this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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Internal contradictions are akshually totally good and not evidence of ideological impurity!
It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.
"Ideological purity" first off, isn't really a thing in Marxism-Leninism, because Marxism-Leninism explicitly calls for adapting policies to specific material conditions. To the extent that people have tried to pursue an "ideologically pure" version of it, it generally hasn't worked so well. The Great Leap Forward, for example.
Now, one would think that China learning from its past mistakes and adapting policy in such a way that 700 million people get lifted out of extreme poverty would be seen as a good thing. And one would think that if someone didn't see this move as a good thing, then they must prefer China's pre-reform policies when they didn't have billionaires and a stock market. Yet somehow, y'all seem to just blindly hate China regardless of what kind of policy they implement.
It kinda seems like what we are dealing with is an anticommunist ideological framework that can transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence, a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
As an anarchist, I dont hate China specifically, I just hate states in general. So as long as the chinese state doesnt implement policies to abolish itself, I will always have something to critize.
You understand that if China were to do that today, it would immediately be vassalized, neoliberalized, and plundered by the imperial core, just as the dissolved Soviet states were 35 years ago, right? That life expectancies would plummet and poverty would become rampant?
Until imperialism (“the highest stage of capitalism”) is dismantled, socialist states are necessary. Basically, nearly everyone has to reach socialism before anyone can reach communism, because capitalism, as long as it continues to exist, will never stop trying to expand. You can’t wish your way immediately to the end-goal. You will surely fail.
Well, the funny thing about that is that Chinese state has actually done that. Or Mao did, anyway.
See, Mao feared that the government was going to follow the same reformist path as the USSR, so he issued a series of declarations saying that the government had been infiltrated by bourgeois elements, that the people of China had a "right to rebel," and finally calling on them to "Bombard the Headquarters."
These declarations created a period of violence and disorder known as the Cultural Revolution, where independent, student-led militias known as Red Guards formed and started fighting whoever they suspected of being counter-revolutionary. With no command structure, they often wound up fighting each other, when they weren't committing atrocities.
Ironically, all this did was discredit this approach and convince a lot of people of the necessity of the reforms they were meant to prevent, and of the central government.
Of course, there were another time in Chinese history where China lacked a strong central government. After the fall of the Qing, there was no central government at all. This is generally referred to as the warlord period, and it sucked so bad that the communists and nationalists put aside their differences to try to end it. Unfortunately, China remained largely decentralized, which allowed the much smaller but more centralized nation of Japan to invade and kill tens of millions of people.
If you don't read theory/study history, it's easy to just rail against authority and centralization from an idealist perspective, but if you actually study China's history and conditions, you'll find reasons for every path they've chosen.
You are talking as if the choices made are the only reasonable ones regarding the things that previously happened.
They largely were. If you disagree it would be extremely interesting to get your analysis of each major turning point in modern Chinese history (from the fall of the Qing through the cultural revolution and the modern reform period) and explain what the better choices that should have been made are given the material conditions and constraints of the times.
Yes?
At least your honest that you're driven by a hate of concepts instead of a curiosity driven by compassion.
Being against states is compassion. Because there is nothing compassionate in police action, centralization of power and borders.
Nothing compassionate? Really? You can't see any way that conditions could necessitate a police force? For example, a population of hundreds of millions of deeply traumatized people that commit acts of violence against each other as a symptom of their trauma which then perpetuates the trauma and threatens to subsume all of society in an arms race of psychopathy? You think you couldn't organize a police force to manage that situation from a position of compassion?
How about the compassion of borders? Without borders, your people can't justify defense against violent incursion from entire countries organized around sociopathic violence by deeply traumatized people. Those people won't even share resources with you if you don't have borders. You don't see a reason to potentially participate in that system from a position of compassion?
I'm sure your world is so much easier having a purity test like that, but it's not useful in solving the problem of sociopathic self destructive world systems.
I love that your standard is ideological purity! It's like you're a textbook case of what not to do.