Yes, but the examples in recent history are often instigated. Like salafists wouldn’t have anywhere near the same influence without Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia basically wouldn’t exist without US support.

The Shi’a Sunni sectarianism was helped (at least in Syria) by the US government.

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06DAMASCUS5399_a.html

Well, that’s ineffectual if it prevents you from having solidarity with the Axis of Resistance, the Alliance of Sahel States, the DRC in the conflict with Rwanda, Russia in ending the war against the Western-backed Ukrainian government, and the Sudanese Armed Forces against the UAE-backed RSF. We should put our support behind all anti-imperialist groups.

Bullying works.

“Nuanced.”

You’re gonna have fun reading them, especially, George Jackson. He’d have a lot to say about you.

“my concept”

Okay, it’s just slop. I wasted my god damn time, there was no point in arguing with this person. Go develop your own diy special snowflake political alignment, then.

“It would also have huge advantages for a state to dissolve the problem of state debt.”

Have you heard of the Dunning Kruger effect? Well, you’re on the peak of Mt. Stupid and set up camp there. Now your brain is dying from the lack of oxygen.

Yup

I’m new to Lemmy I don’t know how stuff works.

Don’t necessarily look like socialists, c’mon, bruh, there was nothing that indicated I didn’t support those groups as well. I do wish there was more communist opposition to international capitalism I’m just stating that there isn’t as much of them around in the post-cold War era.

Darwin is a terrible example because biologists didn’t throw out Darwin did they? I guess general relativity is a bunk theory and nobody should read about it, because now we know it’s probably only a low energy limit of some kind of 11 dimesional superstring theory.

Here:

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher written in 2009.

Women, Race and Class written by Angela Davis in 1981. (This one is a really good analysis of slavery in America.)

Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson was written in 1970. (I haven’t read this one, but it’s on my list. It definitely is still relevant: the horrific oppression of black people by the US carceral system is still ongoing and you can make comparisons to the treatment of immigrants.)

Kwame Nkrumah wrote Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism in 1965 exactly coinciding with the release of the first ever desktop computer, the P101.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b98HfZPWpyQ This is a good video on the topic.

Thank you, I wanted people to ask.

In Capital volume two there’s a section on the expanded form of capitalist reproduction and the simple form of capitalist reproduction. It’s basically how the capitalist system reproduces itself so it continues after a production cycle. It’s an analysis of the entire system, instead of just capital in isolation.

The entire economy can be abstracted into two departments.

Department I is the production of the means of production: all of the factories and private enterprises, etc. owned by capitalists that produce the means of production. The means of production are commodities like industrial machinery, mining equipment, smelters, tools, electrical infrastructure, chemical intermediates, Dow Chemical teflon coating, dyes, iron gear wheels, basic circuits, etc. Consumers don’t buy this stuff (unless they’re nerds), companies do.

Department II is the production of the means of consumption and the production of commodities for consumption: Coca Cola, Nestlé, Chiquita bananas, all of the companies you see in grocery stores, pharmaceuticals, coffee, personal use vehicles, personal computers, smartphones, fast food restaurants, avocados, diamond rings, private jets, etc. Department II is what consumers actually buy.

The value in departments one and two can both be expressed by:

c + v + s

c is constant capital, which is portion of capital that doesn’t grow, it’s value of the ingredients and the cost of maintaining the equipment that processes those ingredients.

v is variable capital, which is the same as “the total wages paid to workers.” It’s variable because it’s the portion of capital that actually grows, because labor-power is the only commodity that creates more value than its cost to purchase (wages).

s is the surplus value. Surplus value is the value produced by workers beyond what is needed to reproduce their labor-power. It’s the value produced during the unpaid part of the working day that capitalists are able to extract from workers because they own the means of production. It’s the profit.

Constant capital (c ) and labor-power (v) are being bought by capitalists to be turned into new commodities with surplus value (s) added to its value when it’s created (c + v + s). The new commodity is then sold for money and the money is used to pay wages and buy new constant capital for the next cycle of production.

Departments one and two must be balanced, because if they aren’t, then capitalists will find out that they can’t sell their goods because there’s not enough buyers (crisis of overproduction).

The first example of the meme is the simple form of reproduction. The simple form of reproduction is when the surplus value generated by the production process isn’t re-invested into expanding the production process and is entirely consumed by capitalists.

s = s_c + Δc + Δv

s_c is the portion of surplus value consumed by capitalists.

Δc is the portion of surplus value being used to buy additional constant capital, beyond just replacing the original, and Δv is the portion going to buy additional labor to expand a company’s workforce.

In simple reproduction s=s_c and Δc and Δv both equal zero. So in the first example the capitalists are spending all of their profit on like gold steaks, or ballrooms, or sculptures of balloon animals, or whatever.

