a communist country is one where there are non-state owned enterprises

Again, I implore you to actually read Marx. “Communism is when nobody owns a toothbrush” is just neoconservative propaganda. This isn’t what any AES state practices, much less what the more academic types believe.

Generating capital is definitely a feature of communism as long as it’s fictitious capital.

Nothing precludes you from generating ficticious capital in a communist system. Marxists simply recognize it as such, rather than deluding themselves into believing material value has been created when speculative asset prices rise.

I’ve read Capital and the Communist Manifesto

Then you should already be familiar with ficticious capital and know better than to claim someone “earned $5B” in the middle of a speculative asset bubble.

I know that billionaires who hoard money and own controlling interests in publicly traded corporations

Neither Nongfu Spring beverage company nor Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise are SOEs. Which Chinese billionaire owns a controlling interest in a Chinese SOE?

But to hear you and others tell it

Wait, people actually think Russia or China would be any different of they had the US’ influence?

They’ve got different leaders, different economies, and different cultures. Brazil, India, and Indonesia would also be different were they to enjoy US influence.

Any country that ends up with that amount of influence will inevitably resort to bs to maintain that power

There’s a big difference between soft influence and hard military power. In the wake of WW2, the US enjoyed both by being the last major industrial power still standing. This offered their financial sector an enormous amount of sway in how developing/recovering countries reentered the industrial world. Similarly, they only had one remaining international military peer by the end of the war (in part because they helped the USSR rearm in the wake of German continental invasion). So they were free to throw out both banks and military bases on a global scale.

But all of this was a consequence of a unique historical moment, created at the end of the 19th century colonial era and perpetuated by the US/Soviet schism during the Cold War.

We’re no longer in a Cold War, we don’t have a single globe-spanning economic superpower, the US has repeated demonstrated an inability to project its military across hemispheres, and the soft financial power of the western states has eroded significantly since the 2008 financial crisis.

The BS we’re seeing today is not a failure of large influential blocks to maintain influence. Its a failure of a large mercantile system to reconcile with the contradictions of an economy that demands infinite continuous upward growth.

If the US focused on internal development, rather than profit-seeking outsourcing, China and India would be integrated partners rather than rivalrous superpowers. If the US had struck a detante with the USSR and integrated their economies, rather than playing wack-a-mole with anti-colonialist uprisings across Latin America, Asia, and Africa for sixty years, we’d have a more stable industrial base and fewer poverty-driven insurrections. If the US had stopped sucking at the teet of Middle Eastern fossil fuels and pivoted to green/nuclear energy back in the 60s/70s when the time was ripe, we wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of a climate apocalypse that threatens all the capital accumulation we’ve achieved to date. And we wouldn’t have the Radical Islamic Extremism boogeyman to whip everyone into a terrified lather.

There are so many moments when things could have gone differently (for better or worse - I guess we could be living in Nuclear Winter right now). This history is not a given and the future is not set in stone.

I joined .ml because it was privacy, security and FOSS focused!

Sort of the joke in all this. The .ml users are “raiding” the sub because they like the advanced feature set.

I just have to wonder what the state of the NATO coalition is going to be if Trump takes office a second time.

Now that’s just nonsense

That’s how strong federal governmental systems work.

He literally earned $5 billion in one day

He didn’t earn anything. He benefited from a sudden upward swing in speculative asset prices.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch25.htm

PLEASE READ MARX

Your ignorance and your bigotry are both showing

My god, dude. You just built your case on “Ethnic subgroups don’t count” and now you’re back here defending Israel on the same grounds?

Are you some kind of weird niche Zionist-supremacist?

a pillar of Marxism and communism is that the workers control the means of production

Through workers councils and vanguard parties that govern the country.

That doesn’t preclude any one person from accumulating more currency than another.

one multibillionaire controls the means of production

He doesn’t control it. He administers it on behalf of the workers’ state.

I had no idea

If you read the whole book, rather than panicking at being handed a single chapter, you’ll know more

you can’t quote the relevant passage

The accumulation of labor power through central management of the capital stock isn’t something you’re going to understand or accept as a single sentence.

You want this to be like the Bible, where you can just quote John 3:16 and nod sagely, as though it should be revealed wisdom.

But the material is more complex than a bronze age scripture verse.

That said, capital accommodation is one stage of economic development. This is the chapter which covers the process of economic development. At some point, you do need a handful of central administrators to oversee productive use of capital. And these administrators will become rich as a result.

Marxism doesn’t refute this process, it leverages the process towards Socialist accumulation.

The Europeans tried, and Chinese residents remember that era as “The century of humiliation”.

I would have more money on the UK cracking up than China.

Am I supposed to read the whole thing

Not just that chapter, either. You should read the whole book.

Please do show me where in Captial or the Manifesto Marx approves of the existence of private owners of corporations to get extremely rich.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm

Israel has a diverse ethnic population,

One of the jokes of the Israeli enthostate is how loosely it is applied. Afrikaner Protestants can convert to Judaism in order to gain citizenship, while Beta Israelis and Safardic Jews are subject to abuse and discrimination almost as harsh as any Arab native.

But then so much of the Israeli claim to diversity boils down to “we have every kind of European”.

Describing China as “majority Han” means about as much as describing Europe as “majority White”.

Are you absolutely sure “China has a large and diverse ethnic population” doesn’t help my argument?

the Han Chinese, who are an ethnic group whether you like it or not

They’re a multitude of ethnic groups, with a wide variety of linguistics dialects, cultural affects, and regional traits

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese_subgroups

In their willingness to faithfully implement the central economic plan, just like every other economic participant.

“Capitalism is when people have different amounts of money” is definitely a take, though.

What?

Who holds a major government position, yes