Women's Oppression is Profitable - Why Socialism is the Only Way For Women

Cuba has endured an economical embargo since the early 60's... No wonder they are poor.

Is tragically comical that the one country responsible for the blockade uses the argument that it is because Cuba commits human rights violations and also that same country has a torture center in Guantanamo.

If you are interested in the history of Cuba you can read about the history of the embargo, I would also recommend you look into their numbers on child mortality, literacy, life expectancy and doctors per capita. If you compare those numbers to "certain" neighbouring countries you may be surpirsed.

Edit: sorry I replied to the wrong post, lol. But still, same argument to those who use Cuba as the bad example.

China has lifted over 770 million people from poverty in 40 years.

Sine it was so funny here is the source: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience

Is it? How so? People owning the means and results of their own production doesn't sound hostile to me.

I'm curious - are you opposed to the actual policies presented in my post? Or is it just to the concept of socialism? Because while these things are intrinsically linked, they can also be discussed separately. I personally don't think women have any shot at getting those things in a capitalist system, but they can also be discussed in the context of other political/economic situations.

I'll happily remove the links to actual political parties if those are against the rules.

Actually, I'm just gonna go ahead and remove them. You have a point, @Queen, in that it makes this seem more like a recruitment post than a discussion post. I've left an edit stating what was removed and why.

Love this Queen 👑 spot on analysis

Oh, I would love to live in a country with strong social support systems as well. My only issue with them is that they are concessions granted to us by the ruling class. They can be taken away at any time. And they will be. The UK's NHS is under constant attack. (Honestly, the UK's welfare state, once among the strongest in the world, is in shambles.) There was once a time when the US had a pretty strong social safety net, under the New Deal. It was immediately dismantled after Roosevelt's death. Because at the end of the the day, the capitalist class still owns everything. They have the power. The government represents their interests, not the interests of the working class. Bourgeois democracy is a sham - a performance to placate the working classes by making them feel like they have a say. But we don't. When the capitalist classes provide those kinds of concessions, it's because it's in their best interests to do so. If they decide it's not in their best interests, they will stop offering the concessions.

I have no delusions that the former Eastern Bloc had some serious problems, especially in the later years. A lot of stuff didn't work well. There was also an enormous amount of western meddling to destabilize and weaken those states, which can't be ignored. Destroying the Eastern Bloc was basically the entire geopolitical project of the western capitalist states for most of a century. They couldn't fend it off, and they made a lot of poor calls while attempting to do so. For example, that harsh repression of dissidents. They weren't paranoid for no reason - there were western spies all over the place trying to sow discord and dissent. But in their attempts to stop it, they came down too hard on average citizens who just had average complaints about their government, and they shot themselves in the foot.

But I also feel like pointing to specific failures in politics, policies, and/or leaders as proof that an economic system inherently doesn't work is kind of.... I'm not sure what the word is here. It's like tunnel vision. It would be like claiming democracy or capitalism doesn't work because the Nazis rose to power in a democratic capitalist system. Like yeah, technically that's true, but only because of a perfect storm of conditions that don't actually have all that much to do with democracy or capitalism itself. (Well, maybe with capitalism. But the degeneration of capitalism into fascism is another conversation entirely.)

And actually, I want to make a quick point there. I'm not a socialist because I think capitalism is "bad" or "wrong" or "doesn't work." I'm a socialist because I hold with Marx's theories about economic development and how class struggle drives that economic development. Capitalism is a specific stage of development, and a very necessary one. (That's why all these socialist states had to institute market reforms.) But eventually, the contradictions of capitalism become unsustainable. Eventually, capitalism is not a progressive force, but a regressive one. Rather than increasing development and overall improving the lives of the working class, it becomes a hindrance to development and it worsens the lives of the working class. From that point, you have to work against a capitalist system, rather than within it, to achieve further progress in production or standard of living. This leads the working class to struggle against the capitalist class and eventually - inevitably - wrest control from them. Capitalism has long since reached that point. In the first countries to industrialize, like the UK, it had already reached that point when Marx was writing.

