One of the weird quirks of capitalism: doing good things that help people generally attracts more workers (since most people are empathetic and want to do good things), and the labor market then places downward pressure on wages and other benefits. Of course, this does have benefits in that we can then enjoy a larger quantity of cheap coffee, music, charity, etc. but I feel there’s got to be a better way. Especially since the inverse is true. Doing wicked things the system requires but most humans hate then demands a wage premium because fewer people are willing to do them.

Is there a way we prevent it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy though? My concern is that armed groups are more likely to escalate things, foment conflict, scare moderates into supporting the fascists, and give them propaganda tools to justify crackdowns. The similarity to 1930’s Germany rings true but doesn’t imply any specific solution. See the Reichstag fire for resistance that played into fascist hands.

I’m open to this hedge your bets argument but for it to make sense the benefit needs to be bigger and more likely than the cost. I’m not sure I see that yet. And I have a natural skepticism of violence because many people get carried along with it even when in retrospect it was unhelpful or even harmful.

My concern with this is if you spend all your days practicing hammer swings pretty soon you start to think every problem is a nail.

I am personally very skeptical that the most effective resistance to a possible Trump presidency will involve guns. There are 1000 tactics to try before that that have a much more proven history of effectiveness. Politics is ultimately about persuasion. It only becomes about killing your enemy once you’ve failed at that.

I tried to approach this as objectively as possible but you are correct that I’m speculating as far as intentions here. But several Israeli politicians have made statements supportive of ethnic cleansing, and the broader strategy from their side seems in line with this goal. As far as Hamas, I admit to being more uncertain about their motivations but their original charter and some Oct 7th actions seem in line with a desire for ethnic cleansing.

But I am curious: what do you think Hamas’s end goal is?

I think differences in prisoner treatment (if real—I have not investigated this and there is much propaganda out there currently) are attributable to differences in bargaining position, and not differences in ideology. The prisoners held by Hamas are important bargaining chips so that is why they may not be mistreated. Prisoners held by the IDF are not as important to the Israeli strategy due to their greater force of arms.

My view is that the armed forces on both sides are controlled by far-right ethnonationalists that in their dream world would like to kill or expel everyone who does not belong to their ethnic/religious group. Views within the wider populace vary but there has not been much organized opposition to this goal.

The biggest difference is that Israel has a much greater ability to enact this vision of ethnic cleansing.

Removed by mod

This isn’t the gotcha that you think. Party and business elites (to the extent that these two groups are even distinct—in many cases there are overlapping members) cooperate to maintain control over the economy and political system at the expense of working Chinese. In recent years, Xi Jinping’s tightened grip on power has involved the elimination of some rivals from the ruling class, but he has not changed its overall structure, merely eliminating those deemed threatening and replacing them with allies. But we’ve seen many examples of countries where totalitarian dictatorships coexist with capitalism. Though the capitalists often have more power collectively, as long as they are allowed control of the economy and fabulous wealth, it’s not worth the risk of resisting the president, Führer, chairman, or whatever he wants to call himself.

I’m familiar with and agree with these criticisms of republican democracy in the West. But what you don’t seem to understand is that the situation in China is not materially different. In fact, the idea that China is socialist is actually also Western propaganda—and very successful propaganda at that. Most informed people can see that China is not a good place to live for ordinary people, and by labeling this system socialism, it confuses people into believing that socialism is a bad economic system. This is a big reason we have not had a real socialist movement for the past 100 years. The west was able to successfully associate the term with unpopular totalitarian governments, even though they never allowed any kind of real worker control or autonomy. For example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mVh75ylAUXY. These films were effective because people could see that workers under Stalin or Mao did not have appreciably more control over their own lives or prosperity than workers in the US.

But I am interested in your claim that Chinese workers have more of a voice than we do in the west. Others have merely attempted to assert China is definitionally socialist or distract with irrelevant and cherry-picked economic statistics. Can you substantiate this claim? In my view this is the heart of our disagreement. From where I am I do not see much to suggest that Chinese workers have any say at all in political or economic decision-making but if that is incorrect there must be evidence.

While I appreciate you going through the trouble of finding this, it kind of misses the point. Have you read this book? Is it an honest examination of the Chinese economic system? Is it acknowledged by the wider community (and not just Leninist and Chinese apologists) to be a serious work that is based on reality and not propaganda? I don’t have enough faith in the other user to read something this long solely on their recommendation.

Funny because I was going to say the same thing. Keep on believing imperialist propaganda, I’m sure communism will arrive any day now. Just need to force capitalism on a few more generations.

I’m not slandering you, just expressing skepticism at your own interest in constructive conversation and explaining why I don’t value your book recommendation very highly.

As to the rest of this, it is again much too long to read in its entirety but it seems to come down to the same economic growth metrics that are used to justify neoliberal economics in every country. Yes, a small fraction of the wealth falls down to the poor and by some metrics this leaves them better off. This is not socialism in Western countries and it is not socialism in China. In fact, these are the same reasons people supported far right politicians like Trump or Hitler. If we concentrate power in the hands of the people who know better, they will grow the whole economy and we will all get richer, right? It doesn’t matter if the ruling class seizes most of the wealth and power, now you can buy two toys for your kids instead of one!

