It’s also not applied at a national level, but in some areas, from what I’ve read, and is used largely against companies that try to skirt the law.

The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Moreover, the economy in the PRC is socialist, with public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.

I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.

The working classes in socialist countries are the ones dictating the state and its direction.

Why wouldn’t she? Imperialism is a bipartisan project.

You never engaged with the points I made, though. I engaged clearly with what you were saying, then you ran off to the Nazi bar to make a post about me. You can certainly understand how that makes you come across, right? Why would anyone want to work with someone that behaves like that?

I never said I was unwilling to take an evening to vote, the part where I disagreed with you was in your over-emphasis on voting as a legitimate vehicle for change. If you truly believe voting is important, rather than a “might as well,” then you aren’t learning from centuries of leftist struggles that inform us that this is a dead end. Running to an anti-communist Nazi bar after you got banned tells me how you actually feel about lefties.

This is all vibes-based. Explain exactly what you mean.

To be clear, Harris would not have stopped fascism, fascism is rising because imperialism is decaying and forcing austerity inward to compensate.

Can you elaborate? No, their populations are absolutely not in the same situation. Their social surplus is dedicated to fulfilling the needs of their people, not extraordinary profits for the few.

The PRC, Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, and Venezuela are already socialist and are not controlled by an international pedophile cabal.

There are existing socialist states, where public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes are in control of the state: the PRC, Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, and Venezuela. We’ve indeed learned time and time again that socialism can and does exist.

What is the “global authoritarian parasite class?” Classes are specific relations to production and distribution. Are you referring to the top of the capitalist class, the imperialists in the US and Europe? I’m not sure how that relates to the meme. This meme is specifically about how liberals use terms like “authoritarian” to discredit existing socialist states, without an analysis of what that authority is used for and how it’s different from capitalist states.

I’m aware and am referring to the meme as well, as we all are in this discussion.

But that’s not what we are discussing here, we are discussing socialist states where public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and the working classes control the state.

But in reality, the workers are not in control of the state

Can you justify this statement?

NATO is a platform for the United States to project power on the world stage.

• Mark Rutte, General Secretary of NATO.

?

Voting in elections may be the most popular way, but it’s the least effective in capitalism. Organizing, unionizing, striking, and more are far more effective.

We’ve been through this before, so I’m not sure why you’re repeating this misunderstanding. Administration is not a class, just like “intellectual” is not a class. In socialist states, the working classes do control the state, and this is expressed by the working classes being the primary beneficiaries of social labor. The Greeks had an entirely different mode of production and distribution, so not sure why you bring them up.

You keep saying “word salad,” but that doesn’t really follow.

In what way is the interconnection of production and distribution increasing? Why is that contradictory with the concentration of profits into fewer and fewer hands? Our systems of production and distribution have been getting increasingly complex since the middle ages and yet the concentration of wealth has certainly ebbed and flowed in time. In what way are you suggesting one affects the other?

A contradiction is the unity and struggle of opposing tendencies. Using the example of production and distribution increasing in interconnectivity (a process made certain by the growth of capital outward, turning all non-capitalist production into new capital ripe for production and appropriation), this is what creates the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. This creates a struggle between the international working classes and the imperialists, as production is socialized but the profits are still privately appropriated. Negating this concentration means socializing ownership.

This is not a profound statement. It has literally always been the case since society has existed. The system of imperialism in the city states of antiquity died and gave way to the imperialism of the classical empires, which gave way to the imperialism of the feudal monarchies, and then the nation states, and the colonial empires, and so on to the capitalist economic imperialism of today.

This isn’t really true, though. Roman imperialism dying away gave rise to feudalism, not to imperialism again. Imperialism has only really developed as an incredibly high level of development of a given mode of production.

Post-imperial? I doubt that and you have provided no evidence that that would be the case. It seems to me that the economic imperialism of the Western nation states is in transition to some kind of fascist corporate techno-feudalist imperialism.

As the global south develops, and socialist countries like China continue to grow and develop, the method of unequal exchange is being undermined. Western fascism is them bringing austerity home to cover for the loss in gains from imperialism, and the waves of wars to open new markets is an attempt to rescue imperialism.

And again, how does this relate to the distribution of wealth and systems of production of distribution? It’s not big and it’s not clever to say they are related because the fact that everything is related everything else is basically axiomatic of the system of analysis. You have to point out how.

As capitalism grows, rates of profit gradually tend to fall. This is fought by raising absolute profits, which requires growth, which results in outward expansion. This forces countries into economic inter-dependence and trade, at the barrel of a gun, but this interconnection alao provides the basis of futute cooperation.

That’s just, like, your opinion, man.

You didn’t explain that.

Which answers, exactly? Because the answer always seems to be the downfall of capitalism and to be replaced by socialism and then communism. And when that continues to not happen, the response always seems to be “but it totes will, eventually.” That isn’t analysis, that’s a teleological belief.

I don’t follow, socialism is rising, the largest economy in the world by PPP is socialist. The reason we believe socialism is the next step is because capitalism has already socialized production, it just keeps the profits for the few. This creates a heightened class struggle that can only get worse as time goes by. We still have to overthrow capitalism and imperialism, but this is a process that is compelled by capitalism’s own centralization and monopolization. There’s no such thing as a static, unchanging system.

I explained up here how it’s a contradiction:

The contradiction is between the increasing interconnection of production and distribution, and the concentration of the profits of this system into fewer and fewer hands. The old system of imperialism is dying away, while the interconnected, post-imperialist world is rising, trying to overcome the old. The interconnection of production and distrubution creates the elements of the downfall of imperialism as the global south develops.

On Contradiction isn’t word salad, and dialectical materialism isn’t Kool-Aid. Dialectical materialism isn’t a formula to impose on the world, but a tool for us to see where to look when analyzing existing phenomena. It doesn’t give answers, but it helps us find them.