And that also goes back to what I mean when I say those kinds of labor protections and social safety nets are concessions. Those things exist because the working class had to struggle against the capitalist system to achieve more progress in standard of living. Sometimes, the capitalist class chooses to lose the battle to win the class war, so to speak. That's what all the western social-democratic reforms and labor protections of the early to mid-20th century were. But capitalism can't sustain those kinds of concessions forever. The economics of it don't work that way. I won't get into a long economics lesson, but it has to do with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the things capitalists do to combat that tendency. It already happened in the USA, decades ago, because America is kind of speed-running capitalism. It's currently in the process of happening in the UK, and most of western Europe. It will happen everywhere else eventually. And you don't get two bites at the apple. Once the concessions are gone, they're not coming back. Economically speaking, they can't.

So while I would definitely like those concessions, I know for a fact I'm not getting them. And even if I did, I don't get to keep them. I might enjoy them, but my kids and grandkids won't get them. The concessions are a band-aid, not a cure.

If you live in America you will NEVER own property the government cannot take away.

Even if you think you're immune from any kind of poverty that would prevent you from paying property taxes, the government could decide at any time they need to build a freeway through your yard & they can take it by eminent doman. For capitalism.

If you're not talking about real property and you just meant personal property you should look into civil forfeiture if you think they can't take it from you if they want to.

Frankly, I agree with you in theory. This question of socialism vs. capitalism wouldn't exist if women were in charge. I just don't see it as something that can be practically achieved in any kind of forseeable timeframe. Especially not to go from a patriarchal-capitalist system to a matriarchal... I don't even know what that economic system would be. It would be something entirely new.

I think you've misunderstood my comment.

Bluntly, yes. Patriarchy is innate to humanity. And yes, pickmeshas do exactly that. And while we are no longer overtly stabbing each other in the face, humanity is more passive-agressive about it. We are always competing, just not with swords.

That said, just because it's innate it doesn't mean its hopeless. We are animals, but we are also more than animals. We CAN control our rabid insane monkey-lizard brains. We'd never make it out the jungle if we were only basic animal instincts. But to fight the patriarchy it is also to become more than crazy animals subject to hormones. That is the struggle, to grow beyond brutal nature.

I respect your position, but I firmly disagree that patriarchy is innate to humanity. That has some truly horrific implications. It implies that women are naturally lesser than men. It implies that men have a "rightful" or "natural" rule over us, and that combatting patriarchy is to combat our essential nature. Most importantly, it implies that the children women bear "naturally" belong to the man who fathered them. For that to be true, there must be a way to to ensure that paternity, and the only way to do that is female monogamy and chastity. Essentially, that women "belong" to one man, either her father who safeguards her chastity or the man who fathers her children. That's the underlying concept of patriarchy, the "father-right."

I also don't think that position is well-supported by anthropological or evolutionary evidence. Not all human societies have been patriarchal forever. Nor are many of our evolutionary relatives patriarchal. Our closest relatives are chimps and bonobos. While chimpanzees are patriarchal, bonobos are matriarchal. If you compare us to animals that are more similar in intelligence, rather than pure genetics - such as cetaceans and elephants - they all have matriarchal social structures.

But I also want to point out a contradiction in your logic here. You say that patriarchy is human nature, but that we can combat it and become more than just animals. However, you also say that competition is human nature, and it's pointless to try to fight against it. If patriarchy and competition are both natural, why should we combat one but not the other? My position is that neither are natural, both are related to economic systems that are socially constructed and, they both can and should be changed. Your position is that both are natural, but only one should be combatted?

I think it's a great idea and I know it's literally never perfect because corporations need their little monopoly dollars but it's not a hard and fast solution.

