this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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Merz is explaining that they are going to cut welfare. Why? Because wealthy capitalists run Germany, and their gains from imperialism are drying up, so they force austerity to keep their own rate of profit while making the working class pay for it. This is the nature of late-stage capitalism. The inequality, wealth disparity, incompetence, and bureaucracy are all intrinsically tied to the mode of production, imperialist capitalism.
Yes, Germany could have welfare without imperialism, this requires socialism. Socialism isn't taxation under capitalism like you seem to think it is, though, it's a fundamentally different mode of production. Where capitalism is a mode of production characterized by private ownership as principle and capitalists ruling the state, socialism is a mode of production characterized by public ownership as principle and the working class in charge of the state, like the GDR.
In capitalism, you cannot simply "tax the rich until there are no rich left," because the system is dictated by the rich.
Communism is a post-socialist mode of production where the contradictions within socialism have been resolved into a stateless, classless, moneyless society. Communism as a mode of production has never existed, only socialist states guided by communist parties working towards communism. Socialism absolutely does work, and is guiding the largest economy in the world, the PRC.
It seems the problem is most people can't begin to imagine what actually existing socialism looks like from the inside, without suspending their belief in generations of propaganda fed to us for several generations by our own states, and while we may be able to imagine how to work differently within the framework we have, can't imagine discarding that framework without something better to replace it. We can imagine bending the framework, but not building a different one before or during the process.
I wouldn't be surprised if most people imagine a socialist replacement looking a lot like what DOGE did, but here's a thing: we already have a blueprint for reimagining the existing framework ala New Deal, while we can also work toward building and implementing a new framework based on blueprints from AES states. Nobody is talking about taking a chainsaw to the current framework on day one.
Maybe what I'm saying isn't realistic, either but I'm open to having it picked apart.
The major difference between the New Deal and what socialists want is the replacement of bourgeois rule with proletarian, which does require axing the state and replacing it. The Party for Socialism and Liberation has a book called Socialist Reconstruction that goes over what that would look like in the US, including nationalizing the top 100 companies immediately.
Well I'm good with immediate nationalization of top companies, and cutting away bourgeois rule, too. I was offering a gentler transition, but now that I am thinking about Trotsky, that's a poorly thought idea.
Yep, the jump from capitalism to socialism is a qualitative leap before gradual quantitative buildup to a qualitative leap to communism. History progresses by leaps and bounds.
That's what I get ~~even~~ when posting while still being sleepy.
Haha, fair!
I never said that.
This is what I have to go off of.
Ah, got it. That's oversimplified. Obviously the money needs to go to education etc, and money isn't the only instrument of class warfare.
I suppose, but just so we're on the same page, you understand socialism to be when public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working class in control of the state, right?
Yeah, I think that's mostly it, isn't it?
Yep, that's correct, it's just that it pretty much requires revolution.
Well, this is why I suggested we'd start to eat the richβ’ globally.
Sure!