@Steve Again: Who are "the liberals" in your book? Like there is your social laissez-faire attitude of mind your own business when it comes to things that are really just personal preference, anti-racism, pluralism, queer identities, freedom of expression and whatnot and then there is your economic liberalism of deregulation and "let the market regulate itself", so give power to those controlling the industry.

But while it's the latter that takes shots at the well being of the workers and that constantly harms them, it's the former that the outrage against liberalism is directed towards. Trump is the champion of the party that supports "classical liberalism" so that economic free market ideology and he hasn't stacked anything. He's a liar and a fraudster who used the presidency as his get out of jail free card. On the contrary he has basically made bank off that job...

@Steve Fascism never is progressive, it's not "destroying the system", it's defending the system tooth and nail against any attempt to even reform let alone revolutionize it and instead of actually picking about the root causes persecutes minorities who can't defend themselves. Lenin was probably the first and last time that this populism approach actually worked and largely because he was running in open doors.

@Steve He's an old fart, that has no clue about anything, his big attacks are nothing but acting and he's more of a TrashTv actor than someone who could lead a movie... And he basically IS running for the establishment and doing their bidding. Like his policies hurt his own voters and enriched his donors...

@Steve Sorry but you're mixing up entirely different groups here. Trade unions, social democrats and so on aimed to improve the conditions of the working class. Some were Marxist, some were revesionist Marxists and some were just pragmatic, but yeah when they aimed for individual liberties that didn't exclude the working class. However that approach and these groups are different from those pushing isolationism and nationalism

Where the latter group usually just tried to divert attention from the class struggle, by calling a race struggle and have populist majorities brutalize minorities and if that ended up not working, but actually harming the economy and society at large, had them fight other nations "for blood and empire":.. Yet while pretending that the nations are one big team, it's still the working class fighting those wars, ramping up production and enriching the fascists...

Like idk currently Russian citizens are dying like flies and it's not the oligarchy or Putin that they are hurting on the contrary he'll make a fortune on their corpses.

@Steve I mean Stalin also fucked that up big time, but conflating social democracy with fascism is a very dangerous error and not just ideologically. Fascism is radically reactionary whether it's Italian fascist praising the roman empire German fascism praising the pagan germanic origins and the empires, or Russian fascism apparently canonizing the tsar or chinese fascism having a mao cult (again)

"Destroying the system" only works if you have an organized working class who deliberately wants to self-actualize itself as a class and have political participation. If they are sick of being the ruled and actually take rulership, which given their class size makes rulership absurd. But if it's just another minority trying to subjugate and the workers are just cheering the new overlord than Marx likely would have called that Lumpenproletariat.

@Steve Markets suit the party best who has the most in demand resource/product/service/etc to offer. As they can buy cheap and sell expensive increasing their power and influence. So it usually doesn't help if agrarian states join the global market, but it does very much help highly developed countries to do so. Though while free market believers see supply and demand as a tool to organize distribution, more capitalist minded countries like china/US see it as a weapon

@Steve It's not about their wealth or excess property it's about their unchecked power and autonomy. The only reason not to call those bureaucrats bourgeoisie is because they are more like the step before "aristocrats" that ruled through proximity to power rather than build their power on wealth. Though the conversion is fairly simple, if you have the power to decide the course of the economy you can easily take bribes.

The effective wealth of Stalin is hard to measure, but it's safe to say he was very very very rich: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stalin%27s_residences he didn't liquidate his assets because he didn't need to, if he wanted luxury for himself he would have just added that to the plan and he wouldn't have been able to spend his fortune outside of the USSR through political reasons so there was no need with that regard either, but still he was very much a capitalist.

As can be seen by how surprisingly Russia has so many oligarchs after the collapse of the USSR despite all of them having had roughly the same.... If you rule the system you can take bribes and get a fortune and that kind of corruption permeates most every system in which you have this kind of unchecked centralized power. Which is why for example the original idea of "soviets" was decentralized workers council with imperative mandates, but that was already dead with Lenin

@Steve Capitalists aren't a race of people, capitalists are people who have political or economic power and use it to increase that power. Capital is the ability to set a society in motion for your own goals and you can do that by money, by force or by being the leading bureaucrat. All of that is well documented in history, none of that is new. Just the narrative changed over times.

