QinShiHuangsShlong

Why? The message you responded to was about Stalin not stopping in Berlin

This is nonsense the soviets didn’t even kill everyone who deserved to be killed not to mind this nosense of killing everyone they didn’t like. Yes capitalists and fascists shouldn’t be allowed run media that’s a pretty basic position I would hope. “Cutting every freedom”. Just say you exclusively read DW and have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.

Fascist is when you support the most successfully antifascist force in history

Yeah big issue with your attempt to demean me with your shitty meme you couldn’t even be bothered to find is that I am neither white nor a denizen of the imperial core. I am also absolutely not a Third Worldist. I am a Marxist-Leninist. I even have a Master’s in Marxist theory (not that that is particularly relevant in this context beyond credential-stuffing.). My positions come from study grounded in practice, not abstraction. You aren’t stricter in your reading, you’re more dogmatic, and thus unscientific. That’s a massive break from the core of Marxist socialism, which demands analysis of concrete conditions, not the application of invariant formulae. You are a settler operating with much arrogance and little understanding beyond the academic exercise you take socialism to be. This is the pattern of many modern “ultra” flavours in the imperial core: much “critique” from the margins, zero real engagement with the material contradictions of actually-existing socialism. I hope one day you can grow up and move beyond your infantile disorder, best of luck to you.

Sure thing settler

It appears continuing further will unfortunately be entirely unproductive. Your reply is clearly bad faith (I had hoped we could have at least some meaningful interaction but that was never your interest.): idiotic name-calling because you lack the theoretical capacity to engage with substance, zero grasp of formalism and how it directly negates Marxism’s scientific method, nearing functional illiteracy with your inability to hold or meaningfully respond to a single argument actually made, and CIA brainworms that have you wielding “Stalinist” as a slur while you plug your ears and turn away from reality. You project your own utopian immediatism onto me, demand purity tests instead of material analysis, and substitute sectarian noise for revolutionary practice. I stand by my opening conclusion that I was beginning to think was perhaps too harsh but now realise was directly on point. You have an understanding of theory and reality equivalent to that of the most learned dust mite yet hold an arrogance when you talk far greater than the most arrogant emperor.

A formalist reading of Marx is not just wrong. It abandons the soul of scientific socialism and borders on the reactionary. It substitutes legal abstractions for the analysis of concrete social relations and replaces historical materialism with moralistic catechism. Your watch analogy is idiotic. A watch is not a means of production. Conflating personal possession with capitalist private property shows you have not grasped the most elementary distinction in Marxist theory. Private property is a social relation that enables the extraction of surplus labour through exclusion and market enforcement. Administering a gift does not let you exploit wage labour. Your bank analogy is equally empty. Try exercising your supposed “ownership” by walking into that bank and demanding to appropriate that capital you “own” as personal wealth. See how fast the social relation of capital reasserts itself through law, force, and institutional discipline. Administration is not ownership. Your confusion reveals a complete lack of conception of private property as a social relation. Your point about public land, firefighters, and internet services under capitalism is detached from both theory and reality. Thatcherites privatized public land on a massive scale. Tech firms and telecom monopolies wage constant campaigns to enclose the digital commons and commodify every facet of the internet. The fact that capitalism tolerates or even manages certain public functions currently does not negate its driving logic. These are concessions wrung from capital or functional necessities for reproducing labour power, not evidence of a different mode of production. Your KMT comparison remains idiotic even after clarification. Yes, both the KMT and the USSR employed state centralization. But form without content is idealism. The USSR broke private property relations in land and industry. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The class character of state power and the direction of surplus allocation were fundamentally opposed. To ignore this is to reduce Marxism to a checklist of administrative techniques. That is not analysis. It is fetishism. On planning under capitalism, you swing and miss again. Aid to Israel is not a benevolent decree. It is the outcome of a bidding war between arms firms, lobbying blocs, and imperial strategy, all mediated through the logic of accumulation. Sweden building apartments is not socialism. It is the imperial core using super-exploitation of the periphery to fund social peace at home. Ignore austerity, the housing crisis, and the privatization creep across Scandinavia if you like. Ignore the private health insurance racket in America if it suits your argument. But do not pretend these are equivalent to socialist planning. Scandinavian economies do not subordinate firms to the public good. Private ownership remains the principle. Decommodification is tactical, contingent, and constantly under assault. Under socialism, social ownership is the principle and capital is repressed. That absolutely determines the direction of travel. The USSR, for most of its existence, directed surplus to industrialization, universal education, healthcare, and defence against imperialism. That is not a minor variation. It is a qualitative break. When I say the law of value cannot be abolished by decree, I mean exactly what Marx meant. You can issue all the plans you want. Without the proper material conditions and productive forces, they will not amount to shit. That is why socialism is a transitional phase. It is the process of creating those conditions through planned development, class struggle, and the gradual withering of commodity relations. To demand the immediate absence of all market forms is to demand socialism without history. That is not revolutionary. It is utopian. Your “necessary communization” point is equally detached. Postal services, education, social security: all are under active assault by capital. Privatization of public assets is a global trend (outside the remaining socialist holdouts). Social security in the imperial core is funded by imperial rent and is in structural decline as the periphery liberates itself. Austerity has been the dominant policy for over a decade. To cite these as evidence that capitalism already does what socialism does is to ignore the direction of travel and the class struggle over every concession. Finally, your deflection about personal hardship misses the point entirely. Your precarity is likely real (if you’re telling the truth) and is produced by the system we oppose. But having no practice in building socialism, as a settler denizen of the imperial core, renders your theory a purely academic exercise. That is why your arguments are so detached from both reality and theory. Revolutionary clarity is not forged in grievance. It is forged through study, practice, and alignment with the movement of the working class. Bordigist purism offers the comfort of certainty without the burden of construction. It is easy to declare every actually existing socialist project impure from the safety of the core. If your theory cannot account for the struggle to build under constraint, it is not a meaningful or worthwhile guide to action. You have not refuted anything. You have only repeated your formalist catechism with more words and less understanding.