At least with 4B it's actually getting companies to scramble and shit their britches handing out money to people in Japan to have kids for the "replacement rate." And at any rate if we can choke the birth rates down enough the rich will be treating us like princesses just so we can mate faster. Not only are we having less sex/children but we have more knowledge than ever and they're going to be too busy spending money on products we're not buying, ads and natalist propaganda. We're going to bleed them dry by simply being minimalist, anti-capitalist and hoarding our own wealth. They'll start paying us to have kids soon because capitalism is so unstable and dumb if you don't treat people like livestock.

I've had plenty of hardcore socialist boyfriends in the past, they'd get offended by the idea that we all stop having kids and choke out the corporations (because they atleast want to get the chance to have us as property). We have very different solutions to the same problem and honestly they're only socialist because they're sick of needing to get up from the couch, attract mates and find meaning. Meanwhile I actually just want rich men dead 🤷 and I want that to happen in my lifetime, not 100 years from now.

There are gross men advocating for every political tendency on the planet because they've decided it'll give them a 0.001% higher chance of getting their penis touched. Twitter dude's political opinions are hardly a good barometer of the value of a political theory lol.

I mentioned in the OP, though I didn't bold it, that I don't think socialism is the panacea for women's oppression. I think it's a necessary prerequisite for liberating women on the macro scale by removing institutional barriers to our freedom. As much as I like things like 4B and separatism, even if you could get a politically-significant mass of women to participate, you're still basically waiting on men to change their minds and decide to play nice in order to regain access to bangmaid services. Whereas with something like Marxist feminism, you literally remove men's institutional power to trap women or burden us with the second shift. While men still have the option to use physical violence/force to control us, those financial and institutional barriers are a dangerous weapon. And often a far more effective tool for keeping women reliant on men. A strong man is dangerous with our without a weapon, but I'd rather fight him unarmed, if you catch my metaphor.

Marxist feminism typically holds that men are not inherently, naturally evil, nor is patriarchy a natural or inevitable state of being. They argue that it comes from the concept of private property. The exact details of this theory are long, but it basically comes down to two concepts - the need to identify paternity for inheritable class status/ownership of private property, and the concept of slavery. Slavery and patriarchal marriage developed together in many places, because they are functionally the same system. So patriarchy is rooted in this concept of private property, wealth, and class status. So, extrapolating their theory out into a distant future, where bourgeois class and family relations are a long-forgotten relic of the past, Marxist feminists argue that eradicating those concepts will eventually eradicate patriarchy, because the conditions that create and justify patriarchy no longer exist. This is actually where I think Marxist feminist thought is the weakest, because I don't really see why that would necessarily happen. But it does sound like the only situation in which it could happen. The eradication of bourgeois family dynamics is not sufficient to end patriarchy, but it's a necessary precondition.

But really the TL;DR is that I don't think feminist movements, no matter how radical, are gonna get much farther under capitalism. We've hit the point of diminishing returns, hard. We're working 10x as hard just to keep the status and rights our foremothers achieved, forget about actually gaining new ones. (abortion, birth control, no-fault divorce, sex-based legal protections, etc.) And even if we manage to keep all of those, there isn't a lot farther to go. We've won the majority of the legal battles. Now we're fighting a cultural battle, and we can't win it when the economic system justifies the culture. And that's the point of my title - women's oppression is profitable.

I think that's optimistic. I don't think declining birth rates or reduced consumption will make the rich give out concessions, or that separatism/4B/sex strikes will make men start behaving better. I think those things will actually give rise to backlash and harsher oppression. Abortion bans, birth control bans, ends to no-fault divorce, repealing of laws that protect women's participation in the workforce (equal pay, maternity leave, sex-based legal protections, etc), followed by the expansion of the sex industry to absorb all the women who fall through the cracks in this system. Force women to choose between slavery to one man or slavery to all. Anything to make sure that the women keep taking dick and pushing out babies, because the system relies on it.

It's far better to just make a system that doesn't rely on it. I don't want men to decide to be better, I want to take away men's power to be worse.

