There are plenty of governments that do that. Cuba, China, Vietnam, Korea, the late Soviet Union.

While Stalinist ultraleft economic policies were not so generous to small businesses, the new Chinese model (which has been adopted by most Socialist states, bar Korea, which hews still to the failed Stalinist model) focuses on nationalization of heavy industry (steel, aggregate, resource extraction, refinery) while allowing consumer goods and small-scale retail to remain in the hands of business owners.

The reason this doesn’t happen in the West or its neocolonies is that it hampers the wealth and resource extraction of the international finance capital class.

Consider this: Victorian England was the prototypical Capitalist economy, but the entire economy was not subject to the Capitalist mode of production. In parts of the empire, there were still peasants and feudal power structures; some parts of the economy were also government-owned.

What made Victorian England a Capitalist state is that the economy was predominantly Capitalist, and that the Capitalist Class was the one in charge.

In China, the majority of the economy is state-run. The state operates steel mills, mines, and farms (though many farms are also homesteads or cooperatives, from what I understand none are privately owned). Capitalists operate tech firms and consumer good factories.

The last three I think are especially important - many people don’t really understand how political national flags can be and that they never really just represent a people/region/language in a completely unbiased way.

If the Democrats wanted me to vote for their candidate they should have picked one that didn’t suck balls

I understand where you’re coming from but I think there are multiple reasons why military- or guerilla-style combat training isn’t really useful for the situations Marxist groups will find themselves in in the near future.

To the extent that armed resistance is effective, it is effective as a deterrent. If it comes to armed conflict, we will lose. This basic level of deterrence does not require training (at least, not extensive or dedicated training) - it only requires being armed.

Marxists in the United States do not (yet) have the support of the people. Becoming Maoist guerillas living in the woods and performing adventurism on police precincts and factories might be cool but it isn’t really an effective use of personnel. The best use of a Marxist is as an organizer - a mover of people. Any action that turns a potential organizer into a criminal who cannot operate in professional society is ineffective as a revolutionary tactic.

Even if we did spend weeks doing combat training and arming ourselves, if the police or the military starting sending goons to our homes and community centers, there would be very little utility in shooting back. Our options would be (1). Go to jail and fight through the legal system, (2). Go into hiding, or (3). Flee the country.

If the cops raid your home, having combat training will not determine success, only how many cops you take with you. And cops are easier to replace than Marxists.

I’ve been thinking about this comment for a few days, so apologies for the late reply.

The current state of Marxist organizing in the United States is very fractured, disorganized, and sedentary. The fact that we’re talking about this among Internet randos and not at a party Congress is proof of this, and needs to be accepted as a proposition that we are having this conversation in order to encourage a course of action among comrades and not to decide on a course of action as an organized, disciplined group. In other words, we are Agitating, not Organizing.

And that all being said, the Marxist movement in the United States is still several stages behind that which would benefit from the building of combat ability. Here are a few reasons, which I intend to be taken with nuance (as cautions) and not as absolutes.

(1). Because we are positioned as enemies of the state, the building of military force gives the state casus belli to use greater violence against us.

(2). The current stage of Marxist organization prioritizes recruitment, propaganda, and coalition-building. A perceived obsession with violence is, in a phrase, bad optics, and will turn off both potential recruits and allies in struggle.

(3). Time spent “training” could be better spent performing other duties of a party, such as recruitment, education, organizing, and protest.

Why can’t we be critical of democrats by being selective in the primaries?

Watch out guys, we got a Vooter over here!

That’s functionally the difference between Anarchism, a fundamentally Individualist and Idealist ideology, and Marxism, which is fundamentally Collectivist and Scientific.

A Marxist political society will also tend towards Classlessness and Statelessness, though in the case of Marxism both of these are not goals but an inevitable result of a society dominated by the Proletariat according to Marxist theory.

I’m in an org and I’m basing my entire frame of reference on our recruitment numbers and attendance for our local events

I agree with your main point but disagree on the specifics.

Fascist militias are so prominent because their primary mode of action is using violence against working-class people with the tacit approval of the state. Think of the Freikorps, the Brownshirts and Blackshirts, the Azov Battalion. They exist to commit acts of terror against civilians that the government proper would prefer to distance themselves from.

