Thank you. Always glad to hear when people find my comments helpful or interesting.

Getting incessant DMS full of waves of bullshit, circular argument etc. from a racist nationalist gets annoying but I think it’s still worth writing up a reply for others to see at least gives it some meaning beyond headbutting a brickwall.

I responded again

A brief list of issues:

You completely reversed the historical record on Czechoslovakia: the Soviet Union proposed a collective security pact with Poland and Britain in 1938 to defend Czechoslovakia against Nazi expansion; Poland refused, then joined the Nazis in annexing Zaolzie; Britain chose appeasement at Munich. Claiming the Soviets “ordered” Poland to invade is not merely incorrect, it is the precise opposite of what occurred.

You equate Russia’s defensive reaction to NATO encirclement, the 2014 western-backed coup in Kyiv, and eight years of war in Donbas with interwar Poland’s opportunistic seizure of territory in Western Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. One is a response to imperial threat and the protection of persecuted populations; the other was expansion into neighbors weakened by revolutionary disarray. Conflating them ignores material context and serves imperial narratives.

You dismiss Comecon as “theft” while ignoring the Marshall Plan as an instrument of imperial subordination, measuring socialist solidarity by capitalist standards. You conflate Khrushchev’s public, factional speech attacking Stalin’s supporters with an internal CIA memo never meant for public consumption. One was intra-party maneuvering weaponized by imperialism; the other was an admission against interest by an ideological enemy. They are not methodologically equivalent.

You ignore the material difference between the DPRK, flattened by carpet bombing, under permanent sanctions and existential threat, and Poland, which retained industrial capacity and operated within a supportive bloc. Scale and concrete conditions matter. False equivalence is not analysis. You reduce the complex reality of the Donbas conflict, the Minsk agreements, and the repression of Russian-speaking populations to a simple moral label of “imperialism” while ignoring the chain of causation and eight years of prior warfare.

You claim EU integration began in 2004, ignoring decades of trade conditioning, political alignment, and structural adjustment that prepared Poland for subordination to EU capital. You treat your lived experience of shortages as total analysis while refusing to consider war destruction, population loss, industrial prioritization, and counter-revolutionary sabotage as contributing factors. Anecdote is not structural analysis.

You demand socialism achieve perfection under siege, sanctions, and threat while applying no such standard to capitalism’s inherent crises, inequalities, and imperial violence. You confuse essence with deviation: capitalism produces exploitation as its logic; socialism produces it as a contradiction to be corrected. You present correction as proof of failure. You treat power as abstract rather than class power, reflecting liberal individualism rather than materialist analysis.

You impose idealist definitions of “real communism” from outside, then dismiss actually-existing socialist states that do not fit your abstraction. This is not method; it is arbitrariness. You shift goalposts: first claiming “communism produces unaccountable systems,” then narrowing to “elites can emerge,” which is a tautology applicable to any system. You engage in circular reasoning: comparing incomparable cases, ignoring concrete conditions, then insisting the outcomes prove your premise.

You made racist remarks about my English, judging my background by language patterns, then dismissed my village’s transformation under collective planning as “performance.” This is imperial condescension. You stalked my posting times to insinuate I am not working or not Chinese. You accused me of using a VPN (I am, it is legal, and I have no issues with it).

You claim to reject “self-applied labels” while imposing your own external definitions, leaving you with no consistent method for analysis. You present the Khmer Rouge as evidence against communism despite their repudiation by every existing socialist state. This is intellectually dishonest. You use liberal moralizing to judge historical events without context, dismissing socialist self-critique as proof of system failure while ignoring capitalism’s systematic protection of oligarchs.

You argue that any deviation under socialism refutes the whole, while treating capitalism’s endemic crises as normal. This is bias, not analysis. You claim to have been “raised in the 80s and 90s” and remember hunger, then use that to dismiss structural analysis. Lived experience is valid (except you have none of the communist period); it is not total. Materialism requires examining the totality of conditions. You accuse me of arrogance while displaying profound historical gaps, logical fallacies, and personal attacks. Projection is not critique.

You refuse to engage dialectically: you cannot hold that socialism can correct itself (as with party criticism of past errors) and that such correction proves failure. Both cannot be true. You demand I “share excuses” while ignoring broadly known party analyses and declassified admissions from ideological enemies. You select evidence that fits your narrative and dismiss the rest. You claim not to be anti-communist while functioning as one: judging socialism by standards never applied to capitalism, dismissing actually-existing socialist achievements, and amplifying imperial narratives. Intent does not negate effect.

He has again responded with another round of horseshit:

Your opening sarcasm was a universal claim. Now you narrow it after being pressed typical.

Nah, you just assumed I’m going after communism in general, where I was making a point that communism can also give rise to pathological elites/leaders. I just hate the shallow fanatical/fanboy approach to ideology showcased here so often, whatever the tendency. If you’d went thought my old comments you’d find me going after anarchists or liberals just as well (fascism is not to be debated).

Labeling is not analysis. The DPRK’s political form developed under total war, permanent sanctions, and existential threat.

Is the country ruled by workers council or a dynasty of unquestionable leaders? Whatever you call it, it is not communism.