Your “argument” rests on a formalist reading of Marx that confuses legal categories with social relations. An owning class is defined by private appropriation of surplus and the ability to reproduce that power through inheritance and market competition. The Soviet nomenklatura held administrative authority, not private property. They could not sell factories, bequeath positions, or extract profit as personal wealth. That is a qualitative difference. Comparing the USSR to the KMT shows some impressive ignorance and ignores the rupture in property relations. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The Soviet state expropriated both. Planning under capitalism coordinates individual firms while leaving social reproduction to market anarchy. Socialist planning, however imperfect, subordinates enterprise activity to social goals: full employment, universal services, industrial catch up. The presence of markets or external trade does not erase that direction of travel. The law of value cannot be abolished by decree because it is a social relation, not a policy. Marx was explicit in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: right can never be higher than the economic structure of society. Socialism constrains the law of value through planned allocation, price controls, and decommodification. It withers through development, not proclamation. International conflicts between socialist states reflect the pressure of the capitalist world system and unresolved national questions, not an inherent capital logic. Uneven development, border disputes, and great power chauvinism are real contradictions. They demand critique, but they do not settle the class character of a mode of production. Prussia modernized under Junker aristocracy and state led development, but it never socialized the means of production or aimed at the withering of the state. Achievements in literacy or industry under socialism are not “just development”. They are the result of surplus being directed to social need rather than private accumulation. Bordigist purity spectacles are a luxury of those like yourself, a settler, denizen of the imperial core whose only interaction with socialism is as an academic exercise. You have built nothing, defended nothing, and achieved nothing. You demand a socialism that arrives without contradiction, without transition, without struggle. Revolutionary practice must engage with concrete conditions, not ideal blueprints. If your standard for socialism is the immediate absence of all market forms, all state mediation, all external trade, then you have defined it out of historical possibility. You clearly wish to appear revolutionary without the effort of grappling with reality.

Trade predates capitalism and has taken different forms under different modes of production. Its existence under socialism does not make a society capitalist. What defines a social system is who controls the means of production and how surplus labour is allocated. The Soviet Union inherited a devastated, largely agrarian economy encircled by imperialist states. Socialist construction could not skip stages. Public ownership of industry, finance and land became the foundation. Market mechanisms and limited private trade operated within boundaries set by the plan, not as its driving force. Under socialism, the law of value is not abolished by decree. It is progressively constrained through planning, price regulation, and the expansion of decommodified services. Policies like the NEP were not retreats from socialism but applications of materialist method: you transform society with the conditions you inherit, not with ideal blueprints. To dismiss the USSR because it engaged in trade is to mistake form for content. Socialism is a transitional process, not a finished state. It shifts power from capital to labour, expands collective provision, and subordinates exchange to social need. By these measures, the Soviet project lifted hundreds of millions from illiteracy and poverty, built industrial capacity from scratch, and defended social gains against relentless external pressure. Please refrain from arrogance when your understanding of a topic matches that of the most learned dust mite.