I once saw a tweet, I can't remember the name of the woman who wrote it, but she was a black woman who was an influential voice in the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. The tweet said something to the effect of, "I don't care if a white man wants to be a racist. His racism is his problem. I don't care about making him less racist, I care about taking away his power to make his racism my problem." Those weren't her exact words, and I would kill to find this tweet again, because the concept really struck me. She put words to something I had always struggled to explain. I don't care if a man wants to be a misogynist. His misogyny is his problem. I want to take away his power to make that misogyny my problem.

That is an incredible story! Your grandmother fought for a better life and she created one for herself and her entire lineage.

To be honest, she's not that visionary to be able to see in the future what socialism can bring her, but I think she feels that she's treated as an equal when she participated in the war instead of being a servant in her own home. But that got me to think, if socialism has not been so villainized, my grandmother's story could be one of those success stories, like you said, fought for her life and helped her lineage.

You're half-right. In the past, socialist governments pushed really hard to get women to join the workforce instead of being at home. It was never, like, illegal to be a housewife or anything. But they did use a variety of incentives and social pressures to encourage women to join the workforce.

However, the reason they did this is that they were trying to combat regressive, sexist cultural beliefs. They were trying to end the idea that a woman's "place" is in the home, and create a new culture where women were equal participants in all aspects of society. That's not as big of a problem in the modern world, especially not in a western country. So there would probably be no need to push work outside the home quite as hard. It's already culturally normalized.

Furthermore, a lot of the Marxist feminist proposals for accommodating women's needs as mothers in the workplace would essentially allow for working women to have the same benefits that SAHMs enjoy now. A year of paid parental leave accommodates nursing and bonding. Workdays would be shorter (4-6 hours a day, 4-5 days a week - depending on who you talk to), and most workplaces would have nurseries attached to them. So your kid isn't just off in some random daycare across town all day - they're down the hall for a couple of hours. Mothers who are doing extended nursing, or who went back to work early, get paid breaks for nursing. Public education starts young, as early as age 3, and parents are expected to be heavily involved in education. Workplaces would not only accommodate it, but encourage it. School, work, and family life are not as separate as they are in a capitalist society. They're all seen as part of the same community life, and all are equally important.

For example, I recently read a story from someone who lived in the USSR in the 1930s. A coworker's kid was struggling at school, getting poor grades and acting up in class. The schools had parent organizations that had regular meetings, and all the local kids attended the same school, so the kid's struggles were common knowledge in the community. The father of the kid who was struggling in school ended up being called into a meeting with his supervisor at work, who basically said, "Why don't you take some time off to focus on parenting? It sounds like your kid needs some more support." The guy did take the time off, and the kid's performance in school improved. And while this seems pretty... intrusive... to a modern westerner from a capitalist state, it also speaks to just how interconnected these things are in a socialist culture, and just how much workplaces accommodated the needs of parents. It's also worth pointing out that this story was about a father. Childrearing wasn't just considered women's business.

Ultimately, I think most women would choose to work outside the home in some capacity if family life was accommodated like this.

That was informative. Thanks. I think one thing in the socialist realm that they say is that it takes a village to raise a child. I actually agree in a way. Just one parent at home trying to do it all, without any other social infrastructure in place to help out, does sound nightmarish. Sorry if I sound ignorant about this issue. I'm not that good at the socialism vs. capitalism stuff.

Don't apologize! Never apologize for taking the opportunity to learn more. That's where informed opinions come from.

And you're absolutely right about the socialist/Marxist feminist idea that "it takes a village." One of the things that early Marxist feminists pointed out was that wealthy mothers had that village. They had nannies and tutors and governesses and private schools and maids and cooks and extensive social networks of friends and relations - who also all had their own army of servants - to assist in the process of childrearing. Only working-class women had to bear that weight all by themselves. Often while also being part of a wealthy woman's "village," because most women at the time worked in domestic service. And even pretty late into the 20th century, most women either had a maid or were maids themselves. It wasn't until women started entering the workforce in large numbers in the 60s and 70s that that dynamic changed.

