It is not that there isn’t some flow both ways, but that the material conditions is much more dominant than people coming up with ideas and mechanations moving things in ways contradicting the conditions. The system setting the conditions is in fact dominant. The way corruption and self-dealing manifests is different between where you can just create a private corporation and lobby for a government contract to justify being given a 500 million dollars of tax payer money, versus trying to massage Gosplan to syphon off several million Rubles of excess spending, versus tricking a sovereign wealth fund to hand over several billion dollars for some supposed innovative building company to create innovations for Neom.

The fact that it is attributed to a very few actors and not a literal, singular actor does not negate great man theory.

The issue is that this is arbitrarily flattening of the actual material conditions. You can point out that nearly all political systems, on a long enough timeline lead to some form of collapse (Joseph Tainter is a good reference on this). But all of these things are dependent, not independent, of the systems and conditions they find themselves in. The timescales and forms can vary drastically depending on the material conditions actors find themselves in.

IDK, if it were Iraq levels of stupidity, the Democrats would become completely on board. This is a rare break with imperialism, because, also, Democrats usually would be on board with any support of fascism in Latin America (e.g. Pinochet, Operation Condor, etc.). We are finding extremely rare exceptions to right-wing stupidity that the Democrats wont agree and sign-off on.

Edit: And here I was constantly pointing out that the Democrats completely gave up any pretense of being an opposition party. Maybe they have finally found some difference between post 2024 Democrats and Trump in terms of policy.

Who could have known? These goddamn tankies, telling us not to immediately blame the Jews?!

American Capitalism? I invoked multiple genocides and political repressions that weren’t American. I am sure that 1840s Hungarians and Irish, 1930s Bengalis, and 1990s and 2000s Iraqis are glad to know that capitalism isn’t repressive or intentionally creating starvation because the people creating the repression and starvation said that they aren’t. Even though China gave up on most communist ambitions post-Dheng and Cuba has been strangled by American blockades, both have not been nearly as active in war mongering as “Western Nations”, nor as repressive, despite active propaganda about them. And Western repression is much more tied to their economic modes than other nations. You have to kill anti-war protesters (e.g. Kent State) because if not full colonialism, we need neo-colonialism, so pro-Vietnamese protests can’t be tolerated. And we need to support Israel, so “anti-Semitic” a.k.a. anti-Zionist protesters can’t be tolerated and have no rights, because of their ties to the military and arms industry. Such as Mahmoud Khalil, who needs to be disappeared and sent to an undisclosed location to try to push fascist anti-protest, anti-speech laws.

Yeah, as someone with Lakota, Irish, Bengali, Kurdish, and Iraqi friends and opiate and meth addicted family, I am not sure whether to laugh or cry at children of your kind. I am sure the 1990s and the introduction of capitalism was a great and prosperous time.

We are seeing the capitalist West’s descent into fascism. The direct proof of the 1930’s maxim, “fascism is capitalism in decay” between the AFD, Orban, Erdogan, Starmer being basically indistinguishable from a Tory, Macron pulling a Hindenburg by using the presidential power to appoint a prime minister that will unify the center-right liberals with the far-right to prevent the left from having any power in government, and Meloni being an acceptable, reasonable western leader because she follows through with whatever US foreign policy is on offer. We are seeing a direct breakdown because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (law of diminishing returns, applied to profit, if you are a child that believes in neoclassical economics). So profit has to be sought out by purely national protectionism and reshoring since there is not a growing pie, but you just have to claim a greater slice of the pie. Capitalism on any sufficient timescale is Fascism, the destruction of WW2 and the Marshall Plan reset this “diminishing return on profitability” so that we are reaching the same state of the 1920s. But since there isn’t a strong socialist movement we have to modify Gramsci’s assessment. “The old world is dying, a new one is completely stillborn, now and forever is the time of monsters”

Communism by any other name would smell as sweet

Indonesia, Chile, West Germany, Congo, Iran, Bengal, Guatemala, Nicaragua…

Yeah, capitalist Britain, France, and America were terrible in their use of famines and genocides. The problem with capitalism is that eventually you run out of other people’s land and food.

Democrats are currently proving that they are controlled opposition.

Democrats aren’t generally pro taxing the rich or deviating significantly on many issues since Clinton and the 90s. Yes, some of the squad said that they were pro-taxing the rich when they knew that there was no possibility of it being brought to a vote and the Democrats maintained a pretend opposition to the extreme violations of civil rights in the war on terror or ICE deportations. But after Obama, the most extreme and worst excesses of the war on terror were bipartisan, and after Biden all ICE and immigration policies were fully bipartisan (he continued the obviously facetious use of COVID as a terrible, contagious disease to deny asylum seekers, just as Trump did, after saying COVID was over, and continued deportations and putting immigrants in ICE concentration camps, when 4 years prior Democrats could understand that was fascist). That is why the left hates Democrats. Because the two-party system means the Democrats can absorb all opposition to the Republicans, while continuing all of their policies and claiming that wanting any movement to the left/away from fascism is only helping the Republicans. That we should just continue the Republican’s policies, but it is fine because Obama is going to file the paperwork correctly to send Arabs to blacksites or Biden is going to file the paperwork correctly to do ICE deportations at a greater rate than Trump [term 1] or genocide in Gaza. The Democrats are above criticism and should be allowed to do fascist immigration policy or genocide.

AOC obviously didn’t get the message. The Democrats have completely given up on the Kafabe of pretending to be an opposition party.

Breaking: Democrats might still be electable in the future, through no virtue of their own!

Völker, hört die Signale!
Auf, zum letzten Geficht!
Die Internationale
Erkämpft das Menschenrecht!

Grok is still woke!!!

If you believe in great man theory™ and think that all political developments happen because one person can magically steer entire countries and the world, in geo-political terms, or idealists in thinking that if you have the correct ideas, you can magically steer the entire rest of the world to whatever you think, by having the correct thoughts. Then your theories of political developments are non-materialist, like this comment is objecting to. The system sets the conditions of who is going to be empowered or rewarded for their actions and positions.

No, it was because they didn’t want a bordering nation to join a hostile military alliance.

Not even just changes in administration. The U.S. will often suddenly move on or just decide you will work better as a villain for internal politics. The US basically told Saddam Hussein that we wouldn’t care if he invaded Kuwait only to then use that invasion as justification to make him a boogeyman for the next decade.

You losers are still using mechanical tweezers? I upgraded to optical tweezers long ago.