this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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You told me you reject existing socialist projects, and we have not seen any viable alternative demonstrated in over a century. So, yes, you very clearly are suggesting a magical alternative here.
And no, I don't believe there is one correct way to enact a transitional period. This is just a straw man you're making to avoid engaging with what's being said to you. What I believe is that there is one DEMONSTRATED way to do this, and that nobody has shown a viable alternative. If there was a workable alternative then we could discuss it. It does not exist.
You want to come back to your original point of rejecting real working socialism that's tangibly improving people's lives in China in favor of some mythical idea that you're evidently unable to articulate. Go troll elsewhere.
Not all of them. Just the state-capitalist ones which claim to be socialist. Do you condone everything done in the name of socialism? Because that's not possible with a coherent worldview. You'd have to both condone the Kronstadt rebellion, as well as it's crushing. (Even if you claim that Kronstadt was a ploy of the whites: the official reasoning was a socialist one)
That's not true. Anarchist Catalonia was less than 100 years ago. Rojava and the Zapatistas still exist as well.
Also, there's a materialist reason, why so many countries imitate the Bolsheviki.
Then why do you reject critique of the chinese government with the claim that it must be necessary?
The only reason you claim that is because you ignore every non-Leninist/Maoist project and also ignore all the states where ML/MLMism failed. Why is the soviet union supposedly viable, but anarchist catalonia isn't. The success rate of Marxism-Leninism and it's offshoots is less that 10%.
No. I've stated my original point several times: the images on the left are eco-virtue signaling, which can be found in capitalist states. If you wanted to show how the PRC improved the lives of its' denizens (which I don't even disagree with - but so has Sweden), you've chosen bad examples.
If you want to see green LEDs in subway stations, you don't have to go to China. The thing you've posted is existing in bourgeois states. You've failed to show how "actual existing socialism" is improving one's life. If given these two options (green LEDs vs. concrete hell), I'll take neither.
Maybe I lack context. If you think I'm wrong, you could focus on my original critique (before you defended China against phantom attacks) and explain what I'm seeing on the left. But I guess that any example you give will have an equivalent in an openly capitalist state.
You're just doing sophistry here. The whole idea of state capitalism is a bit of a misnomer. It basically says that while you have state owned enterprise, the internal capitalist relations within it remain largely the same. While that’s true, there is a fundamental difference here. Capitalism is a system where people who own capital hire workers to exploit there labor with the purpose of increasing their capital. The goal of capitalist enterprise is to create wealth for the owners with any social benefits being strictly incidental. On the other hand, the purpose of state enterprise is to provide social value. Workers in state owned companies are producing things that the society needs. They are working for their own benefit and those of others around them. Therefore, the nature of work itself is fundamentally different from actual capitalism. And it's very obviously a huge step forward from capitalism.
What I condone is improving people's lives and moving towards a communist society. This is what existing socialist projects like China, Cuba, DPRK, and Vietnam are currently doing while people like you bloviate endlessly living under the boot of capital.
The point is that these projects don't survive and they don't scale. This is what inevitably happens to these approaches https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/zapatistas-declare-dissolution-of-autonomous-communities-in-chiapas/
Kinda of hilarious to point to a video from somebody who doesn't even understand what a dictatorship actually is. Really not helping your case there. Having a single party simply means that the society as a whole agreed on a single collective vision. There can be plenty of debate within the framework of a party on how to actually implement this vision. Meanwhile, any class society will be a dictatorship of the class that holds power. Given that socialist society would arise from an existing capitalist society, it would necessarily inherit existing class relationships. What changes is which class holds power. That's the difference between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Finally, the notion of dictatorship in a sense of a single person running things is infantile beyond belief. People who peddle this notion are the ones who should truly be ashamed of themselves. As Anna Louise Strong puts it in This Soviet World:
I reject the critique of the Chinese government because it's baseless. What I said is that I don't believe there's one specific way to enact the transitional period. But it's very clear that there ARE proven ways to do so. The Chinese way is one that has proven itself to work. People claiming they can do better have to demonstrate how that works. And not by showing us failed experiments that are in the dust of history.
You're right, I ignore fantasies and past failures. A rational person is able to look at the results and decide whether approach works or not based on that.
They're not. China is literally at the forefront of clean energy, mass reforestation, and desert greening. The images very much embody what PRC is actually doing. Enjoy doing your preaching while ignoring actual human progress I guess.
I’d rather not get involved in another anarchism vs. state socialism debate, but I find @Prunebutt@slrpnk.net’s attitude obnoxious. While I do question if a people’s republic is the best possible way to go, dismissing the people’s republics as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘failures’ is a crappy, oversimplified conclusion that wilfully disregards the enormous gains that the working masses made in them.
Not to mention that this paskudnyak is being needlessly hostile: I trust that you despise capitalism as much as I do, so there’d be no need for me to behave smugly or condescendingly to you just because of your anarchism scepticism and preference for the people’s republics.
Anyway, like I said I’d rather not get into an argument. I just want to tell you that I sympathize with your frustrations and we don’t have to be enemies simply because we’re socialists who have different perspectives on state machinery. We can handle our disagreements respectfully.
