Juice

I'll repeat myself - capitalism is not about making money. Making money is an intermediate step. That is what the accumulation of capital allows one to do. Capitalism is a system of class dominance which means it is about power.

Power is effort expended over time. so how does an institution, for the benefit of its leaders, gain power, politically or economically? They get other people to expend effort for the institution or for those leaders. Basically you get people to work for you.

Capitalism, the threat of starvation, the ideologically religious myth of hard work being the main determinant of wealth is one way. Doing work for a church or religion is another much older way. How this connects together, if you are able to connect two ideas together at all, is that capitalism in the form of imperialism, that nasty combination of militaristic dominance, financialization and exploitation of workers described by Lenin in his book on imperialism; has backed fundamentalists particularly for their domestic feistiness. The USA has a long history of backing with money and weapons, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists such as the Mujahideen, Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi Royal family, and yes, Zionists etc., because as I've already described, the aim of this imperialist project was to destabilize the region so it could be taken advantage of by oil and mineral speculators.

As for "my narrative" history tells a narrative; the events I've described are provable, have been proven and are proven again and again for anyone who reads the news or academic studies. You on the other hand don't even have a narrative, you are arguing from a position of ignorance. Its sad that you are so weighed down by your own lack of history and political analysis. But I can't blame you personally, we are all the products of our environment for better or for much much worse.

just a capitalist conspiracy

Capitalism isn't just an economic system, it isn't a way that people make money it is a system of class domination. It is the productive system of the globe, and the history of humanity is the history of production.

You would have it reduced to just a religious dispute. Religion enforces the ideological superstructure of our system. Within feudal society God was the disembodied social object that drove productive relations: the king was king because god wanted him yo be, and the church made sure the serfs and peasants served (produced for) the nobility and aristocracy as it was god's will.

Now our god is money. We don't do things because god wills it, we do it because we need money. It is a system of forced competition that takes our time and work, converts it into commodities, sells those commodities for a profit in a marketplace, and delivers those profits to the "owners" of the capital. All social relations are condensed down to impersonal market exchanges, and people become alienated from each other, from themselves.

Marx said that Religion was the opiate of the masses, which taken in context is actually a very humanist conclusion. But he also said that atheists were like children trying to reassure everyone that they don't believe in the bogeyman. When you view religion as the enlightenment does, as it views all things, you see individuals acting irrationally at the behest of their own imagination. When you view it dialectically you realize that it is rational, that it is a real social force that has a function as a part of society, for better or for worse. A vast system of social interconnectedness. Rather than a mere delusion, it has great power and influence, which leaves us the question about for whom it operates and what are the historical conditions that temper it's operation.

Hopefully someday your lived conditions will set you on the path to emancipate yourself. As the great social philosophers George Clinton once proclaimed: "Free your mind and your ass will follow."

Utterly breathtaking amount of historical confusion.

After WW1 the British, who were the major imperial colonial power at the time, though on a steep decline, had already decided that the strip of land we now know as Israel/Palestine was a strategic necessity in order to ensure a divided and weak middle eastern political arrangement, which could be exploited by mineral and oil investors. The old colonial system was clearly on the way out, and needed to be replaced by a system of international finance neocolonialism that came to prominence after WW2 with the Marshall Plan.

So they knew they couldn't just colonize Palestine, it was against their interests as the seat of international finance capital. This was outlined in broad strokes in the Balfour Declaration written by James Balfour sent to Lord Lionel Rothschild, later adopted with the League of Nations Mandate in 1921. So they backed the Zionist project and started encouraging Zionists to move to Palestine which had an existing Jewish population and whose government was generally tolerant of these Zionists who brought with them lots of foreign capital to invest. This plan continued until WW2 when the industrial economies of Europe, and especially Britain were utterly destroyed by the war. The USA, which had stayed out of the war as much as possible until the battle of Stalingrad that turned the tides against the Nazis, had wanted this since it could then establish itself as the world's industrial powerhouse and seat of neocolonial finance capital. After a period of mass industrialization, this is exactly what happened.

