This meme is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. While 98% of self-described anarchists are LARPers, anarchists do exist.

their houses and businesses

Of course they worry about wealth redistribution, they’re wealthy. That’s why the capitalist class will do literally anything in their vast power to crush socialism.

Yes. I’m not disagreeing with you; I’m just highlighting what a unique moment it was, because most people think that was “normal,” and that we can get back to it, but we never can.

You seem very excited about this subject, maybe you should calm down.

“You are an emotional soyjack and I am a rational chad.”

Redditors, man.

We had a middle class when taxes on the wealthy were 50-90 percent. Unless we bring that back, the ‘economy’ is bullshit.

If you were white and male it was a good deal for one generation. That was an anomalous moment in world history that will never come again. The US was the only major power in the world that didn’t have its productive capacity blown to smithereens in WWII, unions were comparatively strong, and the USSR posed a serious ideological threat to capitalism which caused the bourgeoisie to give (temporary) concessions.

Nor are you, but I am an admin here.

Some of the economic problems were self created because many leftists have zero formal economic backgrounds

That may well be, but at the same time, most economists in the world have a garbage education in neoclassical economics and carry neoliberal brain worms.

Biden literally framed it as “democracy vs autocracy.” As if the US has ever been anything close to a democracy.

The results are usually bad when you don’t kowtow to the imperial core, but they’re also likely to be even worse for the majority of people if you do. That’s why monopoly capitalism has to be fought, if we ever want better outcomes to even be possible.

Both can be true at the same time.

They can also not be, brainiac. Despite what Redditors may think, vagueposting is not an argument.

You also have no evidence of “debt-trap diplomacy, undermining local sovereignty,” or “undermining labor movements.”

Their evidence is that the TV told them this many times over years, enough times that it’s true.

Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: requested one app per comment

Please don’t bother mods with piddlycomplaints like this.

Russia isn’t imperialist, it has no colonies nor neocolonies

Yeah, tell that to Crimea, the Donbas

Are you kidding me? The people in Crimea and the Donbas wanted to join Russia, to protect them from Ukraine, which had been killing them since 2014.

• Reuters, 2014: Leaked audio reveals embarrassing U.S. exchange on Ukraine, EU
• Leaked recording between Nuland and Pyatt: audio | transcript
• Counterpunch, 2014: US Imperialism and the Ukraine Coup
• BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
• Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
• Consortium News, 2015: The Mess That Nuland Made Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s regime change without weighing the likely consequences.
• The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
• The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
• WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
• Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
• The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
• openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
• Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
• Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
• Consortium News, 2023: The West’s Sabotage of Peace in Ukraine Former Israeli Prime Minister Bennett’s recent comments about getting his mediation efforts squashed in the early days of the war adds more to the growing pile of evidence that Western powers are intent on regime change in Russia.
• Internationalist 360°, 2022–2024: History of Fascism in Ukraine: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV
• NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide

China is a kinder imperialist, but they are using largely the same playbook that the west used in Africa, including debt-trap diplomacy, undermining local sovereignty and regulation, and undermining labor movements.

The Atlantic, 2021: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth

What is China doing to undermine local sovereignty or labor movements in Africa?

The current real estate crisis

What “current” real estate crisis? The Chinese state intentionally popped the real estate bubble over a year ago, making the capitalists eat their losses.

• Reuters: China Evergrande ordered to liquidate in landmark moment for crisis-hit sector
• Bloomberg: China Reiterates Stance That Homes Are Not for Speculation
• CNBC: China’s housing minister says real estate developers must go bankrupt if necessary

  “We will scale up the building and supply of government-subsidized housing and improve the basic systems for commodity housing to meet people’s essential need for a home to live in and their different demands for better housing,” an English-language version of the report said.

Compare that to Obama, who bailed out the private banks at the expense of people with home mortgages, banks that knowingly wrote those bad mortgages. Michael Hudson, 2023: Why the Bank Crisis isn’t Over

The financial sector is the core of Democratic Party support, and the party leadership is loyal to its supporters. As President Obama told the bankers who worried that he might follow through on his campaign promises to write down mortgage debts to realistic market valuations in order to enable exploited junk-mortgage clients to remain in their homes, “I’m the only one between you [the bankers visiting the White House] and the mob with the pitchforks,” that is, his characterization of voters who believed his “hope and change” patter talk.

“ghost cities” are a pretty obvious example.

Reuters, 2015: The myth of China’s ghost cities

Wherever you’re getting your information from, it’s dogshit.

Well that was a lot of credulous Lemmy users. I should spend less time debunking imperial talking points and more time selling these people bridges. I’m leaving money on the table.

Some of them even fired up their dusty old alt accounts to vote multiple times.

no u

They’d probably have named imperial core “socialist” nordic states.

❤️Through the power of love ❤️

What are your real-world examples—bourgeois “democracies”? If it’s so easy, why hasn’t it happened?

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism — not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience — could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not.

Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency — which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack.

One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government.

Stalin has been dead for over 70 years, and “tankie” is nothing but a terminally-online pejorative for anyone left of Sanders. Maybe spend less time worrying about people’s takes on Stalin. He was neither Jesus nor was he Lucifer, despite what a century of anticommunist propaganda has said about him.

1. They have a “tankie”-punching community, but we’re the brigaders?
2. That comm is way more censorious than we’ve ever been. Wrongthink is an instant permaban.