Poland faced pressure too, but the material base was not the same. You cannot compare a state flattened by carpet bombing followed by brutal sanctions

Followed by theft of the remaining industrial equipment, rejection of Marshall plan and German retributions and years of pillage by the Soviets,

to one that retained industrial capacity and was supported by multiple blocs post war.

Soviets were taking away enough food to bring one of the breadbasket countries of Europe to the edge of hunger multiple times over the next 40 years. At the hight of the protests in 70/80 workers welded trains fool of produce bound east to the tracks, as there was no food for them to eat. If you come at me with propaganda statistics which are broadly know to be absolutely fake please mind that this, again, is a lived experience of generations. The only ones able to question the supply issues were the ones with access to party stores.

Also they are elected and rule collectively through a Congress but I’m sure you’ll dismiss that out of hand.

Are there repercussions for questioning the leaders line? Would that encourage acceptance and freeze any other fractions/party lines? Could (at least theoretically) that influence their choices in the parliament? Can you at least consider that something might not be right, even tho it labels itself communist?

Different class compositions,

How different? Poland was mostly rural, mostly city population got wiped out, as well as some of the cities themselves.

different party formations, different leadership decisions under different concrete conditions produce different outcomes.

Yeah, you cited reasons that would make it even worse for Poland, so when countered you state it’s because everything else is different. Right, great argument.

Poland was not under siege from the Nazis for decades after the end of ww2

No? I was pretty sure we were still next to the border with germany, where radical majority of the nazi administration went unpunished and was armed by US and then NATO for the very prepose of war, for which generations of Polish people were primed just as well. Might be just me tho.

they received a huge amount of funds for rebuilding and integration instead first from the soviets

LOL.

then the EU. Are you really this uneducated?

No, I was rised in the 80 and 90 and remember going hungry as an effect of the economy collapsed by communist and then shot in the head by liberals. Are you that ignorant? Also Poland joined UE in 2004, “communism” fell in 89/90. Thats ~25 years. How old are you again?

“Is it like something anti-communist and hostile to its society grew out of a originally communist/maoist party? Would that be exactly the point Im making and youre prettending not to see?”

No. The Khmer Rouge were repudiated by every existing socialist state.

Were they originally a part of the communist party?

By your logic, any group that uses socialist language while acting against socialist practice counts as “communist.”

Not exactly. My very point is that communist parties of systems might give rise to what you call deviations. Again that is exactly the point I was making original and you chose to ignore.

The Nazis called themselves socialists too.

DPRK is calling itself democratic and state capitalist regimes call themselves communist. Obviously I don’t care for the self applied labels.

Maybe you are the type of McCarthyist idiot who would call the Nazis socialist but I hope not that’s low even for a polish nationalist like yourself.

Mate, you cant insult me however many times you attempt. You’re an internet ignorant, not unlike a street drunk and your insults are just as touching.

Nationalist currents existed in Poland long before 1945.

Are you, again, attempting to teach me my own history? Was your point not being offended that someone might want to tell you what things are? How come you give yourself the right to do so, time and time again? You just think your a better human as you internalized some party line you little Eichmann?

The post-war state inherited those contradictions.

Yeah, that was over 20 years latter, and you are now justifying a antisemitic pogrom, without a word of critique for the fact it took place, and was organized by party members. Who primed you to be incapable of showing any humanity if any supposedly communist party might have done something evil?

That the party later criticized and corrected these errors is a feature of socialist self-critique, not a refutation of the system.

Ok, so did the same happen after Stalin, by any chance? And if so, would that again be my exact point made?

Twisting this history while ignoring your own country’s record of invading Czechoslovakia,

That was on Soviet order, so happens, but yeah, disgraceful.

occupying Western Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine is ironic.

I’m glad you accept Ukraine’s right to self determination, I also think Russian invasion is an illegal and immoral act of imperialism. As was Poland’s occupation of nowadays Lithuania, Belarus and Russia. Poland was a imperialist state, and a slaver one and bares the full responsibility for that. Stop assuming what I know or believe, you can just ask.

If Vietnam, a socialist state, overthrew the Khmer Rouge, then your example refutes your own claim.

My claim was communism can give rise to degenerate elite/rule. Same as democracy, as being an oligarch going around fucking children is not democracy, same as khmer’s were not communist. They were degenerated, but rose from communist ranks. That. Is. My. Point. No idea or human is immune to corruption that comes with absolute power over others. You’re trying to make my argument into something else to save your own point, against reality.

“Living memory” does not replace structural analysis.

Is this structural analysis by any chance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Cult_of_Personality_and_Its_Consequences Or do you put a CIA report over that? Would this prove the point of my particular example being determined a “deviation” by the party?

I noted that when an institution dedicated to undermining socialism internally acknowledges

Correct me if I’m wrong, in a single report, you haven’t even read?

My village’s transformation from poverty to modern infrastructure under collective planning is not a performance for your approval.

Ah, by my entire country’s is for you? Arogant fuck.

Also it was around 8am I was on the train to work

Your last posts would be at; 18:42 8:21 4:43 3:46 You’re one stubborn commenter, I’ll give you that. But isn’t lemmy.ml blocked in China? Hope you’re not an anti-social on a VPN? That would be against party line, I’m sure.

