The idea that any of our presidents ever actually “ran the country” should actually be completely unacceptable. You think farmers can run an entire country? How about actors? Failsons? Sex pests? None of these people should be “running the country”. The country has a massive bureaucracy running it and the president is filling a specific role of making judgement calls and tweaking the roster of bureaucrats

Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, The Philippines, Nicaragua, Chile, Guam, Hawaii, Marianas, Cuba, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, economic shock therapy in Russia

And that’s just the basics. Millions dead, nukes on civilians, chemical weapons on civilians, mass deforestation, poisoning land and water, generations of cancer and birth defects, some individual US targets had more bombs dropped on them than all countries combined dropped in WW2, napalm and white phosphorous to bind chemical fire to human flesh, land mines fucking everywhere, depleted uranium dropped in population centers, coups, death squads, resource extraction and annexation, torture, kidnapping, direct terror and training and arming thousands of terror cells.

Not to mention the USA was built on land where 80% of the indigenous population was killed and the USA maintained and continues to maintain the policies of genocide, enslavement, mass murder, lynch mobs, systematic rape, eugenics, child torture and trafficking, etc.

Sooooo, no. The USA is not on its third invasion of a sovereign nation, it’s 200 years into it’s prosecution of the genocidal annexation campaign that it deliberately took control over from Western Europe.

As Marxists, I think we need to be very careful about how we talk about taxes.

1. All value is produced by labor
2. All value produced by labor is stolen by owners through private property law
3. Of the value stolen by owners through private property law, some of it is provided back to labor to reproduce that labor
4. Of the portion of the value provided back to labor for reproduction, a portion is stolen by the owners through tax law
5. Of the portion stolen from labor by tax law, a portion is provided to both labor and lumpen.

It’s a ridiculous system of exploitation. Owners should be paying all of the taxes, but they control the tax law.

Tell me you live in a fantasy land without telling me that you live in a fantasy land

To maintain their empire

It is true that a cornerstone of US policy is to foment reaction and anticommunism everywhere, but a cornerstone of any communist revolutionary state must be to be able to deal with it. However, I disagree that the color revolutions created revisionism. They did not bring Kruschev to power, they did not create Kruschev and his posse, nor their political positions.

So while reactionary elements in the Eastern Bloc were supported by the West, in the central committee during the days of Lenin and Stalin I don’t think you’ll find much evidence of it. The failure of the USSR was in the central committee and the ascendance of the counter revolutionaries who were motivated and powerful in their own right. The vast empire supporting them seemed to work at a distance, primarily creating external pressures, not internal ones. The empire made the USSR suffer economically, caused brain drain, caused the focus to be on proxy wars instead of domestic development. It’s not like the situation in Iran in '53. The counter-revolutionaries in the USSR weren’t backed directly by the CIA, they weren’t brainwashed, they weren’t directed.

If the USA has gotten soft, then it’s not the formidable power it once was.

My words were unclear. The USA has not gotten soft. It’s just that the whole idea that it was a formidable power in WW2 is sort of just not true. The USSR defeated 80% of the Nazi forces, the rest of the Allies combined fought 20%, the USA only a portion of that. The rest of the US’s “formidable power” was spent killing peasants, and they still lost to guerilla warfare. The Nazi army was the most advanced and powerful army the world had ever seen, not the USA army. The USA continues to operate the strongest spy network in the history of the world, it’s still as strong or stronger than it was in those days. It’s just that the material reality is that this strength is not enough and perhaps was never enough. The Western Europeans were already struggling with colonialism by the 1800s and had begun developing neocolonial superstructures long before the USA unseated them. Once the USA unseated them, the USA inherited a world where the development of advanced guerilla warfare was showing North Atlantic military strategy to be fundamentally incapable of sustainable occupation.

And it certainly has gotten soft. As I’ve said before, the current leadership consists of Cold War mummies and their sons who grew up in the End of History. I believe that the growth of BRICS and the push towards dedollarization, the ICJ ruling against Israel, countries pulling out of ECOWAS and AFRICOM, the deal China made with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Iran, these are all signs of the empire’s decline.

