First Principles or Axioms would be the terms you’re looking for

Started (at least in Western science) with Euclid’s Elements:

It is possible to draw a straight line from any point to any other point.

It is possible to extend a line segment continuously in both directions.

It is possible to describe a circle with any center and any radius.

It is true that all right angles are equal to one another.

(“Parallel postulate”) It is true that, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, intersect on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles.

All of these are taken as the base assumptions for the rest of the logical proofs for euclidian geometry.

With physics, I’d say the thermodynamic laws are the axioms.

With political science, the axioms aren’t as clearly defined. Marx and Engels are really the first to try and lock them down with the concepts of class struggle and Labor == Value (“all history is the history of class struggle” is one of Marx’s big axioms). Marx also uses thermodynamic principles in the context of political economy with Labor standing in for energy.

This is absolutely just her drumming up a case for intervention. She sees China’s B&R as an existential threat to the US and see the entirety of South America as nothing more than raw material.

Chinese investment is really extraction, Richardson said. Not just in terms of cash or natural resources, but also strategic positions. The general described a recent flight over the Panama Canal where she saw Chinese state-owned enterprises on both sides of the canal that could be turned quickly toward military capabilities.

“I think we should be concerned, but this is a global problem,” she said.

it shows that Marx sees that the state is bourgeois and therefore antagonistic to the proletariat.

Yes. The German state at the time was antagonistic to the proletariat. The Feudal state in Germany was in the process of transferring power to the bourgeoisie and that process didn’t end up happening until after WW1 because the German revolution failed. The goal of the manifesto was to solidify that the new German state post revolution would be worker controlled and not controlled by the new German industrial bourgeoisie.

This quote says nothing about “The State” as a concept or entity being bourgeois, only that the state is an opressive/antagonistic force that is currently bourgeois.

If you want to try and claim that Marx said “All States are Bourgeois”, you’re going to need to dig a lot deeper than the Manifesto and you’ll not find any consistent answer as his views on that changed throughout his life and after the revolutionary movements in Germany (Revolutions of 1848 the first failure and when the Manifesto was written), America (Civil War 1865 see The Civil War in the United States), and France (Paris Commune 1871 see The Civil War in France).

As he saw how the bourgeois power structures maintained themselves through these successive revolutions, he began to become much more clear on the role of a workers state in maintaining the revolutionary movement.

The hurdle a lot of illiterate liberals have to get over when they read Marx is that his use of oppressive isn’t a moral assertion, it’s a dialectic.

Yes, a state is opressive. It is the oppression of one class for the benefit of another. As long as a state exists, there is an existing class divide in the place that state exists.

Do you think the bourgeoisie care that the state is oppressive? No. Because the current form of the state serves their interests. Should workers care that a bourgeois state is opressive? Yes. Because a bourgeois state will actively sabotage any attempt by the body of labor to free itself.

As long as this dynamic exists (either domestically or internationally) states will continue to exist, and the form of that state will take on the character of the class that controls it.

In “The Civil War in France” Marx directly condems the revolutionaries (though respects their lofty aims) for not taking over the State in Paris. For not opening the banks, exploiting the existing power structure, and then destroying the bridge behind them. The Paris Commune is one of the first direct examples of a suddenly stateless society failing in the face of an organized bourgeois state.

If you want a socialist project to survive, you have to learn from the mistakes of the Parisians and take hold of power and use the oppressive nature of the state to cement the new order or you risk reactionary movements that aren’t afraid to wield that oppressive power destroying all you’ve built.

And this is a hard thing for liberals to get their heads around because it’s something that Marx changed opinions on the second he saw what had happened in Paris. Unlike most liberal political economists who are dogmatic in their beliefs and theories, Marx was driven primarily by the state of things and analysis of reality. His theories changed as he saw them practiced.

Totally understand, there is a tendency with the Western left to idolize the CPC, which kinda makes sense. There isn’t really an alternative except maybe Cuba, Vietnam, and DPRK. Those nations are also not in a position to really influence the positions of global capital.

There’s also the fact that Marxists who don’t live in China don’t have to interface or deal with the domestic issues that come up there. All they have to interact with is the foreign policy of the CPC, which is significantly better than any other country (at least any country with a similar GDP, Cuba and even DPRK both do fantastic work with aid programs given their size).

I’ll always be critically supportive of Chinese governance with the knowledge that many of their decisions arise from the conditions of China within the global market system and the reliance of China on access to that system. We can hypothesize about how things would be different if the Sino-Soviet split didn’t happen and the entire East was unified under one socialist market that drarfed that of the west, but that’s not the reality.

The reality is that China until recently had a relatively small domestic market for light industrial goods and developed their economy through export of labor and import of MOP. The current factor that we need to pay attention to is how the CPC transitions that model as China’s internal markets develop to the point where they don’t need to rely on export and can entirely function as a closed loop.

At that point, the need for “reform and opening up” will be basically gone except maybe for dealing with third world nations still shackled to the Dollar, but as the B&R continues to be built, those nations will be able to more easily divest from the dollar market and subsist on Chinese trade routes that honor their local currencies.

So yes, I agree that there’s issues and that if things stagnate where they are then China and the CPC run the risk of backsliding into revisionism and a new form of capitalism, but as of now the pieces are in play that could absolutely be used to cast off that system. All we need to watch out for is how these programs and policies actually play out.

The site specifically uses chatGPT to generate these tweets, so they probably just have an API set up to run a news article summary with the prompt “a positive spin for Ukraine and the United States” and an alternative one with “A negative spin for Russia and their allies”

Reform and opening up is always one of those things I didn’t like, but understood. So far it’s worked to massively increase China’s control over global production and is in line with how Lenin saw the NEP (If they want to sell us the rope, let them). So far the downsides include over exploitation of workers in any of these zones and also exploitation of specifically migrant workers near these zones to generate profit for a new capitalist class.

If this new capitalist class can be controlled and kept from creating a new power structure, it’s a useful tool for dealing with imperialists, but it needs to always be subject to complete liquidation. Which is how China seems to approach this class.

The leveraging of foreign capital to develop domestic production for domestic consumption is also a plus. A trade surplus allows China to have some financial levers of power and keeping foreign capitalists from private ownership of the land their factories sit on also creates a positive power dynamic.

The development of China’s domestic consumption has also made it irresistible to western capitalists who will continually prostrate themselves at the CPC’s feet for access to it no matter what they say in the west.