I also agree with NATO needing to be dismantled, I dont agree with you that Russia is doing that. Look at trump and Putin, the invasion of Ukraine is not fighting against america or the NATO, its imperial landgrabing a non NATO state.

Objectively, NATO is the only reason Ukraine is still standing. No NATO = no war, Ukraine wouldn’t even have had the 2014 coup if it wasn’t for NATO.

And even if Putin would fight the NATO directly, I dont think this will benefit our class, we are the ones dying in the wars, hunger in the famines and getting arrested for fighting for solidarity amongst the international working class, a true change cannot come from a tyrann winning over another tyrann, it need to be a struggle by the people against the oppressors

Struggle against oppressors often does take the form of great tyranny and violence. That’s just how struggle works. If NATO is destroyed NATO is destroyed, the moral character of the people who do it don’t impact the material reality. Is any part of what you’re saying here actually a true thing that can be verified through study of history, or are they just moral platitudes that sound nice?

If you dont condemn an imperialistic country invading its small neighbour, you fight for the oppressor. War is never good for the working class, if you justify people dying in imperialistic wars, you are a class enemie in my eyes.

I gave my thoughts on the matter of civilian deaths in the war in Ukraine. My contention is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine weakens NATO; I could just as easily say that your refusal to fight NATO makes you a class enemy, and the critical difference is that my position can be justified by observing the ways that NATO is involved in really oppressing the world; meanwhile your disagreement with me is based in moral categories.

About China:

What your friends told you, plainly speaking, is just incorrect. You definitely can criticize the Chinese government publicly and privately. You can protest, the protests against the pandemic restrictions are the reason they don’t do zero COVID in China anymore. There’s active Hexbear users from China who do criticize the country’s policies and are sometimes a lot more critical than the rest of us. Seriously, check out @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net’s posting history. You can hop on Chinese social media like RedNote to see what people are saying; there will be a lot of positive things but negative things too.

On the issue of surveillance, I think surveillance and privacy is basically just dead in the water except for enthusiasts at this point. It’s all screwed, worldwide, it’s just a situation that’s completely beyond repair. Every country that has wide internet access has mass surveillance and the whole world is a police state. Bad situation all around. I’m not gonna try to tell you that it’s better in China than in some other countries because that’s just not good consolation, lol. But if you think that China is a country that has more mass surveillance than the rest of the world, that is mistaken.

They don’t control the flow of information, though. That part is wrong. Talk with Chinese people, I encourage you. They aren’t living in some kind of secluded little bubble, they know what’s going on around the world. My honest opinion is that sometimes they have overly naive takes about what it’s like to live in the West, like they don’t know how bad it is over here in a lot of cases. But they are broadly pretty well informed.

A state where the working class is truely ruling needs a free working class who can freely from their opinion. This can’t be done in a surveillance state.

I take specific issue with this argument. I mean, if you put some stress on the word “truly” then I don’t disagree. It’s a bit of a purity obsessed argument, but not strictly false. But if you really think that the condition of being surveilled is itself reason to forget about the tremendous historical progress China has achieved for their people, even though that surveillance and all other forms of state repression are things that Chinese communists have been aware of as necessary parts of state-building, then I think you are more concerned with creating a utopia than real emancipation.

Also also: being able to vote doesn’t make a country socialist or “not capitalistic”, if it would america would fall into this category as well.

I agree, what I meant is that China has a democratic state and that democratic state’s partial ownership of the means of production makes China a socialist country. Both parts are necessary. State ownership without any form of democracy can look like Saudi Arabia. Liberal democracy with a capitalist economy is, at best, social democracy like the Nordic countries.

And yet, what can Israel do without the material support of the country that makes its domestic weapons production capabilities possible? What can Israel do without the country that supplies its Iron Dome system? What can Israel do without CENTCOM? Without the power of the US dollar being maintained? Without Europe being greased up to act as one imperialist unit together with the US? Without US control of oil trade? Without US rigging of international institutions?

Can one meaningfully ever “control” someone that has that much leverage over them?

You’re flattering yourself if you think the politicians of the US need to be blackmailed to carry out the material interest of the capitalist ruling class. They won’t pay attention to you even if they stop cheating on you with Israel, their main girl is capital.

But since we are on the topic of war: who is supplying russia with the drones and fiber optics they use to invade Ukraine? Isnt that China? And isn’t xi giving Putin the same political backing?

