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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-142
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
Ukraine:
Palestine:
Empire:
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Other issues:
Assassination:
Hindufascism:
Georgia:
Tradewar:
U.S. launches Spacewar:
- New Star Wars Plan: Pentagon Rushes to Counter Threats in Orbit (archived) – New York Times
Citing rapid advances by China and Russia, the United States is building an extensive capacity to fight battles in space.
[T]he Defense Department is looking to acquire a new generation of ground- and space-based tools that will allow it to defend its satellite network from attack and, if necessary, to disrupt or disable enemy spacecraft in orbit, Pentagon officials have said in a series of interviews, speeches and recent statements.
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
@17The quote from Margaret Thatcher is “There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.” Families looking to themselves first is “community” in the practical, mundane, everyday sense. There are many who are convinced that it’s their own families that are being oppressed and thus are conservatives standing against the hateful oppression of some abstraction deranged “PMC” or other power mad frauds, like socialists and Communists and Democrats.
“Until the coming of industrial capitalism, nourished within the imperial system, nobody, this side of satanists, dared to promote a theory in which the great majority of people were farmed for the benefit of the few and in which famine, inadequate shelter, wage slavery and premature deaths were celebrated as incentives to work.” Every ruling class that celebrated collecting taxes for the Empire (and often enough an excess for personal profit) did precisely that. Every noble who legislated against rebellious or runaway slaves did that. The clergy who invented asceticism, confessions, penitence, offerings, monasteries, inquisitions, on and on, did precisely that. The only reason to lie and glorify such age old reaction is so far as I can tell a shameless commitment to reaction today. The only “socialist’ thinking I can see here is as superficial as that which led fascists to call themselves national socialist. By the way, religion misguides. And no verbal ideal will “fireproof” real world people against anything. If moral suasion was the key, the world would have been different long, long before even the Enlightenment!
Spouting so much nonsense, so many distortions is symptomatic of bad faith and secret agendas and helpless folly, hopelessly blended together in an unsalvageable and indistinguishable mess.
The pushback @23 denies there is any socialism by theoretical standards, which I suppose is true, especially to hostile eyes. If Marxism/Communism is the real movement, though, the theoretical images projected can only ever have a dialectical, that is, historical, developmental, even statistical/probabilistic, relationship to the momentary reality. Even worse, substituting an act of anti-imperialist will for a real movement is just a secularized version of religious conversion. I think it was supposed to be Debs who denied being the Moses who would lead the workers to the promised land of socialism, because he could by that power mislead the workers away from socialism. And misleading workers into the anti-imperialist paradise is too vacuous to lead to victory. It’s altogether too much like waiting for capitalism/imperialism to just fall over and the bourgeoisie to commit class suicide. Ain’t happening folks.
The constructive agreement @24 (with @17) calls for a doubling down on irrationality, religious illusions, messianic fantasies. It asks rhetorically why “LOTR, Dune and Trump” are so popular? It’s precisely because these fantasies function to derange real change with an illusory satisfaction of genuine needs. The worst of it is, solidarity is irrationality by bourgeois standards. (And the bourgeoisie’s ideas tend to rule, at least until people take real world action rather than raving about conspiracies. It is impossible to argue effectively against the heartlessness of the cash nexus while trying to substitute medieval (or worse) cruelties! Wanting to suck up to billionaires (whether foreign or domestic is truly irrelevant) in an alliance against mere working people with peculiar ideas. There is nothing more “metaphysical” than the very notion that revolution, which costs so much in lives and treasure, is nevertheless the way forward. That’s why reactionaries hate Revolution, especially the “metaphysical” so very much. “Robespierre” the personification of revolution, the Cultural Revolution are both hated and despised with a passionate intensity by the overwhelming majority of”socialist” and capitalists. The feeling there is that enemies like those justify crossing class lines.
It is not clear why @33 endorses @17, given the pushback to claims the PRC is capitalist. Personally, I think, for just one example, the absence of free capital markets hint that you haven’t got real capitalism in the previous meanings of the word. And I certainly don’t think you must quote Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, three men who died before the PRC was even created to refute any argument for Chinese forms of socialism, at least before any identifiable counterrevolution takes place. That said I don’t think purely political forms are decisive. And by the way, ” Liberalism has always been the ideology through which the elites rid themselves of the authority of the sovereign so that they could better exploit the rest of society, with the help of wider society as they promised a more general democracy…” is altogether too close to the gibberish in @17. It makes some sense if artificially limited to western Europe for maybe the last two centuries, sort of. But nobles have often found that having a king is so helpful for moderating the strife with other nobles to the point they aren’t mostly killed off like the less well known actors on Game of Thrones. Losurdo is excellent but he more or less starts in 1848 with Louis Napoleon. If you look at the supposed origins of democracy, the distinction between “elites” (a favorite non-Marxist swear word,) and “citizens” can be much harder to drawn than you think.
The problem with bad ideas, which includes all those that rely on “facts” that aren’t and on fuzzy labels that aren’t thought out concepts, is that they prevent winning. Good ideas are needed to replace the old. Discarding old nonsense is indispensable to this.
Posted by: steven t johnson | May 20 2024 1:10 utc | 52
Posted by: Ahenobarbus | May 19 2024 20:23 utc | 23
Posted by: Ahenobarbus | May 19 2024 22:48 utc | 37
– “China is in every way a Capitalist country.”
