AkariMizunashi [comrade/them]

This worked (to some extent, in the small cohort of industrialized capitalist countries as a sort of class collaborationist regime mediated by unions and a relatively activist government) for around 20-30 years after WWII but that’s exactly what it is - something that will only work temporarily and for as long as it’s tolerable to capitalists, because the political system is built by and for capitalists, and as soon as they see an opening they will use the state to beat back and discipline labor (in this case the neoliberal reaction that’s continued since the 80s). Reformism is a circular dead end because politics and economics are inseparable, and political power just like economic power under capitalism is always (in the long term) gonna be stacked in favor of the people with capital - and those people aren’t gonna give up their power without a fight.

That analysis is also looking at the whole labor market as a closed system within rich capitalist countries when the reality is that most of the breathing room that the middle class / unionized labor had during that period was built on top of capitalist super exploitation of labor in Africa, South America and Asia, and that sort of exported exploitation is always gonna be the case under a capitalist political system built around nation states.

To add on to what others have said, the concept that capitalism is just letting the economy do its thing with no government influence is really mystifying and innaccurate. Capitalism requires immense support from a state (some sort of apparatus with a monopoly on force) in order to guarantee and enforce property rights, contracts, the collection of debts, ensure stable currencies that are widely accepted as payment etc. Just because the state is overwhelmingly working on the side of people with capital to preserve and accumulate that capital, doesn’t mean it isn’t working.

No, having a job isn’t remotely the same thing as a corporation / capitalist being driven by the profit motive - in the latter case profit is extracted from the labour of the people with jobs. And your friends, family, coworkers, or the bar you go to generally don’t have a financial incentive in making sure that you remain romantically unsatisfied, or absolute control over the social circle you’re exposed to; in contrast a successful long term monogamous relationship is literally a bad thing from the perspective of the shareholders of a dating app (in the same way that social media sites like Facebook basically make a business model out of addiction).

Class war is a matter of fact in the societies we all live in whether you want to acknowledge it or not. That can be attested to by people who have died from homelessness and hunger as a result of the exclusion of housing by people who have more money than them (landlords), by Indians who died in famines perpetrated by the capitalist British, by Indonesian communists who were murdered en masse by the authoritarian capitalist regime in that country supported by the United States (or in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America…), etc. etc. and over cases from centuries ago during the Atlantic slave trade up to exploitation and war under today’s neoliberalism.

When the interests of capitalists and landlords uphold a system that privileges them and murders countless people whom it exploits and excludes from even what they need to survive, that system is already violent against people that you implicitly don’t care about, regardless of whether it makes you uncomfortable to be aware of that violence.

edit:

To add on, this way of comparing “death tolls” under communism and Nazism is a classic tactic of neo-Nazi apologia and soft holocaust denial whether you intend it that way or are credulously repeating it. If you follow this line of thinking you end up at a point where, as one of the main goals of the Nazis was the eradication of communism and the Soviet Union (along with Jewish people and other groups), they really weren’t all that bad since they were trying to stop a greater evil (and indeed, you are explicitly minimizing Nazism next to communism in your post). I encourage anyone interested to read more about The Black Book of Communism that you cite and academic criticisms of it, since it deliberately exaggerates and imagines deaths under communist states in order to reach its figure of one hundred million and support this sort of comparison.

it looks like they got pooled between “doesn’t exist” and “no” to “are oil and gas companies responsible?”. “global warming doesn’t exist and if it does it isn’t their (our) fault”

irrespective of any other empirical claims you’re making in this thread, you must see how ridiculous it is to claim that news from massive private and state owned corporations is little influenced by money because low level journalists aren’t paid well (if you reflect on it for a moment). it’d be like imagining that Wal Mart’s corporate policies are decided by cashiers and store shelvers

It feels really remarkable how quickly in the late 2010s that top level people in the US government (as well as the media and society generally) pivoted to using annihilationist rhetoric as though China is some sort of anime arch-enemy they have to power up to defeat. I guess this is probably what the red scare years after 1945 felt like when the US and USSR quickly shifted from allies to rivals