But that changing dynamic didn't actually improve things for working women. The only thing that improved the burden on working mothers was the pulling of private work into the public sphere. Women no longer have to educate their own children, sew clothes for their entire family, or churn their own butter. These things are done publically, by skilled laborers, on an industrial scale. The rest of the "private" labor of the mother/wife should be pulled into the public sphere along with it.

You probably don't realize this, but you've managed to touch on some really important concepts in socialist political theory.

The first is basically Marxist stage theory. You've actually described it pretty well here. You've pointed out that capitalism and colonialism did benefit a lot of people, and that your previous home is now more capitalist than it was before the revolution, and both of those things are true. (Well, I don't know exactly which country you're from, but the information you've given leaves a pretty short list of options and it's true for all them.)

Capitalism isn't inherently "bad" or "wrong," and neither was colonialism. Politics and economics aren't moral like that. An individual can be opposed to the concepts they rely on on moral grounds, but that's a different thing. Those systems came out of specific material conditions, and they existed because they were beneficial for a lot of people. They were also really harmful for a lot of people. Every economic system has these kinds of contradictions. So, yeah colonialism was brutal and - in the long term - stunted the economic and socio-political development of colonized countries. But in the short term, colonization required investing in developing the economic and political infrastructure of the country. Building ports and roads and mines, importing or building new technology to increase extraction, and then essentially "catching up" the political, social, and cultural systems to meet this new level of economic development. That's part of the point of my original post - culture arises from the relationship people have with production. Change the production, change the culture. Doesn't really go the other way around. So, for a very short period of time, colonialism was a progressive force, not a regressive force. It promoted economic development, and all the other forms of development that go along with it.

And then colonialism gave rise to capitalism, which was hugely beneficial for a lot of people. Capitalism arose out of class struggle - the struggle between the bourgeois capitalists, the class of extremely wealthy and powerful businessmen who made their money in colonialism - and the old feudal aristocracies. Or their various analogues across the world. Technically feudalism is like, a very specific european thing but similar systems existed pretty much everywhere. Capitalism dealt the death blow to feudalism, freeing people from serfdom and slavery on the land. This was, at least in the short term, an objective improvement in their standard of living. Capitalism allowed for industrialism, because you need to accumulate capital to make industrialization happen. (I'll come back to that.) And industrialism raised the standard of living on a global scale. Industrial agriculture, healthcare, etc. And as the means of production changed, the culture changed with it. But it didn't take long for those contradictions to show up again. And eventually, capitalism became a regressive force rather than a progressive one. That is to say, people had to struggle against a capitalist system to achieve more economic progress, rather than achieving that progress within it. That's where you get the first labor movements, anti-trust acts, etc. And according to Marxist theory, that struggle intensifies until eventually the working class overthrows the bourgeois class.

But I want to go back to that point about how capitalism allows for industrialism. Because you're exactly right, whatever country you're from is far more capitalist now than it ever was before. In fact, I suspect the country you're from is currently a major power within the global capitalist economy. That's because nearly every country that has ever had a successful socialist revolution did so before they had become a fully industrialized, capitalist state. In most cases - and especially the ones you could be talking about here - that's because they were victims of that colonization I mentioned earlier, and colonialism had become a regressive force. They weren't going to industrialize, and even if they did, they weren't going to reap the economic benefits of it because the bourgeois colonial powers were the ones getting those benefits. That has been the case for pretty much every colonized state that didn't have a socialist revolution, even if they managed to free themselves from the colonial relationship.

