Amazing, no actual response possible so just a weak insult to dodge making one. Classic.

To be honest I don’t rely on Wikipedia much at all. However, when I am making a point and Wikipedia even agrees with me, it’s enormously effective because it means that even those normally biased against socialism agree with the claims I make. This isn’t a particularly difficult idea to grasp, if they are biased against something but don’t have the evidence to back up someone’s anti-socialist claims, it means that no credible evidence exists, period, for said anti-socialist claims.

I have no idea what your incoherent rant about Russia is meant to imply. It’s a homophobic, capitalist country governed by reactionary nationalists. Defending Russia’s stance against western imperialism is not the same as saying Russia is a socially progressive and good country to live in, this isn’t a difficult concept to grasp either. Russia is similar to Iran in that communists don’t support their domestic policy, while supporting largely their foreign policy.

I organize with a communist party where I live. I actively work to bring about socialism where I live. I’d love to move to China, except it’s enormously difficult and would uproot the lives of myself and my family. Why is this a difficult concept to grasp for you?

NATO countries aid and assist with genocide. The purpose of NATO is to defend the collective interests of the world’s imperialist countries from anti-colonial and socialist backlash

Russia’s territorial expansion was provoked by the endless encirclement and expansion of NATO, with the refusal of Russian admission to NATO to protect it. When imperialist countries encircle you and refuse to let you join so as to protect yourself, it’s only reasonable to expect that one day said encircled country will lash out. The entire war was preventable even up to 2022.

NATO is as defensive as the IDF is. It’s a gang of imperialist countries protecting each other from the imperial boomerang, and will constantly invent new enemies to justify its own existence.

The new Ayatollah was not picked based on inheriting the title, but through a council election. That’s like saying the presidency in the US was handed down from H.W. Bush to W. Bush. I’m not going to say that the democratic process in Iran is amazing or anything, but I’m also not going to waste time trying to argue against it while it is currently fighting for its life against a genocidal terrorist empire.

I will say, I am not a fan of the mod of Inventing Reality, Geneva is a doomed and essentially a liberal with better than average political instincts. This means Geneva is frequently wrong and often takes ultraleft positions, argues that Hexbear is “transzionist” and other such absurdities.

Yea I don’t see Lula losing. Geneva is a terminal doomer, unfortunately, despite usually being decent when it comes to which side to support.

It went quite a bit deeper than that, you were contesting the idea that Iran is the most democratic country in West Asia. This is pretty true, considering their neighbors are largely monarchies or the genocidal apartheid settler-colony. The idea that Iran is all sunshine and rainbows is wrong, but that wasn’t the point actually being made, which was that Iran isn’t literally Mordor while many of their regional enemies are far worse than they are.

I have never seen anyone say Russia is a good place to live in. Maybe you mean the USSR, that would make more sense, but certainly not the Russian Federation. As for the Uyghur people, the CPC is overwhelmingly popular, including in Xinjiang. Over 70% of people in people’s committees in Xinjiang come from ethnic minority groups as well.

Russia has a paltry amount of finance capital, it cannot be imperialist in the sense that Marxists analyze what the US Empire is doing with the global south. Aggressive? Sure, I can agree to that, but they aren’t the ones brutally exploiting the global south, because they can’t. The US can and does, and this is why its financial domination of the world is so important to oppose.

Communism isn’t a “fairy tale,” nor would any reason why the free market is a fairy tale be applicable to communism. I think this sounded good in your head, but reading it makes it incredibly obvious that you said nothing of note here. It’s just a slogan.

Alright, I’d love to give a definition of imperialism for you! Genuinely, this is actually the first major productive point you have raised.

In short, imperialism has the following characteristics:

-The monopolies generate the enormous finance capital.

-The banks are the vehicle through which this finance capital is organized and exported.

-The international monopolist associations are the cartelized form of this exported finance capital dividing the world.

-The territorial division is the political-military guarantee for the safe operation of this exported finance capital.

