Sad for my comrades. I would drop a red rose if I had the opportunity.

I wish the radical left could launch a presidential campaign for next year. That would help to tip the scales of the political debate. The problem is that currently there is too much ego. I was just listening to Jones Manoel this morning, and he was calling the parties out for their sectarian behavior.

This is just in São Paulo for the moment. I think the main purpose of the act wasn’t even the Trump’s tariffs, but they are simply using the momentum right now.

Yup, unless one is a worker’s party simp, every leftist militant is angry with Lula right now.

Lula is almost licking Western boots to please the Western overlords in his third term. Even Xi Jinping seems to have made some reprimands to him.

Yup, everyone in the Brazilian left thinks Trump just presented them a gift. Trump’s tariffs will hit the most reactionary capitalist sector in Brazil which is the Agribusiness. We have a big opportunity in Brazil to push a discourse of sovereignty, of non-alignment with the US and forging closer ties with the BRICS.

The problem right now is how the Workers’ party will take advantage of it. Lula and the rest of the leaders of the party have shown again and again that they are a bunch of spineless cowards afraid of any conflict with the financial capitalist class. Aside from symbolic gestures, I’m skeptical on how this event is going be used politically.

The US will never admit their F-35 got shot. They alleged a few F-35 fell into the ocean after defensive maneuvers done by a carrier. Note that this happened at least twice.

Yep, they would need both fighters and AEW&C to make AEW&C effective. But if they at least have more modern jets, deploy their anti-air defenses strategically and use radar tricks to hit F-35 then they would be able to tick the scales a bit. But this depends on how much Iranian air forces are used to these tactics and are used to the more modern equipment.

https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/china-rebuilding-iran-air-defence-hq9b

Iran would actually need airborn early warning and control (AEW&C) to effectively defeat F-35 fighters with anti-air defenses. But if Iran were to deploy a few J-10C that were used by Pakistan, they would at least put an obstacle in acquiring air superiority in Iranian territory, since the jets would not be able to maneuver freely in Iranian territory.

Let’s keep in mind that J-10Cs are 4th gen as well. But I think Iran would be able to replace their old fleet with newer J-10Cs as quickly as Pakistan did with their older jets.

One more of those revolutionary functional languages that fade over the course of 5 years?

Oh, and I forgot to add, China, Russia and Iran didn’t even use their top tier missiles yet.

Yup, and today missiles can have satellite guidance. So, not only precise, but it is also smart enough to avoid some routes with heavy anti-air defenses.

US missiles are hypersonic just because AngryCommieKender said so.

This newspaper is very close to the workers’ party: https://www.brasil247.com/brasil/lula-cita-raul-seixas-ao-ser-questionado-sobre-venezuela-e-diz-que-os-brics-sao-uma-metamorfose-ambulante

Finally, Lula said that BRICS has its doors open to new countries that want to be part of the bloc. “We don’t have closed doors. Whoever wants to join says they want to join and we will evaluate. And when we evaluate, we will make the invitation. That’s how it is,” he concluded.

Lula did not cite Venezuela directly, and it did not take a definitive stance yet. But Lula at least did not use the neoliberal discourse of last year. I think as long as either Russia or China put pressure, he will cede.

If the Brazilian leadership is right wing, which is very likely in the next elections, they will surely do as much as they can to cause headaches for Venezuela. Regarding the workers’ party under the third Lula term, I sure hope they re-assess their position, but today Brazil has been making gestures to the US.

I haven’t heard anything from the leftist press, however. What the mainstream Brazilian liberal press is talking about is how Maduro wasn’t invited to Lula’s special meetings.

Edit: I editted this post two times with additional info, so check it out.

I think Brazil is currently an anchor pulling BRICS down. While most BRICS countries seek sovereignty by getting as far from US dependency as possible, even though not necessarily harboring anti-imperialist takes, Brazil is selling even more of its industry to other global powers, even defunding is military industry (Avibras and Embraer) and depending more on US and Israeli tech.

It’s not even effectively taxing the rich. The government simply set a goal of 0 budget deficit.

In Brazil the government spends budget is divided into primary spends and nominal spends. Primary spends are the amount the government spends on health care, education, social benefits, infrastructure, research, military etc. Nominal spends are financial expenses (treasure bonds interest rates, securities etc). So the workers’ party government goal of 0 deficit is basically about reducing primary spending to a value below the tax revenue.

