December 2025 – Ecological Era

Capitalism and Socialism. 12 17 2025

There is a brewing conflict about whether or not to have capitalist assistance, in tandem with taking part in their governments. We have seen Boris Yeltsin basically completely removed worker owned property, leaving only Belarus with a socialist government. His handpicked successor Vladimir Putin, who came to power in 2000, has been a little better, but it was a form of capitalist assistance when he helped Alexander Lukashenko stay in power when capitalists were running in the streets trying to stop socialism.

Which directly goes to the issue of capitalist assistance. I guess it may have been a concession to keep Lukashenko in power? Putin would come to attack Ukraine, first from Belarus.

It was not as successful as Russian efforts in the Donbas have been, where Putin is winning against the American and western European bourgeoisie. The first invasion targeted the capital Kyiv, where Vladimir Zelensky fought and slowed the progress of Putin.

NATO and the Americans are capitalists, and they are already carving up Ukraine’s mineral wealth, claiming the spoils before the end is reached. Trump has claimed large mineral deposits in Ukraine.

It might be there? Apparently there are rare earth metals underground, and Trump wants the profits to pay for the war effort against Russia. Believe it or not, after 20 years of war in Afghanistan, in what was a loss for NATO and the Americans, Ukraine is becoming too costly,

Well when missiles valued at $10,000 a pop are being shot to stop missiles from entering the Ukraine by NATO, it’s not hard to see how even with American deep pockets, the war is not sustainable forever.

Trump has said Europe needs to spend more, shouldering most of the burden of fighting Russia. The long range ballistic missiles at Moscow are coming from Ukraine, who get them from NATO. Not only did NATO not reduce missile numbers after the Cold War ended, they are now shooting these drones and missiles at Moscow, albeit with limited success.

Have we really come full circle? There were pacifists who wanted to end the Iron Curtain, who supported rapprochement to stop nuclear weapons.

Well the long range missiles Ukraine is using are coming from America, Britain, Germany and France. Many of them were designed to use nuclear warheads.. Russia shoots most of them down; they have defenses for this. But how did we get to this point?

Trump has stopped short of calling it ”Biden’s war”, or the “Democrat war “. But it looks like Trump is ready to lose another war, like Afghanistan. Biden inherited that one; Kabul was failing badly under Trump, Biden saw the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Ukraine may be forced to give up about a quarter of their territory, or risk losing all of it to Putin’s Russia. It is difficult to see how one could call this some sort of victory for NATO.

But unfortunately one has to see that Putin represents Russian capitalists; he may not own much property, or the means of production in the form of stocks, bonds,. etc., but is insured wealth if he leaves power by the same bourgeoisie he spent his time supporting under Yeltsin.

He could help out socialism, but it probably requires a concession. For Lukashenko it was allowing for Russia’s army to use their territory to attack Ukraine. Zelensky has already asked for nuclear weapons from NATO, the latter seems to be saying no. A little too close to World War Three?

Cuba has been under embargo again under Biden and Trump. Obama has loosened the embargo, but Trump put up the curtain again. The Cubans do not cooperate with the bourgeoisie, short of allowing tourism from the Canadians. They are a heroic example of a small country pitted geographically against a capitalist empire.

Cooperating with capitalists seems to sort of work for China, where there is a Politburo. Xi Jinping is not a capitalist, but they are present in modern China. This may be a useful example of cooperation, but the issue of Taiwan, where the Chinese bourgeoisie fled to when Mao Tse Tung completed his Long March, says something else. Even Putin has joint exercises with planes and ships, under China in the Pacific near Taiwan. Reunification has yet to occur between Taiwan and China.

In the case of China it looks close to impossible not to cooperate with capitalists, who use China as a production center for massive industry. Capitalists feel this too, the inability to compromise with socialists. Trump has tariffs on Chinese goods 45%, after threats of 145%. Who is not getting along with socialists? Combine this with the embargo, you see both sides agree to disagree.

The difference is the proletariat is represented by socialists, and the workers under capitalism are often only differentiated by national boundaries, created for the purpose of keeping the working class divided. The capitalists are fighting to hold down the worker, to maintain wage labour.

When capitalists fight other capitalists, it is for control of markets. Lenin called this imperialism, this is the case. World War one was a conflict of this type, even though Russia had a successful workers revolution, the war was not about this. That comes later, in the second world war, with Hitler fighting Joseph Stalin.

In the last world war the Allied Powers got over their differences for a short time, resulting in cooperation with Russian socialism. It was short lived; within 6 years Harry Truman, who succeeded Franklin Roosevelt, was fighting in the now free Japanese colony Korea in 1951. The same man who dropped the bomb on Japanese capitalists cost the Chinese communists millions of men, in a conflict we are still reminded of 83 years later, the Korea’s are divided. He no longer seemed so cooperative.

Russia is winning the war, and it looks like NATO is retreating. How much cooperation there will be between Russia’s workers and capitalists when this is done with remains to be seen. Russia could return to a more worker friendly society, keeping Lenin’s vision of a proletarian society without capitalism possible. Or something like China, a revolution holding on even with capitalists again present. Or it could crush the last pockets of resistance of the workers, and betray Belarus and China. History will soon determine this.

