EatTheRich
President
He’s only left-wing compared with the rest of the Washington nomenklatura, and that’s because the right absolutely dominates both big-business parties and calls all the shots (hence the proliferation of crises).
This perfectly encapsulates the situation in Ukraine...
- Thread starter Raoul_Luke
- Start date
RickWA
Snagglesooth
No, he’s a socialist fruit loop.
Which of those have been deployed to any nation adjacent to Russia? "Technically disparate" means what? The idea that Patriots can become Tomahawks is laughable...
And crackpot right wingers are republicans.
The two governments are not to be considered as equals. One is run by a dictator who ordered the invasion of the other. The other has overwhelming support. Not only from his own citizens, but the free world.
EatTheRich
President
Since he opposes nationalization of the commanding heights of industry, he is a socialist in name only. In fact the entire explanation of his political program is that by lulling the masses to sleep with “socialist” phraseology, he prevents workers and farmers from embarking on the road of class struggle.
georgephillip
Senator
The US corporate press serves the interests of those getting rich(er) from the mass murder in Ukraine. It can not afford to reveal the full extent of Ukraine's destruction especially as the 2024 election cycle kicks off.
John Bolton isn't someone I normally find credible, but occasionally he reveals long-term US strategy:
https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/19/joe-lauria-leaks-spelling-the-end-for-ukraine/
"After Ukraine wins its war with Russia, we must aim to split the Russia-China axis. Moscow’s defeat could unseat Mr. Putin’s regime. What comes next is a government of unknowable composition. New Russian leaders may or may not look to the West rather than Beijing, and might be so weak that the Russian Federation’s fragmentation, especially east of the Urals, isn’t inconceivable.”
Raoul_Luke
I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe you should drive.
How many would you accept off the coast of Virginia?
It means that with a few keystrokes, they can be configured to attack fixed and moving ground targets.
You just described drones.
Which missiles are you talking about that have been deployed by NATO to any nations on Russian borders.
Patriots cannot be configured that way. Himars are surface to surface and went to Ukraine after the invasion. They are not nuclear weapons....
Putin was full of shit when he made the claim and now you repeat it.
Last edited:
Nationalization would be communism...
RickWA
Snagglesooth
He’s a cockeyed collectivist kook.
EatTheRich
President
“Socialism” that is not “communism” (but, for example, Stalinism, Pol Potism, social democracy a la Bernie Sanders, anarchism, or National Socialism/National Bolshevism) is reactionary and undeserving of the name.
His politics have more in common with Trump’s than with mine.
Socialism does not entail confiscation of private property...communism does.
EatTheRich
President
No confiscation of private property=no social revolution. “Socialism” of this sort means perpetuating capitalism.
Sorry...the point is which philosophy is about the confiscation of private property...certainly not socialism. Communism preaches the state should own everything.
That has proven to be a disaster in the Soviet Union, China, Venezuela...
All have begun to experiment with hybrids that allow privatization. Who is left to point to that still has total government ownership? Nobody I can think of.
EatTheRich
President
Not “everything” … the means of production, as an idealization which in practice generally allows for some private ownership as a political compromise with middle-class layers whose loyalty is needed.
Venezuela’s economy was always dominated by private ownership. The Soviet Union and China at any given point each had significant amounts of both individual and collective private ownership, although the state owned the bulk of the means of production in the Soviet Union for about 70 years and in China for about 50 years, in both cases permitting a freeing up of productive forces that multiplied wealth.
Both the Soviet Union and China entered socialist construction from the standpoint of low levels of capitalist development skewed by remnants of feudalism, ensuring that the efforts to build socialism there would be slow, painful, and marred by the barbaric backwardness of its semicolonial origins. In both countries, the ebb that naturally came when objective conditions halted the flow of revolution took the form of the ossification of a state layer of privileged bureaucrats whose counterrevolutionary efforts objectively aimed at capitalist restoration, which in both countries was/is pushed through from above through harsh blows against a resisting populace. In all of the former Soviet Union, except perhaps Belarus, capitalism has been restored, while China is definitely in transition back toward capitalism.
State ownership probably reached its maximal extent in the USSR under the First Five-Year Plan and in China during the period of the Great Leap Forward. In both countries it was accompanied by ultraleft errors and bureaucratic abuses (reflecting divisions within the ruling bureaucracy which themselves reflected underlying class struggles) which led to tremendous suffering, particularly among superexploited peasant layers. Both countries also had their maximal economic growth during these periods, and, with the exception of the economic collapse in the last year of the Great Leap Forward, generally saw high growth, improved living standards for worker and other urban consumers, and rapid industrialization. When the rightist backlash to these ultraleft periods came, it was precisely the great wealth created that made social stratification and the embryonic capitalism pushed through by the bureaucracy possible.
N. Korea has the highest levels of state ownership today. That country, also extremely backward at the time of its revolution, is clearly an economic basket case. But that is not so much due to the workers’ state, on the basis of which it made considerable progress in the 1950s and 1960s, as due to war and enforced isolation, the bureaucratic regime occasioned thereby which has exploited the masses to fuel its own petty-capitalist aims, the distortion of the economy for military construction occasioned by the war and the bureaucracy’s repressive aims, and the shortages of the oil on which the country’s now highly industrialized economy depends.
RickWA
Snagglesooth
That you consider yourself some sort of geopolitical definitional benchmark is mildly humorous…but you do you, dude.
Spamature
President
Still haven't seen you post that Putin should turn his army around now and go home.
Say it.
I dare you.
Raoul_Luke
I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe you should drive.
Yes, because you have become a card carrying neocon.
Raoul_Luke
I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe you should drive.
Putin should turn his army around now and go home...and NATO should give him a reason to do so.