Russia has an absolutely paltry sum of finance capital, and the era of open neocolonial grabs in the global south is over. Russia has, at most, a national monopolist class, but cannot turn this into international monopoly. As a consequence, Russia cannot use super profits from the global south for a large welfare state like the west can and does.

As for NATO, it was formed against the USSR and the colonial liberation movements of the 20th century. The USSR just came out of an incredibly bloody war, and had no reason to attack. NATO was formed, therefore, to serve as a bulwark against anti-colonial revolution and socialism. This remains true today, where NATO is a gang of the imperialist powers protecting each other from the imperial boomerang.

I’m sure this comment is pretty typical, I’m able to elaborate my views coherently and back them up logically, as well as with evidence when needed, as is common among communists.

I asked you what you believe a leftist is, because in my view the left begins at anti-capitalism to begin with. Maintaining capitalism and imperialism is not a progressive stance, it is holding us back from future progress. Social Democrats in Europe maintain their cushy welfare states alongside immensely wealthy capitalists because they rely on exploiting the global south heavily. There is no way to have both a large welfare state and a dominant, healthy capitalist class without plundering it from somewhere, and that somwhere is the global south. Thus, considering European Social Democrats to be on the “left” is an absurdity to me.

I never lied a single time, you made the claims and failed to support them. This crashout on your part isn’t an actual point.

Why is the idea that communism is good not a leftist talking point? What do you think a leftist is?

1. Nobody says Russia is a good place to live in, nor does anyone believe it to still be socialist. China is a socialist country and is good to live in, yes.

2. NATO did provoke the Russo-Ukrainian war, through backing the 2014 Euromaidan coup and using Ukraine the way they use Israel, as an attack dog. Not all Ukrainians are Nazis, but Nazi batallions like Azov have outsized influence, and train far-right death squads sent to Latin American and African countries to destabilize them, similar to how Israel trains Statesian police.

3. Capitalism is bad and communism is good, I agree with this.

4. Statesian imperialism is identified by the hegemonic role that US finance capital plays in the world economy, through institutions like the IMF, and is maintained through NATO and the overwhelming overseas military presence of the US.

5. Yes, NATO is bad. It’s a coalition of imperialist countries designed to protect against blowback from the global south, and to depress revolutionary movements.

What you describe as “actual leftist talking points” are largely relegated to the realm of social welfare. Equal housing, rights, and universal healthcare are of course wonderful things that we all want to achieve. The problem is that we cannot achieve these things at a global scale with the present system of US imperial hegemony, by which the global south is super exploited for superprofits. Socialism remains necessary, and Nordic style welfare States retain imperialism in order to both have large welfare and a healthy and dominant capitalist class.

I personally think it’s a good thing to block that social fascist bar.

I think it’s a pretty common take that Trotsky’s idea of Permanent Revolution would have been suicidal for the fledgling socialist state, so yea, I think running the Soviet Union directly into a broader, protracted war and losing the entire Soviet Union would have been worse than Stalin.

Mostly people saying socialist states aren’t literal hellscapes and have quite a lot of positives.

I’d need to see any evidence of what you claim, because it sounds like you repeated right-wing mythology and got shut out even when shown direct evidence to the contrary. For example, I already explained how China doesn’t have the social credit system you think it does, yet you keep repeating it like it’s relevant and real.

Tankies don’t “blindly” support the Russian Federation, PRC, and DPRK. Ask a tankie about what they support about anything you find odd or abhorrent. Tankies don’t even support Russia, just their movements against the present hegemonic system of US imperialism, which by opposing they help take the boot off the necks of the global south. The PRC and DPRK are supported, as actually existing socialist countries, but not blindly. Ask away and you’ll get nuanced answers.

