FunkyStuff [he/him]

Jakarta Method

We find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this net-appropriated labour was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level. This appropriation roughly doubles the labour that is available for Northern consumption but drains the South of productive capacity that could be used instead for local human needs and development. Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by systematic wage inequalities. We find Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49687-y

If your political program isn’t based on getting the power to stop imperialism, you’re not only complicit, but are stepping on a rake because the methods of imperialism will inevitably come bouncing back to exploit workers in the core.

There’s gonna be things that can be attended by direct action (union organizing, literacy, breakfast program, that kind of thing) and things that can’t. I think what leftist leaders should do about the things that can only be tackled by national reform is to encourage people to vote for the progressive democrats where it makes sense; worst case, they lose and we learn nothing, but best case they win and when everyone sees them fail to change anything, it makes it a lot easier to sell people on further revolutionary action.

The buregoise are a plague a systematic plague and you help them by having a class war that they become desperate to win.

These were your words from the previous comment. Are you against class war or not?

And when I say there’s no beneficial policy I mean you won’t ever get lasting reforms by electing better politicians, you’ll just get temporary concessions that will be taken away the next time there’s a crisis. I think looking at the fall of European social democracy since the dissolution of the USSR should prove my point: European workers opted for just getting “beneficial policy” instead of revolution, and now the benefits are gone.

I am cringe, but I am free.

Ok, first of all you clearly know a lot about this than I do and I would love to learn more, where do you find information related to socialism and socialist nations? Obviously I cannot expect to learn all of this from you.

I learned a lot of the history from Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds and Vijay Prashad’s Darker Nations. You don’t have to read the entire books, they have lots of lectures on YouTube. Here’s Parenti’s Yellow Lecture.

You can also could read China Has Billionaires, it’s a good essay that explains why China is the way it is and why socialists should understand it.

First of all many European nations such as Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands have a progressive multi party system which prioritize good urban planning and privacy laws (the latter I am not 100% sure about but believe to be true) And the European union as a whole regularly enforce regulations ensuring fare practices among big companies such as recently they enforced apple to require side loading and meta to remove the consent or pay advertising model. As well as when apple was required to use usb-c on there iphones. This is just my limited knowledge so feel free to prove me wrong and two examples may not be enough evidence.

Those are good things, but they’re really just regulations. The urban planning is clearly miles ahead of NA, but it’s still comparable to Japan and we could probably all agree Japan is not a socialist country.

The main difference between those countries and a socialist country like Cuba or China is that in Europe, owners of industry, financiers, real estate moguls, and other capitalists have a lot of influence and political power as a function of the capital they own. They move the capital around to where it will make them more money. They will move capital across borders to colonies and neocolonies where labor and resources are cheap. The state responds to their needs.

Meanwhile, in socialist countries, the state takes the capital under its democratic control. In China, for example, the state is growing its control of private companies and steadily implementing more measures to reduce the power of their capitalists. Even when Deng liberalized their economy a great deal, they never stopped regulating the flow of capital, still having strict controls on investments.

“absolute power corrupts absolutely” and therefore find it difficult to believe that any dictator can be better than a democracy.

I think there’s 2 levels to this quote. First, how could power be held non-absolutely? Through a constitutional republic with a balance of powers where each branch of government keeps the others in check? What Marx shows us is that, make the political system how you will, if the state remains a bourgeois state the ruling class will keep using political power to protect the interests of capital. There is no way around that, all regulations will be stripped away as the rate of profit falls and the capitalists go hungry. They’ll descend into fascism if their profits are threatened enough. So ask yourself, doesn’t capital already hold absolute power?

Secondly, if I take it at face value that the way a state is organized makes a big difference and it matters how much control any given individual has (which I think is true, even though it kinda contradicts the previous point that all power is class power) that’s still not a reason to say European and North American democracies are less dictatorial than any socialist democracy. Check the link I put in my first comment to see how China’s system works. The USSR had a similar system with soviets making up the democratic structure, with democratic power over each workplace and each community, which would go up in levels up to the CCCP. People think that these countries aren’t democratic because they’re one party states, but the truth is that they just make their limitations on what ideologies are not allowed to take control explicit, instead of implicit like they are in the liberal democracies.

What are you talking about? The “peaceful” status quo is already a class war. Capitalism is devouring the planet by creating conditions that will inevitably displace hundreds of millions of people as ecosystems collapse over the next ~20 years. I don’t even want to imagine how many people are going to die of starvation, heat stroke, or gunned down at the borders by the fascist stormtroopers. That is a level of violence that no socialist state has ever unleashed on the world, not even in WW2. There is no “beneficial policy.” Capital only responds to profit, that’s why workers strike instead of appealing to the good nature of their employers. Don’t you think the same applies to the whole system? The capitalists, executives of energy companies for example, have known they were destroying the world for decades. In the early 2000s they were writing letters to the Bush admin asking the government to put stronger regulations on them, because capital is entirely incapable of stopping itself from the race to the bottom, to make the most profit possible out of the exploitation of labor and natural resources. You should seriously consider how possible it is to stop these processes without revolution.