For it to balance Department I must replace its own constant capital, so… c₁ + v₁ + s₁ - c₁ = v₁ + s₁

This is like the stuff that goes into producing the stuff that produces the means of production.

And Department I must also produce the constant capital used by Department II, so…

v₁ + s₁ (the remaining value in Dept.I after it has renewed its own constant capital) must equal c₂ (the constant capital that Dept.II requires).

v₁ + s₁ = c₂ (The balanced equation for simple reproduction.)

This is stable, but we rarely see situations like this in reality.

In expanded reproduction there are the same two equations for the value of both departments:

(Dept.I) c₁ + v₁ + s₁

(Dept.II) c₂ + v₂ + s₂

I already gave an explanation for what those variables mean so I’ll skip over to the different bits.

In expanded reproduction s != s_c and Δc and Δv for both departments are non-zero (in real life the vast majority of profit gets re-invested as there’s just no way the bourgeoisie can spend billions on consumer goods every year, nobody could ever use that much money). s = s_c + Δc + Δv so substitute it in where s was.

The full equations look like this now:

(Dept.I) c₁ + v₁ + (s_c1 + Δc₁ + Δv₁)

(Dept.II) c₂ + v₂ + (s_c2 + Δc₂ + Δv₂)

To balance them now we require that Department I renew its constant capital, so you just substract c₁, but it also must renew its newly bought constant capital, so substract Δc₁ too:

(Dept.I) v₁ + s_c1 + Δv₁ (The value left that is able to circulate out of Dept.I)

This must be able to renew Department II’s constant capital (and newly bought constant capital) so the balanced form of expanded reproduction is…

(Dept.I) v₁ + s_c1 + Δv₁ = c₂ + Δc₂ (Dept.II)

However, as you can probably see, this requires the growth of Department I to be in lockstep with the growth of Department II or else commodities are being created that nobody can actually afford. Capitalism has no way of balancing these departments, they act independently out of self-interest.

Department I can buy from itself like a feedback loop and then realize its in trouble once its producing too much for Department II to feasibly buy, but the capitalists can’t stop themselves, because once the crisis hits, if they didn’t grow then they’ll go under! This can only be resolved by Department II growing beyond capacity as well, or by sections of Department I going bankrupt.

Department II are all competing for the consumer’s attention, all at once. And all of those companies are trying to grow, all at once, but the total wages of workers and s_c can’t consume all of it.

Almost always:

(Dept.I) v₁ + s_c1 + Δv₁ ≠ c₂ + Δc₂ (Dept.II)

So there are cyclical crises overproduction where huge swathes of capital that has over-accumulated devalues or is destroyed, and afterwards there is usually even more inequality, and the economy is more monopolized and more financialized, so the next crisis will be even bigger.

(Idk, though, can someone check my homework here, I had to really think and I’m not sure if I got everything right.)

why are trains catching strays? I love trains.

Have you read the books? You should really read the books. It certainly can’t hurt.

but… for the state to not exist that would require the elimination of class, which no socialism has ever been able to achieve immediately. Without a state there would be no way to enforce the abolition of private property, defend your pocket of socialism against your own bourgeoisie or a counterrevolution funded by a foreign imperialist bourgeoisie. I understand that all states commit excesses of violence and oppression and you feel rightly repulsed by that, but to get to a point where abolishing the state is possible, workers have to achieve power over most of the world, and the world is very divided by imperialism.

“Imperfect” state socialism is the only viable option when a revolution only succeeds in a portion of the world and capitalism is still the dominant, world-spanning mode of production.

well, damn, at least my hypothetical stocks in Nvidia will provide a return! /j

They’ve exported unimaginable horror and trauma and then blame the people lashing out against it for being not morally pure.

This system that consumes billions like a biblical winepress for turning labor into capital needs to be stopped. It’s gonna kill us all. I’m on the side of anyone against it.

People who own capital on an international scale vs. People who own a small amount vs. People who own none.

Class struggle isn’t dead. It’s just that the people fighting don’t look like socialists.

In the core, imperialism has created a labor aristocracy, but it’s shrinking as the need for ever higher profits causes the bourgeoisie of the global North to increase the exploitation of workers in the core. They are unsustainably cannibalizing the group that actually consumes most of the commodities produced by the global imperialist system which will lead to a global crisis of overproduction. We’re heading unstoppably into this crisis, it’s just that the ideas haven’t caught up. Workers in the core are, very slowly, waking up from their treat-induced class-coma. Western leftists are dead, but will come back.

In the periphery, the fight is against neocolonialism is the primary concern for workers and the fight against their own bourgeoisie is secondary or has to be paused, like in Iran. Communists might not be that common, but people willing to fight colonialism are common all throughout the global South.