The price hike is because market price is now starting to catch up with the physical price. And since there’s now a global oil shortage, the price is going to keep going up.

Efficient is a loaded word because first have to establish what exactly is being optimized. Privatization makes profit extraction more efficient for the elites, but it does fuck all for regular people.

Buddy, I was in HK just a month ago. It’s night and day compared to the shithole it was when occupied by the Brits. Go spew your drivel somewhere else.

Not going great from what I’ve seen.

Exactly, taking over a large existing codebase is a herculean task. So, most forks just end up adding superficial changes on top and keeping upstream code as is.

Same

I’m expecting we’ll see the same dynamic we saw with solar panels and EVs. Once Chinese companies ramp up production, there’s going to be a flood of affordable GPUs. The big question is whether Western countries will ban them for ‘national security’ reasons.

I mean look at China successfully transitioning towards clean energy using state owned enterprise. These things are certainly possible to do. The problem is that our political system creates all the wrong incentives.

The reality is far more complicated than that. Maintaining a large project takes a lot of work in practice, and you can’t just fork it and expect the fork to magically succeed. There are very few examples of such successful forks in the wild.

What we should actually be doing is nationalizing our oil industry, and then using the money it produces to fund a transition towards clean energy. Of course, that’s never going to happen under neoliberalism.

You are describing a natural monopoly and why private ownership of it sucks. That is the whole point.

Gas stations are a natural monopoly. You cannot have twenty competing pipelines running to the same neighborhood. You cannot have fifteen different refinery complexes in every city. The infrastructure is too expensive and too duplicative. So what happens is a handful of companies end up owning everything and they just coordinate as a cartel instead of competing.

PetroCanada used to be a crown corporation. It existed precisely because we recognized that fuel distribution is too important to leave to private profit extraction. It kept prices honest because there was a public option that could undercut the private cartels. Then we privatized it and pretended the market would fix everything. Surprise surprise it did not.

The core problem is not algorithms or Gas Buddy or tax holidays. The core problem is that we allowed a natural monopoly to operate as a for profit business. When one company owns twelve thousand gas stations and the other three companies own similar numbers there is no competition. Market based pricing really means that a group of executives in a boardroom decide what number makes them the most money and then they all charge that number.

This is exactly why socialists argue for public ownership of critical infrastructure. Fuel distribution is a natural monopoly. Either the state owns it and sets prices at cost plus a reasonable margin or a cartel owns it and extracts every cent they can get away with. There is no third option where competition magically appears.

And who’s going to develop this fork?

Haha, I just updated the comment right after you replied to note that. I very much agree with you.

I’d argue that people end up gravitating towards anarchism because they desire personal agency, and I would also argue because western society conditions people to become atomized and see things from individualistic perspective. So these small organizations and flat structures become appealing from that perspective. There’s also an aspect of defeatism to it as well where people can’t really see the system being challenged and they start focusing on carving out something for themselves within it, like making a commune. It’s not about broader liberation, it’s just a way to solve a personal problem.

And this explains the phenomenon of anarchists adapting to a socialist state once others do the heavy lifting of creating it. The new social conditions are more conductive towards making communes and other types of organizations anarchists desire. So, in a way the hostility anarchists have towards Marxism-Leninism is itself strange. If they’re willing to live under a capitalist system and try to carve out spaces for themselves within it, then doing so under a socialist system would surely be easier.

I do think that if there was a serious ML movement in the west, a lot of anarchists would in the end align with it as they have in the past. Part of the problem is that it’s all largely theoretical right now with the conditions being what they are.

Right, hierarchies are a necessary tool for managing complex systems. Hence why they continue to show up both in nature and human organizations. They’re not some inherent evil as anarchists see them, but merely a tool for creating abstractions and partitioning work. At this point, I’m convinced that anarchism has been sanctioned and promoted as a legitimate form of dissent within the western system precisely because of its opposition to hierarchies. It ensures that anarchist movements never actually grow and become a real threat to centralized state power.

I love how you just assume here that you’re making some novel arguments here. As if I’m not familiar with them. Pretty rich of you to call other people campist too given the whole context for this discussion.

You still failed to explain what we’re actually seeing on the left. It’s visually indistinguishable from green capitalism, so you failed in using a picture to promote whatever the PRC is doing.

Except I literally did explain this in the very comment you’re replying to. I didn’t ask you to watch a video because I’m actually able to articulate my thoughts like an adult with a fully developed brain:

You’re just doing sophistry here. The whole idea of state capitalism is a bit of a misnomer. It basically says that while you have state owned enterprise, the internal capitalist relations within it remain largely the same. While that’s true, there is a fundamental difference here. Capitalism is a system where people who own capital hire workers to exploit there labor with the purpose of increasing their capital. The goal of capitalist enterprise is to create wealth for the owners with any social benefits being strictly incidental. On the other hand, the purpose of state enterprise is to provide social value. Workers in state owned companies are producing things that the society needs. They are working for their own benefit and those of others around them. Therefore, the nature of work itself is fundamentally different from actual capitalism. And it’s very obviously a huge step forward from capitalism.

I love how you completely ignored this and just proceeded to regurgitate the talking points you memorized like a parrot.

TIL tha green LEDs will safe the environment. /s

Oh look more dishonesty from a troll. Let’s look at what I actually said:

China is literally at the forefront of clean energy, mass reforestation, and desert greening.

Weird how you choose not to engage with that.

Edit: Lol, you posted the first thing you found when you googled Zapatista dissolution, didn’t you? The Zapatistas restructured their autonomous approach. They didn’t abandon autonomy. They still exist, therefore they didn’t fail.

