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.
The biggest problem is that this heavily relies on calling a socialist market economy like China a “regulated market economy,” it’s deceptive and implies capitalist countries have been pulling people out of poverty. In reality, China has pulled massively ahead with its socialist system, while capitalist countries have stagnated.
I checked the thread you were talking about, that’s not what happened. The supporting evidence came from a huge number of different sources, including many western sources. You also equated Chinese diaspora with the Chinese government itself, which reeks of chauvanism.
As for the bit on Tian’anmen Square, it’s correct, even Wikipedia says so:
Deaths in and around Tian’anmen Square itself
Government officials have long asserted that no one died in the square in the early morning hours of 4 June, during the “hold-out” of students’ last batch in the south part of the square. Initially, foreign media reports of a “massacre” on the square were prevalent, though subsequently, journalists have acknowledged that most of the deaths occurred outside of the square in western Beijing. Several people who were situated around the square that night, including former Beijing bureau chief of The Washington Post Jay Mathews[i] and CBS correspondent Richard Roth[j] reported that while they had heard sporadic gunfire, they could not find enough evidence to suggest that a massacre took place on the square.
Student leader Chai Ling claimed in a speech broadcast on Hong Kong television that she witnessed tanks arrive at the square and crush students who were sleeping in their tents, and added that between 200 and 400 students died at the square.[268] Ling was joined by fellow student leader Wu’er Kaixi who said he had witnessed 200 students being cut down by gunfire; however, according to Mathews, it was later proven that he had already left the square several hours before the events he claimed to have happened.[211] Taiwan-born Hou Dejian was present in the square to show solidarity with the students and said that he did not see any massacre occurring in the square. He was quoted by Xiaoping Li, a former China dissident to have stated: “Some people said 200 died in the square, and others claimed that as many as 2,000 died. There were also stories of tanks running over students who were trying to leave. I have to say I did not see any of that. I was in the square until 6:30 in the morning.”[269]
In 2009, human rights activist Robin Munro, stated that he was present during the clearance of Tiananmen Square and that, according to his account, there were ten Western reporters near the Monument to the People’s Heroes at the time. He also reported a Spanish television crew that recorded footage of the event. Munro disputed Wu’er Kaixi’s claims of mass killings inside the square, stating that he did not witness fighting there and instead observed students peacefully complying with the soldiers’ demands to leave the square in an orderly manner. He further noted that the Spanish TV crew reported not seeing killings within the square during the final clearance.[270][271]
In 2011, three secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing from the time of the events were leaked and published by WikiLeaks, all of which stated that there was no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square itself.[194] Instead, they said Chinese soldiers opened fire on protesters in Beijing outside the square, around Muxidi station, as they fought their way from the west towards the centre.[194] A Chilean diplomat who had been positioned next to a Red Cross station inside the square told his US counterparts that he did not observe any mass firing of weapons into the crowds in the square itself, although sporadic gunfire was heard. He said that most of the troops who entered the square were armed only with anti-riot gear.[194][216]
The square was evacuated bloodlessly, all of the deaths that day occurred in areas scattered around Beijing during riot suppression. A few hundred people died, which is a tragedy, but not 10,000 people being executed on the square like the west initially reported. Substantial evidence to the contrary since then has come out, and Wikipedia has accordingly responded and added this context.
I don’t think Wikipedia is a CPC front group.
To be fair, the quadrant system is also bullshit. Authority isn’t a sliding scale, it depends on which class controls the authority of the state and is therefore either the beneficiary of or victim of authority.
I’ll try to define anything one might struggle with then, I guess.
Authoritarian - to hold a monopoly on authority, ie the political legitimacy to the use of force
Ruling class - that class which owns the commanding heights of the economy and controls the state
The state - the special administrative body for managing the affairs of the ruling class
Owning class - that class which gains their means of subsistence through ownership
Working class - that class which gains their means of subsistence through labor.
Tankies - those who defend socialist states
Bourgeoisie - those who own capital and employ it to profit off of the labor of others
Hegemony - the dominance of a given subject
Neoimperialism - the current, highly financialized system propogated worldwide whereby the more developed capitalist countries profit dramatically off of exploiting lesser developed countries
Finance capital - the monopolist merging of bank and industrial capital
What part was difficult? I’ll do my best.
All states are authoritarian. All states are monopolies on violence, in the interests of the ruling class of society. The major difference with socialist states is that the ruling class is the working class, while owning classes are subjugated by the authority of the state. Further, so-called tankies aren’t really concerned with excuses, but with dispelling bourgeois mythos. Information warfare is incredibly complex, and directed against anything that serves as an alternative to the dominance of western hegemony and neoimperialism, led by the dominance of finance capital and multinational corporations on a global scale.
If I actually got paid for every time I’ve been accused of being part of or paid by the CPC, I’d have no purpose in organizing IRL beyond my own moral obligation to do what’s right, lmao.
Anarchists that support existing socialist states get called tankie all the time. “Tankie” isn’t an ideology or a species of human, it’s a pejorative for a loose grouping of those that like, say, China and Cuba.
“Tankie” is essentially a pejorative for those that support AES states. Tankies are everywhere on the fediverse, the reality is that so-called tankies aren’t the evil people that want to eat babies or anything like those loudly complaining about us believe.
Welcome!
As the person effected, it seems pretty suspicious when my entire comment history going back a few weeks at a time steadily get a stream of 5-10 downvotes within a short timeframe, despite lacking any movement, or when a comment of mine gets downvoted suspiciously by a ton of people despite a similar comment being more upvoted than not right next to it in the comment tree.
Also, I don’t think I’m Dessalines’ favorite poster, whatever that means.
Nobody believes the USSR is still here. This is a made-up strawman point, and talking to literally any communist will tell you this.
China is a socialist country, public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy and the working classes control the state. Russia is a capitalist country, nobody says it’s leftist in any way. The only support Russia gets is with respect to the fact that it opposes the current hegemonic force of western imperialism, no further than that.
I personally think it’s a good thing to block that social fascist bar.