Markets are a mechanism,

Yeah, and very much not communism. Market socialism, maybe?

Still; theres oligarchs, and nepo babies citicised and even at times punished by the party. Again a proof that my argument was right and such issues can arise under what you claim to be communism.

So is it possible these fascists in power have colored your view of things just like McCarthyism did for Americans?

At best as much as it is that youre so blinded by your ideology you ignore anything that doesent suit it 1:1.

Then you have abandoned your original claim. You started with “communism produces unaccountable systems.”

No, that’s what you read assuming I’m coming from an anti-communist position, because, you are an ignorant fuck who only accepts a singular party line as the only source of truth.

Those are opposite arguments.

You might have missed a part of the argument, feel free to re-read it, as it is on how the communist power gave rise to an elite acting against the people. Stil the main point of my comment.

That is not free choice, that is crisis management under duress.

Which justifies anything from Korea to Poland. Great. When and where there was a time without such pressures? Are you telling me communism will always be shaped by capitalists?

I have to ask, are you a teenager?

No.

The arrogance paired with the historical gaps (…) and engage with materialist analysis before debating.

Gaps? It would seem to be more like not sharing you excuses, while you seem to be ignoring broadly know party analysis (On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences) and place a CIA report over it? Get a grip.

“I am not waving it away, I am lowering its status to be within the same realm as concerns that are secondary in capitalism.”

You can’t just decide ownership matters less after capitalism by fiat. That’s idealism. Ownership isn’t a preference. It’s the material anchor of class power. The point of proletarian state power isn’t to wish authority away. It’s to use authority to socialize production, break imperial chains, and create the conditions where class distinctions become obsolete. You don’t get there by lowering the status of property relations. You get there by transforming them.

“Any group with authority over these matters that can have solidarity within the authoritative group will serve as a ruling class that gains from exploiting the working class.”

This conflates function with class. Yes, bureaucrats can degenerate. That’s a real contradiction. Mao wrote extensively about the risk of a “new bourgeoisie” emerging from within the party. But the solution isn’t to abandon proletarian authority. It’s to deepen mass line, criticism-self-criticism, recall mechanisms. The AES experiences show that proletarian authority can break imperial dependency, socialize surplus, and expand human development. That isn’t authority becoming a class. That’s authority being wielded to transform the conditions that make class possible.

“If the singular working class as a concept had more teeth than nationality I would expect it to, well, take a bigger bite out of history. For French revolutionaries to abolish slavery…”

The French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. Of course bourgeois revolutionaries didn’t abolish colonial slavery out of “solidarity.” That proves the class character of that revolution, not the impossibility of proletarian internationalism. The Paris Commune, the Bolsheviks, the Chinese revolution, the Vietnamese revolution, the Cuban revolution, these show proletarian internationalism in practice. It’s uneven, contradictory, contested. But it exists. And it exists because imperialism creates a shared enemy, not because workers spontaneously feel nice to each other.

“No, we should become anarchist… complex social structures with far less authority already exist from sociocracy to decentralized guerilla cells.”

“Anarchism”(I’ve read anarchist theory and debated principled anarchists; in practice, when faced with real revolutionary tasks (smashing the bourgeois state, defending against counter-revolution, coordinating production at scale) they end up adopting positions functionally close to MLs, because material conditions demand it. The “authority is inherently tyrannical” line is tyranny of bedtime idealism that collapses on contact with actual struggle.) treats authority as the problem. But authority isn’t the problem. Class power is. You can’t dismantle the bourgeois state with decentralized cells. You can’t break imperial chains with sociocracy. The material task of revolution is to seize state power, socialize production, and defend the revolution against counter-revolution. That requires coordination, discipline, and yes, authority. “Anarchism’s” refusal to confront this is why it has repeatedly failed when faced with real revolutionary situations.

“But where you expect administrators to make such improvements to their personal and (sub)class’ detriment, anarchy keeps the power to make these changes with the people…”

This sounds good but is abstract. Who are “the people”? How do they coordinate at scale? How do they defend against counter-revolution, imperial invasion, economic sabotage? The mass line is a method for tying leadership to the masses through concrete practice. But it requires a vanguard, a party, a state form capable of wielding power. “Anarchism’s” distrust of all authority leaves it unable to answer these questions.

“We are able to be anarchist (or state communist) even within capitalism…”

You can build prefigurative spaces under capitalism. That’s great, but prefiguration isn’t revolution. The bourgeois state won’t be voted away or out-organized by parallel structures. It has to be smashed. And what replaces it has to be capable of holding power, not just avoiding it.

You see authority as inherently dangerous, so you want to minimize it. I see authority as a social relation, so I ask: which class wields it, for what end, and with what mechanisms to prevent ossification? One approach leads to moralism. The other leads to strategy.

To which I replied:

“Where do I state that communist systems are in general impossible to remove?”

Your opening sarcasm was a universal claim. Now you narrow it after being pressed typical.

“3 generations of absolute rulers from a single family is not communism its monarchy.”

