freagle

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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

Isn't there someone you forgot to ask.
:xi:

Lol. Lmao even

Let's fucking goooooooo!

Will be given access, right? No way they would give access during this epic spat

Unfortunately the material reality of what exists inside the skulls of the proletariat in the US is anything but liberatory. If we saw a flash point this year, the left is far too small in organized numbers to be the winners. We would end up with an Idiocracy where the most unhinged gun slingers would take control and execute an uncontrolled rage-induced reign of terror.

we need to stay the course

Sunk cost fallacy. The trade war is a collossal mistake on the part of the US. It can accomplish nothing. Trump's entire strategy was based on the idea of tarrifs being more undesirable for his opponents than for him. He was wrong.

China is not worried if the US issues a full embargo on Chinese exports to the USA. China's focus is on the rest of the world when it comes to trade and it's only focus on the US is worrying about US military adventures that it needs to defend against.

As for Hong Kong, you mean the city that England stole from China when they devastated them after getting half their people addicted to opium because it was the only thing the English could figure out how to sell? You mean the city that was run as an oppressive colony by brutal British governors until they realized they were finally going to have to give the city back and then decided to do a complete propaganda/indoctrination move, enrich token Hong Kongers, "enhance" the already existing indoctrination in schools that worshipped British "civilization" and propagandized their captive audience to fear and loathe their own countrymen? That Hong Kong situation that China has successfully worked through so far in a processes of integration, deradicalization, and respect? That situation? Where the protests in Hong Kong saw protestors throwing fire bombs at police force weeks on end but never escalated into a police riot like what happens in the US? That situation?

So confident in the IP regime of the US military

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.

Did someone say "Kafkaesque" to trump? Pearls before swine