Executing or otherwise punishing capitalists guilty of subversion and corruption, such as Bai Tianhui, is a good thing. "Dissidents" aren't virtuous by "dissenting," it's important to know what dissent means in practice and what they are dissenting against.
Can you elaborate? The US isn't adopting PRC style domestic policy, nor is the PRC adopting British nor US-style imperialism, so I have no idea what you're talking about. The PRC isn't imperialist to begin with, it has no colonies nor neocolonies and isn't plundering the surplus value created by the global south. Trade deals with China don't come at the barrel of a gun either.
How exactly am I boot-licking? How am I trying to "fool" anyone?
The US Empire is currently exporting mass death and destruction globally, threatening Greenland and Canada with annexation, kidnapped another country's president and first lady, is performing piracy for oil, threatening Cuba, and on top of all of these overt acts of terror, is super-exploiting the global south for super profits. The PRC, on the other hand, as a socialist country, is far more peaceful, maintains a defensive millitary, has ~3 overseas millitary bases compared to the hundreds of the US Empire, and offers mutual development opportunities like Belt and Road.
The differences are staggering. When countries in the global south partner with the US Empire, they are trapped in cycles of underdevelopment, where their surplus value is plundered. When countries in the global south trade and partner with the PRC, they achieve rapid development, and escape the never-ending cycle of impoverishment. This win-win development isn't because China is more morally good, but because their economic structure and geopolitical position compels them towards mutual cooperation over plunder and terror.
Further, there isn't really an alternative to the US Empire and PRC. The US Empire is actively invading countries to make sure they comply. The EU is vassalized by the US Empire. When we look at who the global south goes to for development opportunities, they are increasingly rejecting western imperialism in favor of cooperation with China and BRICS, and forming mutual partnerships with neighboring countries (like the Alliance of Sahel States).
The bad of the US Empire isn't why the PRC is better, the sheer benefit of working with the PRC is why the PRC is better.
Marxists disagree with "anarcho-antirealists" because Marxists are materialists, not idealists. Grail is stating that reality itself is a reflection of ideas, and that, therefore, escapism is praxis. Marxists take the opposite approach, and seek real liberation by real means, as dialectical materialists. Propaganda and cultural hegemony have little to do with why Marxists oppose idealists, it's because idealism itself is bourgeois and prevents effective praxis (see escapism as being seen as praxis by idealists, rather than organizing and struggle).
Also not sure what you mean by Marxist-Leninists depending on "propaganda and manipulation," we certainly believe in dispelling bourgeois mythos and in espousing correct, scientific lines on revolutionary struggle. However, the idea that this is in service of some nefarious, manipulative ends is ill-founded. Communists have always fought for the working classes, and against bourgeois cultural hegemony in favor of proletarian culture and science.
It seems more like you're letting your distaste for Marxism cloud your interpretation of Their comment, when They are quite literally telling you They are rejecting material reality in favor of fantasies. You're interpeting the message as getting in control of perceptions to dispel propaganda's effect when the reason the concept is controversial is because it's a fundamentally solipsist ideology.
Ah, thanks!
I thought that's what happened with that one, thanks for digging it up!
Incredible, the shining knight of Zionism and anti-communism.
Is that real?
To a degree, perhaps, though the CPC largely sticks to the Chinese sphere of the internet. I haven't seen any evidence for CPC interference in Lemmy though, nor of widespread CPC influence over western, English-speaking spaces. China doesn't really care as much for that, plus the implication is that the US Empire is fundamentally weaker than the PRC at propagandizing on the Statesian "home turf" when we know the opposite is the case.
Communist subreddits like r/GenZedong and lately r/TheDeprogram, after being banned by Reddit, migrated largely to Lemmygrad.ml. I agree that the study is a good read, but for humor, not serious journalism. Their study is essentially them finding out that communists are on a communist platform, and then the study conductors conflate anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, a common hasbara tactic.
Nothing you said contradicts that Lemmygrad.ml is Marxist-Leninist, all you've really done is confirm that it is, while also conflating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism. Further, the only comment they point out as anti-semitic, was in fact removed by the moderation for spilling over the edge, as comrade Edie pointed out here. Claiming grad is anti-semitic because of comments it removes is tortured logic.
Also not sure why you're tagging my grad account, if I was trying to hide that I wouldn't post in my account description that I'm a Marxist-Leninist, nor would I have made my grad account the same name as my Hexbear and Lemmy.ml accounts.
No worries!
To be clear, .ml stands for Mali, and it was allegedly chosen because it was cheap/free. Lemmy.ml is just the flagship, test instance, and happens to have a lot of communists because the devs are communists. Lemmygrad.ml is explicitly ML.
