you gotta understand something about tankies: they think that’s a good thing

I don’t know much about the Chinese revolution/civil war, but it wasn’t Stalin that turned Soviet Russia authoritarian; it was like that from the start. Stalin simply consolidated power within the already authoritarian framework of one-party rule. It could’ve been Zinoviev or Trotsky that came out on top and Soviet Russia would still have been an authoritarian hellhole. It might’ve been a better authoritarian hellhole or a worse authoritarian hellhole, but none of these guys were advocating for abolishing the Cheka (later the GRU) or holding new elections.

How can someone corrupt what was made to be corrupt lol? Lenin and Engle’s empowerment of the state against the proletariat could have never ended any other way. It’s the same brain rot that right wing Libertarians espouse, just from the other side.

Out of control government, out of control businesses. It’s the same picture.

It’s not “just democracy” when it explicitly prescribes a one party state.

mandates the implementation of direct elections on behalf of and within the confines of the ruling proletarian state party

The democratic part is only within the ruling party, the one that claims to represent the proletariat.

They brag about all the theory they’ve read. Even as they expose how bad their reading comprehension is. And they think it’s a flex.

True, but it prescribes rule by one party (the party of the proletariat) alone. In any possible practice this rule can only be held by a party that claims to represent the proletariat, a claim that may or may not be true at any given time.

It’s amazing that so many people who claim to be socialists miss that despite Marx stating it pretty clearly in one of his shortest and most accessible (and widely read) works.

Well, not quite - we don’t consider it a dictatorship because the proletariat is the largest class by population, but we would recognize it as such if the proletariat were the minority (e.g. in some kind of near-future highly-but-not-fully automated society.)

My basis is: read what i fucking said.

No single person can rationally have a thorough understanding of every single issue facing a country of 1M+ people. An engineer with expertise in electrical systems shouldn’t be expected to have a reasonable understanding of public health policy, and expecting people with no understanding of a <<thing>> to make good decisions about it is folly.

That’s an incredibly stupid take, esp. since RIGHT FUCKING NOW the majority of people in the US and UK are opposed to transgender people having equal rights, and it wasn’t until less than 10 years ago that the majority thought that gay people should have the right to marry the person they chose. If you polled in Sweden, Denmark, et al., you’d probably find that the majority of people are opposed to Muslims immigrating to their country as well.

The tyranny of the majority is absolutely alive and well; what you’re talking about is a utopia, which is literally ‘no place’.

Yeah China produced more billionaires than the USA since the pandemic. Tankies go mum when this is brought up. This is hardly “classless and equal”.

There have been very close contenders. I like Australia’s democracy.

I think it’s much too susceptible to populist authoritarians. One of the nice benefits of representative democracies is that representatives don’t want to give too much power to the head of government, because that removes their power and let’s the next party have more power.

Communists? Anarchists? That is not their stated aim.

To contrast with Neoliberalism - “financial freedom” of a “free market” is a core tenet, including the continued existence of a capitalist class (those who generate wealth through capital/assets rather than labour), which requires a dichotomy of capitalists and workers (cannot have a society of just capitalists since someone has to clean gutters and such) and therefore it’s not possible to fully democratize the economy.

It’s why democracies are so unpopular in the west now, almost everyone understands on some level that votes just switch colours and a few key details and have no way of affecting larger power dynamics guided by wealth. The people simply have no democratic voice in the way that actually matters.

I’m an anarchist, but as far as I understand my theory, Neoliberals don’t actually argue that this exploitation isn’t a stated aim or core part of their ideology, rather that this exploitation is mutually beneficial, even something as obviously exploitative as sweatshop labour is preferable to just having no money and no food.

I think the issue is that this works only some of the time, only as long as it is cheaper to actually borrow millions for insane R&D and megaprojects affairs that promise guaranteed returns, and otherwise it instead incentivizes the creation of extractive institutions instead where every capitalist becomes an economic rent-seeker, forcing all wealth to “trickle” up, not down, and then Marx’s predictions of internal contradictions start coming true.

The answer neoliberals pose to this is regulation, which would be good if not for the contradiction that from my understanding neoliberals also propose market solutions where possible, generally privatised/market solutions are seen as superior to Keynesian SocDem adjacent ones, which results in the assets of a government being exposed to markets as investment opportunities.

