Trump is not serving the ends of American oligarchs. He’s serving the ends of Russian oligarchs.

He would honestly be dead if that was the case. He’s in the white house celebrating how his friends made out like bandits out of the stock dips. Again, allegiances shift, it’s a balancing game. He’s serving oligarchs in general, the nationality barely matters these days, he’s not supporting some Russian/Israeli/American local bourgeoisie, those are extinct. I don’t know why you guys think nationality matters at all, they’re allied to money. Imperialism is the current order, and modern capitalists are greater internationalists than your average commie.

I really don’t see the need to try to see some dark unilateral control, when it’s across the board the exact same thing we’ve identified for literal centuries: The shifting alliances of powers whose interests are aligned.

The sad irony of conspiracy theorists is that it’s not paranoia (alone) that leads them into those rabbit holes, it’s naivety. They think that there are dark forces that hijacked their otherwise fine institutions, but refuse to recognize that those institutions were never meant to serve them in the first place. Trump and his entourage aren’t a cancer on a previously healthy organ, they are a healthy part of a parasite.

No, but they helped get him elected

Sure, I mean people made the argument with Russia too for his first term. I still think it’s absolutely insane to conclude that Russia controls western governments.

Any argument that the genocide in Palestine didn’t impact our election is not being honest

Of course, and I never made that argument. I can’t give an educated estimate, but folks more knowledgeable than me on US sentiment and voting habits say that this one issue could have massively shifted the election. You could probably even made a case that the democrats would have been a better ally to Israel in the grand scheme of things.

AIPAC: We control Western governments.

They are coping, trying to project their own power when they see very clearly that they’re on the brink. I don’t remember AIPAC saying that outright in english, but I wouldn’t exactly put it past those psychos either.

Enlightened Liberals: “no this is a strategic partnership”

I’m neither enlightened nor a liberal, but this is broadly a strategic partnership (in defense of the empire). Liberals still believe that an apartheid ethnostate is a completely acceptable thing, and that they should just kill a little bit less children. When exactly did the US need to convinced to lay waste to the middle-east for their own profit? If Israel sounds like a perfect unsinkable aircraft carrier in the area, it’s because that’s exactly what it is, and the kind of things they have never shied away from.

I don’t deny that they most likely have dirt on some politician, Israeli intelligence is on record trying to pull the grossest shameless stunts, and of course they try their hardest to impact policies abroad, they’re not even trying to hide it. But saying “they control western government” as if the entire western world is a collection of Israeli puppet states is legitimately insane. The US military budget alone eclipses their whole GDP.

What Israel is currently doing is speedrunning the reputation of the entire Western world into the ground

We can do that ourselves tyvm, Israel isn’t responsible for Trump remarkable attempts at destroying the US economy, USD, and the entirety of their softpower. Israel has decided to completely overextend in a way where western governments, despite their ardent zionism, haven’t been able to reign in antizionist sentiment. But do you think that Israelis mind controlled Trump into destroying their lifeline and tariffing their own fucking selves? Everyone knows that Israel is only held afloat by the uninterrupted stream of weaponry from the US, and that’s a sacrifice profit the military-industrial complex is willing to make.

You cannot in any way explain to me how this is a strategically sound plan

No I cannot, it’s a fascist state eating itself, many such examples. They are desperate, and they’re very clearly running straight into a wall. I’d like you, however, to explain to me how this is a strategically sound plan even IF you assume their total supposed control of western governments when they inevitably crash and burn, as they’ve been working overtime towards. It’s not sound. They’re not sound. It’s a fascist ethnostate.

• Actual conspiracies and manipulation (leading to probably most imperial wars of the 20th century till today)
• A justified distrust in the government, who people identify readily as not defending their interests in the slightest
• Conspiracy theories straight up cooked up by states to misdirect, or propagated heavily from media that are either state aligned or conveniently left unsanctioned
• The manufacturing of a climate of anti-science (in the US specifically)

Are the main reasons I can identify for why it’s become such a norm. When things like MK Ultra, Cointelpro, Operation Gladio…etc are all declassified, the bar gets puts pretty fucking high for what states are willing and able to do.

Israel doesn’t control western governments, it’s just a very valuable tool of the US, for which they are ready to make a lot of concessions. Western governments in turn are broadly servile to the US. I’m not sure how you expect a small broadly hated state like Israel to control the whole west. Lobby and intelligence can get you far, but not that far.

No absolutely, I talk about capitalism because that’s the current rule of the world, but this exploitation predates capitalism by millennia, you’re right. The specific aspect of capitalism or feudalism, or any such form of exploitation, is that power doesn’t represent the population’s interest (even though of course we pretend to live in a perfect representative democracy). If the state protects private ownership by law, and that private ownership gives you incredible power itself (being in control of production, but also media and culture more broadly), you end up with the self reaffirming loop of protecting owners, and not the population.

As an individual, you can have power over me if you hold a gun to my head, but it’s virtually impossible to point a gun at an entire nation when it’s that same nation that must hold the gun. Capitalism today is a massive ouija board, where anyone doubting the mystical forces is shamed, ostracized, or worse (of course this was much more literal under God’s mandated monarchs). But at the end of day, this still requires wide consent, even when enforced militarily.

