It exists, in a functional nation atleast, to ensure stability. You can't just allow criminals who would harm others to walk around freely. So we have to rely on imperfect systems that sometimes can get it wrong. We take efforts to make them get it wrong less often of course, but it's just something that happens.

This is why we have trials, and we treat a conviction of a crime as confirmation that someone DID do that crime not because it is correct 100% of the time, but because it is more often than not correct, and it is the only mechanism we have to determine someones innocence or guilt.

Socially, you are right that many people treat the justice system this way, but even a hazy familiarity with leftist criticism of the justice system would tell you that for many decades this has not been the only way it has been used and conceptualized. See, some people are uncomfortable with the idea of not knowing things for certain and need to have a final decree on what is true even if it's not really certain, but you can and indeed should treat the justice system as a way of coming to the best answer that we can determine for the moment, keeping in mind that it might be wrong and indeed we might discover a more correct answer later. That's a major reason why the death penalty is simply bad in most cases, because you can free someone who got a life sentence wrongfully, but you can't un-execute someone. Why not just keep them alive? It's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things (famously, it is more expensive in many cases to kill them), and even if they never leave the prison, they might still have the chance to do something productive. Are you really that upset to be denied the satisfaction of a hanging when it's not even a more effective deterrent anyway?

It's totally possible to have a functional justice system without playing pretend that things are more certain than they are.

Personally i think that your the one being aesthetically communist while refuting any system that actually works to empower the workers.

I think China has lots of good feature. Do you know about their 12345 hotline? That's pretty cool.

Let me guess your a big fan of european socialist communes that ultimately failed?

I, like Marx, am a fan of the Paris Commune, but I think that I like it less than he did. I don't know which other specific communes you are referring to, since I assume you don't mean literally any European commune. I'm not a big fan of the ones in Spain, I think they helped Franco win. I think this is a weird thing to bring up and shows how you're very ready to do what you falsely accused me of by wildly extrapolating views than I never hinted at and do not hold. If there's some specific bugbear other than Paris that I can help you with though, feel free to let me know.

Certain westerners tend to love socialism as long as it doesnt actually threaten capitalism in the slightest.

I like the Paris Commune because I see it as part of a productive, revolutionary project. I generally don't like communes because I see them as borderline-nihilistic life rafts at best. I don't begrudge the people in them usually, I just would discourage aiming one's activism in that direction unless the commune is meant to be a base of activism because I believe the point needs to be the destruction of imperialism and capitalist society in favor of socialism.

But as soon as an AES state is successful they're "Evil Authoritarians" lol.

I never said such a thing about China and I don't use that word because I think it's thought-terminating. I like plenty of things in contemporary China that liberals would call "authoritarian" though. For example, the Firewall was a great idea and they should maintain it, though of course the eventual aspiration is to take it down.

It's just a coincidence that your views on China allign with US foreign policy interests right?

This is the one that really got to me. I don't think that I said anything to hint in this direction and certainly don't believe it. If you want to say that both I and the US State Department agree because we both say that China isn't a perfect beacon of human flourishing then sure, you got me, I'm basically a white supremacist. I don't think the State Department is interested in China combating revisionism and spreading revolution, which are two things I would like to see from it that I don't expect to ever happen, but I don't think that distinction matters to you.

But what really bugs me is that I think China, even as a revisionist state, is still the greatest historically progressive force in the world right now, and I very much do want to see it prevail over the US. I believe the term the kids use is "critical support."

Couldn't possibly be because they've purposefully cultivated that view among their people in order to support their own goals, and keep actual leftist sentiment under control, and focused on ineffective means of combating capitalism right? So keep on despising every country that is Americas enemy for being authoritarian. It's such an easy position to hold when your in the west I'm sure nobody gives you push back on it. Republicans, Democrats, Liberals, etc would all agree with you. China bad.

You know, the irony here is that you've fallen into a much more comfortable position, believing that there is a state that is Marxist superpower on the rise to be the global hegemon and lead to world communism. Yeah, you are being contrary to the neoliberal establishment, but that doesn't mean you aren't ultimately falling back on something that feels very secure, and I wouldn't blame you if that was why, since it was part of why for me. Still, I do not presume to know.

DPRK bad

I think it's funny that you jump to this one, because the DPRK (while historically progressive and worth supporting over the RoK!) is so non-Marxist that it's not even revisionist. They openly reject dialectical materialism, embrace the explicitly permanent perpetuation of class society, and hardly even meet traditional ideas of what socialism in general is, even in what they profess, unless you use a standard so lax that it almost includes the European socdem states that we both hate (though the DPRK is historically progressive and they are not because of their respective relationships to global imperialism). I can elaborate quite a lot on this (it's something I've already talked a fair bit about on this account, so you can also look up my past comments), and I can just as easily argue against the various myths the west smears them with.