You know that Switzerland, a country in the literal Alps, has one of the best train infrastructures on Earth?

As the other comment said, of course there are fringe cases. There shouldn’t even be a city in Dubai, let alone trains getting there, but fortunately, most cities on earth are in accessible places because, well, otherwise why would thousands upon thousands of people go there.

That’s a policy issue, not one of engineering or physical constraints.

Again, how is that relevant to EU surveillance

How’s that related to this post

How am I defending china? I just don’t see the need to go “oh look like X country” whenever the EU or the US do something bad. We’re plenty bad ourselves

Why the need to compare to China though? People can understand that mass surveillance is bad without resorting to “China bad”. Go ask Snowdon if China is the mother of all surveillance.

Communism is when you perpetuate the class relations of your country in an authoritarian manner. Oh wait, or was it backwards…

While those trains are indeed always late, at least they don’t pollute cities the way that ICE (Internal Combustion Engines) do!

on purpose

lol

At least they’re not blowing their budget exploding rockets…

Feel free to stay an ignorant

Tell me you don’t understand colonialism and imperialism without telling me you don’t understand colonialism and imperialism.

You haven’t read a single thing about unequal exchange, or colonialism, or imperialism. The western countries (imperial core) RELY on cheap raw materials and cheap labour from third countries (colonial periphery) to be able to attain the levels of wealth and development that they enjoy. The USSR simply didn’t participate in this, and you saying otherwise proves you know jackshit about this topics or about history.

Planned obsolescence is a direct consequence of capitalism, and it gets worse the more capitalism develops. Capitalism, through competition and markets, makes some companies triumph and some companies to be outcompeted by the ones that triumph. This, coupled with ever-increasing capital investment by the companies that get the most profits, leads unequivocally and necessarily to increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a few companies in a given sector: oligopoly and monopoly. And when a sector is dominated by oligopoly and monopoly, it means competition between companies, the whole premise of capitalism, disappears. And it is at that point when malpractice such as planned obsolescence becomes a thing, because consumers literally don’t have a choice.

You’re absolutely right that it would be great to go back to times before planned obsolescence, but the only possible way to do so is politically, by eliminating the very system that leads to planned obsolescence.

Again, you can’t expect the USSR, a nation that started industrialising and educating people in 1920s, to be able to outcompete the entire rest of the world in every sector of the economy. It was a poorer nation than the US, Germany or England historically, it developed much later. The fact that it got as far as it did is impressive enough of a feat, especially since it didn’t abuse colonialism and imperialism to do so, but instead used only the sheer work of its inhabitants and the natural resources found within its borders. The USSR falling behind in some extremely novel fields such as computing, is only to be expected.

Yeah I’m not denying they cloned them, I’m saying they were cloned due to the inability to access them widely and affordably in the international market. Cloning stuff is good btw, copyright is a scam

Being able to purchase some models of some products here and there doesn’t mean you can sustain a segment of the industry through imports

Going back to the cold-war era where the USSR had to manufacture and provide mostly every single consumer good for its own citizens due to economic sanctions and isolation. You can’t compare luxury goods made all over the entire world for a wealthy minority, designed by experts from all other industrialized countries, against soviet-made mass-produced items which were meant to be able to be produced in as many units as possible using the least amount of resources possible. It’s just different manufacturing paradigms.

The USSR was what is called a “shortage economy” as opposed to western capitalism’s “surplus economy”. In capitalism, an abundance of competing companies in the same field leads to overproduction of most goods in a way that some products from some brands end up on the shelves of stores and storage houses collecting dust, and companies who manufacture a lot of these non-desired products, disappear. This leads to an inefficient waste of resources and labour, since it leads to unused goods and services.