Oh yeah they did restructure to make their system more centralized and to add *gasp* hierarchy because they’re not anarchists or zealots. They were actually able to honestly look at what they were doing acknowledge the problems and move in a direction that makes more sense. Precisely the thing western anarchists are unable to do.

The short version is that while Nav Canada did streamline operations, but the broader shift to privatized air navigation services can be seen as a net negative in many other places for a number of structural reasons.

Safety oversight gets complicated. Even a non-profit private entity answers to a board and has cost pressures, and regulators can’t maintain the same level of scrutiny they had over a government department. You see this in the UK where the privatized NATS has faced repeated criticism from regulators over performance and staffing levels affecting service quality. The safety culture shifts from a pure public good to something that must be weighed against operational efficiency.

The non-profit model also hides a loss of public accountability because Nav Canada is not directly answerable to taxpayers in the same way a government service is. Decisions about service cuts at remote airports or staffing reductions are made behind closed doors. Communities that lose air traffic services have very little recourse. In a public system those decisions are politically painful so they face more scrutiny.

The cost savings to airlines do not necessarily translate into lower ticket prices either. Airlines generally pocket the savings and passengers still suffer when the system is stretched too thin during a crisis. The pandemic exposed fragility in many privatized systems just a few years ago.

So yes Nav Canada has a decent reputation on the surface. But privatizing air traffic control erodes safety oversight and public accountability. Some things are natural public goods and should be operated as such.

they’re the real constituents

Indeed, there is nothing wrong with principled criticism of existing socialist states. They have plenty of problems just as any human society does. But it’s the whole dismissal of these societies from people who live under capitalism that makes the whole conversation farcical.

And obviously we should continue to explore different approaches, but we should be doing that empirically. We need to honestly look at history and ask why certain ways of organizing tend to succeed and others tend to fail. If we don’t like the current approaches, then it’s fine to try and improve on them, and to do better going forward.

I also find there’s this false notion that if you acknowledge that a particular approach works say in China than it means wanting to transplant it directly to you own country. That obviously can’t happen because Chinese approach is rooted in the history, culture, and the material conditions of China. What we can do is analyze it and understand it to see what aspects of it could be useful. If we ever manage to start building socialism in the west, it will necessarily be rooted in western tradition of thought. It’s not going to looks like USSR or Vietnam, or PRC. It’s going to be something new and unique. The existing successes are there for us to learn from, and if we can improve on what they’ve done that’s all the better.

Not all of them. Just the state-capitalist ones which claim to be socialist. Do you condone everything done in the name of socialism? Because that’s not possible with a coherent worldview. You’d have to both condone the Kronstadt rebellion, as well as it’s crushing. (Even if you claim that Kronstadt was a ploy of the whites: the official reasoning was a socialist one)

You’re just doing sophistry here. The whole idea of state capitalism is a bit of a misnomer. It basically says that while you have state owned enterprise, the internal capitalist relations within it remain largely the same. While that’s true, there is a fundamental difference here. Capitalism is a system where people who own capital hire workers to exploit there labor with the purpose of increasing their capital. The goal of capitalist enterprise is to create wealth for the owners with any social benefits being strictly incidental. On the other hand, the purpose of state enterprise is to provide social value. Workers in state owned companies are producing things that the society needs. They are working for their own benefit and those of others around them. Therefore, the nature of work itself is fundamentally different from actual capitalism. And it’s very obviously a huge step forward from capitalism.

What I condone is improving people’s lives and moving towards a communist society. This is what existing socialist projects like China, Cuba, DPRK, and Vietnam are currently doing while people like you bloviate endlessly living under the boot of capital.

That’s not true. Anarchist Catalonia was less than 100 years ago. Rojava and the Zapatistas still exist as well.

The point is that these projects don’t survive and they don’t scale. This is what inevitably happens to these approaches https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/zapatistas-declare-dissolution-of-autonomous-communities-in-chiapas/

Also, there’s a materialist reason, why so many countries imitate the Bolsheviki.

Kinda of hilarious to point to a video from somebody who doesn’t even understand what a dictatorship actually is. Really not helping your case there. Having a single party simply means that the society as a whole agreed on a single collective vision. There can be plenty of debate within the framework of a party on how to actually implement this vision. Meanwhile, any class society will be a dictatorship of the class that holds power. Given that socialist society would arise from an existing capitalist society, it would necessarily inherit existing class relationships. What changes is which class holds power. That’s the difference between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Finally, the notion of dictatorship in a sense of a single person running things is infantile beyond belief. People who peddle this notion are the ones who should truly be ashamed of themselves. As Anna Louise Strong puts it in This Soviet World:

Then why do you reject critique of the chinese government with the claim that it must be necessary?

I reject the critique of the Chinese government because it’s baseless. What I said is that I don’t believe there’s one specific way to enact the transitional period. But it’s very clear that there ARE proven ways to do so. The Chinese way is one that has proven itself to work. People claiming they can do better have to demonstrate how that works. And not by showing us failed experiments that are in the dust of history.

The only reason you claim that is because you ignore every non-Leninist/Maoist project and also ignore all the states where ML/MLMism failed. Why is the soviet union supposedly viable, but anarchist catalonia isn’t. The success rate of Marxism-Leninism and it’s offshoots is less that 10%.

You’re right, I ignore fantasies and past failures. A rational person is able to look at the results and decide whether approach works or not based on that.

No. I’ve stated my original point several times: the images on the left are eco-virtue signaling, which can be found in capitalist states. If you wanted to show how the PRC improved the lives of its’ denizens (which I don’t even disagree with - but so has Sweden), you’ve chosen bad examples.

They’re not. China is literally at the forefront of clean energy, mass reforestation, and desert greening. The images very much embody what PRC is actually doing. Enjoy doing your preaching I guess.