Indeed, there is nothing wrong with principled criticism of existing socialist states. They have plenty of problems just as any human society does. But it's the whole dismissal of these societies from people who live under capitalism that makes the whole conversation farcical.
And obviously we should continue to explore different approaches, but we should be doing that empirically. We need to honestly look at history and ask why certain ways of organizing tend to succeed and others tend to fail. If we don't like the current approaches, then it's fine to try and improve on them, and to do better going forward.
I also find there's this false notion that if you acknowledge that a particular approach works say in China than it means wanting to transplant it directly to you own country. That obviously can't happen because Chinese approach is rooted in the history, culture, and the material conditions of China. What we can do is analyze it and understand it to see what aspects of it could be useful. If we ever manage to start building socialism in the west, it will necessarily be rooted in western tradition of thought. It's not going to looks like USSR or Vietnam, or PRC. It's going to be something new and unique. The existing successes are there for us to learn from, and if we can improve on what they've done that's all the better.
I'm just gonna ignore your campist gish-gallopping if you don't even bother to skim the video. You're not interested in engaging in critique that contradicts your worldview. Just like people in a cult would do.
You still failed to explain what we're actually seeing on the left. It's visually indistinguishable from green capitalism, so you failed in using a picture to promote whatever the PRC is doing.
TIL tha green LEDs will safe the environment. /s
Edit: Lol, you posted the first thing you found when you googled Zapatista dissolution, didn't you? The Zapatistas restructured their autonomous approach. They didn't abandon autonomy. They still exist, therefore they didn't fail.
I love how you just assume here that you're making some novel arguments here. As if I'm not familiar with them. Pretty rich of you to call other people campist too given the whole context for this discussion.
Except I literally did explain this in the very comment you're replying to. I didn't ask you to watch a video because I'm actually able to articulate my thoughts like an adult with a fully developed brain:
I love how you completely ignored this and just proceeded to regurgitate the talking points you memorized like a parrot.
Oh look more dishonesty from a troll. Let's look at what I actually said:
Weird how you choose not to engage with that.
Oh yeah they did restructure to make their system more centralized and to add *gasp* hierarchy because they're not anarchists or zealots. They were actually able to honestly look at what they were doing acknowledge the problems and move in a direction that makes more sense. Precisely the thing western anarchists are unable to do.
To add onto the Zapatista point, even actual self-described anarchists like in Catalonia developed vertical organizational elements during the Spanish Civil War out of necessity, and were more effective for it. Their reluctance to do so at first actually hindered them. Contrast that to the Red Army, which started off more horizontal but adapted much quicker, and we can see that the Red Army's success in the Russian Civil War can be partially attributed to their flexibility when encountering new material conditions.
Right, hierarchies are a necessary tool for managing complex systems. Hence why they continue to show up both in nature and human organizations. They're not some inherent evil as anarchists see them, but merely a tool for creating abstractions and partitioning work. At this point, I'm convinced that anarchism has been sanctioned and promoted as a legitimate form of dissent within the western system precisely because of its opposition to hierarchies. It ensures that anarchist movements never actually grow and become a real threat to centralized state power.
I think it's a bit of that, but also more nuanced. Gramsci points out that anarchism does not necessarily have a solid class basis, though it's common among classes like the petite bourgeoisie, it also attracts proletarians and other classes opposed to the present bourgeois state. After socialist revolution, proletarian anarchists overwhelmingly side with the socialists, as the new proletarian state no longer oppresses them, while petite bourgeois, bourgeois, etc. anarchists continue to oppose the new socialist state.
Anarchism is, essentially, loosely linked by the desire for class freedom against an oppressive class state, not by a proletarian world outlook like Marxism-Leninism. The Russian revolution largely mapped out how Gramsci described, with "Red anarchists" joining the soviets, leaving the remainder to be seen as the new totality of anarchists that occasionally fought the soviets. This form of historiography hides the actual left unity that happened, the working together of the majority of anarchists with the Marxists, and pit them as bitter enemies when class interests brought the majority of anarchists together with the Marxists.
That's fascinating and insightful, thanks for sharing
No problem!
I'd argue that people end up gravitating towards anarchism because they desire personal agency, and I would also argue because western society conditions people to become atomized and see things from individualistic perspective. So these small organizations and flat structures become appealing from that perspective. There's also an aspect of defeatism to it as well where people can't really see the system being challenged and they start focusing on carving out something for themselves within it, like making a commune. It's not about broader liberation, it's just a way to solve a personal problem.
And this explains the phenomenon of anarchists adapting to a socialist state once others do the heavy lifting of creating it. The new social conditions are more conductive towards making communes and other types of organizations anarchists desire. So, in a way the hostility anarchists have towards Marxism-Leninism is itself strange. If they're willing to live under a capitalist system and try to carve out spaces for themselves within it, then doing so under a socialist system would surely be easier.
Yep, I largely agree with this assessment, with the caveat that these days many anarchists do actually side with MLs, preferring to push for anarchism under socialism than under capitalism.
Haha, I just updated the comment right after you replied to note that. I very much agree with you.
Haha, fair! Agreed!