Ukraine could be just a foretaste of what could come if NATO keeps trying to corner Russia. Expansion through ignorance of workers is the rule, rather than the exception. Condoning bourgeois rule by a worker shows he is probably ignorant, or selfish trying to make himself a fortune on the backs of his fellow workers, rather than cooperation and a vision of emancipation of wage labor..

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

12 17 2025

Well here we go again. The farmers are again being paid to dump the food, wasting millions of tonnes of Soybeans. Trump is paying 12 billion dollars of state money to large farmers, for food that will be destroyed.

The justification for this is that China only bought 2.7 million tonnes of soybeans this year, after promising 12 million, in a large purchase planned by Biden and his government. Trump has alienated China so badly, with 45% tariffs the current number, they didn’t buy the beans this year.

The last time Trump was president the farmers regularly received tens of billions of dollars, and the dumping of soybeans was also practiced in the pandemic.

It is a prime example of overproduction; the soybeans are useful, they are good quality. But due to social conditions, they cannot be sold, rather, the bourgeoisie is sort of paying for them to be dumped. Apparently flooding the market with cheap soybeans is also not possible.

They have about 2 weeks to purchase the beans, before they get dumped. It seems physically impossible to move the about 10 million metric tonnes to China they were expected to purchase. In an event of overproduction, inability to plan ahead for this calamity, the direct cause Trump’s tariffs, food otherwise consumable is all a loss.

We still to this day have famine, often in war torn countries. Gaza is hungry, but the beans are unsaleable. Clearly overproduction is a social problem, not a physical one. It is occurring due to the style of government; the capitalist one.

At this point it looks like the bourgeois will not even be buying the beans, rather just issuing checks to big farmers. Checks were issued last time based on acreage, the more acres, the more welfare.

“The highest per-acre payments will be paid to rice farmers, who could receive $132.89 an acre; cotton farmers, at $117.35 an acre; and oat farmers, at $81.75 an acre. Meanwhile, farmers are eligible for a payment of $44.36 per corn acre, $30.88 per soybean acre and $39.35 per wheat acre. The payments are calculated using 2025 planted acres, cost-of-production data, and market conditions, USDA said.”

Reuters 12 31 2025

This has yet to change. Small farmers will be selling their farms, when their crop is unsaleable due to overproduction. This will concentrate ownership of land further in the hands of the large landowners, who are all Republican bourgeoisie.

The 12 billion dollars comes from part of the surplus value sectioned off for taxes. It is created in the labour process; wage labor is what is paying for this 12 billion dollars. But to the capitalist this money is his property,as it was a deduction from his surplus value, gained through his control of the means of production, in this case the land.

It is a crisis of overproduction, due to a glutted market for soybeans. The only thing different this time is Trump is the cause of the crisis, as he had to tariff China massively, mostly to protect non metric industries like automobile production, which would have a tough time competing against Chinese EV’s. They cost half as much as a Detroit car, or a Muskmobile Tesla. They are not selling them to workers, they are luxury cars. Honda is selling a Chinese EV this year, the Prologue. I was at the Honda dealer recently and asked about Honda EV’s. I was told about the Prologue. I asked if it was Chinese produced. The answer from the dealer was yes.

The bourgeoisie should have remembered the last time, in Trump‘s first term, when tariffs started with solar panels (30%) and washing machines (20%), then expanded under Section 301 to hit steel, aluminum, and eventually a broad range of Chinese products with 25% tariffs. That time they bought the soybeans elsewhere too. The beans were probably dumped the first time Trump pulled a stunt like tariffing China. The farm subsidies of tens of billions also got flowing under Trump in his first term.

It should be obvious there is no gain for the worker here. It is not like Trump is even paying for land, as in a purchase, nationalization of land with a price tag. Instead the 12 billion dollars will go to mostly large landowners, who will use it to pay wages, cementing their control over the labor process on land itself. He just doles it out, and it is the large landowners who pull Trump’s puppet strings.

Not even a year into Trump’s presidency there is already an economic crisis, this time a glutted market for soybeans resulting in millions of tonnes of food being destroyed. Overproduction occurred, and now big pockets are required to keep the landowners happy. They all know Trump represents the gravy train, and regardless of how bad decisions regarding economics go, they are insured through him if their crops fail. They even went along with the tariffs, at least until Chinese tariffs in line with Trump’s made American soybeans unsaleable. Will they keep supporting him if it means economic failure for their crop?

How many more failed years of crops will there be until there is nationalized land? Clearly the USDA planning is not working. It failed in Trump’s first term, when he pulled the same thing, big tariffs on China, resulting in counter tariffs, and overproduction. A more rational planning process, especially regarding the effects of large tariffs on markets, was required. Instead we have failure, another lost year, with Trump to blame for the fiasco.

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic

12 9 2025

edit 1 9 2025