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social democracy isn't a great goal, and while it'd certainly be a huge improvement that I'd support, that doesn't mean I'm going to use its more unsavory rhetoric.
Seems like a pretty good goal for a starting vector unless somebody has an idea how we go from the latest stages of capitalism to a moneyless society without an intermediate phase.
And I'm not sure "disliking the fact 40% of your paycheck goes to your own oppression is bad" is a great starting point
the most successful communists so far have mostly started from underdeveloped countries mostly comprised of peasants, so I don't think its 100% necessary to become socdems (built off the exploitation of the 3rd world) first. Living conditions along the lines of social democracies, but without the imperialism (both economic and military), now that's a more compelling thought
And again, I'd support it, to some limited extent, but that doesn't mean I need to adopt its rhetoric. emphasizing the flaws of social democracy is important, to combat liberals saying "oh everything's great now we don't need to continue to improve" or "going beyond social democracy is redfash tankieism"
What about all the countries that developed past that point? I don't see them just ditching the system without an intermediary.
sure. Not saying it's the only route, just that becoming socdems isn't a necessary step.
I'm not going to support any intermediary if it relies on the exploitation of the natural resources and labor of the 3rd world, though. Frankly I think (and I could be wrong here) that most first world countries would need to do some significant re-industrialization (and along with that would come some proletarianization) in order to maintain their living standards while weaning off of the profits of imperialist extraction.
Becoming western-style soc-dems and living off of either 3rd world raw materials, or purely being finance leeches, sets up your country in opposition to global progress, even as it improves conditions at home.
If you didn't want to rely on extracting resources from the third world seems like using taxpayer money to fund Healthcare rather than using it to fund imperialism would be a positive.
Also, using the taxes for training programs and subsidies of renewables for re-industrialization seems like a better plan then taking a bunch of money from the working class and giving it to Haliburton.
I'm legitimately confused if it's bad to worry about how taxes are being spent is the goal to get rid of taxes and hope for a government that benefits people without any money or is it for a more egalitarian society to spring up from pure anarcho capitalism with no taxes and no safety net.
sure, yes, but the money isn't (just) coming from the domestic working class. it's ultimately being funded by the exploitation of the 3rd world. If you, for example, take venezuela's oil by hook and crook and give it to exxon for pennies on the dollar and forbid venezuela from operating domestic refineries, setting their economy up to be a miserable client state, then no amount of redirecting the exxon employees' tax dollars from the military to social welfare will solve that problem, and in fact, building a society with a high standard of living atop such exploitative global relations, gives that society great incentives to at best, maintain those relations, if not continue to worsen them. It will build public support for imperialism, the MIC will be back with a vengeance next time there's a crisis.
It's a non-solution that only takes care of imperial core workers, and even them only in the short term. The anti-imperialism has to come first.
I feel like you're kind of pigeon holing the argument by sayingg all money is by definition the result of exploitation.
Nobody is going to argue that ExxonMobil should be able to do that, I still don't see why that makes taxes going towards good things instead of bad a bad thing if those taxes weren't the result of exploitation.
Like if the argument is that it's impossible to make money without exploiting somebody were still missing a few steps in how we go from some of the clueless capitalism the world has ever seen to an egalitarian society with no intermediate step.
Proves aren't getting the means of production without taking them from the people whoncutrently have them and i think getting a government to enforce that redistribution is a lot more likely than them giving it up willingly or forming an insurgent labor army that doesn't immedoatly get lut down by those well funded police forces.
all money is by definition the result of exploitation.
certainly not all, but like, a major amount of the US' economic prosperity does come from that. In some other countries it's an even bigger fraction, in some it's much less.
I still don't see why that makes taxes going towards good things instead of bad a bad thing if those taxes weren't the result of exploitation.
That "if" is doing a lot of work here. I agree, if the US economy was free of foreign exploitation, if we traded on equal footing with other nations and did not interfere in their affairs, and weren't coasting along benefitting from several lifetimes of doing so historically, then it wouldn't be odious to build a welfare state on our tax dollars, and there would be no added structural incentives to start doing imperialist exploitation. But that's a big if, and if we had a magic button (or, sufficient political power) to get rid of imperialism, we could probably do better than just social democracy.
I'm not opposed to welfare states in principle, but I'm going to be a lot more supportive of one in the periphery than the current imperial core for all the reasons I've been laying out.
Frankly I don't know what the path to socialism in the imperial core will be, but it's a lot easier to imagine it involving a transitional period in which the spoils of imperialism are lost by some outside mechanism amid declining global influence, and the nation having to make a choice between declining living standards vs maintaining capitalism, than to imagine a scenario in which the spoils of imperialism are used to build a prosperous welfare state that then abolishes the source of (a large percentage of) its own funding (aka imperialism).
And doing social democracy with taxation has nothing to do with "getting the means of production". It's forcing a concession, at best. But I agree that a straight up uprising in current day US is not likely to succeed (though that may change as conditions worsen).
Social democracy as practiced in the west just entrenches capitalism, and leaves the door wide open for any gains made to be clawed back. I won't say it's a bad thing, it helps (some) people, but it isn't my goal, nor part of my vision for how we get to communism
If we had the political power to get rid of or reduce imperialism, a good place for the profits of that stuff to go is back to the countries we stole it from. That would just be pulling out the knife, helping them develop their own productive forces and independence would be a start at healing