Labeling is not analysis. The DPRK’s political form developed under total war, permanent sanctions, and existential threat. Poland faced pressure too, but the material base was not the same. You cannot compare a state flattened by carpet bombing followed by brutal sanctions to one that retained industrial capacity and was supported by multiple blocs post war. Also they are elected and rule collectively through a Congress but I’m sure you’ll dismiss that out of hand.

“How come did we not develop a monarchy with such a similar context?”

Because historical development is not mechanical. Different class compositions, different party formations, different leadership decisions under different concrete conditions produce different outcomes. Poland was not under siege from the Nazis for decades after the end of ww2 they received a huge amount of funds for rebuilding and integration instead first from the soviets then the EU. Are you really this uneducated?

“Is it like something anti-communist and hostile to its society grew out of a originally communist/maoist party? Would that be exactly the point Im making and youre prettending not to see?”

No. The Khmer Rouge were repudiated by every existing socialist state. They were not a deviation, they were its negation. By your logic, any group that uses socialist language while acting against socialist practice counts as “communist.” That renders the term meaningless. The Nazis called themselves socialists too. Are you applying that standard consistently? Maybe you are the type of McCarthyist idiot who would call the Nazis socialist but I hope not that’s low even for a polish nationalist like yourself.

“Well our communist party organised a state sanctioned antysemitic pogrom. Go figure.”

Nationalist currents existed in Poland long before 1945. The post-war state inherited those contradictions. That the party later criticized and corrected these errors is a feature of socialist self-critique, not a refutation of the system. Twisting this history while ignoring your own country’s record of invading Czechoslovakia, occupying Western Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine is ironic.

“Exactly what I was referring to, but thanks for pointing it out, I feel educated comrade.”

Then your point collapses. If Vietnam, a socialist state, overthrew the Khmer Rouge, then your example refutes your own claim.

“Is US supporting a fanatical regime to subvert another state anything surprising to you? Why do you assume it would be for me? And what does that have to the original point?”

It has everything to do with the original point. You present political outcomes as if they emerge in a vacuum. They do not. When the leading imperial power funds, arms, and legitimizes opposition movements, that says something about those movements as I said in the original comment if the largest anti-communist force on earth is funding your anti-communist extremists calling them communist is idiotic.

“Mate, thats a living memory of my family, same as millions around as. You have to be a westerner not to know or understand that. It was criticised by the party itself. Thats also propaganda?”

“Living memory” does not replace structural analysis. American families have living memories of WMDs in Iraq too. That does not make the invasion justified.

“Didnt know you trust CIA reports.”

I do not trust the CIA. I noted that when an institution dedicated to undermining socialism internally acknowledges facts that contradict its own propaganda, those facts carry weight. Is that really so hard for you to understand.

“Must have been very well, Ive been to China and I dont see any of the language patters of people from the private sector. That doesent sound like state educated english. Also what time is it at your place? Pretty late id say.”

Judging someone’s background by their English is a lazy trope. I learned English to engage with friends internationally. My village’s transformation from poverty to modern infrastructure under collective planning is not a performance for your approval. You racist fuck. Also it was around 8am I was on the train to work not that you know anything about labour.

“Isnt last 25 years more like state capitalism? Again Ive been to china i do understand and apriciate the scale of changes, but it is a market economy.”

Markets are a mechanism, not a mode of production. China’s system maintains public ownership of the commanding heights, party leadership (reproduced through whole process people’s democracy and mass line, there’s a reason approval even according to places like Harvard is 90+%) over capital, and development oriented toward social need. The eradication of extreme poverty for hundreds of millions is not a capitalist achievement. It is the result of socialist planning adapting to concrete conditions.

“It has been bordering of fascism since 20 years. My house was stormed by fascist militants attempting to set it on fire, but do tell me more.”

So is it possible these fascists in power have colored your view of things just like McCarthyism did for Americans?

“No mate. I was very clear. Not communism. Elites of whatever came out of supposed communism.”

Then you have abandoned your original claim. You started with “communism produces unaccountable systems.” Now you say the problem is elites after socialism was dismantled. Those are opposite arguments. The latter describes the outcome of externally imposed privatization, not the prior system’s logic.

“They did that before knowing and participating in the system change.”

They participated under conditions of systemic collapse, foreign pressure, and a coordinated ideological offensive. That is not free choice, that is crisis management under duress.

One last thing: I wasn’t going to ask but after your comment about my English, I have to ask, are you a teenager? The arrogance paired with the historical gaps feels like it. But if you are an adult, perhaps it is time to read more than western media and engage with materialist analysis before debating.

If I’m taking the time to refute waves of bullshit using it to help educate anyone interested makes it less annoying.

He responded again (copy paste over screen grab due to length):

original claim, which was itself a lazy, absolutist statement. You opened with a blanket assertion about communist systems being inherently unaccountable and impossible to remove.

Yeah, never did communism bring to power a impossible to remove group or person focused on increasing their power and blocking any chance of keeping them in check. Unheard off.

Where do I state that communist systems are in general impossible to remove? I live in a country where it was removed without violence (other then that of the regime against workers).

I responded by mocking that certainty. If you read that as some kind of debate tactic instead of what it was, that’s on you.

Yeeeeah, right.

If you mean the DPRK, you’re ignoring basic context.