There’s a huge difference between the empire getting soft and the periphery getting strong. Everything you’re saying is evidence of the periphery getting stronger. You could propose the hypothesis that this is all the fault of the USA getting soft. I find that hypothesis underwhelming. It takes away agency from the periphery. The hypothesis I think has more evidence behind it is that the strength of the USA is now irrelevant in the face of the contradictions of empire. Neocolonialism and neoliberalism were attempts at solutions to those contradictions, but they don’t seem to have worked out for the empire. I think the periphery has gotten better at analyzing the material conditions and are exploiting those conditions to finally turn the tide against empire. I would not characterize that as the USA going soft.

Trump actually just pulled all US troops out and surrendered Afghanistan back to the Taliban

This didn’t happen: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2022/10/13/trump-ordered-rapid-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-after-election-loss/

Instead, here’s what we see: https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/ “The fact is, President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump, were both eager to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and end what Biden referred to in his Aug. 16 speech as “America’s longest war.””

Your belief in the conflict between the parties can only be formed by filtering out evidence like this. Which, not to blame you, is actually what most people do.

Trump pulled out of the TPP

The TPP was never approved by Congress. Trump formally pulled it from the table. I don’t have a full analysis on the whys and wherefores of the maneuvering here. Congress is mostly millionaires. They come together all the time for the interests of the rich. The fact that they didn’t ratify the TPP tells me more about the flaws in the TPP than it does about the conflict between parties.

this most recent obstruction of Ukraine funding

Obstruction of Ukraine funding is perfectly timed to fit the timeline of other proxy wars. The Ukrainian’s don’t have enough soldiers, the Russians have destroyed everything the West has given to Ukraine. It no longer serves the interest of the USA to keep the proxy war going, so it’s Congress’s job to stop it. If Biden and his cabinet stopped it, they would publicly have to take up a position the Ds are not willing to take publicly because it will cost them votes. So now its Congress’s fault. The reality, however, is that this is continuous with the history of US proxy wars and quite frankly it’s the only way the Ds could stop funding Ukraine if that’s what they wanted to do. It seems that it’s exactly what they want to do.

limits on the movement of capital between the UK and the rest of the EU

The UK doesn’t want to be harmed, so they protected themselves. They aren’t opposing the USA by doing it, not in any meaningful way, they’re just following their profit motive and risk profiles. There’s no chance the UK attempts to assert dominance of the empire nor that it attempts to undermine the empire in favor of the Axis of Resistance, and there’s no chance it’s going to ride it out alone without the support of the empire. What you see as a schism I see as merely bureaucracy.

It shows contradictions within the logic of empire, not division within the empire. The partisanship is the current strategy of the owning class to manage those contradictions to avoid revolutionary conditions.

Maybe you’re right, but they didn’t need to do that before.

They did, but differently. There was a time when one party was all about the working class and the other was not. There was a time when one party was all about industrialization and the other was not. The history is rife with sloganeering, minor rebellions, etc. I think you’re correct that there’s something distinct about its character today. I think your diagnosis is off. I think that the culture war is all that’s left to them, and I think the nature of the culture war is that it is self-reinforcing, creating a runaway schism. But that schism is rhetorical and electoral for leadership, and personal, emotional, and moral for the populace. If the USA had a way out of the contradictions of empire, political energy would go towards that path, but I think we’re seeing that the empire is trapped and all of that political energy has to go somewhere that is infinitely expansive - culture war.

trying to make it illegal for Trump to run for office and Trump promising to jail his political opponents, but that could all be theater like you said.

I think this whole thing is being carefully managed. The timing of it is ridiculously obvious. It always needs to reach critical points at specific electoral windows that are too short for anything to actually happen but long enough for it to mobilize voters. It’s a total choice whether Trump ends up in jail or not, and that choice is going to be made on the basis of the consequences for the maintenance of empire.

These are outgrowths of partisanship that the empire manipulated people into, but now the blowback is setting in and this partisanship is starting to make empire management more difficult.

I just don’t think TPP and Brexit make it more difficult to manage empire. Empire is more difficult to manage because BRICS, the BRI, Chinese debt forgiveness, and the productive capabilities of the periphery are all taking up the space the empire needs to inhabit.

How about the so-called “labor shortage”, which is in direct contradiction with anti-immigrant/anti-refugee partisanship?

