That bill would impose tariffs of 500% on countries that imported Russian oil, Barrot said.

“Russia has found ways to circumvent the blockage imposed by Europe and the United States so closing the tap would grab Russia by the throat,” he said.

Ladies and gentlemen, the euros still have it in them. If you ever doubted the comedic prowess of the intellectual titans of the 4rth reich, think again.

Thank you

It is not a problem to help nations trying to defend themselves from imperialists. I don’t think there is anything wrong with selling weapons to certain countries like pakisthan who need defending from India.

However, becoming a “major arms trader” is a different thing. It is problematic for many reasons.

1. You need to start putting money into R&D for a lot of different weapons, each suited to a different situation to satisfy the diverse needs of your diverse clientele.
2. The above also makes scaling up production a challenge, as you have more product lines.
3. Selling weapons to lots of countries creates a political problem. The public of the countries you sell to will question why they are relying on you.
4. It creates perverse incentives. Consider this psychotic shit for example.

Fr though. I’m not throwing shade at anyone.

Gooning behaviour the sexual activity? Niche fetish. Never tried it. Never had the time to try it.

Gooning behaviour aka the porn version of being “terminally online”? Annoying at best, community destroying at worst.

Gooning behaviour aka how my friends use it, aka “we have this one friend who refuses to leave the house and we joke that he spends all his time gooning but is actually having a mental crisis and resists all our efforts to help him”? Uh …

So basically, words are the devil and they lead us astray with their multitudes.

Oh person writing for bloomberg, this is a good thing for china. A proletarian dictatorship should not become a major arms trader. It should design and stockpile weapons primarily for its own defensive use. American arms manufacturing has to deal with a myriad of issues due to its nature as a global supply chain and global war machine.

I find it reassuring that despite having such a massive economy and export dominance in almost all industries, and despite having such large quantities of arms production, virtually all of it is for defensive purposes. Although this may just be cope.

They literally torpedoed Brazil and Russia’s attempt at that lol.

You will need to specify what you mean by this, because I am unaware of this incident.

They dont wanna make their reserves of USD less valuable. They wont even use the USD they have to smash 3rd world debt.

This is a Chinese attitude that I myself criticized, however, it is fully understandable that the Chinese leadership is hesitant to just say fuck it and give up (on paper) $4.5T of value. That’s basically 2 decades of hard earnings.

They want to maintain the stable international order.

Yeah cause having an unstable international order sucks ass. I see far too many leftists have this sort of “move fast and break things” attitude which the leadership of a country can’t employ as the standard approach.

Marx explicitly says in the manifesto that a) communism is possible now (i.e. with 1848 productive forces)

In 1848 even the mathematical method for planning an economy didn’t exist. If Marx ever said that a communist society could be built with 1848 levels of technology (he didn’t, as in principles of communism, it was stated that it would take a long time for a newly established socialist state to “multiply the productive forces” until they were suitable for communism), then that just makes him wrong.

At best you could say that by the 1950s-1960s the technological methods became available for creating a communist society (aka numerical planning methods, convex optimisation and modern control systems theory). Even then, those are not productive forces. For much of the world, the lack of even early industrialization was a huge impediment for communism. In China, full industrialization is a relatively recent phenomenon.

The only reason for any marxist post 1848 to call for growing the productive forces is the need to develop military capabilities to defend against the imperialist cancer hellbent on destroying every ecosystem.

I’d prefer not to die from preventable diseases or coal smog or live in a world without artificial fertilizers.

There is no room tactically or theoretically for green growth.

What is your strategy? That China nukes the western populations so that they stop consuming so many resources and stop emitting so much carbon? Or that Chinese people stick to lower levels of development while the ecosystem collapses anyway from western pollution, and then the west invades the weakened China?

Even if China suddenly pulls the plug on western consumption, the only thing that causes is for the west to immediately go for WW3.

Improvements in the quality of life of who? Certainly not the people forced at gunpoint off their land by “leftist” governments to make way for mines using 760,000 litres of groundwater per second and dumping the toxic waste into their lands, waters and airs? The citydwelling labour aristocrats with legal status and formal employment see (marginal) improvements in QoL; the costs are literally dumped on the heads of the slumdwelling proletariat.

We’ve gone from where to where in this discussion. Which government are you talking about? How is this unspecified “leftist” government related to the discussion about China? Most capitalist global south societies have immense class distributions baked into them, I am aware of this.

However, diminishing the QoL gains from improved energy infrastructure as marginal, and those benefiting from them as labor aristocrats (even though most global south city dwellers are still heavily exploited) is just being biased and heavily subjective.

This discussion is already pointlessly long and off-topic. I ain’t engaging on with the USSR stuff.

You don’t necessarily need to push the Communism button to accomplish de-dollarisation. It could be done using keynesian style policies as well. In fact, Keynes himself at some point did try to implement a global “bancor” system in which no currency would have dominance and there would be trade balance.

not “restructure the economy for decoupling and greater tensions with the Yanks.”

This is fairly obvious and not something hidden at all. The CPC has no desire to inflame tensions on the world stage or to close off the economy, and they say this openly. On the other hand, de-dollarisation I’d an explicitly stated goal. There have been multiple tests of moves that could lead to de-dollarisation. The infrastructure for it is already being built and used.

This isnt even mentioning their consistent advocacy of so-called green growth

The question of growth vs degrowth as a method for climate transition is tactical and defining the “green growth” strategy as “not socialism by definition” is presumptuous.