As a leftist journalist you wouldn’t go to Venezuela, Laos, Vietnam, China or Cuba? Also:

Your opening is a the standard lazy shitlib straw man. Saying term limits are anti-democratic does not mean “give Trump a third term,” it means voters should decide rather than having the state pre-emptively remove options from the ballot. That is what a term limit is. It’s not some magical anti-corruption device, but an arbitrary legal restriction on who people are allowed to vote for, imposed on the theory that limiting democracy somehow protects democracy. In practice it does nothing to fix donor capture, party corruption, media manipulation, or institutional decay; it just narrows voter choice while the same unelected interests keep their power completely untouched. The rest of your reply is you wandering off into a generic rant about the two-party system and independents, which has nothing to do with the actual point I made.

I didn’t say anything about age limits. My point was about term limits: they reduce voter choice based on an arbitrary claim that they function as some kind of harm-reduction mechanism, which is hard to take seriously given how obviously dysfunctional the American system is. Term limits do not solve elite capture, corruption, or institutional failure; they just act as another inertial mechanism that constrains democratic choice and blocks the kind of massive structural change the U.S. clearly needs. Most of your reply was a rant about broader problems I never said anything about, but none of it actually answered the point I made.

Improving lives is generally good. The question is whether people are clear about what they are winning. I was replying in this very thread to someone calling higher minimum wages and taxes on the rich the solution. That is the problem. Measures like that can be worth fighting for, but they are not a solution. They are stopgaps within the same system that created the crisis. That matters because without it people mistake temporary concessions for lasting change. They win reforms, are told the problem is solved, pressure drops, and then those reforms are rolled back as soon as capital regains the initiative. We have seen that repeatedly, including in Europe where social protections were swept back once the political balance shifted. That is not criticizing anything short of perfection. It is insisting on political clarity. Fight for every immediate gain you can win, yes. But understand that unless the system itself is broken, those gains remain limited, fragile, and easily reversible.

No that’s not the solution, that’s a stopgap at best. A mild reform. It does nothing to address the core contradictions that drive capitalist crisis.

Responding to it really did take up most of my posts for a while

Uyghur “genocide”, double genocide theory, the holodomor

Lol! Wut? The Soviets didn’t form an “anti-Nazi alliance”…they were allied with the Nazis. They made a deal with them to carve up Eastern Europe between their two empires. This was literally the same cynical opportunism that led the Americans to give sanctuary to Nazi scientists after the war. If this means that Liberals are somehow naturally aligned with fascism, in your mind…then so are Communists, by the same criteria. It simply isn’t true, either way. It’s amazing that every comment you post is so embarrassingly wrong. The USSR spent years trying to build an anti-Nazi alliance. 1933 they proposed collective security at the League of Nations. 1935 they signed mutual defense pacts with France and Czechoslovakia. Spring 1939 they sat in Moscow for months begging Britain and France for a real triple alliance. The West stalled. Refused to guarantee the Baltics. Refused to let the Red Army cross Poland to actually fight Hitler. Poland’s elite, more scared of workers than of Nazis, said no too and instead joined Hitler in attacking Czechoslovakia. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact happened because liberals handed Hitler Eastern Europe rather than work with socialists. When Soviet troops entered eastern Poland September 17 1939, the Polish state had already collapsed. Government fled to Romania September 15. Warsaw was burning. The army was broken. The lands the USSR moved into? Not Poland proper. Territories Poland had seized and occupied by force in 1919-1921 from Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania. And spare me the nonsense about liberals and fascists. They share a foundation: defense of capitalist property. When capital feels threatened, liberalism drops the mask. Chile 1973. Indonesia 1965. Greece 1967. The Soviet Union abolished the capitalist class. That is a total category difference. Then there is denazification. The contrast couldn’t be clearer. In the Soviet zone, former Nazis went to labor camps. They worked. They earned minimum wage like other inmates. In the West? Operation Paperclip handed over 1,600+ Nazi scientists, officers, and spies. Wernher von Braun, who used slave labor to build V-2 rockets, became head of NASA’s Apollo program. Adolf Heusinger, Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff, became Chairman of the NATO Military Committee. Johannes Steinhoff, Nazi ace, also chaired NATO’s military committee. Heinz Reinefarth, who massacred civilians in Warsaw, became a respected mayor in West Germany. I genuinely cannot fathom how someone can be this historically, politically, and materially illiterate and still type with such confidence.

Historical illiteracy and false equivalence.

If Trump had gone through the correct channels, and gotten congressional approval for the “strategic combat operations” weve been involved in, nobody would have anything to complain about

I don’t know I think killing hundreds to thousands of innocents is still bad even if the US pedo elite signs off on it collectively.

This is why most of the world hates you btw.