China is a mass surveillance state which doesn’t protect any of the citizens rights for privacy and has lacklustre working environments

It is a mass surveillance state, but it’s definitely not any more mass surveillance than any developed country. Maybe one important difference is that in China the government has fewer restrictions for how they will spy on you, but in the US for example the NSA will do blatantly illegal things that aren’t even allowed under the Patriot Act and no one can do anything about it, so the extent to which surveillance is legal or not is irrelevant IMO. I would understand your criticism if China was actually a very repressive country where dissent wasn’t allowed and a huge portion of the population was jailed, but I think the quick response to the anti-lockdown protests and the fact they jail far fewer people than the US (while having 4x the population) means that it’s not a very reasonable criticism. Especially not when you consider the Western countries built up their stability while exploiting others, and China had to go through a hard process of occupation, civil war, and then many mistakes during the Cultural Revolution which still breed resentment at the state, even if things have gotten better.

As for the working environments, you’ll always see the worst of the worst in negative coverage of China (the suicide nets in Foxconn factories, for example, which to my knowledge have been debunked). Still, it is undeniable that China has had pretty bad working conditions. I think the key element to understand why working conditions are poor, yet more than 80% of Chinese people approve of their government, is that Chinese people understand that their government is committed to improving things and they consistently see those improvements. They also have a much more responsive political system that listens to their individual concerns very well, so whatever problems they have are more likely to be dealt with than if they had a situation in a western liberal democracy, where you write a letter to your representative and your representative has been paid off by 3 different lobby groups to ignore your concerns.

Cuba is stuck with a poor economy, but I guess that’s all developing nations so i don’t know much other than that.

That’s a huge understatement. Cuba faces a horrible, economy-stifling blockade from the US that essentially shuts them off from the entire global economy because they can’t access the global banking system or buy a huge number of basic goods. Despite that, they’re a global leader in medicine, have a far better education system than the US at all levels, have sent revolutionaries to assist in decolonizing countries in Africa, and were leaders of the NAM.

And I don’t know much about Laos or Burkina fasso.

Laos is honestly quite similar to Vietnam.

Burkina Fasso had a very successful few years of developing infrastructure and improving living conditions for the people under Sankara. It’s a very tragic story because he was assassinated and replaced by a regime that reversed much of the good he had accomplished. Nowadays, Ibrahim Traore is essentially just playing it back with many of the same ideas Sankara had, and he has been massively popular and successful for it (look no further than the fact his security team have had to stop many assassination attempts already, much like Castro).

To be clear I do consider myself a leftist and anti capitalist but I don’t believe there have been many properly successful socialist nations outside of Europe really.

What has been successful in Europe? Yugoslavia and the Warsaw Pact countries were great, but could only exist because of the pressure of the USSR on the capitalist bloc. All the social democracies are only social democracies, they have never put the workers in charge of their own destiny and are therefore not socialist at all.

The obvious one is China. But if you wanna learn a little something, read about Sankara. If you want a whole book of histories of the third world national liberation and socialist movements, read The Darker Nations by Vijay Prashad.

Wait lol you’re a MAGA account but you accidentally came to the right conclusion? JDPON Don does it again.

What do you call Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, the former Burkina Fasso under Sankara, or the former USSR? Do you sincerely believe those countries had a better standard of living for all people, especially workers and peasants, under capitalism? Isn’t the great fall from grace of the USSR proof that the benefits their people had received were indeed the fruits of socialism and not the “rising tide” of global capitalist development (which was actually exacerbating poverty in the global South outside of the socialist countries)?

Welcome!

First thing I’d recommend: we are clearly not the first people to ask that question. There have been generations of radicals who spent their lives combatting capitalism with different strategies and tactics. Some of them were kind enough to write them down, the least we can do is pay them back by reading what they had to say with an open (but critical) mind.

I’d recommend starting with Socialism: Utopian and Scientifi. There were many socialists in the 19th century with various theories about how they could triumph over capitalism. Some thought it would come easily, they naturally just had to appeal to workers’ interests and the workers would take it from there. They were wrong (see: Paris Commune). The movement away from capitalism is an enormous task and it requires us to be fully aware of its scale if we are serious about accomplishing it. Marx and Engels are widely acknowledged to be the thinkers who properly assessed the enormity of the task, and whose theories have proven most useful for those who wanted systemic change.

As to what I think you should do in the real world: join an organization. Anything is (probably) better than nothing. The US has the PSL, other countries have lots of different movements and parties. If your org is more concerned with infighting than mutual aid, you’re better off going to something else (hell, you might get farther in helping people with a church than a sectarian org).

Why? What’s your wisdom you’d like to share with us socialists outside of the imperialist countries?

There are two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There’s myriad bourgeois ideologies and myriad proletarian ideologies. When the proletarians come to power, the bourgeoisie oppose their ideology and their state. That’s true of third world communist projects.

There is only one real user here. Everyone else (including myself) is a bot.

Why is the Stasi, a state organ responsible for countering all the fascist groups the US was still backing, comparable to the state organs of the Nazi Germany that the communists were intent on destroying?

Egalitarian and materialist ethics, shared burdens civic for shared burdens living standard for everyone. Usually when I play Stellaris I aim to free all slaves galaxy wide.