Yeah I do and no I dont. 3 generations of absulute rulers from a single family is not communism its monarchy.

This comes after a war where US bombing killed an estimated 15% of the population (majority civilian casualties with estimates as high as 70%) and destroyed most infrastructure. Given that history, it is not surprising they emphasize continuity and stability tied to the legacy of Kim Il-sung. You don’t have to support it, but pretending it developed in isolation from that pressure is not serious.

WW2 killed 20% of my coutrys population, and whatever industry was not destroyed during got taken away after. We had building up might of NATO combined tank armies some 300km from oir borders, and '60 US plans to drop 20-50 nukes on my city alone in case of war. Still a stalinist and than socrealist government with a considerably normal succesion of power (other than one leader being killed in Moscow).
How come did we not develop a monarchy with such a similar context?

Calling the Khmer Rouge(who I assume this is about) “communist” is not just inaccurate, it’s indefensible

Oh is it? Is it like something anti-communist and hostile to its society grew out of a originally communist/maoist party? Would that be exactly the point Im making and youre prettending not to see?

built on extreme agrarian nationalism that rejected industrial society entirely.

Well our communist party organised a state sanctioned antysemitic pogrom. Go figure. Its just like calling onself a communist might not be enought sometimes.

Vietnam, an actual socialist state, is the one that overthrew them.

Exactly what I was referring to, but thanks for pointing it out, I feel educated comrade.

US support for Khmer Rouge after 1979

Is US supporting a fanatical regime to subvert another state anything surprising to you? Why do you assume it would be for me? Amd what does that have to the original point?

This is recycled Cold War propaganda.

Mate, thats a living memmory of my family, same as millions around as. You have to be a westerner not to know or understand that. It was criticised by the party itself. Thats also propaganda?

Even the CIA’s

Ddnt know you trust CIA reports. But that only works, when absigle one supports your point I guess?

I’m a born and raised rural Chinese minority. I’ve done well for myself, but I’m far from rich.

Must have been very well, Ive been to China and I dont see any of the language patters of people from the private sector. That doesent sound like state educated english. Also what time is it at your place? Pretty late id say.

What I have experienced directly is my village going from abject poverty to modern living conditions in under 25 years, largely through state-led development grounded in communist principles.

Isnt last 25 years more like state capitalism? Again Ive been to china i do understand and apriciate the scale of changes, but it is a market economy.

Meanwhile, you’re speaking from Poland, where the political trajectory has been steadily rightward, with increasing hostility toward left-wing movements.

It has been bordering of fascism since 20 years. My house was stormed by fascist militants attempting to set it on fire, but do tell me more.

Your argument reads less like analysis and more like it’s shaped by that environment, repeating familiar nationalist narratives instead of engaging seriously with the material history.

Yeah, no.

Yes, shock therapy did all of that. And attributing it to communism is a fundamental error.

No mate. I was very clear. Not communism. Elites of whatever came out of supposed communism.

Blaming communism for the outcomes of policies imposed after it was removed is incoherent and frankly idiotic.

Yeah, and your the one making that point to have something to foght agsinst.

As for the crackdowns, they occurred in the context of systemic instability, political fragmentation, and mounting external pressures. Reducing that to a one-dimensional story about “communists vs workers”

They sent tanks on to striking workers.

while ignoring what replaced that system is not a serious reading of history.

They did that before knowing and participating in the system change.

His response and my response to it(was sent in DMS however he clearly would have shared if he was not banned and I want to share my response after taking the time to write it for any interested third parties):

“Thats a lazy eristic trick…”

No, it wasn’t a “trick.” It was sarcasm in response to your original claim, which was itself a lazy, absolutist statement. You opened with a blanket assertion about communist systems being inherently unaccountable and impossible to remove. I responded by mocking that certainty. If you read that as some kind of debate tactic instead of what it was, that’s on you.

“Not a dynastic absolute monarchy…”

If you mean the DPRK, you’re ignoring basic context. The Korean War never formally ended, and the US still routinely conducts large-scale military exercises right off its border. This comes after a war where US bombing killed an estimated 15% of the population (majority civilian casualties with estimates as high as 70%) and destroyed most infrastructure.

The Korean War casualty estimates

Given that history, it is not surprising they emphasize continuity and stability tied to the legacy of Kim Il-sung. You don’t have to support it, but pretending it developed in isolation from that pressure is not serious.

“…another one had to invade to stop the genocide…”

Calling the Khmer Rouge(who I assume this is about) “communist” is not just inaccurate, it’s indefensible. They were anti-Marxist in practice, hostile to Vietnam, and built on extreme agrarian nationalism that rejected industrial society entirely. Vietnam, an actual socialist state, is the one that overthrew them.

They also continued receiving international backing, including from the US, after their removal (the US of course being known supporters of communism (this is sarcasm not a trick)). US support for Khmer Rouge after 1979

Reducing that to “communism gone wrong” is historical nonsense. It ignores both ideology and material alliances.

“…the deified leader…”

This is recycled Cold War propaganda. Even the CIA’s own internal analysis acknowledged that the USSR operated through collective leadership structures rather than a simple one-man dictatorship.

“Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership” (CIA memo)

You’re repeating a narrative that intelligence agencies themselves recognized as misleading. That kind of uncritical repetition is exactly what you would expect from someone leaning on nationalist framing instead of engaging with actual historical material.

“For all I know you’re some privileged western kid…”

I’m a born and raised rural Chinese minority. I’ve done well for myself, but I’m far from rich. What I have experienced directly is my village going from abject poverty to modern living conditions in under 25 years, largely through state-led development grounded in communist principles.

Meanwhile, you’re speaking from Poland, where the political trajectory has been steadily rightward, with increasing hostility toward left-wing movements. Your argument reads less like analysis and more like it’s shaped by that environment, repeating familiar nationalist narratives instead of engaging seriously with the material history.

“…This resulted in shock doctrine… privatization… unemployment… poverty…”

Yes, shock therapy did all of that. And attributing it to communism is a fundamental error.

Shock therapy was the dismantling of socialist systems and the rapid imposition of neoliberal capitalism. The collapse in industry, mass unemployment, and social breakdown across Eastern Europe were consequences of that transition, not of socialism “clinging to power.”

Blaming communism for the outcomes of policies imposed after it was removed is incoherent and frankly idiotic. It’s also consistent with a nationalist retelling of events that flattens complex internal crises into a simple narrative while ignoring the role of external pressure and the economic restructuring that followed.

As for the crackdowns, they occurred in the context of systemic instability, political fragmentation, and mounting external pressures. Reducing that to a one-dimensional story about “communists vs workers” while ignoring what replaced that system is not a serious reading of history.

“Ownership is a social construct like any other. Limiting your interpretation of class to ones defined by ownership makes the analysis pointlessly inapplicable…”

Waving away ownership because it’s a “social construct” is a dodge. Money is a social construct. Borders are a social construct. Wage labour is a social construct. That doesn’t make them less real. It means they are historically produced relations with force behind them, backed by law, coercion, and everyday practice. Saying “it’s just a construct” doesn’t dissolve its material power. It just sounds radical while avoiding the actual analysis.

“Feudal society didn’t just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that don’t fit the ‘feudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on it’ schema.”

This is just wrong. Land was the dominant means of production in feudal society. Control over land structured the relation between kings, nobles, and peasants. Surplus was extracted through that control and the labour bound to it. The church owned land. Free cities operated within and around that land-based order. Their existence doesn’t negate the core relation. Complexity at the edges doesn’t erase the structure.

“Theocracy, bureaucracy, caste systems, white supremacy, patriarchy, and anarchy all benefit from a class-based lens.”

You’re mixing levels of analysis. Patriarchy, white supremacy, caste, these are real, oppressive social relations. They shape labour, reproduction, access to resources, and state power. But they are not classes in themselves. They intersect with class. They are used to divide, organise, and reproduce class relations. Analysing them alongside class is necessary. Collapsing them into class blurs what each actually does. A concept that covers everything ends up explaining nothing.

“Marx focused on ownership as the primary class divide because that’s how capitalism works… but any conflict of interests between groups of people seeking to achieve economic prosperity will do.”

No. If any conflict of interests counts as class, then the term loses all precision. Tenants and landlords, yes. But also senior and junior staff, rival departments, urban and rural voters. Once every patterned antagonism becomes “class,” you can’t distinguish primary contradictions from secondary ones. You can’t explain why some conflicts reproduce across generations while others shift or disappear. Class has explanatory force because it’s tied to production and surplus, not just any difference in incentives. Are green energy execs and fossil fuel execs different classes? Obviously not.

“For example, migrant workers are actively imported under liberalism to divide the working class… citizenship becomes the division between two distinct working classes.”

Migrant and citizen workers can have different immediate incentives. Legal status, deportability, access to welfare, all of that matters. But both still sell their labour power. Both are still exploited by capital. The asymmetry exists but it’s a division within a single class, actively produced because it weakens collective power. That’s why it works. Not because it creates two classes, but because it fractures one.

“And here we see how solidarity is a matter of interpretation.”

There is no solidarity between worker and owner. That’s not a matter of interpretation, it’s a material relation. One sells labour power. The other extracts surplus. Appeals to shared citizenship, nation, or race are ideological tools to obscure that antagonism, not resolve it.

Right-wing workers aligning with capital aren’t exercising some free interpretive choice in a vacuum. They’re being pulled into a politics that reflects their uneven position within imperialism, short-term advantage in exchange for long-term subordination. That isn’t solidarity. It’s a cross-class “alliance”, and those always break when it matters.

When profits fall, when crisis hits, the “shared citizenship” story disappears overnight. Layoffs, wage cuts, austerity, the owner’s loyalty to the nation ends exactly where accumulation begins. That’s the reality underneath the rhetoric.

This isn’t about blaming workers. It’s about explaining why this politics has traction. Imperialism redistributes enough surplus to sections of the core workforce to distort consciousness. That’s real, but it’s unstable and conditional. The moment that flow tightens, the underlying antagonism reasserts itself.

