And how could anyone seriously disagree? It's so blatantly obviously the truth. The sheer amount of propaganda in Western media is just ridiculous in comparison.

I guess endless conflicts that burn through a lot of equipment as quickly as possible to open up space for more buying is the logical endpoint of a for-profit military force.

Yes exactly. Imperialist wars temporarily alleviate crisis symptoms caused by inherent contradictions. They do the following:

• Destroy lots of value inside the imperialist countries, that flows into building weapons (like dumping it in the ocean, as Marx said). Thereby reducing the problem of the rising mass of capital finding fewer and fewer opportunities for profitable investment. So they remove dead capital that clogs up the arteries of circulation. And lower the crisis of overproduction. That's how they re-enable accumulation by capitalist production. They also destroy value in the attacked countries, creating opportunities for profitable rebuilding. This also helps to give a new kickstart to the aging engine of capital circulation.
• Enable accumulation by dispossession: the government moves value from the people to weapons manufacturers. Critically, this does not threaten anyone's profits since no need is fulfilled. If the government tried doing the above by funding housing, education or health care, the for-profit companies involved in that would lose profits.
• Enable renewed primitive accumulation by opening up markets and access to resources. Similar to colonialism.
• Lenin emphasized, how they also can take out imperialist rivals to allow continued export of (financial) capital and charging of monopoly prices. Thereby reacting to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and to inter imperialist rivalries.

This last reason is the classic one. But the previous three reasons (championed by Harvey and others) help to understand how war is also fueled by internal contradictions. Even if there was only one single big capitalist state on the planet, war would still be necessary and enemies would have to be invented. That's why Russia was denied entry into NATO when they were at their lowest point and ready to become a subservient vassal to the US. The war machine has to go on.

Yay! Go PSL!

Maybe that's because they got hit by defending missiles out of frame of the video and the wreckage parts are burning upon reentry in the atmosphere?

Most fish and indeed most vertebraes on planet earth are Bristlemouths. With numbers in the Quadrillions, they easily outnumber mammals, birds (including owls) and all the others put together. If an alien race just made a quick stop and beamed up one specimen of a vertebrae species, it would likely look like this:

These are the main inhabitants of earth as far as complex life goes. You just never see them, because they are smart enough to stay below 300 meters deep. Just chilling and signaling with their bioluminescent spots. Even when their main food source migrates to the surface daily, they stay down there. In fact, as they get older and their sex changes from male to female(oh yeah, that's a thing), their swim bladder gradually fills with lipids causing them to slowly shift downwards to deeper depths of over 5000 meters (16400 ft). They seem to hear the call of the abyss. What do they know, that we don't?

Yes, new technologies in capitalism are adapted, because they shift the organic composition of capital towards fixed capital, initially increasing profits for individual firms but inevitably contributing to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, leading to crisis eventually. A technology, that doesn't lower the socially necessary labor time will inevitably fail. So any technology that does succeed in capitalism is a technology that has the potential to be freeing us from labor under communism. Until then, it's impact depends not on the specific technology, but on how it changes the power dynamic between capital and labor. I agree, that for AI, this could go both ways.

To recycle my own comment from another thread: Take software development for example. It's a a field with unusually high wages despite almost no unionization. That's because it's organic composition of capital leans towards variable capital. The tools of the trade are cheap. Like a skilled artesian, a software developer can just take their laptop and walk, if their wage is too low. An engineer in a car factory might be just as skilled, but can't take the robots and assembly lines and walk out, their field has much more fixed capital. So labor in the field of software development has high individual bargaining power, even without collective bargaining.

But like almost every technical innovation ever, AI will shift the organic composition of capital towards fixed capital. This could lower the bargaining power of workers and drive down wages. That's why they push it. For example, if huge server farms to drive closed source, centralized AI models become the norm, software engineers won't be able to just take those with them and walk out as easily as before. On the other hand, small, cheap, specialized, easy to train, open source models (like China develops) might actually benefit labor power. It will be necessary to fight for democratic control over AI to decide whether it's a blessing or a curse.

Let's hope they do ally with China. They won't be fine, if the US decides to escalate their constant wars against large parts of the world further.

I don't know about peaceful, but Giovanni Arrighi explains in The Long Twentieth Century , how and why during the history of capitalism, power passed from one Italian city state to another, then to the Dutch empire, to the British empire, to the American empire and is now in the process of passing to China.