So these socialist revolutionaries got in there and realized that they needed to industrialize, and industrialization requires capital, which they didn't have because of colonialism, and that's where you get market reforms. There's also the unique elements of throwing off colonial rule, which complicates things a lot. Because you end up having to give a lot of power to what Mao called the "national bourgeoisie," those capitalists who are native to your country, not foreigners from a colonial power. Basically, the people who would be in charge if the colonizers weren't. So these former colonies took a page out of the USSR's book and implemented various approaches to allowing capital investment in industrial development, while still in a socialist context. These were the market reforms. And every existing post-colonial socialist state is still in this stage. Only one has even arguably kinda-sorta reached the point where they could start moving out of this stage - where the market reforms become an economically regressive element, rather than a progressive one. You know which one I mean.

So yeah, you're absolutely right. Capitalism isn't bad. It's necessary stage of development. One that the west is long since ready to move out of. And, to bring it back to my original post - by moving out of that stage, we will move towards a better world for women.

The other thing you touched on that I think is really important is, "how do you avoid shitty scrotes from taking over and ruining everything?" That's a question in literally any political system. How do keep bad actors from ruining everything? That tends to be a very messy question, rhetorically. Because there's really only one answer. You have to use force to stop, disenfranchise, and repress them to ensure they don't ruin everything. That's a major part of the early stages of a socialist revolution. But who gets to decide who a bad actor is? Nobody considers themselves a bad actor. Nobody considers themselves deserving of repression.

For example, I've spoken to lots of people who are descended from people who fled communist revolutions. And with astonishing frequency, they admit that their ancestors were capitalists, or aristocrats, or high-ranking members of the colonial government, or literal slaveowners, or soldiers for a counter-revolutionary force, or straight-up Nazis. The kinds of people who would absolutely be considered dangerous elements in a socialist society. But they didn't see themselves that way. They didn't think they deserved to have their slaves taken away and be forced to work the fields. And that's just for the obvious cases. What about the less obvious ones?

I don't really have an answer to this question. I don't really think there is an answer to that question. I think it's the Great Question of Government. Who gets to decide, how far are they allowed to go, and what happens if somebody else disagrees? But I think it's a good question, and one that should never stop being debated and discussed. The moment we stop having that conversation is the moment somebody goes way too far.

Remember kids: Capitalism is not an immoral system, it is an amoral system.

It's especially frustrating when people say "capitalism is bad, but socialism is not the answer!" Do you have a better option? Either the means of production are privately owned or they're not. Everything else is, frankly, details.

I think people get scared of the word "communism" because it has been used as an insult and because "Stalin/Mao killed 70 thousand bazillion people 🤡" I understand why people get scared of the term.

I was watching this TikTok video and a girl was saying something like: "Let's buy some land with some friends and work together, and live off the land, and we should have some workshops and maybe like a bar and spaces to be creative, and is not a cult, because we will have no leaders other than ourselves working for the common good" And I was like... Yeah, that's q very original concept that nobody for about 200 years ago had thought about before 😅.

Yeah let's do the death count for capitalism, the number of people died in wars motivated by oil companies, the number of people died of cancer or other diseases (including Covid) because companies refuse to install safety equipment or pay clean up cost or shut down for pandemic, the number of people + animals died from natural disaster caused by climate change. Can we even do the count? That's right, we can't because they're innumerable.

I was also going to point out that with the credit score, you are spot on.

And another thing is the fact that I always see the argument that there is no Freedom of speech or freedom of information in socialist governments, but the same people choose to totally ignore the fact that Julian Assange is currently in prision and allegedly being tortured because he exposed War crimes commited by the US Government... So yeah, there is that...

I cannot let the idea that these governments stay in power because "people want them" stand. This isn't like the west where there's a possibility you can vote out leaders you don't like.

Where I come from, the communist leadership is for all intents and purposes the new aristocracy. They and their cronies hoard enormous wealth and hold onto absolute power with all their might.

Most people are too busy barely surviving to get involved in any uprisings.

Still, uprisings have happened when people are pushed so far they can't take it anymore. But they tend to be quashed before long. People caught being a part of any uprising are declared traitors in league with foreign powers and executed. Then no one within the country is allowed to mention these uprisings again. It's as if it never happened.