Even with all the added value that may bring, (best case e.g. shitty swamp turned into a city park by a rich investor with a vision), this will directly transfer assets and value, and ultimately - power, from governments to private entities. The end result of this is that inevitably capitalists simply have far more economic power than the public institutions meant to keep them in check, whether small corruption or mass-disinformation campaigns, they simply muscle their way into the democratic process to facilitate further and further extraction.

This inevitably leads to Fascism where the government and capitalists merge together, they disempower the working class through austerity measures while financially reckless behaviour gets them government hand-outs because they are simply too big, too important of an institution to fail anymore, they buy out the press and use misinformation to incite bigotry and patriotic fervour, while gunning for power on platforms of “cutting government waste” to further defund public programs, thereby increasing their own bargaining power to exploit the working class.

Ultimately the working class have no choice and surrender to whatever exploitation they may face once the capitalists own all assets, many of them become traitors and side with those with power in exchange for wealth, status and protection, even if it means threatening violence and following through on any workers who want to take that power back.

With enough technology amassed in few enough hands, the capitalists are now free to unleash horrors beyond our imagining on anyone they please.

The solution to prevent this is clear: we need to protect public institutions from privatisation, and enforce hard limits on how and when free market economics can play out, and strive towards more and more egalitarian distribution of power, where the creation of wealth and economic activity’s primary purpose is maximisation of happiness / minimisation of suffering for everyone, rather than elevation of the few.

Those in power would never give up a shot at near absolute power so easily, certainly not via the methods they ultimately control due to the power imbalance of their accumulated wealth, so it’s unlikely that electoralism can succeed, though reforms on the electoral level can and should be supported to limit capitalist influence on the public sector, but it’s likely that ultimately nothing short of a violent popular people’s revolution can save us now from an eternity of misery.

We may fail and end up with a politburo of apparatchiks and an army of red corpocops, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make a better world, especially when the trajectory for the current one is bleak beyond measure.

In the early 1900s the workers of the world were beginning to build the framework for the democratic collectivization of resources and labour. Elites considered this such a severe threat that they were organizing their own conferences on how to deal with it. This was stopped in most countries with one of two methods: concessions (like The New Deal) or fascism. Welfare or fear-mongering austerity politics.

To put this another way: some capitalists conspired to promote and ultimately install fascist authoritarians to fight socialism because it was in their class interests to do so. The various banana republics and other economic colonies of imperialist nations? Installed by capitalists. The forever wars that no one even wants? Believe it or not, also capitalists. These are not the moves made by freedom-loving people lol.

So I guess I should ask you: where are you consuming your propaganda from?

You do know, that communism and authoritarianism are two completely different things? Communism by itself is neither authoriatarian, or democratic. A communist world aims at dissolving all borders to achieve global equality without any form of higher governance. This of course is something thats quite unlikely to ever happen. A totalitarian regieme is directly contradictary to the pure idea of communism, which is that everyone should have the freedom to support (or not support) society. Any form of violence (no matter what type of violence) to force people into a set system is therefore contradictory to these ideas. Just because we didnt see very good examples of communism (maybe cuba, but I dont know that much about it, so I cant really judge) this doesnt mean, that communism itself is an inherently dysunctional and bad system.

Also, we have seen much more violence being emitted from capitalistic states, even if they claim to care about human rights. Every year the EU pays quite a significant amount of money to Lybia, so that their coast guard stops refugees crossing the mediterranian sea, causing hundreds of deaths and trapping those who get “rescued” by the coast guard in a subhuman system, where rape and torture are normalised.

This does not mean to invalidate the harm done by self proclaimed communist regiemes, but to show that shitty practices are done by all kinds of different people.

The US is the most capitalist and the greatest abject failure.

Do not confuse capitalism with commerce. Commerce improves lives; capitalism seeks to destroy them for personal gain.

I don’t give a fuck who made it up, I want democratic control of the economy. Anything else is secondary to that.

Thought-terminating cliche.

That’s a really broad brush you got there. You can replace “liberals” with “people” here and be correct.

Most people tend to passively accept the political positions of their surroundings, yes.

Holy pedantry, you know exactly who I mean when I say liberals.

But let’s say political liberals, including the ones on both sides of the US political spectrum, since you need to frame it in a US centric way.

Even the most radical of the liberal thoughts in the world do not dare to think to address the fundamental issues with the socioeconomic system, though I guess that might be because they created it.

Even in your comment you can see the complete lack of political imagination, or any attempt to strive towards anything but the status quo.

“everything will be the same but Megacorp™ will have a rainbow flag profile pic on a site ran by a nazi in June”