Every solar panel and EV that China exports is a little bit less carbon dioxide released from what would have been fossil fuels. And if that transportation/energy wouldn’t have been produced otherwise (such as in the global south), it is still a gain if improvements in the quality of life are achieved.

Oh hey, the tarriffs woulda been excellent for reducing useless production of dollarstore trash. Oh well.

The tariff war isn’t even over

neither the government or party seems to care about the ecological and social harms inherent to industrial mining.

I have not looked into this specifically, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was technological work in china towards gradually reducing such damage.

You mean “soviet peoples” right?

It was a typo. No need to be obtuse and accuse me of “great Russian chauvinism”.

Which, again so you dont misunderstand me, was a necessary tactic but one that had unexpected and negative consequences that marxism demands we not ignore just bc it makes us sad.

You are preaching to the choir. There are few people here who would tell you that rapid industrialisation doesn’t have ecological and social consequences. What appears tenous as best is your assertion that rapid industrialisation paved the way for reaction to take root in the USSR, while ignoring the losses incurred by the party during WW2.

Now it certainly may be the case that some of the reaction in the latter years come from the “fordist” practices of the USSR during its early years, but this is the case with literally all societies. The economic situation of earlier generations creates specific mentalities within them that they carry on until they die. Thereby creating inertia in thinking. Your proposed mechanism does not explain why the CPSU couldn’t adapt to changing times.

Going to sheaffication of G sometimes feels like I’m getting whatever the opposite of education is lol.

It is clear there is no consideration in China beyond “line go up” when it comes to their capitalism action plan.

Certain factions in the CPC have this view, but there was an ideological struggle in the CPC a little bit before Xi became president precisely around this issue, and Xi’s victorious faction has made significant efforts in curbing liberalism. So this isn’t an accurate reading of the modern CPC.

This is the fundamental issue that the USSR had to contend with in the 20s-40

I think it’s kinda crazy to accuse the Stalin administration of being concerned solely with enacting some “capitalism action plan”. And while the USSR during this time was certainly very focused on increasing economic growth as rapidly as possible, this was absolutely necessary to ensure the survival of the Russian revolution (and the Soviet people). The real seed of reaction was sown by Krushchev and the failure of the CPSU during that era of filling the loss of high quality and young party cadres in the aftermath of WW2.

there is no replacing the US consumer market, other markets are already oversaturated with Chinese exports, and quite simply are not as wealthy as the US

This is not true. The tariff war is a prime opportunity for China to develop its own “internal circulation”, aka domestic consumer base (the CPC’s own terminology and stated goal) and to increase consumption/development in the global south. The US “consumer base” and “wealth” for imports is really just the American heavenly tribute that it extracts from the world. The US gets commodities on debt that it has no intention of ever paying back, while the rest of the world is forced to trade US debt with each other if they want to do business.

The loosening of tariffs is a missed opportunity. The Chinese government could have continued to maintain pressure on the US. And while it’s true that this would have caused damage to export oriented businesses in China, China has a planned economy and certainly could print money to support these export oriented businesses. It could bouy its export industries by providing loans in Yuan to developing countries, so they can purchase Chinese products. The latter policy would pair well with China’s earlier decision to remove all tariffs on low-income countries (a much welcome move). Both China and the global south could then trade goods with each other using Yuan or alternative currencies.

The only good part about this move is that it gives Chinese policy makers more time to consider consider their options and take things slowly. However, this time is fundamentally limited, as the American imperialists are becoming increasingly impatient and belligerent.

3Blue1Brown

The current goat of youtube math education. I don’t know what he is like on some of his streams (because I don’t care about those). However, his mainline videos really helped me understand a lot of math concepts.

Bessent said the temporary reductions would effectively reduce the level of U.S. tariffs still in place on Chinese goods to about 30%, while China was reducing its levies on American imports to 10%.

Why couldn’t the US just destroy itself?! Don’t make the rational move! JDPON DON I believed in you!

sending positive energy your way!

I hate the way the bourgeois media talks, lacking literally even an atom of concern or respect for workers, the environment or the life/flesh of living things. It’s all numbers and profits, national spats and numbers. 80 of the Amazon’s deforested area reduced to merely a few billion dollars of exports.

Fair enough. That is a victory worth celebrating because the 9/11 planner (aka comrade George “Dubya” Bush) was successful in accelerating American decline by 20 years.

At least it’s a step up from

The existence of a Palestinian state or people is anti-semetic

Americans also don’t have any military victories to celebrate. Both in the sense that the keep loosing wars, and in the sense that even when they win wars, they end up creating such hellish outcomes that the ruling class prefers to bury the shit under the sand.

Firstly, America is not nazi Germany 2.0, nazi Germany was America 2.0.

Secondly, Who will declare war on America?

China? They already are preparing for WW3 scenarios and Trump’s statements do nothing to change the timeline of preparations

Russia? They are already at (proxy) war with the US

Iran or North korea? They have enough defensive capabilities to have a good chance of defeating a US invasion (which appears to be a matter of when not if). But no real offensive capabilities against the US (discounting US satelites).

India or NATO minus the US? Their ideological conviction would lead them to siding with American fascism rather than against it. Like, why would they invade the heartland of world-historical fascism when they themselves are fascist?

We just gonna sit around and let Nazi Germany 2.0 happen?

Modern america doesn’t a tenth the (relative to the rest of the world) military or economic power that Nazi Germany did. And that’s because other countries haven’t been sitting on their asses all this time. They’ve been struggling for decades to create the multipolar world.