Marxists, on the other hand, will neither be committing terrorism against working-class people nor will they have the tacit but unofficial support of the state. The current Marxist movement neither has the capacity nor an urgent interest in building combat ability. That time will come, but it isn’t now.

I believe we’re building towards a revolution, but whether it is successful or not remains to be seen.

Despite what you might see from weird guys on the Internet, grassroots-level Socialist politics are as active in America as they’ve been since the Red Scare. Big Things are Happening. In parts of the country where 20 years ago there were just Anarchists doing drugs in bars and 5 radlibs attending City councils, there are explicitly Marxist political parties with dozens of members organizing protests and events that draw hundreds of attendees. Every year interest and applications grow exponentially.

They say we’re supposed to have Revolutionary Optimism, but personally, I don’t really care one way or another if we win - I’m just mad, I have nothing to lose, and I want to fight.

The difference between such a machine and a worker is that the worker has the power to withhold their labor and a machine (or animal) does not. An animal will never show solidarity with the workers’ movement.

I’m not saying that animal rights are bad. I’m generally in favor of them. But they have nothing to do with Marxism. In fact, I would call any call to have solidarity with a group incapable of or unwilling to have solidarity with the general workers’ movement to be a form of Ultra-Leftism.

And I’d appreciate people not over-extending this analogy. Some workers are queer, or immigrants, or disabled. Most are female or colored. These are all people who have the agency and incentive to show solidarity with the Socialist movement. Animals have neither agency nor incentive.

That’s not to say that there is no Marxist justification for working with or even making concessions to Vegans. They make up a significant part of the general left-wing movement and animal rights are a bargaining chip that may be used to gain their support when it is strategically necessary. And, again, I am in favor of some animal rights - I just recognize that that is coming from the moral side of my brain and not the scientific side.

Animal rights are not defensible as a Marxist point of view. The basis of Marxism is working people and others marginalized under Capitalism joining in solidarity and using their collective power to overturn Capitalism and establish a dictatorship of the working class.

While animals are marginalized under Capitalism, they can neither engage in solidarity nor do they have any power to express in a collective movement.

You may believe that exploitation is animals is immoral, but Marxism is not a moralistic ideology, and there is no direct Marxist justification for animal rights.

If you trained a machine to feel pain when mistreated, desire freedom, and fear death; but it would still perform its function for whoever exploits it, Worker or Capitalist; there would be no Scientific Marxist justification for workers to cease exploitation of the machine.

Mutual Aid is fundamentally an Anarchist idea and, while I don’t seek to defend CPUSA, there are legitimate critiques. It serves as a “release valve” for organizing work: effort that could be put into overthrowing the system as a whole is instead put into helping a small number of people.

Building parallel power structures through Mutual Aid isn’t by any means bad (just like many other things in Anarchist thought), but it is not an effective means to challenging state power in all cases.

Mutual Aid takes a lot of work, and an org performing Mutual Aid has an opportunity cost - less time for organizing protests, educational events, recruiting, social events, speaking at councils, canvassing for petitions, or any other important things that political parties are supposed to do.

I am in a Marxist-Leninist party in Northeast Ohio. We do not do Mutual Aid, but many of our members do work with Serve the People, a Mutual Aid org mostly run by Anarchists (the one Aaron Bushnell was in). I believe this is a more effective way to organize and is compatible with MLism in a way that the political party directly organizing mutual aid is often not

Lord Almighty, you could do something so funny right now

(0.999… + 1) / 2

IDF soldiers are beheading children by the dozen and we’re supposed to care that a soldier - who presumably knew what he was getting into - was killed in a slightly unusual but likely more humane way than dying slowly of an infected shrapnel wound?

It does make sense, it just has slightly abbreviated grammar - in the traditional style of a newspaper headline.

While “Biden is going to lose the election” is “proper” grammar, abbreviating it to “Biden to lose election” is also completely valid, within certain contexts (such as a headline).

The “No Fly Zone is a declaration of war” truism only works when you’re declaring one over another nation’s sovereign territory. Oman has every right to determine what military aircraft can enter their airspace, and if another country’s military violates that airspace, they will have declared war, not Oman.