Still looking for a single leftist here who claims they support communism. I constantly see it being attributed to the left, but in real life scenarios I just don't see it, only in memes, unless you meant socialism, which is a healthy system of every country, including US.

EDIT: I guess I should stop waiting, this feels like strawman argument/gatekeeping

They would also tell me to my (virtual) face that they think my country has no right to exist, so that too makes it pretty hard to have any sort of productive collaboration.

Because the French Revolution didnt permanently damage democracy as a political system. And democratic system in one form or another existed for millennia before the French Revolution.

The USSR and China under the CCP permanently discredited (without any chance of rehabilitation) communism as legitimate ideology.

No one in their right mind would want anything to do with communism. It's like asking for genocide, mass killings, gulags, lack of free expression and poverty. No one is going to do that.

And I not saying this in the polemical sense used by pro-crime/pro-corruption Americans ("this is such a socialist shirhole").

And the Soviets allied with Nazi Germany and carved up Poland with their new buddies.

Because the French Revolution didnt permanently damage democracy as a political system.

Ok. Neither did the communist revolutions of the 20th century permanently damage communism as a political system.

And democratic system in one form or another existed for millennia before the French Revolution.

As have anarchist and communistic systems.

The USSR and China under the CCP permanently discredited (without any chance of rehabilitation) communism as legitimate ideology.

No. They didn't. Only too western liberals who were always hostile to communism would say that. The idea that communism is permanently dead just because capitalists didn't like it is pure "end of history" Neo-liberalist nonsense, and basically ignores the fact that a large chunk of the worlds population still actively feels positively about these revolutionary projects; to say nothing of the people who don't like those particular ones, but still agree with communism in general.

Besides, so called "liberal democracies" have done far more evil than the USSR or Communist China. In fact, they're doing a repeat of the Holocaust as we speak. Does that "permanently (without any chance of rehabilitation) discredit democracy as a legitimate ideology"?

No one in their right mind would want anything to do with communism. It’s like asking for genocide, mass killings, gulags, lack of free expression and poverty. No one is going to do that.

Sure, if you're a complete dullard who has mainlined nothing but pure, concentrated cold war propaganda without any thought or consideration, without ever bothering to open a single book on political theory. Everyone else is not that stupid.

And guess what? You have genocide, mass killings, gulags, lack of free expression, and poverty now, no communism needed. In fact, communism has almost always been associated with a reduction in those things if you actually check the stats.

And I not saying this in the polemical sense used by pro-crime/pro-corruption Americans

Yes, you are. That is exactly how you are saying it.

The communists were never "buddies" with the Nazis. The communists spent the decade prior trying to form an anti-Nazi coalition force, such as the Anglo-French-Soviet Alliance which was pitched by the communists and rejected by the British and French. The communists hated the Nazis from the beginning, as the Nazi party rose to prominence by killing communists and labor organizers, cemented bourgeois rule, and was violently racist and imperialist, while the communists opposed all of that.

When the many talks of alliances with the west all fell short, the Soviets reluctantly agreed to sign a non-agression pact, in order to delay the coming war that everyone knew was happening soon. Throughout the last decade, Britain, France, and other western countries had formed pacts with Nazi Germany, such as the Four-Power Pact, the German-French-Non-Agression Pact, and more. Molotov-Ribbentrop was unique among the non-agression pacts with Nazi Germany in that it was right on the eve of war, and was the first between the USSR and Nazi Germany. It was a last resort, when the west was content from the beginning with working alongside Hitler.

Harry Truman, in 1941 in front of the Senate, stated:

If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.

Not only that, but it was the Soviet Union that was responsible for 4/5ths of total Nazi deaths, and winning the war against the Nazis.

This strategy is dishonest though. We cannot use all the same methods of the far right and ruling class.

There's a conflict of interest between wanting people to think critically and then lying to them and only slowly letting them learn parts of a truth.
In another example, you can't have a democracy when all parties try to deceive the voters. That will damage the concept of democracy and the existing supposed democracy.

There is also the danger of falling your own rhetoric and propaganda. Prime example of this is how fascism was created. Mussolini actively engaged in nationalist pro-war propaganda as he thought the continued war would lead to the conditions necessary for socialist revolution. He wasn't wrong about that as then revolutions broke out in several successors / breakaways of the Russian Empire, in Germany and in Hungary. But eventually he fell to his own propaganda and created fascism.