So no, solidarity isn’t a matter of interpretation. It’s grounded in position. People can misread their interests, sure. They can be won to chauvinism or reformism. But those interpretations only stick because of material conditions, and they only last as long as those conditions hold. Real solidarity has to be built on shared relation to production and shared interest in ending exploitation. Anything else is temporary alignment at best.

“Those in power have similar choices between mutually contradictory strategies… Neither is objectively better for the US capital class…”

Factions within capital do choose strategies. But they don’t choose freely. They respond to crisis tendencies, falling profitability, geopolitical pressure, labour unrest. Finance, tech, energy, they have overlapping but not identical interests. That doesn’t mean there’s no structure. It means class rule is contested internally.

Those strategies aren’t proof that ideas escape material limits. They’re proof that ruling classes adapt under pressure.

The deeper issue here is analytical. You want a framework flexible enough to absorb every pattern you see. That feels sophisticated because it acknowledges complexity. But it quietly drops the hard part, distinguishing structure from expression, primary from secondary contradictions, class from layer.

Once “class” means any durable conflict of interest, everything becomes class. Every hierarchy, every incentive split. At that point you’re not explaining anything, you’re just renaming it.

You’re using “class” as a catch-all. I’m using it in the stricter sense that actually lets you explain things, relation to production, control of surplus, reproduction of power. That’s what gives the concept teeth.

And the political implication of your position is pretty dark, whether you mean it or not. If every exercise of authority or unevenness in incentives is already the seed of a new ruling class, then organised transformation becomes impossible by definition. Any revolution complex enough to survive would already contain the embryo of its own betrayal and again we should just give up and kill ourselves now.

You definitely are tapped in and fully aware of the real truth so why dont you educate some of us plebians about communist governments/leaders that clung to power despite being hated in their country. (being hated by gusanos and crackkkers doesn’t count)

No straw man. You said mode of production is a “choice” and solidarity comes down to “interpretation.” That’s putting ideas in the driver’s seat. If you want to soften that now, fine. But don’t rewrite what you said and call it misreading. Degrees of freedom exist, but they exist inside hard limits. Movements don’t invent new material conditions by thinking hard enough, they work through contradictions they actually inherit.

On feudalism, you’re stripping out the core of what made it feudal. Lords didn’t just maneuver socially. Their power rested on land, and on peasants being tied to that land. That’s how surplus was extracted. Vassalage was a political expression of that underlying relation, not a substitute for it. If you take away control over land and surplus, you’re not describing feudalism anymore, you’re just using the aesthetic of it.

With administrators you’re doing the same thing, collapsing authority into ownership. They’re not the same. Authority that can’t be turned into private property, sold off, or passed down as a right is conditional. A feudal lord could hand land to his heir. An administrator can’t hand a factory to their kid. If they start acting like they can, that’s not proof that authority magically equals a class. It’s a sign something in the system is breaking down, and the question becomes why, materially.

You’re right that bureaucrats can game systems, build networks, sideline rivals. None of that is controversial. But describing behaviour isn’t the same as identifying a class. You keep jumping from “they consolidate influence” to “therefore they are a class,” without showing the property relation that would actually make that true.

Even the well documented idea of a “new bourgeoisie” emerging isn’t a blank cheque for your argument. It’s a warning about a process, not a claim that any layer with authority already is one. There’s a difference between a contradiction that has to be managed and a fully formed class that reproduces itself through ownership. If every exercise of coordination produced a new ruling class, then no collective project would ever be possible and we should all just give up and kill ourselves now.

On nepotism, same issue. Favouritism exists in almost every system ever. That alone doesn’t define a class. For it to do that, those positions have to become something like property, stable, transferable, independently reproducible. If that happens, then yes, you’re looking at a real shift. If not, you’re still dealing with a deviation inside a different structure.

You’re not wrong to be wary of authority. Nobody serious ignores that problem. But right now you’re treating suspicion as if it’s analysis, and it isn’t. Analysis asks what the underlying relations are, who actually controls production, how surplus is allocated, whether positions can turn into property. Without that, you’re just pointing at hierarchy and filling in the rest by analogy and vibes.

The pugjesus acolyte returns. Why do you feel the need to brag about posting memes like it’s some major service/feat?

Ok, I’m going to try lay this out as clearly as I can, because I think you’re mixing up what materialism and idealism actually mean (even if we haven’t used their names to this point it is the core of the argument).

The main tool of my analysis is materialism. Put simply: the way people organise production, how they meet their needs, who owns what, who has to sell their labour, this is the foundation. Ideas, culture, politics, they arise from and reflect that material base. They aren’t illusions, but they don’t float free. People think and act, but they do so within conditions they didn’t choose.

Ideas matter. People can be persuaded, misled, organised, educated. But those ideas only take hold because they connect to real conditions. You can’t sustain a set of ideas that are completely out of step with how people actually live. And you can’t just will a new society into existence because it sounds good. Ideas move things along, but they don’t set the underlying terrain.

What you’re arguing with is idealism. In short, idealism puts ideas first. It treats consciousness, values, or narratives as the engine of history, as if reality bends to what people believe rather than belief being shaped by reality. When you say the mode of production is a “choice,” or that solidarity is basically a matter of interpretation, you’re putting ideas in the driver’s seat. That treats history like a competition between narratives, where whichever idea wins out determines reality.