You aren’t banned for mentioning the 1989 Tian’anmen Square protests, nor the June 4th, 1989 Beijing Riots and suppression of said riots. You get banned for repeating now debunked atrocity propaganda about 10,000 students on the square itself getting killed, rather than the truth, which is that the hundreds that were killed that day, including dozens of PLA officers and a few hundred rioters, happened in areas all over Beijing as the PLA advanced towards the square. As for China and Russia’s genocides, not even western consensus agrees that these even exist. The UN doesn’t believe any repressions by China or Russia amount to genocide, and Wikipedia simply reports on the allegations, not taking a firm stance.

As for China, the working classes own and control the state, which in turn controls and owns the commanding heights of the economy. Virtually all finance is state-owned, and all strategic industries such as defense, electric power, petroleum and petrochemicals, telecommunications, coal, civil aviation, and shipping are overwhelmingly state owned. “Pillar industries” such as equipment manufacturing, auto, information technology, construction, iron and steel, nonferrous metals and chemicals are largely but not as thoroughly state owned, and emerging industries are largely private.

Private industry is allowed to assist with the socialization of production, developing the foundation of public ownership and planning. It’s very difficult to individually plan millions of tiny firms, but a few monopolies become very easy to plan, and folding them into the public sector turns them into public use. Markets create these monopolies naturally, and that’s how and why they are used.

As for the idea of a social credit score, it doesn’t exist outside of a few cities, and is largely used for corrupt businesses. The idea of an Orwellian style credit score simply is fiction meant to scare you, when in reality the west has social credit systems like FICO that apply to every citizen, and dramatically impact what you can afford to do and how to live.

Talk to a tankie sometime.

I have never seen anyone argue that no deaths happened whatsoever in Beijing on June 4th. Every time the Tian’anman Square Massacre narrative gets brought up, people come out of the woodworks to correct the narrative, that there were disparate riots all over Beijing but that the square was peacefully evacuated. This is factually contrary to western “common sense” narratives.

As for using Wikipedia, it’s frequently biased against socialist states, so when it’s forced even by its own biases to admit that there isn’t hard evidence of something, it’s noteworthy. This makes it an especially useful tool for introducing leftist analysis of socialist states and their histories whenever they are forced to concede the narrative to the socialists.

As for gay rights in China, they are getting better. The Supreme People’s Court of China issued a response declaring anti-LGBTQ discrimination to be bad and harmful. This is not a legal change, but a sign of changes already undergoing in China, where the younger generations are more accepting of queer identities and thus laws are locally changing gradually.

As for moving to China, my spouse and I have that as a backup plan, though it’s incredibly difficult to do and enormously expensive, which is a hurdle for any working class family to do. I don’t know why you think we wouldn’t be willing to live in China, besides the fact that we have families, friends, and lives where we live currently that we would have to abandon.

The killings weren’t “a few meters outside the square.” Riots happened in disparate places all over Beijing, with PLA members lynched. The PLA responded with force, and in the end a few hundred rioters and a few dozen PLA members were killed. The west reported on an entirely fabricated story of the PLA running their tanks over 10,000 students on Tian’anmen Square itself, which has remained in pop culture as the understanding of the events. It isn’t about trying to play semantics, but to highlight that the west quite literally invented an entirely different history and reported on it as fact against a geopolitical enemy, one of many such examples.

Russia is not imperialist, as it utterly lacks the finance capital required to be as such. It’s predominantly an industrial economy without any colonies nor neocolonies, similar to Iran. Marxist-Leninists do not support the capitalist economy of Russia, but the idea that it even could replace the US Empire as world hegemon is frankly a result of a lack of understanding how and why the US Empire is what it is. Finance capital is the key, and Russia has a tiny amount of it relative to the rest of the world.

As for “authoritarianism,” Marxist-Leninists support workers having control of state authority. All states are authoritarian, the distinction lies primarily in which class wields it. The form may change, and the extent it is applied also changes based on conditions, but at the end of the day the state is an instrument of the ruling class in any given society, be it capitalists or workers. As such, no Marxist-Leninists support the dictatorship of capital in Russia.