The USSR, on the other hand, had a state-planned economy in which, using predictions of the planned output of raw materials, decided what to produce with these materials. Producing 10 more drills, meant that you had to produce 10 fewer units of something else. Hence, the economy was optimized so that only as many as strictly necessary of most goods would be manufactured. Additionally, the products were design to require the least amount of labour and resources necessary to be manufactured, taking into account mostly long-life and easy repairability to prevent inefficiencies. It was the only way that the USSR could, as a less industrialized state than for example Germany or the US or Britain (which had started industrialising around one century before the USSR did), could provide goods for everyone, and for the most part it did. The quality of products may not have been as high as high-quality consumer goods in the west, but that’s simply a combination of design choice to be available to cover more goods with similar amounts of raw materials and labour, of fewer experts in design and manufacturing than worldwide due to the size of the soviet block and their economical embargos.

We need, as commies, to establish grassroots movements that will improve things locally, create safety nets, organize labor to get progressively better victories through strike and if necessary through other means, and to have a growing sector of workers that are class-conscious. When the material conditions arrive, we need to have a critical mass of class-conscious workers so that we can organise as best as possible, and help to educate the rest of people, and to discuss the wants and needs of the workers and translate those needs to the vanguard party. But we also need the vanguard party.

You talk about how things can “go wrong and corrupt the entire thing”, but by doing so you’re forgetting that that’s already the case, that we live in a corrupt, bloody and oppressive system, which kills millions every year worldwide through violent and less-violent means. You say it’s never happened, but I disagree with you. Ask an anarchist and they’ll tell you about Zapatista and Rohinya movements. Ask a Marxist-Leninist like me and we’ll tell you about Cuba and the USSR and why we believe they’re inherently more democratic and less oppressive than the current system, although admittedly not perfect. Our best tool to prevent the system from being corrupt, is to have as many class-conscious workers as possible. So let’s organise labor, let’s create communities and activist organizations, and let’s improve things on a local level, so that people’s material conditions start to improve and as a bonus we can draw more people to the movement that actively improves their lives.

You’re insulting all the people who suffered even more oppressive regimes than Stalin or Mao as a consequence of NOT arming themselves. Chileans suffered Pinochet as a consequence of lack of oppression of the fascist opposition during Allende. Spanish suffered Franco as a consequence of lack of oppression of the fascists during the Spanish Second Republic. Oppression is sadly a tool that must be used, as sparingly as possible that’s true, to prevent reactionary elements from maintaining or reinstating even more oppressive structures.

People everyday in post-colonial countries suffer immeasurable despair as a consequence of lack of revolution. If you criticise Stalin or Mao and consider them undesirable and illegitimate, you should be even more convinced of the illegitimacy of current western governments that impose imperialism on the global south. Every day that we delay or refuse these armed revolutions, we’re perpetuating this system which is even more harmful than the USSR or communist China by any metric possible.

The only exception was started by rich landowners because they didn’t want to pay taxes to the king. (American)

You really think the US is the only American colony that seceded from its colonial authority by means of violence? And are you implying that the current US government isn’t tyrannical?

or succeeds only for the winners to establish a new tyrannical system

You’re just making that up. You’re tautologically defining any successful violent revolution as failed because it didn’t eliminate every single hierarchy overnight. Even if I’m a Marxist-Leninist I can conceive why you’d make that argument about the USSR (though I’d disagree with you), but if you make that argument about Cuba too you’re just wrong. Cuba is a state much more democratic and much less oppressive by every metric than its predecessor. You’re just falling into that mentality that “the only acceptable revolutions are those which failed”.

Additionally, you’re failing to acknowledge that non-violent revolutions, such as Allende’s Chile and the Spanish Second Republic, can end up in bloodshed and a more authoritarian and repressive form of government not as a consequence of violent revolution, but as a consequence of the lack of it. As a Spanish myself, I’d have much rather seen a version of my country where there was an armed socialist repression against fascism (for example by the CNT or some Bolshevik party), than the history we lived, where a democratically elected, non-violent leftist government was nevertheless couped, plunged into civil war, and eventually turned into fascism. An armed revolution could have actually possibly prevented that. (Funny historical note: the only country that really supported the struggle against fascism in Spain was the USSR, despite the Italian and German fascists helping their Spanish counterpart.)