Thank you always happy to hear when people enjoy and/or find my comments insightful.

No

>But oh no gaza The fact you can say this about a genocide and people not supporting it's enablers really shows how despicable you are.

Bernie is absolutely a liberal. Calling him anything else ignores what he actually proposes. He wants to regulate capital, not expropriate it. He wants to blunt capitalism's worst edges at home while leaving the imperial core intact. That is social democracy at best, a liberal ideology. His own platform accepts the basic framework of private ownership of the means of production. He seeks to manage the crisis, not resolve its root cause. That is precisely the reformism Luxemburg critiqued a century ago in the work I already recommended. You really should read it. Electoralism under liberal democracy is not a path to socialism. It is a containment strategy. The ballot box is designed to channel dissent into harmless rituals that leave property relations untouched. You think stacking votes can overcome capital's structural power. But capital does not rule through votes. It rules through ownership of production, control of credit, domination of media, and monopoly on organised violence. When the vote threatens those foundations, the mask comes off. The courts block, the capital strikes, the media smears, the state represses. This is not conspiracy. It is the normal functioning of the bourgeois state. Expecting otherwise is like expecting a wolf to vote itself vegetarian. Your entire argument rests on idealist assumptions. You treat consciousness as primary and material conditions as secondary. You think changing minds at the ballot box changes the balance of class forces. That is backwards. Social being determines social consciousness, not the other way around. You mistake the form of democracy for its content. You ignore that the two-party system is a mechanism to limit political competition to factions of capital, not to enable working-class rule. You cite 2016 and 2020 as if they were isolated failures of strategy, not expressions of a system that structurally excludes anti-capitalist politics. You blame the left for "quitting" instead of asking why the electoral arena absorbs and neutralises radical energy every single time. This is not analysis. It is moralising. I am Chinese, not American. We had our revolution. We broke the bourgeois state and built a system where the vote actually means something because it is embedded in democratic centralism and whole-process people's democracy, not trapped in a ballot box ritual that changes nothing. These electoralist squabbles about which faction of capital should manage the American empire are none of my concern outside of the theoretical interest I take in educating and engaging in dialogue with comrades in a much different situation. I know it sounds cliché to say "read theory," but genuinely, every idealist assumption you are recycling has been academically addressed and refuted for decades.

The best alternative liberal Zionist Bernie Sanders who even if he had received all the votes you wanted would have just been undermined and sabotaged again by the DNC establishment like in 2016. You can't vote the fascism away. The ruling class is not going to politely expropriate themselves. You should read Luxemburg's "reform or revolution".

I didn’t presume anything I read your replies as you turned yourself inside out whenever anyone had the slightest bad thing to say about America.

I don’t care about internal US bullishit (we were talking about US wars) but even in that area you’re wilfully ignorant McCarthyism, The deporter in chief, Guantanamo bay. You are clearly a very privileged person with a very loose grasp on history and reality. While we’re on the tipic. Please explain to me how the extermination campaign in Korea (dropping more bombs on half an already small peninsula than were dropped in the Pacific theatre of WW2 as a whole, 1 in 5 to 1 in 4 of the population killed, all major farms and structures turned to rubble leaving the survivors living in caves) is not equivalent or honestly worse than the more recent atrocities. Or how about Vietnam still dealing with the after affects of the rainbow agents (agent orange etc.). Or the US collection of pet failed states like Libya. How about putting pinochet or the shah (aka the butcher) in power alongside the rest of their pet fascists of the day. You are an arrogant uninformed privileged ass who needs to read some books and get in touch with reality.

Why ask this question when you clearly have decided that China is bad and America is great? If you want to go to America so bad just do it there’s no need to ask inane questions and fight people giving you answers and advice.

Thank you. Always glad to hear when people find my comments helpful or interesting. Getting incessant DMS full of waves of bullshit, circular argument etc. from a racist nationalist gets annoying but I think it’s still worth writing up a reply for others to see at least gives it some meaning beyond headbutting a brickwall.