Another way to put it is that while we often center the conversation around the “conflict of interest” that accompanies power, we ignore what that interest is. If exploiters or their defenders are systematically put in power, they expectedly defend exploitation. The scary communist motto of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is about recognizing the origin and importance of power in the short-term, and giving it to those whose interests are emancipation. I fully agree with you, personal gain doesn’t automatically go away if you get rid of profit, but thinking about this not in terms of conflicts of individual interests, but conflict of class interests allows us to dispel the misleading scary and brutal image of power wielded in any other way than the liberal democracy. The goal of course is a real democracy, one where workers, instead, defend their interests. The expected outcome is the dissolution of that exploitation through the dissolution of class, and eventually the dissolution of the state itself.

None of this magically protects you from acts of corruption or abuse, this is why the communist approach is not to flip the table over and bring a new ouija board except this time with “the good spirit” inside, but to create class consciousness, to dispel the lies and manipulations (because we’re not naive and pliable, the manufacturing of consent is a massive global industry), and to continue collectively educating ourselves as we progress so we don’t get fooled when someone brings a tipping table.

I swear I’m trying to be brief 😭

That’s interesting but I think you’re making a couple of crucial mistakes.

First as others mentioned, production and consumption are obviously intrinsically linked. A bigger country doesn’t automatically mean bigger quality of life despite having more workers, Switzerland is not richer because it’s smaller when it’s got roughly the same population as the poorest country on earth. But if talking proportionally, more workers per capita means more production per capita, which means more consumption per capita.

Second, to kinda go in your direction and in part because of the contractual nature of employment, the market pressure on workers wages is not a product of the number of workers, but the number of available workers. For working (not unemployed) people, the quality of life does increase as that number gets lower, but this means less unemployment, not less workers. This fact is the reason why unemployment is not a side-effect of capitalism (or the lazy nature of people or whatever else), but a necessary feature of capitalism, since capital relies on this perpetual supply drive (buyers market) for profit.

edit: This isn’t to talk about immigration, this is a more nuanced subject. Immigration has been defended on progressive basis (often not genuinely, but to benefit from cheap exploited labor) and attacked on reactionary basis (surprisingly also often non genuinely, e.g. France making massive anti-immigration propaganda in the 20th from one hand while asking border to let through illegally half a million of Portuguese workers with the other, against Portugal’s demands).

There’s countless invaluable Jewish voices in the anti-zionist movement of course, but what Jewish homeland could you support that wouldn’t be an ethno-state? /g

Our economy is organized around exploitation, I understand the point that someone in power might use this power for their own good if unchecked, but in an economy of exploitation like ours, power is organized around said exploitation. The worst of people go to the top not because bad people inherently do (or as you say, because power incentivizes bad action) but because this system is structured around exploitation, being ruthless and clamping down as hard as possible on those below you.

I don’t believe that power generally incentivizes bad action. Outside of the structure of a company or a capitalist state, it’s merely a factor to account for, like any other conflict or human element (and is usually handled fairly expeditiously). In my experience in non profit organizations, usual “human issues” are of course presents, but corruption and power abuse only ever rear their heads when the rubber hit the profit road.

This confusion also isn’t a mistake, it’s a misdirection, perpetually maintained to depict the constant corruption of states and companies worldwide as a mere “unfortunate reality” of human organization, while minimizing scrutiny of the structures this corruption exists in. When Trump, Elon and friends are waging a crusade against corruption, you would think this misdirection is at its absolute stretching limit, but somehow it still holds strong even (and especially) in those critical of them.

Sorry for stupidly long reply, in a word, I think we shouldn’t mistake “profit incentive”, for “power incentive”.

I wouldn’t expect anyone to deny the existence of corruption or abuse of power, but I think the corrupting influence of power is often used to justify in retrospect the acts of people put into power to do exactly that. It might sound pedantic to say that CEOs or state officials aren’t really “corrupt”, because they rarely ever intend to represent the interests of the workforce or population, but really it’s a total inversion of causality. They don’t “betray” because they got in power, they got in power to “betray”.

On an interesting sidenote, it also goes against the common misconception that any form of authority ultimately leads to corruption, since those same CEOs and officials seem to stay pretty loyal.

Perhaps surprisingly when it comes to breaking the echo chamber and having diverse political points of view and approaches (on subjects like identity politics, intersectionality, geo politics, organization building, strategy…etc) I’d say even ML circles have a lot more of that than just vaguely leftist safe liberal stances (at the very least they might have novel ideas and no orange man bad meme).

If you want more diversity of opinions you can expand in different directions, but I hardly see what good would be a place that has both fascists and anti-fascists for example and most of us are tired of picking internet fights. I suppose as long as you’re aware of which kind of discussion you’ve more tolerance for you’re good, but whether it’s tolerance for the occasional black crime rate statistic or an esoteric graph of the falling rate of profit, you’re not likely to find a space that has both.

In general I’d go with Cowbee’s recommendations though (for something that’s still obviously fairly leftwing)

It’s funny that they did all that and open-sourced it too. Like some kid accusing another to copy their homeworks while the other kid did significantly better and also offered to share.

Wait I somehow never thought about this, does the one china policy really dictates that they have to apply tariffs across the strait? I assume it’s in jest since I’m pretty sure they regular import/export on a smaller scale yet (like ban on Xinjiang imports), but I’m curious

Are you running a quantized model or one of the distilled ones?

The funny thing is that I would realistically only care about, for example, the Russian government collecting my data if their oligarchy collaborated with my government’s oligarchy against my and the population’s interest (which I guess in this case is significantly more likely than China)