This is part of the set of contradictions that go along with the labor aristocracy in empire. From a purely economic situation, they would just flood the nation with migrants and tank wages, but there would be revolt. The migrants would eventually revolt as well, developing solidarity with the working class, so we need jingoism against the migrants. Now we both need cheap labor and also can’t have cheap labor. But the evidence of what I’m saying is here: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/26/biden-urges-bipartisan-border-deal-00138206 Both parties want the same thing.

The rest of your contradictions are things I agree with. I just don’t think it’s the ruling class in contradiction with itself. Capitalists are all in on the US Dollar. Europe is primarily consumer market at this point. There will be rifts in the empire as European politicians attempt to stay in power by courting BRICS for energy and goods, but capital is going to stay with the US. This is because the USA is strong, not weak, but also because that strength cannot resolve these contradictions.

Texas blocking federal border patrol agents

That’s one to watch for sure. Balkanization of the USA points to some interesting conclusions. But this is long enough. Thanks for the chat.

They’re looking for a way out to maintain the system. Right now, tech is not strong enough to allow the bourgeoisie to defeat the proletariat. They need to be able to neutralize massive numbers of people to prevent a revolution from ending class society. Autonomous weapons systems are the obvious move. Not sure how neuralink fits in, but these fuckers are just looking for leverage

I must disagree. Reaction and revision in the party were consequences of Western actions taken against them.

I think this is terribly mistaken. Reaction is inherent in any society undergoing change. It’s not something imposed from the outside. There IS international reaction, but that reaction is based on the international community’s relationship to the change. Kruschev represented the reactionary forces within Russia, not Western reactionaries. Revisionism in the USSR had nothing to do with the West and everything to do with the reactionary elements within the USSR that wanted to make socialism compatible with enterprise for profit and individual enrichment. It’s completely naive to assume that all of the USSR was ideologically aligned and that the only reason the USSR went the way it did was because of the West.

It wasn’t some internal failure of the USSR that caused it to collapse

It absolutely was.

it was the Cold War and Western aggression

The Cold War was the way that the US created pressures on the USSR without engaging them in nation-state war. The USSR needed to manage these pressures, and they failed to do so. The counter-revolutionaries within the USSR outmaneuvered the revolutionaries, and Stalin had no one to pass the torch to when he died. Kruschev launched the anti-Stalin campaign and from that point forward there was an attempt to build a new world power that allowed for private wealth accumulation and would compete with the West on economic and hard power grounds instead of ideological ones.

Back then, the West was actually a formidable colonial power - they weren’t just managers, it was a shrewd and effective system of colonial conquest.

It still is. The problem isn’t that the USA got soft from it’s success. It’s that there’s no other empires to inherit from. The USA finished taking over for the others empires after WW2. That doesn’t exist anymore. So the empire has been trying to figure out what to do, but there’s no room to expand into anymore. This is the contradiction of achieving unipolarity through displacement - once you achieve it, you cannot maintain with displacement, and the only solution is for you yourself to be displaced by the next empire. The USA has been trying to figure out a new strategy for decades, and the blowback strategy (War on Terror) has been the most effective and promising it’s come up with. You can call them soft for not coming up with an answer, but there’s also the possibility that there is no answer to be found.

Yes, the West lost battles before, but today they can’t even present a unified front

I don’t think this is a mistake. The apparent divisions politically are really useful rhetorically. You can easily see this because there’s clearly continuity in the USA’s behavior, despite the appearances of lacking a united front. The way the USA prosecuted the proxy war in Ukraine is identical to how to it prosecuted other proxy wars, but this time they did while putting out an image of division. The image and the reality don’t match up. The reality belies the continuity and consistency. The only conclusion to be drawn, then, is that the image is artifice.

Now other colonial actors and capital interests act in defiance of the empire to make their own rogue moves for power

What other colonial actors and capital interests are acting in defiance of empire? The international bourgeoisie is firmly in control of the empire. There are no wars between billionaires. And just to pre-empt the obvious - Russia and China are not colonial powers.

Brexit, for example

How is this defying empire? The UK participated in a project to create a European economic union and then backed out to protect some of its interests. In no way is this a defiance of empire.

I think this shows internal divisions within the empire and that this is reflected in partisanship.

It shows contradictions within the logic of empire, not division within the empire. The partisanship is the current strategy of the owning class to manage those contradictions to avoid revolutionary conditions.