You definitely are tapped in and fully aware of the real truth so why dont you educate some of us plebians about communist governments/leaders that clung to power despite being hated in their country. (being hated by gusanos and crackkkers doesn’t count)

Ok, I’m going to try lay this out as clearly as I can, because I think you’re mixing up what materialism and idealism actually mean (even if we haven’t used their names to this point it is the core of the argument). The main tool of my analysis is materialism. Put simply: the way people organise production, how they meet their needs, who owns what, who has to sell their labour, this is the foundation. Ideas, culture, politics, they arise from and reflect that material base. They aren’t illusions, but they don’t float free. People think and act, but they do so within conditions they didn’t choose. Ideas matter. People can be persuaded, misled, organised, educated. But those ideas only take hold because they connect to real conditions. You can’t sustain a set of ideas that are completely out of step with how people actually live. And you can’t just will a new society into existence because it sounds good. Ideas move things along, but they don’t set the underlying terrain. What you’re arguing with is idealism. In short, idealism puts ideas first. It treats consciousness, values, or narratives as the engine of history, as if reality bends to what people believe rather than belief being shaped by reality. When you say the mode of production is a “choice,” or that solidarity is basically a matter of interpretation, you’re putting ideas in the driver’s seat. That treats history like a competition between narratives, where whichever idea wins out determines reality. But that’s not how it works. People don’t get to pick a mode of production the way they pick a belief. Capitalism didn’t arise because it was persuasive. It arose because older systems stopped functioning under pressure and new relations became necessary to keep production going. The same logic applies to any transition out of it. There’s a reason certain ideas appear at certain times and not others, and it’s not just because someone made a good argument. None of this means people are robots or that they can’t act against their interests. Obviously they can. Propaganda exists, divisions exist, fear exists. But even that happens within limits. If ideas were truly primary, you wouldn’t need to look at anything outside discourse to explain social change, and that clearly doesn’t hold up. On your last point, you’re also treating “authority” as if it automatically creates a class, and that’s just not how class works. Class isn’t about who gives orders day to day. It’s about relationship to the means of production. Who owns them as property, who controls them in a way that lets them extract surplus, who can pass that control on. Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isn’t privately owned as capital, people in those roles don’t become a separate class just because they have authority. They don’t own the factories, land, or infrastructure as something they can sell or accumulate. Their position depends on the broader structure, not the other way around. If that changes, if people in those positions start turning control into private, inheritable ownership, then you’re dealing with a class shift. But that has to be shown in actual material terms. You don’t get there just by pointing at hierarchy and calling it a class.

Technically, it’s built on the idea that a socialist society can be/should be reached gradually by participating in parliamentary liberal political system instead of overthrowing liberal society and implementing a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. You are mixing social democrats with democratic socialists. Democratic socialists, however ineffective or utopian, at least retain socialist aims in theory. Social democrats do not. Their program, accepts the permanence of capitalist property relations. Their project is not the abolition of exploitation but its rationalization: a “fairer” distribution of imperial superprofits among the labor aristocracy of the core. This is not a path to socialism. It is a management strategy for capitalism. The meme is clearly pointing out that “social democracy enjoyers” turn into fascists/Nazis once the economy declines. Or, if we keep OP’s caption in mind, the idea that social democrats are actually fascists “wearing a mask”. The social democrat’s mask, like the liberal’s, depends entirely on the surplus extracted from the periphery. When that flow contracts, the mask comes off. In the words of Malcolm X on a similar issue: “The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling.” Social democracy operates the same way. Its niceties are financed by imperial rent. When the rent falls, it defaults to open class defense. What helped Hitler seize power was not just the actions/inactions of the socdems and the economic collapse, but the deep split of the left overall, the ineffective political system and the relentless infighting to the point were socdems and communists saw eachother as equivalent or even a bigger threat than the fascists. I explicitly said “helped,” not “solely responsible.” Multiple factors converged in 1933. But the SPD’s role was decisive in one key respect: they preserved the bourgeois state apparatus after 1918. Through the Ebert-Groener pact, they kept the reactionary judiciary, the imperial officer corps, and the bureaucratic machinery intact. They unleashed the Freikorps on the KPD. They refused every proposal for a united working class front against the Nazis. Stalin characterized this relationship precisely when he stated that “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism” and that these organizations “are not antipodes, they are twins.” The KPD’s analysis recognized that in a crisis, social democracy functions as the left wing of counterrevolution. History confirmed that analysis.

Do you have any points or do you prefer the tried and true call people names and stick your fingers in your ears?

Yes, they are different, but the point at the core of my argument is that it’s irrelevant as they serve the same purpose at their core.

Whether it’s s RCV or MMP, the outcome remains austerity, imperialist foreign policy, and rising far-right influence because the state remains an instrument of capital. Ballot mechanics don’t override class power. RCV isn’t “anti-establishment at its core”; it’s a procedural tweak that can just as easily stabilize bourgeois legitimacy.

How do you expect to have a revolution if 90% of people don’t agree with your viewpoint?

In my country the revolution has already happened. We now conduct class struggle through party debate and socialist democracy, not bourgeois elections.

