OK, I can put it like this: I agree with you but I'd label myself as being overly optimistic whereas you'd label it as realistic.

Your point about oil is astute; there does seem to be a positive paradigm shift. And yes, electricity and internet are common commodities. But, I'd temper this optimism with the idea that we don't seem to learn from these examples. Or, we learn agonizingly slowly. Take any healthcare discussion, not WHAT is being discussed but HOW it's being discussed, and it becomes readily apparent we don't fundamentally grasp the point of technological progress and its naturally occurring, universal benefits.

To distill it more, most people get up in the morning and go to work because Once Upon A Time there wasn't indoor electric lighting. It's 2017 and we have what would in recent history be considered supercomputers in our pockets, supercomputers that also make phone calls, but we live like the Amish, relatively. Amish that post a lot on Facebook. And there seems to be a half-zombified system hellbent on ensuring this relative Amishness continues.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

And Adam said, Yeah that's cool and all but how are we gonna monetize it and generate a revenue stream?

Seems a question of form vs content. Calling the grass blue doesn't mean the grass takes all of the characteristics of blueness. It's a label.
Union (empires aren't unions) of socialist (workers didn't own means of production) Soviet (workers/peasants/soldiers councils in name only with no formal power) republics (dictatorships). Form =/= content.

This concept of "the Global South" is key if you really want to understand what's going on at borders all over the world right now. The imperial western countries are heavily reliant on the STOLEN natural resources and slave or supercheap labor of the Global South, and these people are forcefully walled off from the "nice" places while constant warfare is done on their political and economic systems, but especially if they ever push to the left, for a movement for the people to control the means of production and their own natural resources. The United States has conducted coups as recently as 2016 in Brazil, but if you look back 20 years you can find many done by administrations of both parties.

And if they try to leave to get into the imperial area, they are put into concentration camps, forcefully deported, or worse. We've seen how this movie plays out, and there's only one last step after mass concentration--mass extermination.

Big version:



One note on the map:

good point einbert. a plan is to make china nice enough that people from other countries immigrate there and eventually at a much later date, india. china would become thebiggest economy and in a way a kind of barrier for what you have listed as the global north

Judge rules that Trump administration has been wrongly detaining asylum seekers - USA TODAY

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ers/753151002/

Not an Obamajudge either.

I like to call it "the imperial zone" versus "the global north" because of this:



The imperial zone is mostly connected and allied and on the same page, the global south is not. What they have in common is that they've had all their resources stolen at the point of a gun for the last couple of centuries and now people make fun of them for being "****hole" countries.

thats true but my understanding is that there are lots of groups working to make the rest of the world better. saudi arabia for the first time women can drive, millions are being lifted out of poverty, the net migration rate to america from mexico is now negative due to improving conditions in mexico, aid from all over the world is being given to africa.
ourworldindata.org has a lot of useful data that shows a lot of bad situations but mostly improvement. Obama said the world is more peaceful than its ever been.

Obama oversaw two perpetual wars (really more than that) and a coup in Brazil. I guess the world is pretty peaceful when most of our conflicts are simply carried out through the CIA and so forth in the last twenty years. The world is not peaceful to people outside the imperial zone. They are fighting hard for their lives. In Venezuela, the US is working hard to overturn the leftwing government of Nicolas Maduro, and they have blocked the flow of food and supplies to this country and other such countries as best they can. It's a perpetual cold war being conducted on the global south since 1991, and Donald Trump is the natural escalation of it.

https://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Oh by the way:

well there's a lot of dangers but governance was always this way. Theres a lot of new ill call them challenges coming. artificial intelligence, predator drones, etc but of course all dangers can be more or less dangerous to any groups of people. The reality of the world is a long history of war and in order for the world to not be controlled by a madman the rules need to be enforced. The global south used to be bigger still. the balance of power and the rule of law were never easy things. for anyone. What if america just did nothing and russia and china ran the world instead? what if the entire imperial zone was destroyed and all its inhabitants murdered how would that solve the problem of the global south?

If that happened the working class could potentially rise up and control their OWN means of production, their OWN resources, and we could smash these international borders which only serve the interests of capital. We could spread that powerful wealth all throughout the globe and everyone could live in prosperity, with free time and space to live. Noone has to be exterminated, we have plenty of resources for everyone in fact (again, most of which were stolen and shipped to the imperial zone by force). But if we want to continue to live these fatcat high on the hog lives on the backs of the workers of the global south, harder and harder questions will have to be answered. You see climate refugee crises all over Europe and the United States, and it's only going to get much much more intense. These crises are going to be solved by communism, or a lot of people are going to get murdered by Fascism.

