and time and time again.

volodya_ilich , (edited )

Sorry but there's absolutely nothing wrong with what I'm saying.

The state is the only issuer of a given currency, for example the US federal reserve is the only issuer of Dollars. If we divide the economy into private sector and public sector, we can talk of taxes as "removing money from the private economy", and of public expenditure as "introducing money in the private economy". Every dollar spent by the state increases the available currency by 1 dollar, and every dollar collected as taxes reduces the available currency by 1 dollar. The state doesn't need a "savings account" since it creates its own currency, so for all intents and purposes, taxation is the destruction of currency and public expenditure is the creation of it.

There's no such thing as "tax money" as you speak of. The state creates currency, it doesn't need to firstly collect dollars that it can create itself. We saw this in the Covid pandemic when states started to spend tremendous amounts of money without collecting it first in taxes, the US government doesn't need dollars, it can create infinite dollars at a few keyboard strokes.

This is not to say that states should start creating arbitrarily big amounts of currency, but if they CAN do so, it begs the question, when should they stop? You mention inflation, but let me ask you, are you SURE that currency creation is the main driver of inflation? The answer is no. We've been poisoned by neoliberalism, we've been told millions of times that "inflation is a monetary phenomenon", and that somehow, markets are omniscient beings with perfect knowledge of currency flow, and they have a dial that they turn up when currency is created and prices grow proportionally as much. But is that really, empirically proven to be true? The answer is absolutely not. In fact, modern empirical studies show that currency creation is a very bad predictor for inflation.

Let's look at the latest inflationary episode for example, in 2022. If we look at the REAL reasons for the inflation, they are

  1. bottlenecks in industry and in supply as a consequence of COVID effects

  2. increasing energy prices and market destabilisation as a consequence of the Ukraine invasion

  3. private companies increasing prices beyond the increase of price of their inputs, riding the wave of inflation to increase their profits

If you look at any inflationary episode in the developed world for the past 80 years, you'll find that inflation has very little to do with money supply, and in fact most times is caused by shortages in supply because of external reasons (oil crises, wars, pandemics...), and not because of excesses of demand as a consequence of currency generation. I'm not suggesting that unlimited currency creation is a good thing, of course it can introduce macroeconomic imbalances. But if evidence shows time and time again that inflation isn't a good measure of this, then how much should we ACTUALLY create? These are the questions that we should be asking, not "but how are we gonna pay for this?".

You also talk about debt. How come Japan, with 250%+ of its GDP in debt, has absolutely no issues? That's because debt isn't a bad thing. First of all, if a state indebts itself in its own currency, it can ALWAYS, by definition, pay it. And it doesn't need to collect taxes for it first. Tomorrow, Japan or the UK or the US, could press 3 buttons on a keyboard at their respective central banks, and perform an early payment of their debt by simply placing the amount of money indebted in the accounts of the owners of that debt. And again, it would NOT need to collect taxes first to do that. But furthermore, debt isn't a bad thing in and out of itself. If public expenditure amounts to putting money into the economy, debt is simply a way to make the private sector more wealthy! Wealth isn't a burden on taxpayers, it's literally the opposite! Many taxpayers own debt from their own country, and they receive an interest from it! "Public expenditure" is literally a synonym of "making the private sector wealthier"!

I seriously encourage you to open your mind about this, and really examine how much of the neoliberal dogma that we've been exposed to for the past 4 decades is really, actually empirically proven to be true. If you want to read more on this "new" way of looking at economics, which matched the empirical data a lot better and offers some interesting new points of view, it's called "Modern Monetary Theory" (MMT). Stephanie Kelton recently made a documentary called "finding the money" which introduces some of the concepts, and if you speak Spanish, the economist Eduardo Garzón has a series of videos in his YouTube channel explaining the basics of MMT. For some empirically based critique of neoliberal dogma, although not explicitly MMT, I suggest the English YouTube channel "Unlearning Economics".