@Steve over

@haxor789 I think you'll find both liberals are the same. For example, liberals have at times both supported and opposed racism, the controlling factor being whether one or the other benefitted the rich or not.

@haxor789 you say the Republicans are (generally speaking) the party of classic liberalism, but so in fact are the Democrats. Trump's apparent nationalism, and his apparently dangerous foreign policy, is the gravest threat to liberal interests, which depend on globalism and peace or (at most) controlled war.

I accept Trump is a liar and a fraudster. But so are liberals anyway. What's more, the liberals control intelligence and media networks which selectively publicise this about those they don't like, whilst concealing or abating the wrongdoing of those they do like.

He's used the presidency to get out of jail free, but really on the whole it's his political activities which have caused him to be threatened with jail in the first place. Moreover, it's releaved the deeply undemocratic mentality of liberals, who for example tried to get the ballot rigged against him.

There's no suggestion of getting the ballot rigged against Biden for his offences against the interests of working people. This is why people sense that liberals who masquerade as socialists, are not in fact socialists, because they are always seen to be activated more by threats to liberal interests than to socialist interests.

@haxor789 whilst there's plenty of evidence that fascism ultimately becomes an attempt to work within the liberal status quo, there's little evidence of its success in this regard when it concerns the most powerful economies. Moreover, if it did work, then it follows that liberals will always threaten it, when what actually has to happen is that they try it, cause chaos, and are then defeated.

The open door for Lenin consisted of Tsarist Russia being at war with the rest of Europe. That's the kind of pressure the liberals need to be put under - pressure on every front so that they are forced to deal with chaos and can no longer target their attacks against workers.

If Trump's policies do hurt, given that people are already entering revolt against the hurt of liberalism, then there'll just be even more violence and internal strain in America in four years or sooner. Sometimes the only language liberals understand is collapse into revolution.

@haxor789 "social democrats" are just another liberal strain who have prevailed over relentless attacks on workers.

@haxor789 nobody seems to genuinely think that the Russian rich are increasing their wealth whilst workers get poorer. There is talk of wages soaring in a war economy forced to engage In import substitution. Soldiers are on premium wages. The state has been forced to end artificial unemployment and marshal everybody into the war effort.

Indeed it is even said that Putin effectively held a gun to the heads of his central bankers, and told them if they did not set the dials in a way necessary to benefit the Russian economy, he would simply find someone else who will. So they've set the dials as necessary. Just as the liberals set the dials in the West to assault workers.

I accept soldiers are dying, but provided there is no anti-natalist liberal assault, then the working class has ample capacity to replace these. The working class has the capability to produce cannon fodder capable of fighting the rich for its collective interests. It's not necessary or possible to preserve every individual in the fight against liberals.

If you're not willing to die fighting them, that's what the liberals will menace you with. Instead you go the other way, and respond to their threats with lethal force against their lives at the cost of your own.

@haxor789 no, destroying the system is about destroying all the things which stop the working class organising, which it otherwise already would have. The agenda therefore is chaos and fire, to simply raze those obstructions.

What the liberals need to be faced with is a Gaza-like environment themselves, where they are simply constantly on the run and unable to direct their power effectively in any direction, to any one enemy, or towards opposing any coherent force. This destroys their repressive capability.

Under those conditions, the liberal minority are deprived of their experience controlling a known system, they are forced to pair off their minority lives against the soldiers of majorities, and the interests of the majority are now able to organise freer of their deadening and interrupting effect.

You have to understand, the liberal does not oppress and exploit by their numerical superiority or the popularity of their agenda, but by their colonisation of positions of power and control, including their ability to manipulate and feed lies to the majority. Once you rip them out of these positions and they're forced to organise on equal terms, they then perish.

That's why the populace refusing to swallow the lies they're fed, and substituting their own lies and fantasies, is in fact enormously threatening, because it's depriving those who control the press of power.

