excellent thread all around. excellent work from our comrades on lemmygrad. thank you to our mod for putting up the firewall between us and lemm.ee
some highlights
I haven’t only read Wikipedia, I’ve read things such as interviews from former Chinese citizens saying that Google was banned, and on their search engine the tiennamen square never existed. Also, how is China becoming more communist? The government getting profits from wage-slavery isn’t becoming more communist, it’s becoming the center of capitalism. Even if the government weren’t making direct profits from wage-labor, they still make profits from things like taxes and corporations buying land. When the government is making profits from capitalism, they won’t go socialist.
You do know the Tiennamen square is the literal most famous place in China right? It’s the place where there is this super famous building that is one of the country’s symbol and that almost every content about China ever can’t help but have at least one picture of.
So saying that the name of the place is censored in China is completely ridiculous.
As pointed out by others, the event that you are referring to is known in China as the june 4th incident so yes, of course if you type Tiennamen in the search bar you won’t find it, when you look up something on a non-english website maybe try to look up how the thing you’re looking for is called in the site’s language instead of assuming it’s called the same way in english you westernbrained monkey.
Why do you enjoy sucking your own dick?
Because I don’t have the reading comprehension skills of a fucking carrot.
Why do you not have the reading comprehension of a fucking carrot?
Marx said that the state was inherently oppressive. But I guess I missed the part where he said that it doesn’t matter if the party brands itself as communist.
If you bake a cake and you have this magnificent idea in your head; do you gather all the ingredients and then presto magic you have a beautiful cake in front of you? Or is there some sort of process that’s missing? Some sort of transitionary period?
There’s a reason it’s called Marxist-Leninism too, older works can be superseded or reanalyzed by newer works in a more refined context.Baking doesn’t cook down the ingredients and claim it’s heating them up.
In that case, why do they call it oven when you of in the cold food of out hot eat the food?
You could call any machine anything, yet it doesn’t become the thing.
Yes it does. A name inherently defines the characteristics of whatever it’s being used for. For example, the names your mother calls me during sex defines the intrinsic nature of our relationship, that is me being the oppressive dom authority figure (because I’m a tankie), and her the submissive proletariat.
Marx said that the state was inherently oppressive. But I guess I missed the part where he said that it doesn’t matter if the party brands itself as communist.
Where did he say that? Can you quote the passage?
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
-the Communist manifestoWhere in that quote does it say that, to use your words, ‘the state was inherently oppressive’?
While this quote does not encapsulate marx’s entire view on the state, it shows that Marx sees that the state is bourgeois and therefore antagonistic to the proletariat.
chatgpt answer if I’ve ever seen one.
The state is inherently antagonistic to the proletariat, because their controlling society gives rise to them creating their own class within the bourgeoisie.
Ehhhhhhhht wrong. What did Engles say about the state in On Authority? There’s literally a whole ass book called State and Revolution that you definitely haven’t read.
Lol “creating their own class within the bourgeoisie” 😭 I bet the smug was on a milli when you typed that outPower = authority is wild. Was freeing slaves authoritarian because the majority didn’t support it?
READ THE BOOKS MOTHERFUCKER 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️
I personally view [freedom of a populace] as that if you can’t allow people to see other viewpoints, then material conditions don’t matter. As John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty, the person’s ability to choose for themself is more important than an alleged better living condition. Furthermore, I see that if China were so much better, they would let their people see the alternative. By not letting their people see something they allege is worse, they prove it is better.
Said by someone who has never really been hungry,
Ha yes, I’m sure having fucking google make the homeless in NY city sooo much better off than the peoples living in nice cheap apartments in Beijing. Tell me you’ve never been poor without telling me you’ve never been poor. 🤡
Again, I do not argue for capitalism, I agree with Stalin on this quote. I’m saying that I can go into whatever forum I want, and say that Joe Biden is committing genocide, and I don’t disappear, I don’t “kill myself” in my hotel room. I’m not defending capitalism, as I am a communist. The condition in which the worker lives is irreconcilable the universal liberty, however if China is socialism, in terms of liberty, they would be the same. I believe that socialism could be so much better. I believe that China could be so much better and it will be someday. But the state will not allow it.