Also revolutionary consciousness isn’t a precondition you wait for, it is forged through struggle. The 90% figure is wrong for a start, even in the US communist sympathys are quickly growing, you also assumes static opinions under static conditions, but material crises radicalize people faster than decades of electoral gradualism. Reformism doesn’t build toward socialism, it manages capitalism more palatably and demobilizes movements by channeling energy into cycles of hope and disappointment.

Pushing forward the agenda over the course of decades is more likely to be successful than a single revolution, in my opinion.

History suggests otherwise. Social democracy produced the welfare state only under the unique pressure of postwar reconstruction and Soviet competition, then dismantled it once those pressures faded (and even that was built off massive exploitation and imperialism in the periphery). Capital concedes reforms only when forced and retracts them the moment profitability demands it. Waiting for electoral consensus while the climate burns, fascism rises, and imperialism massacres isn’t a strategy. Bourgeois democracy won’t let you vote through its own abolition. The task for those still under bourgeois democracy is to build dual power: organs of working-class authority that can confront and replace the dictatorship of capital. That’s how you can make voting matter.

They didn't even read the first section of the article they linked. >There have been widespread misconceptions in media reports that China operates a unitary social credit "score" based on individuals' behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low or rewards if the score is high.

What do you think is happening in Xinjiang? Do you mean the lies about a genocide? Please be specific.

You are treating “authoritarian” as a special category of state. That is simply untrue. Every state is an instrument of organized authority. A state exists precisely to enforce the rule of a particular social order. Laws, police, prisons, intelligence agencies, and armies are not neutral features. They are mechanisms through which the dominant class secures its position and suppresses forces that threaten it. In that sense every state in a class society must act “authoritarian,” because it must compel obedience and defend the structure that produced it. The label therefore functions less as a meaningful description and more as a moral signal. Governments aligned with Western power are described with neutral language such as “government,” while adversaries are cast as “authoritarian” or reduced to the “regime” of a rival country. China becomes “authoritarian China,” Iran becomes the “Iranian regime,” yet the United States is rarely framed through the same lens even when its institutions exercise clear coercive authority, whether through domestic repression such as COINTELPRO or the routine enforcement of property and political order. The distinction therefore obscures the basic reality that all states rest on organized force. What changes from place to place is not the presence of authority but the historical conditions and social interests that direct it.

I still rather like to live in Europe,

And that’s your right like it is mine to say I would never want to live in any of the imperial core nations especially not at this moment in time where austerity and fascism is coming home to them as imperialism declines and the contradictions of capitalism are heightening. I am happy in China.

What do you actually know about China? "authoritarian oppression" entirely meaningless when stripped of context.

That makes sense, and then you look at Europe and realise the issues at hand are systemic, caused by material conditions and bourgeois democratic electoralism is never going to fix those issues. Much of Europe already uses ranked choice or proportional voting, yet remains austerity-ridden and sliding toward the far right because it is still under the dictatorship of capital. The voting mechanism is secondary to the concrete material conditions: capital's imperative to accumulate, the commodification of labor, and the state's role as an instrument of class rule. Until that dictatorship is overthrown, electoral reform is rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. The core contradictions at hand are: Socialized production versus private appropriation:workers collectively create value, but capitalists expropriate the surplus The tendency of the rate of profit to fall: as organic composition of capital rises, profitability declines, forcing capital to seek new fixes Overaccumulation and underconsumption: capital produces more than can be profitably sold, leading to crisis, layoffs, and austerity The contradiction between capital's global mobility and labor's relative immobility, which fuels a race to the bottom in wages and protections. As imperialism declines (neocolonial extraction becomes costlier, interimperialist rivalry intensifies, and the Global South resists outright plunder) capital can no longer rely on external superprofits to offset domestic falling rates of profit. The response is internal repression: austerity to slash social wages, union-busting to weaken labor power, surveillance to preempt dissent, and the normalization of authoritarian governance. This is capital's logical reaction to crisis. This dynamic mirrors Weimar Germany: economic crisis, delegitimized liberal parties, and a bourgeoisie that ultimately backed fascism to crush the organized working class and restore "order" for capital. Today's far-right surge is the same phenomenon: capital's emergency management when consent can no longer be manufactured through bourgeois democracy alone. Voting under these conditions is not a path to liberation; it is a ritual that legitimizes the managers of decline. For voting to matter, you must overthrow the dictatorship of capital and reach the synthesis of these contradictions: a revolutionary transformation that socializes production, abolishes exploitation, and builds a state that serves human need, not profit. Only then does political power and thereby voting become meaningful.