Whose interests this policy and budget goal favors? The financial sector. The government put a lock on primary spending, in a way those spendings can’t grow in the same pace the population grows or gets old. It can’t run a deficit to increase the amount it spends on infrastructure and services. Even if the government increase its tax revenue, it can’t increase spending, since there’s a lock limiting government spending.

So how the financial and banking sector profits from this? Many of the government state owned companies will start having budget issues, meaning they can’t provide services properly to the population. Meaning, to increase investment, they need private money, meaning opening a door for privatization. Secondly, any tax revenue growth that surpasses primary spending will only be used to pay financial expenses, meaning more interests and bonds issued paid by the government to the financial sector, who will probably use this new money to buy off state assets.

So the government is basically pushing a right wing agenda with leftist rhetoric. And using a good, but meagre policy to make the left militancy to support the right wing policies that will come in the same bill.

The “tax the rich” thingy is actually a neoliberal policy to increase government tax revenue by taxing some financial operations related to exchange rate. Most of the people affected will be middle class, not the rich. The government has already stepped back from taxing investment operations in foreign countries (which would target mostly rich people, and specially - financial institutions).

The other policy, the increase of the ceiling of the first revenue tax bracket is a good policy, though. The problem is that the government will still tax middle class people in other ways.

The reason the government wants to do this, however, is to throw some crumbs to the people in order to get re-elected in the 2026 elections. This increase in tax revenue won’t be translated into public investment, since the workers’ party pushed a fiscal policy early in 2023 to limit government spending increase.

The Brazilian workers’ party strategy is to distract the left militancy so they still rally around the party for the next elections (so they don’t leave the workers’ party for another party), while at the same time they maintain their neoliberal agenda that supports the interest of the big financial sector and banks.

Lula is revealing himself as a sneaky bastard, and a shackle to an actually radical leftist agenda.

It’s interesting how the totalitarian argument falls apart when you look at the actual reality. The people isn’t composed of mindless drones that follow the state discourse. They are confusingly different from each other, many even reactionary.

@WaterBowlSlime@lemmygrad.ml and @amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml already provided good answers to this question, so I will just add my 2 cents.

I dislike the term state capitalism, because capitalism per se is a state system. The nation-state is the way the bourgeoisie thought it would be best to organize a country ever since the end of the monarchies in Europe in the 19th century. Nation states have laws (which secure private property, and how agents that hold private property should engage each other), have clearly defined borders, an official language (in feudalism many villages within a territory would speak many different dialects), concentrate all the power of violence and bureaucracy under the nation-state (a move that started to happen since the advent of absolutist monarchies), will issue a currency and will define the laws on how foreign actors will engage in the domestic economy.

So the capitalist market is a superstructure created by the nation-state to uphold the interests of the capitalists. The state creates the conditions for the market to exist. It creates the entire legal framework that is used by the market, and even runs state services (transportation, energy generation, police, roads, railways, airports, military, diplomacy, urban zoning etc) that will support capitalist enterprises. There is a dialectical relationship between the market and the state, both a positive relationship, as the market depends on the state to exist and a contradiction in the sense as the market battles the state bureaucracy to have more power over it (as in neoliberalism) and/or the state fights the market in order to establish the dominance of state-based economic development (as it happened in the Keynesian phase of post WW2).

Note that socialism and capitalism are not different from each other because of economic planning. Both Japanese and South Korean economies heavily depended on central planning, with South Korea having a dictatorship and central planning that was even more centralized than we ever had in the post communist revolution China. The SK state was draconic with capitalists regarding their returns and how they should invest their capital and they would be disposed if they didn’t achieve state development goals.

This reasoning about planning was what motivated Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms in China:

Why do some people always insist that the market is capitalist and only planning is socialist? Actually they are both means of developing the productive forces. So long as they serve that purpose, we should make use of them. If they serve socialism they are socialist; if they serve capitalism they are capitalist. It is not correct to say that planning is only socialist, because there is a planning department in Japan and there is also planning in the United States. At one time we copied the Soviet model of economic development and had a planned economy. Later we said that in a socialist economy planning was primary. We should not say that any longer.

So the idea that state-capitalism is an initial form of socialism is wrong. The real question is, who holds power over who? The communist party, controlled by fractions of the proletariat is the controller of the state in the case of socialist economies. In capitalist economies, even in case of countries with good welfare programs, the state is still controlled by the bourgeoisie. Let’s never forget the politics in political economy. This is essential to understand how both capitalism and socialism work. Let’s not fall in the same trap the traditional neoclassical economists do in order to label economic systems.