You have to be a troll. But - you’re a pretty funny one. A Boeing whistleblower ‘killed himself in a hotel room’ literally just last week. You can yell at Joe Biden however much you want, he’s still gonna commit genocide without blinking.
for context, the Stalin quote: "It is difficult for me to imagine what ‘personal liberty’ is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible" (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm)
Let me simplify it for you. It doesn’t matter if they allegedly have better material conditions when they can’t view information contrary to the state.
Hey y’all it doesn’t matter if you lift billions of people out of poverty and they never have to worry about certain material conditions and therefore improve their quality of life, what makes a society better is being able to “view information contrary to the state”.
“This society is great. I’m glad every source is monitored by the Chinese government, that’s how you know they’re factual.”
This but unironically
do check out the full thread, as always our comrades on lemmygrad are both intelligent and graceful. 
Speaking as an ex-anarchist, there's absolutely nothing that I'd love more for it to be possible to achieve socialism through non-"authoritarian" methods (whatever the fuck that means exactly) as long as it doesn't require demanding that the people in the developing world just sit tight for a couple of centuries while we sort our shit out.
As I went through my own existential crisis with my politics, I dug into the history of anarchist movements I came to the understanding that (at least for the ones which have a decent amount of scholarship in the English language) they engaged in a lot of authoritarian measures themselves but that there's a prevailing narrative amongst anarchists that whitewashes this history.
This is me being completely earnest but I think that when it comes to things like the famine that the USSR faced (all of the USSR, not just the Ukrainian thank you very much) or the way that the gulags or the purges were administered, things could have been handled better. That's not to engage in armchair quarterbacking but to simply acknowledge that there were excesses and that mistakes were made. I have found that principled communists are very willing to engage in good-faith discussions about this stuff but, on the other hand, I found it very perturbing that when I would take my concerns or criticisms about actually-existing anarchism to anarchists, even ones whose opinions I respected, they would almost always reflexively dismiss historical facts as Soviet propaganda/liberal propaganda or they would engage in that deep sorta skepticism that's reserved only for when things go against a preferred narrative. Either that or there was the sort of tactical retreat in an ideological sense where the response was that if such-and-such happened then that's an example of an unjust hierarchy and thus they categorically denounce it, and that pretty much signalled the end of the discussion.
Obviously this only deepened my political crisis of faith because I wanted to understand how authoritarianism was dealt with internally and in what ways that we could learn from history to mitigate this but it seemed like everyone around me either didn't want to believe it, didn't want to know about it, it didn't want to talk about it. (I think that Kwame Ture's bit about the man who hates snakes is very relevant here.)
It made me realise that there's a necessary degree of hierarchy and "authoritarianism" that is required to achieve and defend a revolution successfully, and it made me reflect upon whether my politics amounted to personal preference or whether they are grounded in what I believe needs to happen.
If the revolution kicked off in my country tomorrow, I can just about guarantee you that I wouldn't survive to see it take root because I truly am not cut out for surviving a civil war. That's not to say that I wouldn't try to make it through but I certainly wouldn't count on it happening.
I don't think that outsiders really understand that about my politics.
I'm not power hungry, I'm not fighting for state capitalism where I can sit comfortably high up in the bureaucracy to live a lavish lifestyle, I don't relish violence nor do I want to see more of it in the world.
In a political sense the only things that I truly want are an end to capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Everything else flows from that point and what I see as being necessary to achieve those outcomes.
If it was just about what I wanted the revolution would be:
A bloodless coup
Genuinely anarchist
Without counterrevolutionary forces
Without the need to defend against the threat of outside attempts to destabilise or destroy socialism
One where I had no concerns about whether I'd survive the revolution
One where I wouldn't need to consider the intricacies of managing uneven development, of enacting restorative justice for the peoples who have been subjected to imperialism and colonialism, of trying to balance competing demands like environmentalism, development, internationalism, and the allocation of scarce resources
But I don't get to choose any of that. The only thing I get to choose is what I believe has the best chances of abolishing capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.
I find it pretty galling when people tell me that I don't understand anarchism or that I'm a Soviet larper or that I'm power hungry. Imagine telling someone that the only reason they are a communist is because of self-serving interest when in reality my political struggle, if it ever manages to achieve anything, is one where the outcome is basically:
Of course no lib is ever going to listen to my story because they will have already made up their mind as soon as they hear the word "communist" or "ML".