1. Rainy, damp, cloudy, windy weather is peak weather and beats a “nice sunny day” 80% of the time.

2. Ice cream is winter food and not summer food because of how fatty it is. Popsicles are summer food and not so appealing in the winter.

3. All countries should be making a 100% effort towards eliminating all meat (except that produced by subsistence farmers and the like) in their diets for the sake of the climate. Poverty is not an excuse because vegetarian diets use many many times less resources (which is why wealthy countries eat much more meat).

4. Large wealthy countries should provide free vitamin supplements worldwide to reduce diseases.

By that logic you could argue that no one should be able to get compensated for their skills in an open marketplace.

I mean, nationalising all industries and creating minimum/maximum wages is a fairly standard left-wing policy template.

What would a music phone look like? I’m not arguing, I’m genuinely asking what features are ‘camera phones’ lacking that could be installed into a ‘music phone’ (but not in a '‘camera phone’)?

Oh, I didn’t even realize this. Thanks.

A number of proposals have been kicked around for decades. There hasniot been the will to implement.

That’s the point. A dictatorship of the bourgeoise will not implement progressive policies unless you fight hard for them. They will however, in the absence of resistance, implement increasingly reactionary policies in a heartbeat.

The overarching goal of communism is for laborers to own the means of production instead of an owning/capitalist class.

No, the overarching goal of communism is to create a stateless, classless and moneyless society.

Employee owned businesses are the realization of communism within a capitalist society.

No. At best, you could say that coops are a proto-socialist element within a capitalist society. Firstly, I am using the term “socialist” as separate from “communist” here, and secondly, a proto-socialist element is a very different thing from an enclave of socialism within a capitalist world.

The simple problem is that capital is capital. A capital is a self-reproducing social relation that competes with other capitals in a sort of evolution by natural/sexual/artificial selection on the markets. The problem is capital itself, and the solution is to destroy capital. Creating a new type of capital that is less destructive, or one that operates under less destructive modes is fine for countries where development has not reached to the point that they can directly gun towards communism. However, for advanced, and especially late-stage capitalist economies, the task is not to pursue further development of market forces, because market forces have already matured. The task is to eliminate market forces (although this may take time).

Coops may give a more equal distribution of wealth amongst the workers, but the aim of the communists is to abolish wealth, because the very meaning of wealth is that a private individual gets to command the labor of others. That is the fundamental social relation that money embodies and facilitates. The only way to remove the power to exploit other people’s labor is to remove the ability to command labor. But if you cannot command labor, then money becomes worthless and your ownership of the coop doesn’t mean anything.

Are organizations focusing on this and I just don’t know about it?

Yes. A quick google search shows examples such as the international labor organisation

If not, what obstacles are there that would hinder this approach to increasing the share labor collective ownership?

Part of the fundamental problem is just that the bourgeois class is not stupid. They want exploitable workers and profits. If you deprive them of that, prepare to face their wrath as they abandon all pretenses of human rights or fairness or the sanctity of markets.

They’re a powerful ally.

An ally in what? Bombing third world nations? In that case, yes. If you’re talking about an ally in terms of protecting the interests of european people, then lmao they aren’t.

Oscar Jenkins, 33, was convicted in a Russian-controlled court in occupied eastern Ukraine on Friday of fighting in an armed conflict as a mercenary.

Mr Jenkins, a teacher from Melbourne, was captured last December in the Luhansk region.

Prosecutors said he arrived in Ukraine in February 2024, alleging he was paid between 600,000 and 800,000 rubles (£5,504 and £7,339) a month to take part in military operations against Russian troops.

The article seems to claim that this guy is a mercenary, but someone in the comments is claiming that this guy is not a mercenary because he is a member of the UAF’s foreign legion. I don’t know if there is any additional context here that I am missing.

It sure seems to love selling American military secrets to Russia though.

And so do Americans. Like your argument that the colony controls America is that the colony does bad shit to America. But what part of America doesn’t fuck over America on the regular?

so they could pay less taxes and due to a grievance about parliamentary representation

They did primarily because they wanted to expand their settler colonies further into native lands while the British government had tried restricting settler expansion.

The “free state” was never about preventing oppression of the citizens or launching an insurrection against the state. I don’t know where this bizzare view comes from, since the constitution literally defines treason against the state to be punishable by death.

I’m not sure what your point here is. Whether or not the occupation allows American military bases, or whether or not they can get away with sinking the USS liberty is moot. Because the occupation literally is an American (and partly european) operation. Claiming that the occupied zone controls America is like claiming that south Africa controlled Britain.

why would the US care about gaza

Petrodollars, settler colonialism and imperial control. Israel and the Gulf monarchies are the linchpin of the petrodollar, aka the American government’s ability to run a massive trade deficit over decades with minimal inflation, something no other country can do. This gives the American government unlimited spending power (for its military).

There is also the geopolitical aspect of dividing the middle east, figuratively and literally, as well as having a forward base there to put pressure on Europe, Russia and China.

Finally, a huge number of “israelis” are really just American settlers. From the standpoint of the American bourgeoise, having a settler colony with a racialised underclass is very profitable, as this underclass (the Palestinians) are easily exploited workers. Furthermore, the American firms can test weapons on Gaza and their partnership with companies in the occupation yield them economic benefits.

That depends on which side of “math is an invention” or “math was discovered” you fall into.

Information is physical?

Information only exists in the world in the form of physical media, such as computer circuits, DNA or electrical/neuron pattern in your brain.

