They also cape for Nazis by ignoring pograms and lynchings to suit their narrative.

Thanks for sharing! I’m sure autotranslate doesn’t compare when it comes to prose, but this was still beautifully written!

I’ve explained before, but no, China is not capitalist. Public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, it governs the large firms and key industries and dominates the overall character of the economy. Private ownership exists, but is secondary to that, filling in the gaps left behind by the huge state driven industries in secondary and underdeveloped areas, and is folded into the public sector as it grows. The capitalist class is not allowed to gain political power, and the working classes control the state.

Marx himself believed that socialism was only possible after a capitalist phase and that it was precisely capitalism’s tendencies that would make socialism appear, and in turn give way to communism eventually.

(Emphasis mine.)

This isn’t quite true. Marx believed revolution would happen in developed capitalist economies first, but not that this was absolute. See his famous letter to Otechestvenniye Zapiski:

Be that as it may, as I do not like to leave anything to “guesswork”, I shall speak straight out. In order to reach an informed judgment of the economic development of contemporary Russia, I learned Russian and then spent several long years studying official publications and others with a bearing on this subject. I have arrived at this result: if Russia continues along the path it has followed since 1861, it will miss the finest chance that history has ever offered to a nation, only to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist system.

Marx did cross out this paragraph, but you can see that Marx did not hold such a rigid, formulaic view of the progression in modes of production. That said, whatever came to Russia even without going through capitalism would still have needed to go through socialism to reach communism, they just did not need a period of bourgeois domination and profit above all.

My point is that “extremism” doesn’t really mean anything, except that it diverges from the median political opinion. Communism is correct and viable, despite being “extreme” in the eyes of the mainstream westerner.

🫡

There’s a ton that’s wrong with this comment, but I want to pick on something especially egregious that stuck out to me. Your conflation of administration with ownership:

Administration is not ownership.

To reiterate, it is. When I hold dominion over something like a steam train I practically own it because I get to say what happens to it, I get to say that it’s mine for example.

Here, Marx is responding to Bakunin:

…will consist of workers. Certainly, with your permission, of former workers, who however, as soon as they have become representatives or governors of the people, cease to be workers…

As little as a factory owner today ceases to be a capitalist if he becomes a municipal councillor…

…and look down on the whole common workers’ world from the height of the state. They will no longer represent the people, but themselves and their pretensions to people’s government. Anyone who can doubt this knows nothing of the nature of men.

If Mr. Bakunin only knew something about the position of a manager in a workers’ cooperative factory, all his dreams of domination would go to the devil. He should have asked himself what form the administrative function can take on the basis of this workers’ state, if he wants to call it that.

• Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy

Your analysis is more that of an anarchist than a Marxist, and as I’ve shown before you frequently make metaphysical mistakes in your method. This is why Bordigists have never achieved anything of note, faulty analysis that results in self-sabotage.

Being in the middle does not make a stance correct. Saying “slavery is good” and someone saying “slavery is bad” does not make “some slavery is good” the correct position.

Secondly, utopianism is what they are referring to, the practice of theorycrafting a perfect idea and trying to create that by explaining that perfect idea to everyone. Communism has been scientific since Marx, however those who still cling to utopianism over scientific communism do exist to this day. They are typically called “ultraleft,” but not because they are “more left,” but because they place ideals over material reality. That’s why the question exists, can they truly be called “more left” if their strategy is impossible to begin with?

Communists are left, yes.

Public ownership is the principal aspect of China’s economy. This means that public ownership governs the large firms and key industries, and is what is rising in China, as private ownership is kept to small and medium non-essential industries. No system is static, meaning identifying the nature of a system depends on identifying what is rising and what is dying away. Cpitalists are held on a tight leash, and are prevented from gaining political power as a class. The reason private ownership is allowed at all is because China has very uneven development due to their rapid industrialization, and private ownership does help with filling in gaps left by the primary aspects of the economy like SOEs.

The form of democracy and the mode of production in China ensures that there is a connection between the people and the state. Policies like the mass line are in place to ensure this direct connection remains. This is why over 90% of the Chinese population supports the government, and why they have such strong perceptions around democracy:

The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.

I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.

China does have billionaires, as you might then protest. China is in the developing stages of socialism. Between capitalism, which is characterized by private ownership being the principal aspect of the economy and the capitalists in control of the state, and communism, characterized by full collectivization of production and distribution devoid of classes and the state, run along the lines of a common plan, is socialism, where public ownership is principle and the working classes in control. China in particular is working its way out of the initial stages of socialism:

The reason China has billionaires is because China has private property, and the reason it has private property is because of 2 major factors: the world economy is still dominated by the US empire, and because you cannot simply abolish private property at the stroke of a pen. China tried that already. The Gang of Four tried to dogmatically force a publicly owned and planned economy when the infrastructure best suited to that hadn’t been laid out by markets, and as a consequence growth was positive but highly unstable.

Why does it matter that the US Empire controls the world economy? Because as capitalism monopolizes, it is compelled to expand outward in order to fight falling rates of profit by raising absolute profits. The merging of bank and industrial capital into finance capital leads to export of capital, ie outsourcing. This process allows super-exploitation for super-profits, and is known as imperialism.