This isn’t comparable to genocide for several reasons. I mean, for starters, who’s accusing Russia of genocide? I know that they’ve committed various war crimes and have killed thousands of civilians in their invasion, but neither of those suffice for the war to be considered a genocide. There has to be intent from the Russian side to exterminate the Ukrainian population in a generalized manner.

I’d also just say that with the various contradictions in place in the global stage, it is apparent to me that the only way for capitalism and fascism to be done away with is for every organ of USAmerican imperial hegemony to be dismantled. If the hegemony of the US imperialist ruling class is not dismantled, if the organs of that hegemony remain in place, then the earth is done for because of climate change; if that’s not enough, there will also continue to be genocides like the one in Gaza wherever the white supremacist states can concentrate populations of climate refugees. There will be unprecedented famines and natural disasters. To be honest, a lot of these things are already all but guaranteed to happen with the amounts of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

With that in mind, knowing what’s at stake, and knowing that NATO is one of the organs of US imperialist hegemony, I can’t in good faith consider that there’s a moral equivalence between the US utilizing Israel as a forward operating base, a tip of the spear, into the heart of the oppressed nations and a testing ground for the extermination technologies of the near future versus China giving Russia military aid to prevent their massive northern neighbor from collapsing. Furthermore, since I am of a mind that thinks that NATO cannot continue to exist for anything resembling a viable future to be possible, Russia is doing my work for me by exhausting NATO military supplies. Every drone, missile, bullet, and tank burned up by Ukraine is a NATO resource that will not be used against someone in the Global South in the near future. Every one of them that Russia destroys is one that anti-imperialist forces would have to destroy in another circumstance, and as valiant as groups like Ansarallah have been in their resistance, they don’t have the strength Russia has. I’m not going to condemn that.

I will condemn their war crimes, what has happened to the residential areas, hospitals, and even schools bombed by Russia is horrifying; but I won’t condemn the war in general, it would be hypocritical.

To your final point, you don’t understand what capitalism is if you think that Europe and the United States are a pole that is “just as capitalistic” as Russia and China. Like, dude, China is a massive net exporter country with a state run, centrally planned economy. Their government is fully democratic^[1] and the portion of their economy that is still in the hands of private owners is set to shrink in every successive 5 year plan. That’s not capitalism. Russia is a different story, they are capitalist and have a very reactionary government, but to say they’re “just as capitalistic” as the West is a criticism that reveals a lot of ignorance. The West has such a large concentration of capital that they were the vanguard of the first, second, and third waves of capitalist imperialism. First in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, privately led by the finance capitalists seeking to extract more resources abroad as rates of profit fell at home.^{[2] [3]} This is what led to and was epitomized by the world anti-fascist struggle, or WW2. That led to a period of US domination of world markets. Then in the 1970s came the state-led form of imperialism, carried out primarily by the United States’ unbalanced deficit spending.^[4] Lastly, now we are in a kind of third wave that is still definitely dominated by the US as the center of world finance capital. Russia has always been a secondary character in each of these phases, even the SSR.

Yeah for sure, but I think it’s a bit misleading to make it sound like only owners of capital (be it corrupt haute bourgeoisie or human trafficking capitalists) get executed. I don’t know the numbers but I’d assume since murder and drug trafficking are also punishable by death, that means most of the people executed are workers, not capitalists.

but in the case of China it’s largely for corrupt CEOs and sexual assaulters.

Isn’t drug trafficking and murder also punishable by death?

Just my own perspective, but I don’t think it’s really accurate to say that latinos of mixed descent always stop being settlers. Some are indigenous as you say, but I think most of us still count as settlers. We definitely aren’t indigenous (except in the context of the colonial relationship between our countries and the imperial core) in the strict political sense, and we live in (predominantly) unceded territory. I don’t know if there’s a single country in LatAm that isn’t a settler colony as a result of these facts, I’d probably hazard to say no but there’s a few I’m pretty ignorant about.

It’s interesting, in Puerto Rico I’ve often heard the term “North Americans” used to refer to inhabitants of the 50 states, even though North America is a region that includes other countries and even PR itself.