PREACH

so, someones probably asked you this before but if we restart the economy and everyone has lots of resources whats to prevent a new class of people finding new methods to control what they see as the masses? good people would be fine in a situation like this but people are naturally greedy. part of the hearts of darkness inherent in tyrants and control freaks is their desire to control. even in a world where the resources were handed out equitably some people would try to control others resources just for the ability to control other peoples resources.

Well that's a totally different struggle. There are a lot of ideas but essentially what you do is you have a REAL democratic setup (not a sham casino game where the winner can get 3,000,000 less votes and control the House with like 45% of the vote). And that setup elects people, people who work and help organize things and can figure out how to purposefully direct resources in order to give people meaningful employment, secure housing, healthcare, etc. etc. There's going to be a lot of hard work to done after the revolution, and we're going to need people of all kinds of skill sets to be in office--but we sure as **** don't need like 99% rich private equity ****s from Wall St. and whatnot. But I think this may be a question for a different thread but if you started one I would be happy to participate.

Edit to add: Before you can really even worry about that you have to achieve global communism. Not in a localized area, it's way too weak and vulnerable to imperial destruction as we saw with the USSR etc. You need full global communism before you can direct your full resources to such concerns, though popular support for communism, which is really the only moral way, should be started, well now. It should be something any decent person would do. Read Combat Liberalism. It's short, seriously.

Try to engage in a less and less liberal culture:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/a...2/mswv2_03.htm

I don't think it would be easy for me to start a new thread because it would be difficult for me to go into more depth. I'm already trying. It would take someone really smart like dvaut. Im just glad youre talking to me.

what i want to know down in the peanut gallery is. How would global communism work? Who would decide what and if there were no checks on popular votes how would minority groups be protected? So are you saying mao was the good guy? what are your thoughts on mao and stalin in general?

A clueless non-answer to a good question in how you ensure and install democracy followed up with a Mao quote, classic.

Yeah so you are talking about two people who were leaders in countries that were somewhere on the spectrum of socialism and communism. They were up against the imperial capitalist powers and they were under siege from day one. Similar to the leaders of North Korea today, they were painted as crazies, often using racist language or just dismissing them offhand. This is the kind of culture they were up against, and they struggled, and they won. They survived and thrived for a long time within that spectrum. You can't say they achieved full communism because that has to be global, but they fought and defended their territories and did so to the best of their abilities. Whether they were "the good guys" or not is up to you and I would say you should do some investigation on your own. But perhaps start with more recent events and work backwards, it might make more sense. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein might be a good place to start, and then from there I would recommend The Communist Manifesto and then Capital by Karl Marx. You will really understand things better from reading those than from hearing it from me.

One of the principals of Mao was that you aren't supposed to speak on a subject you haven't investigated. I feel like that is important. Other people will have to comment on whether Mao and Stalin were good, but I can say many of Mao's thoughts and ideas were definitely good.

I think that to a certain extent I do understand those ideas. And I have a great amount of sympathy for them. A relative, who I knew, who at the time was fighting for czechoslovak independence had a bone to pick for germany that went really deep. he was put in charge of a division of czech soldiers in england and performed his diuties admirably but they ended up not seeing any action because there was not the expected land assault in england and so he left and joined a resistance group in the ussr and they fought to the death against nazis all throughout ukraine and poland after crossing moravian borders pretending to be priests. true story.

So i have a great deal of sympathy for the ideals of communism and have read the communists manifesto. but if liberalism "gets in the way" of communism by people voicing their own opinions, by regarding their own individuality over the revolution then of what value is the revolution. Shouldn't a proper government provide for individualism rather than insists on its destruction like in maos pamphlet?

It doesn't mean people don't get to have individuality but it does mean people don't get to be Nazis and Fox News doesn't get to exist. That stuff would get "nipped in the bud" so to speak under communism.

In practice the problem with big state socialism is the same as capitalism. Concentrated power. People will never give that up. The road to freedom and egalitarianism is opposition to concentrations of power in all forms. That Mao quote is obviously terrifying and completely predictably was the ideology of a terrifying society.

Someone will have the power. Either the workers have it or the capitalists have it or someone else will have it.

So it's not possible to have a society where others have no power over individuals, but it's not all or nothing. There is humongous variation.