The material base has changed and this has changed the political superstructure

The political superstructure hasn’t changed at all towards polarization and partisanship. The superstructure changes that have happened have been about power projection through treaties and NGOs. The much larger superstructural changes have been the rise of BRICS, alternate currency trades, and the neutering of sanctions, all against empire.

the voters didn’t just choose to become partisan on their own

They were manipulated into it through the propaganda arm of empire. The empire chose to make them extremely partisan. It serves the interests of empire.

the voters’ partisanship is actually a reflection of the changing material interests of the ruling class coming into contradiction with each other.

You haven’t shown any subgroups of the ruling class being in contradiction with each other. You keep pointing to the partisan divide, but they all party together, they send their kids to the same schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, they get donations from the same corporations, they vote together for everything the empire actually needs to survive. The Ds fucking obviated the filibuster last year to raise the debt ceiling, FFS. You’re getting confused by the image of conflict. There’s no real conflict within the ruling class. The contradiction is between the ruling class and the working class, and that contradiction is getting harder and harder to manage due to the changing material reality, which is itself a contradiction in that the bourgeoisie needed these changes to material reality for their own interests but the changes are making it harder to manage the class basis of society. The partisanship is yet another attempt to divide the working class against itself and defuse revolutionary potential. Is this going to result in some actual politicians reifying the narrative and living in a fantasy land? Yes. But that’s not terribly important, and in fact, it would be really hard to tell the difference between someone who’s a true believer and someone who’s merely behaving in accordance with the conditions created by polarizing the working class.

Even during the cold war the USA lost constantly. I don’t think it’s incompetence. I think guerilla warfare is simply superior. It’s not like the USA was effect during the cold war. The USSR was famous for it’s ability to hunt Western spies far more effectively than the reverse. The USSR defeated the most powerful Western army ever fielded while they were still trying to modernize their agriculture to stop the centuries-long cycle of famine. The USSR failed not because of the West but because of their own failures to manage reaction and revision in the party.

The cold war was colonial management. So I don’t see why you think managing empire back then made our politicians strong but managing empire now has made them weak. You’re over indexing on present-day failures and last generations successes. They were just as loony in the 70s as they are today, we just don’t keep that stuff in the forefront.

The most significant and most important difference is global financialization and the outsourcing that came with it. The politicians from the 30s to the 70s had to manage domestic industry and the business leaders did too. Since the 70s, with new economic policies allowing freer movement of capital, more financialization and abstract derivatives, and then China identifying the economic angle to kill the empire, todays politicians have never had to deal with real productive forces. I don’t think that makes them better or worse in this case. I think it makes them more prone to abstract thinking with fewer moments of contact with reality.

But both parties have that problem and it manifests not fundamentally as forgetting they are on the same team but rather deepening the contradictions inherent in the system through their domestic policy and rhetoric.

Transmission of empire happens in universities, in big business, and in the halls of power. The new guard has gone through that process just like their predecessors. That their behavior is more erratic, again, speaks to the psychology of the voters more than the psychology of the officials.

Fundamentally disagree. The political theater is not showing a deep divide between agents. It is reflecting the deep divide between voters.

Nah, you’re too credulous. The parties collaborate. Winning and losing is just part of the game. The small people care. The leaders golf together, vacation together, etc. They collaborate in the management of empire. No one actually cares who wins and loses. If they cared, they would behave differently.

It sounds like you’re saying that Biden supports the Zionist’s genocide literally because he wants to lose. As if this is a wedge issue that Democrats inflicted on themselves intentionally because they don’t want to be in power anymore.

No no, I’m saying the genocide is more important than winning. And if he has to lose in order for the genocide to continue under Trump, then they want to lose.

To say that they don’t want to win is to imply a secret conspiracy to lose, but that’s not what we see

It’s EXACTLY what we see. 40 years of campaigning on Roe v Wade as law, zero moves to make it happen. Spending their own fundraising on Republican opponents. Espousing positions that people want but never actually following through. Compromising before negotiating. Democrats make their money from Wall St, just like Republicans do, so they have to lie about wanting to win for progressives to vote for them, but they don’t actually want to win because then they’ll be exposed. When they have a majority, it’s always a small majority and there’s always one to three Democrats that adopt the “spoiler” role, either switching sides, going independent, pretending to be a Blue Dog, or lying about the will of their own constituents being opposed to Democrat positions.

