秦始皇帝

This is a lot of unsavoury assumptions you’re making about me and my knowledge of my country that I really don’t appreciate. In future a simple no would suffice.

denying that any of the bad parts exist

Could I get a list of the bad parts you see denied frequently on here?

None of you would last in NK, despite how much you glaze it.

You have so clearly never even met someone from the DPRK not to mind talked to one about what life is actually like. Honestly probably good as I’m sure they wouldn’t appreciate being hit with the torrent of chauvinist assumptions you clearly have.

4 million Americans live abroad

1%. 99% odds is really good for such low stakes assumptions.

But with this clarification, it is now clear the point is just to personally find justification to dismiss dissenting opinion.

No I just don’t like westerners diluting what it actually means to have received a true academic education in Marxism by parading around a nonsense credential from the core of anti-communism. And again I simply said I found it doubtful it was studied properly, as in with full context without some sort of at a bare minimum compatible left twist to at worst some capitalist bootlicking and NED tier nonsense added in “to give both sides” or such.

Which I’m not particularly interested in engaging with

Would hit harder if you had any engagement to speak of rather than stating vague generalities. You could have given some depth to what you studied and how etc show some bonafides yknow instead of dancing around the point so that you could run away feigning offense at someone making an assumption that is 99% precise.

Not really the wild assumption you’re attempting to make it out to be.

we have specific Constitutional rights

You’re clearly Amerikan the vast majority of which have never left Amerika. My doubt in the proper study of Marxism-Leninism in academic settings also extends to every US client state (all of Europe including the UK, Japan etc.).

I’m very well aware of it and have studied it in an academic setting

I don’t wish to be dismissive I simply find it exceedingly hard to believe that in Amerika land of McCarthyism home of the red scare it is possible to achieve anything even close to a proper study of Marxism-Leninism in an academic setting.

Nobody deserves shit. I made the choices I made and got to where I am.

Individualist brain poison.

You are still confusing two different questions: whether authority exists, and whether authority serves oppression or liberation.

Authority does not stop being authority because it is used for a good end. A shovel used to dig irrigation channels and a shovel used to murder someone are still both shovels. The moral and political content changes, but the object itself does not.

So when I say collective decision-making can be authoritarian toward the minority who disagree, I am not saying it is politically equivalent to a kingdom. Obviously a peasant commune, a workers’ council, or a revolutionary party has different class content from a monarchy. The difference is in form, class basis, and whose interests are being served. But if a collective decision is binding, and if the minority must obey it, then authority exists.

That is precisely Engels’ point. He is not claiming that all authority is identical, harmless, or above criticism. He is arguing that anti-authoritarians often pretend they have abolished authority when they have only renamed it.

The real distinction is not “authority versus no authority.” The real distinction is authority in whose hands, serving which class, under what material conditions, and for what purpose.

A kingdom concentrates authority in a dynastic ruling class. A revolutionary collective uses authority against exploiters, saboteurs, invaders, landlords, capitalists, and sometimes against backward or individualist tendencies among the people themselves. These are not the same political phenomenon, but both involve the social relation that is authority.

A village deciding collectively to redistribute land is exercising authority over landlords. Workers seizing and planning production are exercising authority over capital. A revolutionary army maintaining discipline is exercising authority over its own members. Public health measures, food distribution, irrigation, education, defense, and production all require binding decisions. Calling this “coordination” instead of authority does not change the relation.

Also the western anarchist idea of a “political class” or “administrative class” is a delusion that does away with the basis of what constitutes a class. A class is not simply “people who make administrative decisions.” A class is rooted in relation to the means of production: ownership or non-ownership, control over production, and the ability to privately appropriate surplus. A landlord, capitalist, slave-owner, or imperialist bourgeoisie is a class in that sense. A delegate, cadre, militia commander, village official, or administrator is not automatically a class just because they exercise authority.

Can administrators become separated from the masses? Yes. Can bureaucracy become a real danger? Yes. Can a socialist state degenerate and restore capitalism? Yes. But this does not mean administrators or politicians constitute a separate class unto themselves. It means that administrative and political positions can be captured by, subordinated to, or made to serve other class lines. The class character of these positions is determined by the social relations they reproduce: whose rule they enforce, whose interests they serve, and whether they help maintain or transform the existing relations of production. In a proletarian state, administrative authority is supposed to serve proletarian rule; under capitalism, it serves bourgeois rule. The position itself is not a class. “Political class” is just a vague moral category for “people with authority I dislike,” avoiding the real analysis of what class power they express, what function they perform, and what social relations they defend.

MLs do not make authority meaningless. We simply do not treat the word itself as something to fear or evade. Authority remains authority whether it is reactionary or liberatory; what changes is its class content, purpose, and historical function. It is a mistake is to pretend that authority disappears once it is exercised collectively, democratically, or in service of emancipation. It does not. It is still authority, but authority directed toward a different end and grounded in different social relations. MLs do not feel the need to constantly rename liberatory authority as “coordination,” “delegation,” or “justified force” in order to make it acceptable.

Marxists are more blunt: authority means the ability to impose a decision, compel action, enforce discipline, or subordinate one will to another in definite social relations. That can be oppressive or liberatory depending on class content and historical role.