No way. China is not a Capitalist system … as Russia rapidly heads in the same direction and others already are doing.
Trade, business, mercantilism, markets, growing food and selling it, owning land and your own home or business, buying and selling exporting and importing and “money” and even “financial loans” does not make one a Capitalist society/nation.
there are many ways it gets described but roger nails is succinctly with “socialist market economy”
EG
The socialist market economy (SME) is the economic system and model of economic development employed in the People’s Republic of China. The system is a market economy with the predominance of public ownership and state-owned enterprises.[1] The term “socialist market economy” was introduced by Jiang Zemin during the 14th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1992 to describe the goal of China’s economic reforms.[2]
Originating in the Chinese economic reforms initiated in 1978 that integrated China into the global market economy, the socialist market economy represents a preliminary or “primary stage” of developing socialism.[3] Some commentators describe the system as a form of “state capitalism”,[4] while others describe it as an original evolution of Marxism, in line with Marxism–Leninism similar to the “New Economic Policy” of the Soviet Union, adapted to the cohabitation with a globalized capitalist system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_market_economy
The CHINESE DECIDE what it is, and not superfluous social media jockeys nor the US Government. 🙂
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READ – you will not find the words nor concepts of “capital” or “capitalism” anywhere
Hold High the Great Banner of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and Strive in Unity to Build a Modern Socialist Country in All Respects
Report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China
October 16, 2022
Xi Jinping
“revising China’s Constitution, deepening reform of Party and state institutions, upholding and
improving the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics and modernizing China’s system and capacity for governance, formulating the 14th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development and the Long-Range Objectives through the Year 2035, ….”
“… We have put forward and applied a new development philosophy, worked hard
to promote high-quality development, and pushed to foster a new pattern of
development.”
“>https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tGegLW_OEtEJXxJbtnDndJECKA7OASYh/view?pli=1
It’s easy to see what China is NOT …
China’s comprehensive, systematic and elaborate response to Secretary Antony Blinken’s China policy speech
—— Reality Check: Falsehoods in US Perceptions of China
2022/06/19
The American-style democracy is a rich men’s game based on capital. Money politics penetrates the entire process of election, legislation and administration in the US. People in fact only have a restricted right to political participation. The inequality in economic status has turned into inequality in political status. According to statistics, winners of 91 percent of US congressional elections are the candidates with greater financial support. Big companies, a small group of rich people, and interest groups are more generous to offer financial support and have become the main source of electoral funding. The so-called representatives of people’s will, once elected, often serve the interests of their financial backers, and speak for vested interests rather than the ordinary people. A US Senator had a sharp observation, “Congress does not regulate Wall Street. Wall Street regulates Congress.”
and
Noam Chomsky, a political commentator and social activist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that the US is a “really existing capitalist democracy”, where there is a positive correlation between people’s wealth and their influence on policy-making. For the lower 70 percent on the wealth/income scale, they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They are effectively disenfranchised.
and
On the surface, these anti-China rhetoric come from certain media outlets and politicians, but what lies underneath is a massive capital-driven supply chain — some institutions and organizations from the US and other Western countries provide dirty funding for political purposes to anti-China groups and individuals; some think-tanks and academic institutions make up fact-twisting stories to fuel anti-China rhetoric around the world through Western hegemony on public opinion; and politicians and media act as mouthpieces propagating lies and falsehoods about China in massive smear campaigns.
and
US tariffs against China have cost American companies more than 1.7 trillion US dollars in market capitalization and increased average household expenditure by 1,300 US dollars per year.
and
The so-called Chinese “debt trap” is a narrative trap that the US and some other Western countries use to defame and smear China and disrupt China’s cooperation with other developing countries. As a 2021 article in The Atlantic points out, the debt-trap narrative is just a lie fabricated by some Western politicians, and a powerful one.
Western capital constitutes the largest creditor of developing countries. According to the 2022 statistics of the World Bank on international debt, 28.8 percent of Africa’s outstanding external debt is owed to multilateral financial institutions and 41.8 percent to commercial creditors mainly composed of Western financial institutions. These two types of institutions together hold nearly three-quarters of the debt, making them the primary creditors of Africa’s debt.
http://us.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zmgx/zxxx/202206/t20220619_10706097.htm
Dongsheng Explains is a publication that introduces core concepts, processes, and phenomena in China.
https://dongshengnews.org/en/ds-explains/
Whole-process democracy puts people first
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202309/23/WS650e3323a310d2dce4bb762e.html
On September 26, China’s State Council Information Office released a white paper titled “A Global Community of Shared Future: China’s Proposals and Actions.”
Human society is now facing a “life-or-death choice:” whether to enter into a vicious cycle of continuous confrontation and division or to seek a path of cooperation and win-win…
Against the backdrop of the 10th anniversary of President Xi Jinping’s proposal of building a global community of shared future, China has introduced the theoretical base, practice and development of a global community of shared future, and points the way toward a better future for the world. Anyone, be they are developing countries seeking to learn from China or individuals from Western countries who are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of China, will find inspiration in it as long as they approach it without biased views.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202309/1299005.shtml
ENG TEXT
https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202309/26/content_WS6512703dc6d0868f4e8dfc37.html
Of course all these things matter not at all to the ongoing hegemony of the west …. maybe even few in the global south know about these ideas and the political/economic philosophy of China today.
Cheers all.
Posted by: Lavrov’s Dog | May 20 2024 2:46 utc | 68
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