My previous comment on it. Mostly there is no “score” it’s a binary list of businesses and business people (some individuals may end up on the list if they lose a defemation suit for example) who owe debts/damages and refuse to pay. It’s not automatic, it’s not affected by your day to day life and you are put on the list only after a court hearing

Abuses and genocide are 2 very different things. If you want to talk about the abuses during the ETIM crackdown and what was done wrong etc that's definitely possible but you should really stop spreading the genocide narrative that smears mud on this real serious conversation.

Do you have any proof? The OISC disagree with you. And even the UN doesn't call it a genocide because that's not what happened.

This comparison mixes a few real policies with a lot of exaggeration. For example, the train and flight issue people always bring up is not about having a vague “bad social credit score.” What actually exists is a court enforcement measure. If someone refuses to comply with an effective court judgment (most commonly paying a debt or damages) the court can place them on the judgment-defaulter list (失信被执行人) and issue a high-consumption restriction (限制高消费). That mainly blocks luxury consumption like flights, first-class rail seats, and luxury hotels until the court order is fulfilled. The purpose is simply to pressure people to comply with the judgment and protect the creditor’s rights (why should sleazy business people who don't pay their debts get to live lavishly). Because of that, the claim that “if you have bad social credit you’re basically locked out of everything” is misleading. These restrictions target specific high-end consumption, not normal daily life. Even Chinese legal explanations make clear that they are meant to restrict non-essential spending such as flying, luxury hotels, expensive travel, etc., rather than basic living or ordinary transportation. The surveillance point is also mixing separate issues. China does have strong state monitoring powers and extensive digital infrastructure, but that is not what the court enforcement blacklist system is. The travel restrictions and blacklists people talk about come from civil enforcement procedures in the courts, not from scanning someone’s phone or some universal personal “score.” The same confusion shows up in the company data point. China has strict data and cybersecurity laws, but those are regulatory and national security frameworks. They are not the mechanism that puts someone on the judgment-defaulter list. That list exists specifically because someone ignored a legally binding court ruling, not because they refused to hand over corporate data. And the idea that there is some nationwide app warning citizens about people with low “social credit” is another exaggeration. What actually exists are court databases of judgment defaulters, sometimes publicly searchable, similar to debtor registries in many legal systems. Again, the target is people who lost a case and then refused to comply with the ruling. So the reality is much more mundane than the viral version. China absolutely has strong enforcement tools, but the famous travel bans people cite are mainly a judicial enforcement mechanism against people who refuse to comply with court judgments, not a universal social-credit score controlling everyone’s daily life.