With Hillary, they didn’t conspire to make Hillary lose.

They conspired to lose the election. Not to make Hillary lose, but to choose the person who polled terribly, to choose the positions that wouldn’t mobilize the voters, etc.

They didn’t want Bernie to win because he wasn’t a Democrat

No True Scotsman fallacy coupled with a completely ahistorical view. Bernie has been a major part of the party for a very long time. The man is an imperialist through and through. He’s very useful to them as a Democrat, specifically, he’s useful to attract progressive voters and they can always throw an election by the way they manage him. Very few people in the party are like that. Hillary is like that for them too, though less progressive and more violent. But all they have to do is treat Hillary badly and alienate a huge amount of voters.

Winning with Bernie would have fundamentally changed their shitty party

No it wouldn’t have. Because general voters don’t elect party leadership, and the president doesn’t suddenly become the head of the party. The party would have been fine ideologically. Their problem was that Bernie would hurt their donors.

If this analogy applies, if they would rather lose the election than stop doing genocide, then death to America. I won’t give a shit about who wins, hopefully whoever wins destroys this shithole.

They would rather lose than stop doing the genocide. The country is built on genocide - non-stop genocide. Just go look up how many people the USA killed in each military action after WW2. Then go look at how many indigenous people they killed here. Then try to find the numbers for how many slaves they killed. Just for comparison, the very tiny island of Haiti was replacing around 50,000 slaves (because they were being worked to death) annually. During the Haitian revolt, hundreds were gassed by the French in the bottom of slave ships. And that’s just the KILLING. Then you’ve got the erasure of language, child separation policies, which you know about now but literally follow an unbroken line all the back to before the founding of the country, because separating kids from their parents is how you kill an entire social culture, forced sterilization of 1/3 of Puerto Rico and of indigenous and Black people was happening through the 1970s. Both parties are aware. They participated. They think it’s fine. They think it’s correct. They fucking paid the slave owners for property losses but refuse to pay reparations to those enslaved or their descendants.

The USA is a genocidal settler colony that asserted its own leadership, live a cancer that broke free from its host and now lives independently. All the politicians are engaged, fully or partially, in ongoing centuries of genocide.

Electoral pressure is literally the only lever we have to push Biden to do better. There’s no other way.

This is correct, barring revolution.

Biden’s team is making a bet that we aren’t serious and that they can just use Trump to hold us hostage in the party.

You are incorrect. Biden’s team, under the direction of the Democrat party, have taken away your lever because they don’t want to win. The Democrats have said this, publicly. They said back in 2016 that they would rather lose to Trump than win with Bernie. The Democrat party is happy to lose, always.

Since when is Centrist defined as “I will shutdown the border as soon as you sign that bill”, “More kids in cages than the last guy”, “No prosecutions for leaders who incite a violent coup”, “More weapons for genocide”, “Let’s destroy the economy of our allies”, “We must keep the torture center at Guantanamo open”, “Who’s Epstein?”, “No I won’t pardon Peltier”, “No I won’t commute sentence of political prisoners”, “Yes, more black people in jail”, “Yes, it’s OK for prisoners to produce $11Bn in goods for private companies through slave labor”, “I swear we’ll do something about women’s health but it won’t be part of our political platform for the election”.

All of the evidence says we have the same two groups of white supremacist leaders we have always had: the plantation owners who bought the slaves, and the financiers who sold the slaves. You want to claim that the financiers are “centrist” in that formulation because they don’t personally whip people?

voting for Democrats in general elections and voting progressive in primaries is the only way this country will make any progress

Submitted without comment, without evidence, and without self-awareness. Hate to break it to you, but the only reason you say that is because you’ve been trained to say it through years of socialization in a white supremacist settler state. The actions you described have led the USA to its current position. When was the last time a Republican president won more votes than the Democrat candidate who lost? The last time was GWB in his second term by .7%, and that was 3 years after 9/11. Before that it was Public sentiment doesn’t matter. Voting doesn’t change anything. The USA hasn’t been a democracy for a long while:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6w9CbemhVY

Hong Kongers, protective of their distinct identity

The distinct identity of having lived on brutal violent British colonial rule? Fuck off, The Economist

OK, bonehead

Socialization