I don't take you for a troll because there seems to be real thought and passion behind your writing.

Then you seem to buy into the typical communist party line that anyone who goes against their rule are "foreign puppets". They might as well be calling those people witches and heretics. Seems to me someone with your smarts should be able to see this for what it is.

Just because these governments call themselves communist, doesn't mean they are allies to your version of socialism. They are like scrotes calling themselves feminists. They do that to get what they can out of it. Don't take their word for it, judge them by their actions.

Their actions: hoarding wealth, destroying nature building vanity projects to show off their power, rolling over protestors with tanks.

I wouldn't call myself socialist, but when I hear of workers striking against some corporation, I absolutely side with the workers. So am I against these communist governments because I am some kind of big time capitalist?

My argument that "people want them" relies on an assumption that regime change requires two things: popular support and foreign intervention. The more you have of one, the less you need of the other. If you have overwhelming popular support, you can pull off regime change without much foreign intervention. And if you have a lot of foreign intervention, you can pull off regime change with only a little popular support. But you really do need both. (And as a side note, the foreign intervention doesn't necessarily need to be in support of any specific movement. It can just be a destabilizing force that weakens the existing government. This is why a lot of regime changes happen in the context of an unrelated ongoing war.)

And I cannot overstate just how much foreign intervention gets poured into attempts at regime change for socialist states. Basically the entire infrastructure of the American intelligence community is built around this. It has been used against any potential threat to American hegemony, not exclusively socialist ones, but the socialist threats are what it was built for. Just to give one example - the CIA tried to assassinate Fidel Castro over six hundred different times. The foreign intervention is there. So if these attempts at regime change are failing, it's because they're failing to get a critical mass of popular support.

And sometimes they do succeed. That's why the Eastern Bloc no longer exists. There was a truly massive amount of foreign intervention - destabilizing the USSR was the entire geopolitical project of the west for decades - and just enough popular support to pull it off.

The ability to pull off regime change isn't about democracy or autocracy. A popular movement, with enough foreign intervention (either supporting them or weakening the existing government), can overthrow even the most brutal dictatorship. But you need both elements. If the foreign intervention is there, but the regime change isn't happening, it's because the popular support is missing.

As a final note, I want to clarify that "lack of popular support for regime change" isn't necessarily the same thing as "enthusiastic popular support of the current regime." Realistically, most people just don't care enough. They might be unhappy, but they're not unhappy enough to want the struggles that come with regime change. They may want things to be different, but not that different. And in many cases, they might be aware of the fact that regime change comes with foreign intervention, and while they may want things to be different, they also don't want to become a puppet of whatever country is intervening. Because that is very much the goal of American-backed regime change. They want the current leadership replaced with one that is willing to be a puppet for American interests. That usually ends up backfiring on the American government (see: most of the middle east), but it rarely ends up improving the lives of the working class people of that state. In fact, it usually makes things worse (see: the current state of Libya).

So that's an important thing to keep in mind here. When I say, "the people want the current regime in power," I'm not talking about a choice between the current socialist regime and a hypothetical utopian future for that state where they are a fully-sovereign democratic capitalist state. That's not realistically going to happen, even if it is what most people would prefer. The choice is between the current regime and becoming (or rather, returning to being) a western puppet state.

There was no name calling and I did not call her gross. I did name her behaviour, and called the behaviour, gross. - It is. It's covertly hostile and condescending to project on to others and tell them what they feel/think to suit your own ends. And it IS a tactic of abuse dynamics.

It is also an abuse tactic to Deny (denied that you didn't call her gross but her behaviour), Attack (basically your whole post), Reverse role of Victim and Offender (implying she's adopting abuse tactic towards you when she didn't say a word about you).

🤦‍♀️ just read my comment and see for yourself I did not call her gross, sigh. I'm not here to feed trolls. bye.