Seriously, please consider how much of the neoliberal economics dogma that we've been exposed to, has been proven empirically, please have a look at it.

volodya_ilich ,

What I try to say is that taxes don't pay for public infrastructure directly. The state creates an expenditure budget, and decides which taxes it's gonna charge. The fact that many politicians don't know better and conflate the two, has more to do with ignorance and believing the dogma of neoliberalism, than it has to do with the expenditure of public money and with taxation. Most politicians effectively treat taxes as if they do pay for the public infrastructure, but those concerns suddenly disappear when it comes to rescuing a bank, or to exceeding the military budget, and they remember that states can pay for that stuff without needing to collect that money through taxes in the first place. They even bother to remind us of that when it's the case. In the 2010 Euro crisis, Spain (I'm Spanish) 60bn € in rescuing a set of Spanish banks. Our then economy minister, Luis de Guindos, kindly reminded everyone that "this isn't going to cost a single euro to the taxpayer". So yeah, they only remind us about which stuff "needs" to be paid for taxes when it's actually important, such as healthcare, education or pensions, but they suddenly forget about that requirement when it comes to increasing military budget extraordinarily after budgets were approved, or to rescue a bank.

Your point about hyperinflation is a good one, and remember that I'm not claiming we should start creating infinite money for everyone. In the EU, for example, we have a theoretical budget deficit limit of 3% for many decades now. If you examine the historical reasons for this limit, it comes from a meeting some decades ago in which some higher-ups of the EU met for some hours to decide on a deficit limit, in the full reagan/thatcher period. They came out of the meeting with the number of the 3% limit, and also with the suggested 60% maximum debt as percentage of GDP. The 3% deficit limit was made up on the spot, literally in 30 minutes by a French economist called Guy Abelle, which he has admitted to later in life. The 60% debt was based on a study that compared the health of economies and their percentage of debt... until the study was found many years later to be faulty, because it had significant errors in the spreadsheets used to calculate that number, and upon correcting that there was no suggested number anymore... Look up "Reinhart and Rogoff mistake" on your favourite search engine. So yeah, those rules are absolutely made up and they don't obey any experimental or scientific criteria. That's not to say there shouldn't be a limit to budget, but the conclusion I want to get across is that deficit isn't a bad thing since it amounts to increasing the wealth of the public sector, and the limit of deficit should be calculated or even experimented with based on real, empirical data from real economies, and not what some old neoliberal farts decide in a meeting one evening.

I'll finish with an analysis of a case of hyperinflation, that of Venezuela in the recent years. Venezuela is and has been for the past century an economy based on oil exports. In the year 2014, oil prices were reduced from $130 per barrel, to below half of that. In an economy reliant on oil exports, this meant that Venezuela's purchase power to the outside world suddenly halved, with a corresponding immense drop in GDP. This is what originally led to a high inflation. Now, the price of goods for citizens is so high that they can barely afford them or not afford them completely. As a state with a central bank, you're confronted with two choices: you leave things be, and people literally don't have money to buy their basic needs; or you create money so that people can at least afford them for some time. The response was to create the money to alleviate the harshest consequences. This in turn enables the possibility that people can still buy products that are in shortage, which makes the price even higher, and the cycle restarts. The consequence, as we saw, was hyperinflation. But this hyperinflation wasn't triggered by money creation, it was triggered by an external event, i.e. the drop to half the price of the country's biggest export good and biggest sector of the economy. Of course the government could have decided to let the people starve, and there would have been only huge inflation and not hyperinflation, but is that really a solution? The goal is to prevent hyperinflation, or to minimize human suffering? Javier Milei, for example, seems to be currently on the path to "solve" the inflation problem in Argentina... By making the citizens so poor, that they can't afford to buy the goods and services, so that the businesses can't rise the prices. Sure, inflation goes down, but not by solving the economic underlying problems, and instead by creating immense amounts of suffering so that "the line can finally go down".

I appreciate your willingness to listen, all of this seemed crazy to me just a few years ago, but everything makes so much more sens when analysing the economy from the point of view of modern monetary theory, and the predictive capabilities of the theory are so much better, it's been proven so much during the COVID pandemic and the posterior inflation crisis.

volodya_ilich ,

It benefits NATO countries to curb the expansion of a rival power

"Rival" power is a matter of choice though, isn't it? The EU could as easily have chosen to align with Russia as with they've done with the US. In the same way that both France and Germany are powers but they're not really rival. EU should have gone its own way after 1991, NATO stopped making sense after the communist block was dissolved, and the fact that it kept growing and moving further towards the east in violation of the agreements reached last century, kinda shows that it's not a defensive alliance as much as it is subservience to US's geopolitical interests.