I'm a communist, I support communism. Socialism isn't welfare, it's a transitional status towards the gradual sublimation of private property. The US is firmly capitalist and is in no way socialist, socialism isn't "when the government does stuff."

Correct. Neither imperialism is glorified, nor is state-capitalism like the US Empire, Republic of Korea, Singapore, or Bismarck's Germany if you want an earlier example, are glorified by Marxism of any kind.

Not really sure what you're trying to say here as "Marxism and Marxism-Leninism." Are you saying these are antagonistic ideologies? Marxism is an umbrella, not a tendency within itself. History has progressed since Marx, and Marxist theorists since Marx have developed theory and practice accordingly. By far the largest tendency in Marxism is Marxism-Leninism, the closest to a "pure" Marxism you can get is Orthodox Marxism, which itself is ironically anti-Marxist and is overall an extreme fringe belief among Marxists.

bLuE nO mAtTeR wHo unless it's an actual progressive ‍

It does help that the overarching theme of the right is centered around taking as much for yourself as possible and not caring about the collateral damage. The right is full of single-issue voters who might, say, not actually explicitly hate gay people but who also don’t give a shit about their rights and safety if it means they can keep their guns. The left, almost definitionally, needs to consider the complexity inherent in not being able to ignore the effects that any given policy might have on others and this means that there is so much more opportunity for conflict.

You’re correct, of course, I’m just pointing out the difference such that it might help attack the issue from a better perspective.

Good old "divide and conquer".

Yeah, but the question ultimately lies in how many bad and straight up harmful policies are worth the small step toward an egalitarian society? Where does it become ignoble to vote for one policy, when there are ultimately many more harmful ones outweighing the positive? Because it’s kinda rare that we get to vote on policy. We vote for people, with the vague promise of policy ideas that face an uphill battle and watering down— not to mention the straight up bastardization of those good policies, turning them into terrible ones.

I wish it were so black and white as us getting to vote on policy. The policymakers surely seem to be unable.

glorified by Marxism of any kind.

i didnt claim that.

nevertheless, china was oddly missing in ur list of state-capitalist nations that werent glorified..

Protecting Jewish and other minorities rights to live and safety is not an authoritarian act. It is in fact protecting the most vulnerable's liberty. Anti authorization is not lawless. You are a very weird little person and I have no interest in trying to convince you Nazis are bad. I hope you can figure that one out on your own

This thread keeps popping up and it just clicked and I had to ask:

Is the guy in the red shirt supposed to be Vaush?

Your claim, sarcasm aside, was that Marxist-Leninists have a history of glorifying imperialism and state-capitalism, which I rejected, and said not just Marxism-Leninism but all Marxism rejects both. Either you're trying to say Marxism-Leninism isn't Marxist, in which case some heavy justification is required, or I misunderstood your point, in which case I'd appreciate elaboration.

As for the PRC, I didn't list it as state-capitalist for the same reason I wouldn't list the US as socialist. The PRC has a socialist market economy. The large firms and key industries of the PRC are publicly owned, and the medium firms are heavily controlled by the state and rely on the publicly owned key industries to function. Private property and the bourgeoisie don't have political power because they don't control the large firms or key industries.

What distinguishes state capitalism from socialism is private ownership of the large firms and key industries, or public ownership. The US, Singapore, ROK, etc all have large megacorps with firm control of the state, which uses its power to relatively guide and plan the economy for private interest. In the PRC, the opposite is the case, since the large firms and key industries are publicly owned and planned, the bourgeoisie doesn't have political control, the proletariat does. This is reflected in over 90% approval rates for the government in the PRC.

The reason the PRC has a bourgeoisie and private property to begin with is because they haven't yet developed out of it. They are still in a relatively early stage of socialism, market forces are quite useful for small and medium firms to grow into centralized firms that can be gradually sublimated and folded into public ownership. This is a Marxist understanding of economics, and while it isn't what an anarchist would want, I don't personally define socialism in a manner that excludes Marxism.

Does that make sense?

Would be funny considering how much Vaush hates Marxism-Leninism.

I believe what @[email protected] is getting at is that all states are authoritarian, and that there are positive and negative uses of authority. Executing SS officers is a positive use of authority. Since all states are an extension of the ruling class, it is better for that ruling class to be the proletariat, rather than the bourgeoisie, and for the proletariat to use its authority to oppress the bourgeoisie and gradually sublimate capital until all production is collectivized, class ceases to exist, and by extension the state withers away, leaving only administration, management, etc.