I am done arguing across the thread so I am just going to deal with all your bullshit in one go here. You keep repeating the word “authoritarian” as if it is a self-evident argument, but it is not. It is a vague political insult that Western political discourse applies to states it dislikes and almost never applies to itself. Every state exercises authority: it enforces laws, maintains internal security, regulates media to some extent, surveils threats, and suppresses movements it considers destabilizing. The United States conducts mass digital surveillance, criminalizes whistleblowers, historically infiltrated and destroyed political movements through programs like COINTELPRO, and imprisons more people than any country in the world. Yet it is rarely labeled “authoritarian” by the same commentators who apply the term to China reflexively. That should already tell you the term is being used ideologically rather than analytically. If every state exercises authority, then calling one “authoritarian” without specifying material structures of power, governance mechanisms, or outcomes is just moralizing rhetoric. The same applies to your claim that China is “fascist,” which is not merely wrong but demonstrates that you do not understand what fascism actually is. Fascism historically emerges in advanced capitalist societies during severe economic crisis when sections of the ruling class mobilize a violent ultra-nationalist movement to crush organized labor and socialist movements in order to preserve capitalist property relations. It is defined by the fusion of corporate and state power, preservation of monopoly capital, destruction of socialist parties and unions, and expansionist militarism. China does not fit this model in any meaningful way. Its political system is led by a communist party whose legitimacy rests on long-term development planning, massive poverty reduction, public infrastructure investment, and a large state-owned economic sector. Private capital exists, but it does not politically dominate the state the way corporate capital dominates Western liberal democracies. You may dislike that system, but lazily labeling it “fascist” simply shows that you are throwing around historical terminology you clearly have not studied. Your argument about Xinjiang relies on the same pattern: confident assertions built almost entirely on a narrow ecosystem of ideological sources. The modern “Uyghur genocide” narrative traces heavily back to Adrian Zenz, a far-right evangelical researcher who openly states his religious mission is to destroy communism. His methodology (guesswork extrapolated from administrative statistics and speculation about buildings seen in satellite images) has been widely criticized by scholars across multiple fields. Meanwhile, international delegations, journalists, and diplomats have visited Xinjiang repeatedly over the past several years. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation publicly acknowledged China’s efforts in addressing extremism and safeguarding Muslim citizens rather than declaring a genocide. Dozens of Muslim-majority governments have taken similar positions. If a genocide were genuinely occurring, it would be extraordinary for the major international organization representing Muslim states to refuse to recognize it. Satellite imagery itself proves almost nothing. Images of buildings do not magically become “concentration camps” simply because a Western think tank says so. Every country has prisons, schools, training centers, and administrative facilities. Converting “there are buildings” into “therefore genocide” requires layers of speculation that are rarely demonstrated. The testimonies most widely promoted in Western media frequently come from individuals affiliated with political organizations advocating regime change, such as the World Uyghur Congress. Some prominent figures cited as witnesses have direct institutional connections to U.S. security agencies. That does not automatically invalidate testimony, but it absolutely means the claims require scrutiny rather than blind acceptance because they align with Western geopolitical narratives. You also dismiss Chinese public opinion entirely because it comes from Chinese institutions. That is not analysis; it is simply prejudice dressed up as skepticism. Multiple long-term studies, including research conducted by Harvard’s Ash Center, have consistently found extremely high satisfaction with the Chinese central government across decades of rapid development. Hundreds of millions of people have experienced massive improvements in living standards, infrastructure, healthcare access, and poverty reduction. China eliminated extreme poverty on a scale unprecedented in human history. These material outcomes are a major reason the government maintains broad legitimacy domestically. Pretending that 1.4 billion people must all be brainwashed or terrified because their views contradict Western narratives says more about your worldview than about China. Your claims about censorship suffer from the same lack of nuance. China regulates its information space, particularly around political organization and extremist ideology. That is true. But the idea that Chinese society exists in total informational darkness is nonsense. Hundreds of millions of people use Chinese social media platforms every day where public debates, criticism of local officials, policy complaints, and social controversies are common. Domestic media frequently exposes corruption and administrative failures. The system is designed to prevent destabilizing political mobilization and separatist extremism while still allowing broad social discussion. Again, you can disagree with that model, but describing it as total censorship shows you are repeating talking points rather than observing how the system actually operates. Your repeated insistence that your position cannot possibly contain racist assumptions also misses the point. Criticism of any state is legitimate. What becomes chauvinistic is the underlying assumption that Chinese people are incapable of forming genuine political opinions and must therefore be either brainwashed or coerced if they express support for their own government. That assumption appears constantly in Western commentary about China. When someone dismisses the perspectives of an entire population while elevating a handful of exile activists as the only “real voices,” it reflects a colonial pattern of thinking whether you want to admit it or not. More broadly, your arguments show a familiar pattern: start with a predetermined conclusion that China must be oppressive, then accept any claim that supports that belief while dismissing contradictory evidence as propaganda. That is not critical thinking; it is ideological confirmation bias. Real analysis requires examining sources, incentives, and historical context rather than repeating whatever narrative is most popular in Western media cycles. So the issue here is not that criticism of China is forbidden. The issue is that the criticisms you are presenting rely on vague labels, historically illiterate misuse of terms like “fascism,” contested evidence promoted by politically motivated actors, and a reflexive dismissal of the perspectives of the Chinese population itself. That is not a serious argument. It is a collection of slogans and assumptions repeated with confidence but very little understanding.

>Ah yes because government-manufactured numbers hold value— you must think Russia is a democracy too, no? Strawman. Also more racism. You are a racist.

Saying you should shut up if you haven't researched a topic isn't an adhominem.

How much Chinese media do you watch? How much time have you spent on Chinese social media? How fluent are you in Chinese? Or did you just get told this by other white people and decided to just go along with it because it confirms your biases.

The Chinese state that has 95+% support from the population and is made up of a representative of Chinese people. White people decided we're evil and you just go along with it without any investigation because you're racist and it confirms your biases

Not an adhominem. You're not wrong because you're stupid you just happen to be both wrong and stupid.

You have to be a troll. >You can appose 2 things Sure not what I took issue with. I took issue with you calling China fascist which is just an untrue statement. Authoritarian is a pejorative. All countries and states in class society are "authoritarian" by necessity. Fascism is a specific thing arising from the tendency for the rate of profit to decline in capitalist society.

I am a Chinese minority living in China. You really don't know what you're talking about when it comes to China. You very clearly have done 0 research beyond maybe reading RFA. You should be quiet until you have done some proper research.

>Uyghur being widely spoken/“in Chinese” Not what I said. You have to be a troll.