But that’s not how it works. People don’t get to pick a mode of production the way they pick a belief. Capitalism didn’t arise because it was persuasive. It arose because older systems stopped functioning under pressure and new relations became necessary to keep production going. The same logic applies to any transition out of it. There’s a reason certain ideas appear at certain times and not others, and it’s not just because someone made a good argument.

None of this means people are robots or that they can’t act against their interests. Obviously they can. Propaganda exists, divisions exist, fear exists. But even that happens within limits. If ideas were truly primary, you wouldn’t need to look at anything outside discourse to explain social change, and that clearly doesn’t hold up.

On your last point, you’re also treating “authority” as if it automatically creates a class, and that’s just not how class works. Class isn’t about who gives orders day to day. It’s about relationship to the means of production. Who owns them as property, who controls them in a way that lets them extract surplus, who can pass that control on.

Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isn’t privately owned as capital, people in those roles don’t become a separate class just because they have authority. They don’t own the factories, land, or infrastructure as something they can sell or accumulate. Their position depends on the broader structure, not the other way around.

If that changes, if people in those positions start turning control into private, inheritable ownership, then you’re dealing with a class shift. But that has to be shown in actual material terms. You don’t get there just by pointing at hierarchy and calling it a class.

It is possible but not under capitalism which social democracy aims to preserve, It is possible under socialism as is seen in the PRC or the former USSR but that’s not social democracy.

Social democracy needs superprofits from the periphery to fund the core. Social democracy is a type of capitalism. Capitalism requires exploitation to function. If every nation is the core, who gets exploited? The surplus value does not exist.

Those “social democratic” parties in the periphery aren’t proof the model works globally. They’re rebranded revolutionary movements (MPLA, FRELIMO, ANC) that dropped Marxist-Leninist labels after the Soviet Union collapsed. Without that protection, they faced a stark choice: adopt the language of the Socialist International or risk regime change, sanctions, or outright intervention by the imperial core. The label shift was a survival tactic, not evidence that social democracy can function in a peripheral economy (because it can’t).

Technically, it’s built on the idea that a socialist society can be/should be reached gradually by participating in parliamentary liberal political system instead of overthrowing liberal society and implementing a “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

You are mixing social democrats with democratic socialists. Democratic socialists, however ineffective or utopian, at least retain socialist aims in theory. Social democrats do not. Their program, accepts the permanence of capitalist property relations. Their project is not the abolition of exploitation but its rationalization: a “fairer” distribution of imperial superprofits among the labor aristocracy of the core. This is not a path to socialism. It is a management strategy for capitalism.

The meme is clearly pointing out that “social democracy enjoyers” turn into fascists/Nazis once the economy declines. Or, if we keep OP’s caption in mind, the idea that social democrats are actually fascists “wearing a mask”.

The social democrat’s mask, like the liberal’s, depends entirely on the surplus extracted from the periphery. When that flow contracts, the mask comes off. In the words of Malcolm X on a similar issue: “The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling.” Social democracy operates the same way. Its niceties are financed by imperial rent. When the rent falls, it defaults to open class defense.

What helped Hitler seize power was not just the actions/inactions of the socdems and the economic collapse, but the deep split of the left overall, the ineffective political system and the relentless infighting to the point were socdems and communists saw eachother as equivalent or even a bigger threat than the fascists.

I explicitly said “helped,” not “solely responsible.” Multiple factors converged in 1933. But the SPD’s role was decisive in one key respect: they preserved the bourgeois state apparatus after 1918. Through the Ebert-Groener pact, they kept the reactionary judiciary, the imperial officer corps, and the bureaucratic machinery intact. They unleashed the Freikorps on the KPD. They refused every proposal for a united working class front against the Nazis. Stalin characterized this relationship precisely when he stated that “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism” and that these organizations “are not antipodes, they are twins.” The KPD’s analysis recognized that in a crisis, social democracy functions as the left wing of counterrevolution. History confirmed that analysis.

Fear isn’t the driver. Fear is produced. Where does that fear come from? Not from brains. From material life. Precarity. Job loss. Debt. Crisis. These are capitalist relations, not neural pathways. If amygdala size determined politics, how do you explain workers who risk everything to strike? Or revolutionaries who face death without flinching? Consciousness changes through struggle, not anatomy. Doubling down on amygdala talk is phrenology-tier pseudoscience, same logic as Nazi race science. Measuring skulls to explain politics didn’t work then, measuring brains won’t work now. The “no change party” exists to preserve bourgeois rule, not because of brain scans. This idealist framing naturalizes oppression and lets capital off the hook.

They also entirely fund their system through super exploitation of the periphery.

No. Social democracy needs superprofits from the periphery to fund the core. Capitalism requires exploitation to function. If every nation is the core, who gets exploited? The surplus value does not exist. When accumulation slows, the bourgeoisie abandons reform. They choose fascism to protect property. The SPD proved this when they sided with reactionaries against workers. Reformism tries to manage a system built on violence. It cannot work globally because the economic base forbids it. The only path is revolution. Seize the means of production. End the imperialist chain.

Do you have any points or do you prefer the tried and true call people names and stick your fingers in your ears?