The global definition of poverty is an especially misleading metric since it doesn’t actually measure people’s material conditions, just “dollars per day” which is often only tangentially related to actual well-being. See this paper for more information: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169

Notably:

The results of this method demonstrate there is often a significant divergence between the poverty rate as defined by the World Bank’s $1.90 method and the BNPL. Consider the case of China, for example. According to the $1.90 method, the poverty rate in China fell from 66% in 1990 to 19% in 2005, suggesting capitalist reforms delivered dramatic improvements (World Bank 2021). However, if we instead measure incomes against the BNPL, we find poverty increased during this period, from 0.2% in 1990 (one of the lowest figures in the world) to 24% in 2005, with a peak of 68% in 1995 (data from Moatsos, 2021).3 This reflects an increase in the relative price of food as China’s socialist provisioning systems were dismantled (Li, 2016). It is likely that something similar occurred across the global South during the 19th century, as colonial interventions undermined communal provisioning systems. As a result, the $1.90 PPP line likely reflects a changing standard of welfare during the period that the Ravallion/Pinker graph refers to.

But even if conditions did improve during some periods, none of this means there isn’t a better economic system, nor does it make any country where conditions improve socialist. There have been periods of economic improvement in many capitalist countries, partly because pure capitalism is extremely difficult to implement and maintain, so most capitalist countries do allow for some socialist practices to exist. Again, socialism means proletarian control of the means of production, something that no one in these conversations has even attempted to argue is happening in China. Workers in China, like workers in all capitalist countries, have very little say over their own working conditions and economic decision making. This is extremely obvious from the fact that corporate structures in China are very similar to elsewhere in the world; a structure that is incompatible with socialism.

It’s funny because this term kind of underlines how ridiculous the claim is. Would we feel the need to stress the fact that socialism Actually Exists every single time we even refer to it if there really were prominent and obvious examples of it?

I watched about half of that video but it really made no attempt to justify the designation of these far-right governments as socialist. Similar to others in this thread, it’s just asserted and then any attempt to question this assertion is dismissed as “imperialist propaganda”. This despite the fact that imperialist propaganda is exactly why people falsely believe China is socialist. So that the West can point to all of the obvious problems and say “See?! Socialism is bad actually! Please don’t read about meant before the Cold War!” This propaganda has been extremely effective and is why there hasn’t been much of a socialist movement in the West since before WWII.

I’m not spending 25 dollars to win an internet argument but I would consider reading it if you have a free way. But from my experience debating you previously, you have a tendency to post sources that do not support your claims at all, and often contradict them.

China is following the essentially the same development path as other capitalist countries so I’m not sure what you mean by this. In recent years it has become increasingly nationalistic, imperialist, expansionist, and staggering wealth inequality continues to develop and entrench. Barring a real bottom-up movement for equality I expect these types of governments to gradually slide towards fascism.

Isn’t it though? If the goal of China’s economic policy is to avoid the accumulation of capital, they are failing miserably. China has more billionaires and more economic inequality than almost any country on earth—including classic capitalist countries like the US.

Even if we agree to disagree on whether China is capitalist, it just doesn’t resemble socialism in its original conception in any way. Working people have no control over industry or the government, and both exercise repressive controls on any movement towards such a system. Recent reforms have moved things further in that direction by enabling loyal party capitalists to accumulate huge amounts of wealth at the expense of workers, and as Xi Jinping continues to strengthen his control of the state apparatus. It’s hard to see how this will lead to socialism unless you are an accelerationist.

Well, feel free to suggest a term you think fits better, but I think it fits, even if it is clearly a different flavor of capitalism than the US or other similar economies.

The point is that socialism means the economy is managed by and for the benefit of workers and ordinary people. In all major imperialist countries like the US, China, and the Soviet Union, the economy is managed by and for the ruling elite, whether that may be private owners as in the US, party leadership as in the Soviet system, or a blend of these two as in modern China. That is why I feel they are similar and belong in similar categories, despite some differences.

This will be downvoted by some of the authoritarians who dominate this sub but China is not a socialist country. It is state capitalist. Maybe this will help you understand why it is not a good place to live unless you belong to the upper echelons of society. It’s not so different from the US, despite all the propaganda to convince people otherwise.

Actually you could argue that many Western countries are closer to socialism because they have stronger unions. Not that that makes them socialist on their own but it is at least in line with socialist ideals.

It is truly despicable that as the rest of global society wrestles with the monumental task of moving away from fossil fuels our tax dollars are funding research to make the problem dramatically worse. I was perturbed enough when I heard the private sector was trying to bring this failed technology back. These researchers should be ashamed of themselves.

The issue is that the sovereignty of nation states is a somewhat nonsensical idea that has little to no solid philosophical backing. Nations aren’t living things and shouldn’t have rights in the same way people have. They are imaginary constructs, and the consequences of this are inevitable debates over what is or is not a nation. But there is no clear dividing line or definition—and in this ambiguity, powerful nations are free to recognize or ignore nations as they choose.

If you support the US action, you can claim that the Houthis are not a sovereign nation, the action was at the invitation of the legitimate government of this region against an terrorist organization, and was entirely legal and justified.

If you oppose the action, you claim that Houthis are a group of freedom fighters who have established a new separate nation that should be recognized, and this action was an illegal violation of that newfound sovereignty.

Neither can be said to be completely correct or incorrect because there is no solid basis for this idea of sovereignty.

I understand the logic in this case but I still think congress should have more oversight of US military force. If the entire body is too cumbersome to react quickly, surely a delegated committee could be formed that can approve or deny actions quickly. The danger of having that power unilaterally available to the president is too great.

What’s the argument that it’s a good idea? That congress is dysfunctional and can’t respond to urgent threats in a timely manner?

I’m not saying the US are the good guys but I don’t think the legal prohibition on force applies to this strike because of the antecedent conditions.