You can criticize them as long as you aren't doing so from a liberal, anti-communist perspective. The genuine flaws of existing socialism are better analyzed by those that actually study socialism and socialist countries.
"Authoritarian" in this case meaning what, exactly? That the states set up by Marxist-Leninists have lasted for longer than a few years, and built up the necessary state structures to protect the gains of socialism?
Do you have a source on that? Even if you include landlords killed by the peasantry during land reform, all of the deaths by unintentional famine, and the excesses of the cultural revolution as deliberately killed by Mao, the numbers accepted by Historians are nowhere close to 160 million. This is such a fantastical number that even the famously debunked Black Book of Communism doesn't go over 100 million, and that was including the entire history of the soviet union as well as PRC. The Black Book of Communism famously included both non-births as deaths, and Nazis killed by the Red Army as "victims of communism."
That's not a rule, though. Many anarchists critically support the PRC and consider socialism to be better than capitalism, even if they disagree with Marxism and seek communalization over collectivization in the final analysis. As an alternative to the US Empire's naked terrorism, the PRC plays a positive role.
To be fair, I don't think many communists globally are fans of Trotskyism, considering it's predominantly western and liberal-compatible. The vast majority of communists globally are Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyism is seen as more fringe. Trotskyists tend to already begin with anti-AES stances (for a variety of reasons, usually a combination of Red Scare propaganda mixed with alienation from capitalism), so going from "socialism is a good idea but never existed" to "socialism is a bad idea because what's existed hasn't worked" is a common jump. A former Trotskyist making loads of money off of denouncing communism is both entirely predictable and hardly compelling for those who've studied communism in theory and practice.
As for the rapist Eric Blair, also known as George Orwell, the western world listened to him too well. He didn't see through anything, rather, his position as a British fed (known for keeping a journal of people he knew and suspected of being Jewish and/or communists) and propagandist was extremely useful to western intelligence agencies. On Orwell is a good essay going over his dreadfall past and role in propagandizing. Orwell has been taught in countless schools not because of any truth, but because of his utility.
As for Figes, another that earns an enourmous sum of money from preaching the bible of anti-communism to serve capitalist interests, better historians exist. Syzmanski's Is the Red Flag Flying? The Political Economy of the Soviet Union today, Pat Sloan's Soviet Democracy, Human Rights in the Soviet Union, Anna Louise Strong's This Soviet World, Mary Stevenson Callcott's Russian Justice, the recently deceased Dr. Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds, all the way up to Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance, there's tons of academic resources to get a much better view of socialism in practice.
I don't expect you to read these, of course, my point is that just like you don't expect to change your mind by me sharing evidence counter to your views, I'm unlikely to be swayed by professionals repeating standard anti-communist dogma. It takes a much greater amount of study and reflection to go against the dominant, hegemonic culture, nearly every common anti-communist talking point has been wielded against me at some point simply by me stating that I support socialism.
Is there anything specific you'd like to discuss, regarding the effectiveness of socialism/communism? We can have a constructive conversation surrounding specifics.
Communists govern the largest economy in the world by PPP, and capitalism is falling apart at the seams as the spoils of imperialism are beginning to be cut off. The global south is escaping underdevelopment, and this is forcing austerity in the west, explaining the surge to the right. In the US Empire, communists are more and more common than ever before:
Famine was ended by communists in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. These areas had woefully inefficient systems of agriculture, such as the kulak system, which served to enrich one group of people over the laborers they employed. Collectivization combined with industrialization is why food security was achieved after the introduction of socialism to these countries, and the famines commonly attributed by western historians to communism were the last of a long line of regular famines.
Similarly, purges in the largest majority of cases meant expulsion from the party or position, not execution, except in times of crisis, like the 1930s when fascism was on the rise. They were not done arbitrarily, but as a response to corruption, subterfuge, and sabotage.
It's also a bit silly to suggest that people spent "40 years trying to escape communism." Right up to the end, the majority of people in the USSR wished to retain both the USSR and the system of socialism. This is proven not just from eyewitness reports of support, but also vote totals:
Moreover, after the fall of socialism in Europe, the majority of people want it back or say they are worse off. This is compounded by the fact that over 90% of the Chinese population supports their government and system. Socialist countries run by communists have higher approval rates than capitalist states.
Looking at Adam Tooze, I don't see much indicating him as a former communist. He grew up in West Germany in the height of the Cold War, is trained in liberal economics such as Keynesian economics, though his grandfather was allegedly a soviet recruiter, which is cool. I'm not really convinced I could find much out of his mini-series on Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, or Lenin, considering I've already read works both by them and about them in greater detail than a podcast is going to cover.
You were temp-banned, for dogmatically repeating debunked claims pushed by liberals, in the face of evidence to the contrary. You appear to be free to comment there.