The whole thing where you gotta copy a sentence from Principles of Communism to join makes it pretty clear, but yeah maybe it ought to be signposted more. It seems like lemmy.ml isn’t really the “default” lemmy instance anymore, so IMHO it would come at little cost to be transparent about its ideological tilt.

Disclaimer: this is my alt account and I’m not really a .ml user, I don’t want to come across as an authority on this matter

anti-Western dictatorships are actually the good guys and all working together (somehow, despite visibly hating each other a lot of the time).

I’m from Hexbear which is generally more extreme than .ml and this idea seems absurd to me. Who is saying that e.g. Russia is a close ally of Ansarallah?

There’s another side to this. I’m originally from Hexbear and only started checking out what the experience of someone on an instance that isn’t massively defederated looks like. Lemmy.ml’s meme comms are full of tankie ragebait, but then there’s multiple .world communities that are the same, but they’re liberal ragebait. The difference is that .world’s ideology is hegemonic while .ml’s is fringe. But to someone who isn’t a liberal, looking at a Lemmy front page when .world is on that front page also has a lot of propagandistic content with little news or entertainment value; you probably just don’t realize it.

Edit: A period of time where the proletariat organizes power to eliminate the bourgeoisie in order to get rid of those previous class divides, is not authoritarianism.

Ok, so how can this be done in such a way that it is not? Were the Soviets, Cubans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Koreans, Venezuelans, Laotians, Grenadians, Nicaraguans, Tanzanians, Angolans, Zimbabweans, and Burkinabes just not quite smart enough to figure it out?

what is the difference between socialism and communism?

I remain at the same place, yet to understand how one can be a communist and not authoritarian. And I feel like you’re failing to interrogate whether your concept of authoritarianism is being used with any amount of consistency or if it’s just a club you wield against people who have positions you disagree with for other reasons.

Anarchists are cool, but they’re really only a minority of communists worldwide. Whatever you think “authoritarianism” is (as far as I’m concerned if you believe in having a state at all, then that state will exercise a monopoly on violence and will be repressive) it describes almost every single communist on planet earth. The game of splitting hairs on what does and doesn’t count as a “tankie” achieves nothing but divide a movement that has common cause.

If I’m being forthright, I’ll just go ahead and ask: if anarchists are the only communists, why even have the concept of “tankies” at all? Why not just say you’re pro-anarchist and anti-communist? From my perspective, all that the whole thing of saying that there supposedly are communists who aren’t “tankies” achieves is create two categories:

• Real people who exist in the real world and have actual, flawed political movements
• Imaginary perfect people that only exist in your head

Then because you can find real examples of the first category, you can find the flaws they have, and compare them to the ideal people in the second category. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe there really are a ton of Marxists out there that figured out the secret to having a perfectly consistent anti-authoritarian ideology that is still distinct from anarchism. If you could let me know who they are, that’d be awesome.

If you disagree that .ml are communist and insist that they’re “tankies” instead, it seems to imply that not all communists are “tankies.” However, every single communist I’m aware of is called a tankie. What does a communist who isn’t a tankie look like? Are there examples of such a thing?

Osama Bin Laden and I happen to have the same position that the end of the USA as a political entity would be a positive thing. I probably also agree with him that breathing and having meals is necessary for survival.

Are either of those propositions made less true by virtue of Osama also believing them?

It’s not legal to be critical of the state of Israel in a general sense in Germany, at least. You can be jailed for comparing Israel to the Nazis, for calling for the dissolution of the state of Israel, or for various other anti-Zionist positions. I mean, here’s Ursula Von Der Leyen telling protesters ‘in Russia you would be arrested’ while they were actively being arrested for their political position.

Meanwhile, I read criticism of Chinese foreign policy all the time. @QinShiHuangsShlong@hexbear.net, @CloutAtlas@hexbear.net, @Flyberius@hexbear.net and @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net are Hexbear accounts that are users from China who post about their criticisms of Chinese foreign policy.

Okay, thank you, I don’t know why it was necessary to drag the thread out for so many comments to get a source out of you when I was upfront with the sources I used to justify my original claims.

I’ll have to peruse through the sources cited there tomorrow, sadly I’m a little busy right now.

Okay, so it’s not a quote? It’s just information from your mind? Can you tell me what the source of the information was?

No, I’m willing to admit that what China did is really horrible and can rightfully justify putting them as Darth Vader in the meme. I’m saying that Europe doesn’t get to be Luke.