A landlord’s authority over peasants is oppressive. Peasants’ authority over landlords during land reform is liberatory. A capitalist’s authority in the factory is exploitation. Workers’ authority over production is emancipation. Imperialist authority over oppressed nations is reactionary. Revolutionary authority against imperialism is necessary.

Ah ok this makes it clear it is not Engels who has a misunderstanding but you.

But surely everyone can tell the difference between, say, a kingdom, and collective decisionmaking.

Obviously but the difference is not that of authority but of form. The collective decision will be just as authoritarian on the minority who disagree as the kingdom is to those not integrated into the power structure.

should sooner listen to the anarchist arguments, which also criticize the inherent authoritarianism in capitalism. One doesn’t even need to be an anarchist to engage with that.

The anarchist definition of hierarchy (and thus authority) constantly shifts to accommodate whatever hierarchy anarchists currently want to defend as “not really hierarchy” or “justified authority” or “expertise” or “coordination.” Parent and child, doctor and patient, teacher and student, elected militia command, workplace coordination, revolutionary defense, public health measures, collective discipline: suddenly these are not hierarchy, because even anarchists know society cannot function without structured authority.

Engels’ On Authority essay, which is famously known for showing a complete lack of understanding for what authority actually means

Care to expand? Maybe give a more accurate definition?

It’s just a matter of fact that they helped invade Poland

You believe this but it is in fact not a fact in the slightest. Again the soviets only entered “Poland” after the government had already fled and the army collapsed, they also only entered areas of Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus that were under occupation by Poland from the interwar period. Not to mind it only came to this as the western powers and chiefly Poland refused to allow the soviets passage through Poland and a real alliance to fight Hitler in Czechoslovakia, with Poland preferring to ally with Hitler in attacking Czechoslovakia and the western powers preferring appeasement.

Also on the talks Slavs were one of the main “untermench” laid out in MeinKamf, there was never going to be any sort of real pact or alliance there both sides knew this. The Molotov Ribbentrop was a temporary nonaggression pact signed by the soviets after every attempt to form an anti Nazis alliance had failed and every other power had signed pacts with Hitler. It’s goal was to delay the inevitable long enough for the Soviets to industrialise after the civil war and to move the key factories beyond the Urals. This plan was clearly vindicated by history as the soviets dealt 80% of the Nazi casualties and the factories beyond the Urals allowed a quick counter offensive once the sieges of Stalingrad had been won and Moscow and Kursk had been held.

I’m not American. I’m Chinese. You should look into operation gladio, radio free Europe, the NED, etc if you think European countries are free of American influence in regards to Stalin and socialism/communism in general.

You should read Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend — Domenico Losurdo. I found it well sourced and logical throughout. It might help you realise a lot of what you “know” about Stalin isn’t truly accurate.

No. When Soviet troops entered eastern Poland on September 17th 1939, the Polish state had already collapsed. The government fled to Romania September 15th. Warsaw was already burning. The army was broken. The lands the USSR moved into were also not Poland proper but territories Poland had seized and occupied by force in 1919-1921 from Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania. Moving in to secure this land saved millions from extermination.

Recommending the works of a Hitler loving rapist and colonial enforcer is definitely a choice not to mind the fact that his writing is shit.

I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler.
— George Orwell

That makes sense, and then you look at Europe and realise the issues at hand are systemic, caused by material conditions and bourgeois democratic electoralism is never going to fix those issues.

Much of Europe already uses ranked choice or proportional voting, yet remains austerity-ridden and sliding toward the far right because it is still under the dictatorship of capital. The voting mechanism is secondary to the concrete material conditions: capital’s imperative to accumulate, the commodification of labor, and the state’s role as an instrument of class rule. Until that dictatorship is overthrown, electoral reform is rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship.

The core contradictions at hand are:

Socialized production versus private appropriation:workers collectively create value, but capitalists expropriate the surplus

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall: as organic composition of capital rises, profitability declines, forcing capital to seek new fixes

Overaccumulation and underconsumption: capital produces more than can be profitably sold, leading to crisis, layoffs, and austerity

The contradiction between capital’s global mobility and labor’s relative immobility, which fuels a race to the bottom in wages and protections.

As imperialism declines (neocolonial extraction becomes costlier, interimperialist rivalry intensifies, and the Global South resists outright plunder) capital can no longer rely on external superprofits to offset domestic falling rates of profit. The response is internal repression: austerity to slash social wages, union-busting to weaken labor power, surveillance to preempt dissent, and the normalization of authoritarian governance. This is capital’s logical reaction to crisis.

This dynamic mirrors Weimar Germany: economic crisis, delegitimized liberal parties, and a bourgeoisie that ultimately backed fascism to crush the organized working class and restore “order” for capital. Today’s far-right surge is the same phenomenon: capital’s emergency management when consent can no longer be manufactured through bourgeois democracy alone.

Voting under these conditions is not a path to liberation; it is a ritual that legitimizes the managers of decline. For voting to matter, you must overthrow the dictatorship of capital and reach the synthesis of these contradictions: a revolutionary transformation that socializes production, abolishes exploitation, and builds a state that serves human need, not profit. Only then does political power and thereby voting become meaningful.

You can dislike it all you want doesn’t make it less true.

Unfortunately I don’t think ranked choice voting will save you. You need to clear the board so to speak and get some options that actually represent people over corporate interests.

Ah yes because government-manufactured numbers hold value— you must think Russia is a democracy too, no?

Strawman. Also more racism.

You are a racist.