Chomsky whines about the USSR and calls its collapse "a win for the left". Absolutely unbelievable. Of course he has nothing to say about 1993 protests or the fact that the majority of Russians who experienced life in the USSR want it back.
Zizek calls China a "bad model for the left". Of course no actual socialist experiment is ever good enough for the ivory tower intellectual. Even worse, he keeps saying he hopes that China will liberalize its government. So fuck the DotP, lets just give away power to the capitalists, because that is literally what will happen in a liberal democracy, and he knows it.
IDK, to me it seems young western online leftists also hold a lot of bad takes, mostly stemming from the fact that they have only lived under capitalism, and romanticize both China and the USSR.
You can have a system that is objectively horrible, yet still have another one that is even worse. I agree with Chomsky on this take. What happened after the fall of the USSR was the leadership just going mask off. By that point it was horribly corrupt bureaucratized juggernaut, with a security state apparatus much worse than anything you see even today in the West (mainly cause since then technologies have changed, and its all a lot more hidden).
Likewise there are many problems with China. It is indeed not a paragon of human rights, and you do not need Zenzis 100 billion uighur for that to be true. It has a lot of problems in a lot of areas, that make it not a very good model.
What we need is something with the ambition and scope of the USSR or China, but with freedom of expression and rights for say lgbtq people and minorities, as in the better/best liberalized countries in the West, coupled with the economic planning of Amazon or Wallmart, but more humane, and also with actual worker ownership of the means of production, and some smart way of preventing authoritarian power grabs and bureaucracy creep. We have progressed past the need of the juggernaut state structures of the mid-late 20th century....