Its not euros being salty about the defeat of nazism.

This is precisely the case. I’m sick of the casual racism and love for imperialism that even the most “left-wing” europeans will just say to my face because they think I am one of them. It is so fundamentally baked into every dominant ideology in europe that it feels like there is no possible escape.

This is the consequence of having an entire continent dedicate itself to colonialism and capitalism for 400 years. Both of these things become the total norm. People in europe don’t even understand what empire is, or what empires do, even the extent of their own existing empire.

I mean, look at Macron’s comments. He literally runs an old school colonial empire (that is thankfully collapsing under his reign). And yet he lectures other countries about “imposing capitals”. I don’t think he even realises he is being hypocritical here, because European ideology has redefined European imperialism as not counting as imperialism.

Unsurprising to see the euros be salty about the defeat of nazism/fascism.

“Many compare Moscow and Brussels, I’ve heard that … But Moscow is a capital that has been imposed whereas Brussels is a capital that has been freely chosen through our treaties,” said Macron.

Oh fuck off Macron, you little colonist man who still runs an empire.

Reduce gas imports?

Please reduce gas imports more. Cripple any semblance of industry and power you have left. You will only use industrial power for killing children in Gaza and maintaining policing infrastructure either way. Better to let the gas be used by Chinese and Indian consumers (unironically).

Unless you are arguing that there is a different historical materialist argument possible that you could make that doesn’t rely on appealing to the laws of the centralization?

Kind of a late reply, but yeah. There are actually many phenomena simultaneously ongoing these days that place a hard limit on the perpetuation of capitalist society, which kind of makes it strange to me that some Marxists are arguing about centralization (as if monopoly capitalism hasn’t been around for a 100 years now).

1. Capitalist countries are basically unable to manage the climate or ecological crisis
2. As capitalist countries develop their birth rates fall
3. Falling birthrates and falling rates of productivity growth place downwards pressure on profits, which the capitalists are failing to restore
4. The shots in the arm that the capitalist-imperialist countries got from all their imperial plunders are fading in effect over time
5. De-industrialization has weakened the capitalist-imperialist countries’s ability to maintain control over the globe
6. The global surplus fund of labor is in general, declining (relatively).

We are talking about the whole economy coming under a single common enterprise that operates according to a common plan

The details of what this common plan look like and how different sectors act cannot be proclaimed in advance. It is not pedantic to make a difference between socialisation and centralisation.

An enterprise can be highly socialised (a common budget and plan for all departments) while different departments are given significant amounts of autonomy (thereby being relatively decentralised). How this decision making is carried out, at what level, how many levels there even are in the hierarchy are important questions. And the answer to all of these questions differs depending on the purpose of the enterprise, even under a highly developed Communism.

That’s why it is reductive to proclaim in advance that communist society will be extremely centralised.

Marxism is not about completely destroying the old society and building a new one from the void left behind. Humans do not have the “free will” to build any kind of society they want.

Correct

Marxists view the on-the-ground organization of production as determined by the forces of production themselves, not through politics or economic policies.

The relationship between the base and superstructure is not hyper-deterministic. The base reassert itself during revolutionary conjectures, but if the base was always fully determining the superstructure and the development of the base occurred automatically, there literally wouldn’t even be a point to engaging in communist politics. At that point, communists would be able to simply sit back, relax and watch Communism appear in “due time”.

Furthermore, the very existence of a common plan for organising society itself presupppses that the superstructure assert itself over the base.

Feudalism at that point basically didn’t even exist anymore

On the contrary the natural peasant economy still existed in france for many years after the French revolution, and attempted reassertions of feudal relations and feudal superstructures in france continued for many decades after the revolution.

You are just not a Marxist, and that’s fine, if you are an anarchist just be an anarchist and say you are one and don’t try to misrepresent Marxian theory.

I’ve never been accused of being an anarchist before. I guess there is a first time for everything.

It is also somehow idealism for one to expect future communist societies who can plan production for the whole society to be unable to organise themselves more intelligently than obsessing over some ill defined metric of “centralisation” and chain themselves to it.

Oh wow, all of Marxism is apparently just anarchist hate

I would like to see how this snark squares with literally anything I have said in my comment or even posting history.

They dream of taking all the large centralized enterprises and “busting them up” so to speak.

I think it’s amazing that you completely missed the part of my comments where I made sure to specify that “decentralisation” is also a nonsense category and not something to strive towards.

You seemed to have also forgotten while writing your comment that you labeled me as a pedant for basically wanting centralisation but calling it socialisation.

I also seem to have missed the part of marx where he said “historical materialism is when you take the current trend of society and draw a straight line to extrapolate”.

No, a revolution in the forces of production is a phase change. It does not occur instantaneously but the whole point is that the megatrend of developmental progress has been fundamentally altered.

The development process of capitalism does not so much as produce “centralisation” (which is ill defined tbh) but socialisation (the conversion of individual labor to group labor), urbanisation and standardisation.

And while someone might quibble over the idea that “centralisation = socialisation”, people in general have all sorts of ideas about what centralisation is, while “socialisation” itself retains a solid definition.

Furthermore, while it is true that socialist society develops out of capitalist society, revolutions are by definition a breaking point in the mode of production which makes the insistence that socialist societies must be highly centralised backwards logic. We are starting from a dislike of anarchism’s dogma of decentralisation and just working backwards.

Not that I necessarily opposed having a highly “centralised” socialist society, but that would be a very reductive way of classifying a mode of production given what we know about networks and production cycles in modern theories.