In the People’s Republic of China, under Mao and later the Gang of Four, growth was overall positive but was unstable. The centrally planned economy had brought great benefits in many areas, but because the productive forces themselves were underdeveloped, economic growth wasn’t steady. There began to be discussion and division in the party, until Deng Xiapoing’s faction pushing for Reform and Opening Up won out, and growth was stabilized.

Deng’s plan was to introduce market reforms, localized around Special Economic Zones, while maintaining full control over the principle aspects of the economy. Limited private capital would be introduced, especially by luring in foreign investors, such as the US, pivoting from more isolationist positions into one fully immersed in the global marketplace. As the small and medium firms grow into large firms, the state exerts more control and subsumes them more into the public sector. This was a gamble, but unlike what happened to the USSR, this was done in a controlled manner that ended up not undermining the socialist system overall.

China’s rapidly improving productive forces and cheap labor ended up being an irresistable match for US financial capital, even though the CPC maintained full sovereignty. This is in stark contrast to how the global north traditionally acts imperialistically, because it relies on financial and millitant dominance of the global south. This is why there is a “love/hate” relationship between the US Empire and PRC, the US wants more freedom for capital movement while the CPC is maintaining dominance.

Fast-forward to today, and the benefits of the CPC’s gamble are paying off. The US Empire is de-industrializing, while China is a productive super-power. The CPC has managed to maintain full control, and while there are neoliberals in China pushing for more liberalization now, the path to exerting more socialization is also open, and the economy is still socialist. It is the job of the CPC to continue building up the productive forces, while gradually winning back more of the benefits the working class enjoyed under the previous era, developing to higher and higher stages of socialism.

In doing this, China has presented itself to the global south as an alternative to the unequal exchange the global north does with the global south, which is accelerating the development of the global south. China is taking a more indirect method of undermining global imperialism than, say, the USSR, but its been remarkably effective at uplifting the global working classes, especially in China but also in the global south.

To call China “imperialist” or “capitalist” is to either invent a fantasy of China or to not understand imperialism, capitalism, or socialism. China isn’t a utopia, it’s a real socialist country.

Scratched.

Basically, yea. You scratch a liberal, and the fascist underneath reveals itself like a lotto ticket.

There were plans for many more. Only volume 1 was punlished while Marx was alive, the other two were compiled from notes and outlines by Engels.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an anti-semitic Nazi sympathizer, and was arrested as such. His fiction is based on the folklore of the gulag system, and archival evidence and historical texts paint a much clearer picture of the soviet prison system. He’s essentially Yeonmi Park but for the USSR.

Here’s a real quote:

The German army could have liberated the Soviet Union from Communism but Hitler was stupid and did not use this weapon.

From an excellent thread going over his many ideological failings:

In his 2003 book, Two Hundred Years Together, he wrote that “from 20 ministers in the first Soviet government one was Russian, one Georgian, one Armenian and 17 Jews”. In reality, there were 15 Commissars in the first Soviet government, not 20: 11 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 1 Pole, and only 1 Jew. He stated: “I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew”. He also stated that according to his personal experience, Jews had a much easier life in the Gulag camps that he was interned in.

According to the Northwestern University historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: Solzhenitsyn used unreliable and manipulated figures and ignored both evidence unfavorable to his own point of view and numerous publications of reputable authors in Jewish history. He claimed that Jews promoted alcoholism among the peasantry, flooded the retail trade with contraband, and “strangled” the Russian merchant class in Moscow. He called Jews non-producing people (“непроизводительный народ”) who refused to engage in factory labor. He said they were averse to agriculture and unwilling to till the land either in Russia, in Argentina, or in Palestine, and he blamed the Jews’ own behavior for pogroms. He also claimed that Jews used Kabbalah to tempt Russians into heresy, seduced Russians with rationalism and fashion, provoked sectarianism and weakened the financial system, committed murders on the orders of qahal authorities, and exerted undue influence on the prerevolutionary government. Petrovsky-Shtern concludes that, “200 Years Together is destined to take a place of honor in the canon of russophone antisemitica.”

His own wife called the Gulag Archipelago “folklore,” why on Earth are you listening to a rabid anti-semite and fiction author over actual historical evidence? I already said the soviets imprisoned fascists, you’re giving a great example of one and proving my point.

Liberals, when “scratched,” reveal their fascist side. Liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same coin.

Yep, the soviet union had prisons, and had to deal with fascists, traitors, and holdovers from former Tsarism. Read the book I linked, prisoners on average were treated better than in peer countries.

They rapidly developed, and managed to go their entire existence without the regular boom/bust cycles intrinsic to capitalism, due to having a socialist economy.

On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice.

The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.

Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.

The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.

When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.

The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.

Death rates spiked:

And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:

Capitalism brought with it skyrocketing poverty rates, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, crime rates, and lowered life expectancy. An estimated 7 million people died due to the dissolution of socialism and reintroduction of capitalism, and the large majority of post-soviet citizens regret its fall. A return to socialism is the only path forward for the post-soviet countries.

When you look at the US Empire and western Europe as having higher quality of life than the USSR, you are looking at the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and wishing the USSR also practiced this, instead of helping liberate colonies and the global south. Russia in particular was a semi-feudal backwater in 1917, and made it to space 5 decades later. The USSR was not the picture of wealth, but was for its time the picture of development and rapid progress.

That’s really funny, lmao. Bordiga was a bit of a goofy guy.