But of course the international finance capitalists, wherever they were stationed, had a plan in place for the region of Palestine; and a few years later, with backing of the international community, we have the tragedy of the Nakba.

100 years of conflict, engineered by the international ruling class of our current world. Obviously regional tensions existed, Muslim and Jewish tradition goes back a very long time and has occupied the same parts of the world for much of it, but the period of peace that existed in the region of Palestine was 500 years long before the British carved up the Ottoman empire for their own benefit.

I tell jokes. I don't really do small talk. But, yes most conversations are deeply personal and deeply philosophical. I have lots of great friends, a lovely wife, a good job and fantastic kids. So yes, you can do just fine with almost no small talk. Become yourself, not what some unimaginative poster on the internet desperate for validation of their opinions thinks people should or shouldn't become.

Elon Musk loves a fake presentation.

Excuse me? Can you give me more details about what you are trying to say?

70% of Chinese Millennials are homeowners

How can you tell who up votes a comment?

Yeah I thought that too, but it has strong epistemic/ontological implications. Kind of a mix imo

What's epistemology? What is object/subject dualism? What is Gödel's incompleteness theorem? Idk, I just know other people are stupid

Some of y'all have a piss poor education in humanities and it shows

I love this so much.

I didn't really have the time or energy to go into the supporting logic, for as you've just demonstrated its a very involved argument that involves a lot of oft ignored history of the period after the crushing defeat of the German working class uprising (1923, '24) but before the Nazis took power in the wake of the Reichstag fire ('33, '34). Which honestly I'm not great on anyway, I appreciate your insight, slight factual correction that just makes the point even more urgently, and any book recommendations!

So while we are providing clarification and context to the uninitiated, I dug out Trotsky's definition of fascism from 1932 since we are being so adamant about properly defining it:

At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium – the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie [the small business owners basically MAGAs], and bands of the declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat [working poor who are so exploited and disillusioned they defy their own class interests]; all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy. […] And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. […] When a state turns fascist, it doesn’t only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed […] but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat.

In my opinion, wrt building coalition between liberals and communists, there tends to be a real failure by all parties, Marxist communists and liberals alike, to orient the alienated individual within the class or ideological milieu. Liberals can really only see the alienated individual; whereas commies, who claim to be materialists, can view the class/ideological superstructure, or sometimes reluctantly the individual, but almost never both at the same time. Mfs never read/don't understand Theses on Feuerbach and it shows.

Which is to say liberalism and communism can't really be allies, but individual liberals, who we might call progressives, more concerned with rights and human emancipation than preserving private property, can be won over to the demands of class struggle, especially as the conditions of struggle introduce sharp contradictions into their lives and the lives of the people around them. At this point the demands of their class outweigh the explanations furnished by their ideology and alliances can be forged between members of the fractured liberal or social democratic workers, and the communist/socialists who (hopefully) have prepared the field of struggle for the intensifying conflict.

Tldr: noone has a monopoly on being insufferable and maybe we could try not demonizing each other for like 15 seconds and see each other as rational people doing our best, reacting to rapidly changing conditions, that will result in pretty serious lose/lose final consequences for libs and commies alike if we can't resist the actual fascists together.

But now I've been led away from the topic of the post article, proving that we are doomed to become what we most strongly condemn.

there is not and never has been any historical evidence of a red-brown alliance. Communists, even at the height and horror of Stalinist purges, were never fascist. Fascism is something different, and the urge to conflate the two just makes you seem dangerously uneducated on the subject. No, worse than that, because misunderstanding and miscommunicating the nature of fascism is actually a boon to the fascists! It is in essence no different than when Stalin intentionally mischaracterized social democracy as being "the moderate wing of fascism" and worse than actual Nazism in order to give himself political cover in the lead up to Molotov-Ribbentrop.

So when you deceive yourself and others about the nature of fascism, you are aiding the fascists. So like don't do that.

But this still has nothing to do with the article or post, talk about living rent-free