This isn't to say the EU should be aligned to Russia or that the war in Ukraine isn't primarily Putin's fault, or that there shouldn't be a military alliance in Europe, I'm just saying the US shouldn't belong to it, let alone dictate its terms.

volodya_ilich ,

Thing is, a total military defeat of Russia has seemed very unlikely for all the duration of the conflict. It's been ongoing for more than two years, and the only results so far are more Ukrainian territories occupied, and more death and destruction. Peace negotiations should be kept open at all times, and it should be up to Ukrainian people to decide the terms they agree to. Sadly, it has surfaced in an investigation from Foreign Affairs that some western powers like the UK or the US pushed Ukraine to stay in the war, for reasons that we can only speculate about. So, what's the best course of action now?

volodya_ilich ,

While those trains are indeed always late, at least they don't pollute cities the way that ICE (Internal Combustion Engines) do!

volodya_ilich ,

Totally honest question: do you feel this way too about Russian soldiers in Ukraine, or IDF soldiers in Gaza?

volodya_ilich ,

The fact that anyone, let alone LGBTQ+ people, can go to the streets holding a "Lockheed Martin" sign and not get shamed into dropping it, shows we're failing as a society

volodya_ilich ,

Bold of you to assume that there's no cause-effect relation between what Lockheed-Martin execs deem profitable, and whatever policy the US takes. Lobbying is a thing, and the same investors that put money in military conglomerates, put money into lobbying and into media. If you can't see how the existence of powerful capitalist companies that make weapons is detrimental to a democracy, I don't know what to tell you.

What's this bullshit? Now we can't criticise the military conglomerates because "they're just companies doing company things"? Nah fuck that and fuck Lockheed Martin, selling weapons to an imperialist government makes you as bad as the imperialist government.

volodya_ilich ,

"supporting the military conglomerates is just a matter of ideology, don't criticise it pls!" Fuck that lukewarm shit, every exec at Lockheed Martin should be tossed in jail

volodya_ilich ,

But there are employees of the company who apparently support both (and good for them)

God, what the fuck is wrong with you people. "Good for people to be able to both be supportive of LGBTQ+ and support the military industry of an imperialist country like the US!!". Fuck you, honestly

volodya_ilich ,

Our side you mean the side of imperialism and neocolonialism, of the invasion of Iraq, of the bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Korea, and the interventionism in Chile, Libya, Iran (Mosaddegh era), and the support of the banana republics? Fuck that, that's not my side.

volodya_ilich ,

"Corporate shouldn't be criticised for selling weapons to murderous governments because they're just trying to make a profit". What an absolute shit of a take

volodya_ilich ,

If you're not fucking ASHAMED of parading with a Lockheed Martin banner, you're a disgusting human being. Change my mind

volodya_ilich , (edited )

Almost as if, hear me out, I won't praise any private company whose profit motive is making killing easier :0

The INSTITUTIONS of the US in general aren't responsible for the social progress in feminism and LGBTQ+ and racial issues, let alone the military or the industrial complex behind it. It's the people in the US who are behind all of this momentum, despite the institutions fighting against it as we can see with the recent Roe v Wade incident or the oppression of trans rights by republicans. These social victories have been achieved DESPITE the US institutions and the military industrial complex NOT BECAUSE of them.

volodya_ilich ,

Call me crazy, but if you save a granny from getting run over by a car, and the next thing you do is pull out a gun and shoot a pregnant woman in the face, I don't think people are just gonna forget the latter act of violence because of your former act of compassion.

volodya_ilich ,

"sometimes they kill the right people, sometimes they don't, not their fault for producing weapons fully knowing that"

volodya_ilich ,

What's this nonsense? How does reducing military expenditure lead to imprisonment and lynching of queer people? Is the only thing keeping the Military Industrial Complex from murdering queer people giving the former enough money?

volodya_ilich ,

Sure, then I refuse to answer your question

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