There is a newer edition from 2010 and in it, Arrighi writes about China:

accommodating the upward mobility of a state that by itself accounts for about one-fifth of the world population is an altogether different matter. It implies a fundamental subversion of the very pyramidal structure of the hierarchy. Indeed, to the extent that recent research on world income inequality has detected a statistical trend towards declining inter-country inequality since 1980, this is due entirely to the rapid economic growth of China

we pointed out two major obstacles to a non-catastrophic transition to a more equitable world order. The first obstacle was US resistance to adjustment and accommodation. Paraphrasing David Calleo, (1987: 142) we noted that the Dutchand the British-centered world systems had broken down under the impact of two tendencies: the emergence of aggressive new powers, and the attempt of the declining hegemonic power to avoid adjustment and accommodation by cementing its slipping preeminence into an exploitative domination. Writing in 1999, we maintained: there are no credible aggressive new powers that can provoke the breakdown of the US-centered world system, but the United States has even greater capabilities than Britain did a century ago to convert its declining hegemony into an exploitative domination. If the system eventually breaks down, it will be primarily because of US resistance to adjustment and accommodation. And conversely, US adjustment and accommodation to the rising economic power of the East Asian region is an essential condition for a non-catastrophic transition to a new world order (Arrighi and Silver 1999: 288-9).

About the US response to the burst of the new economy bubble and the war on terror, Arrighi writes:

Indeed, to a far greater extent than in previous hegemonic transitions, the terminal crisis of US hegemony — if that is what we are observing, as I think we are — has been a case of great power “suicide”

Less immediate but equally important, however, is a second obstacle: the still unverified capacity of the agencies of the East Asian economic expansion to “open up a new path of development for themselves and for the world that departs radically from the one that is now at a dead-end.” This would require a fundamental departure from the socially and ecologically unsustainable path of Western development in which the costs for the reproduction of humans and nature have been largely “externalized” (see figure P1), in important measure by excluding the majority of the world’s population from the benefits of economic development. This is an imposing task whose trajectory will in large part be shaped by pressure from movements of protest and self-protection from below.

The growing economic weight of China in the global political economy does not in itself guarantee the emergence of an East Asia-centered world market society based on the mutual respect of the world’s cultures and civilizations. As noted above, such an outcome presupposes a radically different model of development that, among other things, is socially and ecologically sustainable and that provides the global South with a more equitable alternative to continuing Western domination. All previous hegemonic transitions were characterized by long periods of systemic chaos, and this remains a possible alternative outcome. Which of the alternative future scenarios set out in thee Long Twentieth Century materialize remains an open question whose answer will be determined by our collective human agency.

Seems like China, with belt and road, is on a good path for dealing with this second obstacle, so the task for leftists in the imperial core is to deal with the first one: contain the violent lashing out of the dying empire and focus our organizing efforts against war.

If the US went along with NATO

Sadly, NATO doing anything is other countries going along with the US empire. It has never been the other way around. Why should they turn against their own country sized military base?

If Marx was alive today he would finish capital 2 and 3 and write part 4 on the history of economics like he always planned to do. Then, if he had a third lifetime, he would start on the rest of the many projects outlined in his "Grundrisse". He would finish them in his fourth lifetime and then in his fifth lifetime start to condense everything down into something more readable and put it into modern context. He would finish the project on economic theory in his sixth lifetime.

White liberals will absolutely pick up guns and kill their enemies. It's us. They kill socialists all over the world. They don't see Nazis as their enemies, because they are not. Fascism is a natural extension of the bourgeoise state in times of crisis. There is no fundamental material contradiction between fascism and liberalism, only ideological differences.

From 2001 to 2003, people tried getting the Nazi party NPD banned. They sued at the highest court and argued, that it was a danger to the constitution. The court found, that too many members of the Nazi party, including highest ranking leaders, where funded by the state. Specifically, they were paid by the very agency (Verfassungsschutz) that was supposed to protect the constitution. They had funded the Nazis for years and radicalized them under the guise of introducing under cover agents. The court concluded, that a clear distinction between the state and the Nazi party could not be made. And so the case was dismissed. The funding continued.

Earlier this year, the former head of this agency set up his own Nazi party.