Rather than the press having to find ways to counter one organising narrative, now they have to counter an indefinite number of organising narratives, many of which are barmy and have no logic, but will nevertheless motivate their holders to rebel violently. It's less economical for the population to behave this way to achieve their goals, but it's the next line of defence against a malicious ruling class.

@haxor789 my point is that liberals are harmed by free markets and assaults on workers, if they adopt them but nobody else does. Because other countries then just control their economic borders to stop foreign liberals bleeding their country, and develop their domestic working class who then possess a real economy and a real military with which to whack the foreign liberals who have none.

This is why so-called communism is always their greatest enemy. Whether it fully conforms to Marxist tenets or not is immaterial. The important point is that there is a state willing to identify and stop their parasitism, and to develop its own strength in a way that allows them to challenge weaker liberal societies bled dry by liberalism, and that's the underlying threat to the liberals which they feel compelled to destroy.

@haxor789 yes, the resemblance of autonomous bureaucrats to aristocrats is one I mentioned. There's a key difference though, it's not a hereditary kingship, and the bureaucrats do not have their origins in a relationship of exploitation. They're not a separate "class" in the political-economic sense.

It's not to say bureaucrats cannot become exploitative, but they weaken both their bureaucracy and the society they administer by doing so, so there's by no means a tendency for bureaucrats to exploit (or to intensify exploitation without limit, if it exists to some degree).

If you look at the Catholic Church for example, it's agenda is not to constantly extract more and more from the congregation for the personal benefit of the Pope, and the bureaucracy incorporates constraints (such as celibacy amongst its bureaucrats) which stop its offices being used for certain undesirable purposes.

The Pope enjoys a comparatively lavish environment, but it's not really any more lavish than it was centuries ago - most of the lavishness is in fact a sunk cost paid by congregants over millenia - and you occasionally get popes like the current one who are capable of self-limiting and make a show of not enjoying material comforts gratuitously.

The point, anyway, is that bureaucrats are not bourgeoisie, because they lack similar economic relations and interests. The fact that senior bureaucrats are powerful is besides the point. Aristocrats were powerful, but they're not bourgeoisie.

I'm thinking on the hoof here, but the relationship that bureaucrats have to the means of production is typically not different to that of proletarians. They have to work as bureaucrats. They do not have ownership rights over their offices or perquisites, as might be bequeathed to children or the ability to assign unearned income to chosen individuals.

The effect of their power is typically to keep their own jobs as proletarians comfy and non-exploitative, and because they are managers with good jobs that are enjoyable and varied, they typically compete for status by demonstrating their competence and capability as administrators.

It's very similar to old-style bank branch managers. They don't compete with each other on charging their customers the highest and most exploitative interest rates. They compete on the level of responsibility the bank bureaucracy entrusts them with, and by implication their financial judgment and business acumen with which they assess requests for capital. The bank owners want high rates and therefore high profits, but the waged bank bureaucrats have no intrinsically similar agenda.

@haxor789 Stalin didn't "liquidate" his assets because he had no right under the Soviet system to acquire assets. You're conflating private ownership of capital assets with mere job perks.

@haxor789 without getting bogged down in what exactly capital is, the point is that the different relations of the bureaucrat lead them to exercise their power in a different way. You're conflating "capital" and the more general and vaguely defined notion of "power".

The fact that bureaucrats have power which they can exercise freely for a proper purpose, and the fact that they may have a certain margin of discretion in which some improper or ill-judged behaviour may go unchecked, doesn't mean that what is proper in a state bureaucracy is the same as what is proper in a liberal free market.

The rich capitalist, when he exploits workers, is not defecting from any ideology that says he mustn't exploit workers. Quite the contrary, his attacks are completely ideologically proper to him and his class.

For a bureaucrat to behave like a capitalist is improper in any bureaucracy that is not objectively viewed as deeply corrupt. If a military bureaucracy behaves like that for example, it will lose. And with business bureaucracies, all but the sinplest firms under direct supervision of the owner would collapse if they behaved internally in a manner like capitalists behave in the market.

@haxor789, over.