The most significant western governments still finance Israel’s existence, that doesn’t mean every single western person or even country gets along with Israel

Poland is definitely The West too, honestly more than Mexico. It’s basically a code for white nations and the vassal states of white nations.

They ordered people killed or at least restrained who wouldn’t comply to them

This is what states do, they are tools of repression. You’ve basically limited yourself to reading from a subset of anarchists and no one else with this statement alone.

Just removing veto power seems like the simpler solution (not that that would happen either)

Not the person you’re responding to

Obviously Israel shouldn’t exist at all. It’s not a diplomatically expedient thing to say, but it’s the only real anti-colonialist answer because Israel is actively a colony. That doesn’t mean expelling all the Jews from Palestine – it might shock you to know there are non-Israeli Jews currently in Palestine – but it does mean that the proper boarders for Palestine are restored and thus that there is no ethnostate (Jewish or otherwise). Recent additions to the Israeli colony (for they are always recruiting) can be sent back to their homelands. Many of them have been there long enough that they have no connection to those homelands anymore (including the more direct descendants of Holocaust survivors, etc.) and they can stay on the land that was Israel, but a lot of them are only there because they like the Jewish ethnostate thing and will therefore flee of their own will. That volume of people fleeing will probably incite still more to flee, but some will remain and they should be treated humanely and as equal citizens, prosecuting whatever crimes they committed but not being treated like subhumans the way that Israelis treated Palestinian prisoners.

The US is a much more difficult question because unlike Israelis being a minority compared to Palestinians, there are many more Euro-Americans, etc than there are Native Americans because the genocidal project of the US is much more complete. Inevitably some land, the land recently taken and some of the more useful land than what the Natives have been left with, should be returned to them, but obviously deporting all the Euros, etc. is neither viable nor productive, like how (to a much, much smaller extent) deporting all the Israelis is neither viable nor productive.

That said, separate from demographics and land rights, the US government absolutely shouldn’t exist because it is terrorizing the world, including through proxies like Israel.

If you were following burden of proof, you could stake your claim on particular billionaires who you say never exploited anyone, and it would then be on the other fellow to prove they did exploit people. Without example billionaires, however, your claim is nebulous and no one has any particular reason to believe in it.

An arrangement where employees bargain collectively with their employer to have more leverage, usually collecting dues from members to help with things like strikes.

I think it’s called a “sindicato” in Portuguese, though in English “syndicate” means something a bit different

I’m unimpressed. The US has crushed rebellions from its inception, famously including the civil war but also many other attempts, and I would say that the patterns of what some call the New Afrikan nation within the US to revolt, going solidly up to the 1980s or further depending on your interpretation, are perhaps the most important.

As some guy said, “Revolution is not a dinner party” and establishing and maintaining a revolutionary state requires its own violence. No Marxist says otherwise, as it is the famous quote of Engels: “The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist.”

Capitalism has been struggling with the problem of collapse, and in fact it did from pretty early on in that history you mention, with Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and so on. The problem isn’t just going to go away, because a system that needs infinite expansion in a finite world necessarily will collapse. It can sometimes “innovate” its way into having more time, and modern imperialism is just such an example of that innovation, pushing much of the poverty capitalism demands into the third world, but that just changes the specific circumstances of the problem rather than eliminating it. The US as we speak is continuously losing its grip on its hegemony as the imperial periphery and semi-periphery develop sovereignty. History will not end.

This is really pedantic, but conditionals do imply a specific inverted inference. Specifically in this meme though, the correct inversion is “If the billionaire class is not your enemy, then this budgeting is not relevant to you,” which I think we’d both agree with.

Billionaires are a political target. It’s not about forgoing ideology, but having correct ideology.

Yeah, that part is bizarre

The police said on Sunday that a knife had been recovered and posted a picture on social media. The next day, however, it posted another message saying the knife had been taken from the crime scene by an unidentified man.

Officers recovered a different knife from the scene, thinking it was the one that the suspect had been carrying, according to the Gothamist.

An NYPD spokesman told the news website that the knife they picked up must have been left behind by another subway rider.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93y74xl1wvo

So they just accidentally recovered some unrelated knife, thinking it was the suspect’s knife, while failing to recover his actual knife that he charged them with. I don’t know what the truth is, but that story is genuinely ridiculous.

Fair enough, I mostly agree. I can imagine that China, Vietnam, and Laos are on the list because of, uh, capitalist roading, and the DPRK is nationalist to a reactionary degree and kind of culty, but what criticism would you apply to Cuba? Do they do capitalist roading too? I don’t hear much about them in that regard.

Is it your stance that every nominally Marxist country is actually Marxist? That there are no revisionist countries even though, for example, the USSR spent most of its existence being revisionist?

I always thought that communism has been proven not to work multiple times throughout history.

The more accurate lesson would be that communist nations have been defeated by capitalist hegemony multiple times throughout history, mainly during the Cold War; the countries didn’t just implode of their own accord. Now, it’s fair to criticize them for this, if you have an ideology all about material conditions and then you aren’t able to survive those conditions, you probably messed up, but I think that’s a very different assertion from “communism doesn’t work”.

You probably want to replace “atheism” with “antitheism” in that context. I would disagree either way, but I think you’d have a point with antitheism.

I apologize about the language bit. I rarely get a liberal arguing about this who wouldn’t use such a term as “comrade” derisively.

Anyway, I explained the reason I shared it, which is that it is:

showing Stalin getting outvoted on a basic ideological issue by revisionists.

But that’s not precisely what you asked for, I just don’t have a good source on your real question.

As for your books, you may realize that I am a bit short on time and do not have the energy to read 4 entire novel-length books instead of specific pages or chapters.

Let me start by saying that the general idea of this response is fair, but I checked and I think it’s only 3 books, two of which are novella-length at best (I think the Losurdo one is a bit longer). I would furthermore like to encourage you to click on the link and glance at The Soviet World because it has a nice hyperlinked table of contents and most of the individual sections, clearly labeled by topic, are just a few pages each.

I believe the idea is that the person saying that is clearly a hypocrite who has no grounds for their decrying of violence when they support so much of it, and possibly that retaliatory violence in self-defense is therefore justified.

Is this the sort of thing you’re looking for?

Within a few weeks after the 13th Congress Pravda published Stalin’s report…. Stalin’s report also contained an attack on Zinoviev, though without naming him:

“It is often said that we have the dictatorship of the party. I recall that in one of our resolutions, even, it seems, a resolution of the 12th Congress, such an expression was allowed to pass, through an oversight of course. Apparently some comrades think that we have a dictatorship of the party and not of the working class. But that is nonsense, comrades.”

Of course Stalin knew perfectly well that Zinoviev in his political report to the 12th Congress had put forward the concept of the dictatorship of the party and had sought to substantiate it. It was not at all through an oversight that the phrase was included in the unanimously adopted resolution of the Congress.

Zinoviev and Kamenev, reacting quite sharply to Stalin’s thrust, insisted that a conference of the core leadership of the party be convened. The result was a gathering of 25 Central Committee members, including all members of the Politburo. Stalin’s arguments against the “dictatorship of the party” were rejected by a majority vote, and an article by Zinoviev reaffirming the concept was approved for publication in the Aug. 23, 1924 issue of Pravda as a statement by the editors. At this point Stalin demonstratively offered to resign, but the offer was refused.

-Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 144

This is from an explicitly anti-“Stalinism” book showing Stalin getting outvoted on a basic ideological issue by revisionists.

For the record, I do think that historical texts by “comrades,” as you sneer, can be interesting and insightful, but I mostly concern myself with texts by liberals (or otherwise anti-communist ideologies) because I know those are the only ones that won’t be rejected out of hand.