She’s got an excuse for everything. They’re shit excuses to historical materialists, but they’re good enough for corporate social media platforms. She should write Langley’s Liberal International Order hasbara handbook.

Scratch an imperial core liberal and an imperialist bleeds.

This person is very smug about her capitalist realism, probably because she’s convinced that she personally benefits from it and wants to maintain it, while simultaneously crying liberal crocodile tears about the damage it does.

There are no “other sides” to capitalism than the oligarchy and their imperialist projects that you say you have never liked.

The US has never been and will never be a democracy, because it was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

That is true for private property, meaning land for resource extraction and for situating factories & offices, not for personal property, meaning homes to live in.

Why do insist on being confidently incorrect over and over?

It seems you’re going way out of your way to aggressively not understand how imperialism and neocolonialism work, nor compradors’ role in it.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method
• https://michael-hudson.com/2021/10/3rd-edition-super-imperialism/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
• https://www.michael-parenti.org/book-against-empire

.
At this point I think your ignorance is intentional. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it is difficult to get a person to understand something when their self-interest prevents them from understanding it.

I also find it hilarious that communists will preach socialism to those who reside in capitalist countries, completely neglecting that converting to Stalin or China type socialism will make the average American poorer because at least 60% of Americans actually own their own property, the land is not leased.

1. How do you not understand the difference between private property and personal property?
2. 93% of Chinese people own their own homes, vs 66% of Americans.

This has gotten ridiculous. You’ve shown over and over that don’t know anything about anything, but you keep on going anyway.

Some of those countries don’t even have plumbing.

Michael Parenti: Africa is rich. Quote from a similar speech:

The Third World is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich! The Philippines are rich! Brazil is rich! Mexico is rich! Chile is rich! Only the people are poor. But there’s billions to be made there, to be carved out, and to be taken. There’s been billions for 400 years! The capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labour. They have taken out of these countries. These countries are not underdeveloped, they’re overexploited!

The point is that anarchism historically has not succeeded and cannot succeed in the real world that we actually live in today, in the face of monopoly capitalist/imperialist states that will do everything in their power to plunder the resources of all other states.

Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds:

But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.

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.

I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing the line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly fell into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.

I’ll read them all the same because it’s nice to know the kind of lies other people like to believe

If this isn’t a tell that OP herself is extremely biased against anything that goes against hegemonic imperial core ideology, I don’t know what is.

Yes, when you go from relatively less to relatively more, you’ll experience improvements like life expectancy and child height. But that doesn’t mean anything when compared to the bigger picture of a failing and disingenuous social and economic model.

What bigger picture is there than improvements in material quality of life conditions, like calories available and infant mortality rates and life expectancy and literacy levels and gender equality and and and? And what is that but the socioeconomic conditions? Before the revolution this was an preindustrial, illiterate, feudal state of desperately precarious peasants. And after the revolution it was war-torn, and continuously threatened by imperialist states, and then, not long after, invaded by the WWII Axis powers. And still the material conditions of the masses improved by leaps & bounds compared to their starting position.

The Nordic model isn’t a socialism model which works for socialism purists, but it makes the most sense for those who don’t want to be subjected to oppression from one source or another.

Again, the “Nordic model” has been predicated on spoils of neocolonialism. How do the neocolonized feel about their subjugation and oppression? And under decades of grinding neoliberalism, the social safety nets have been eroding all over the imperial core, and the bourgeoisie aren’t going to give them back even if they could (which they can’t, especially now that the empire is deteriorating). These are bourgeois democracies, they’re not proletarian ones.

Yeah you’re not going to read them. And everyone knows there is no such thing as unbiased sources, so \/\/.

Either read a book or stop posting wiki articles on a topic you don’t know anything about.

• https://discomfiting.medium.com/debunking-communism-killed-more-people-than-naziism-7a9880696f67
• https://www.iskrabooks.org/stalin-history-and-critique

Nazis and Kulaks weren’t “ranks” of “Stalin’s people,” they were fascists and leeches on the masses of the peasantry, respectively. And Wikipedia gets its “excess” mortality numbers from garbage sources the like fascist propaganda The Black Book of Communism.

You can’t help but refer to Wikipedia, can you, when this whole thread was about Wikipedia’s questionable reliability on topics that relate to Western imperialist talking points?

As I’m legally obligated to disclose, past performance does not guarantee future results.

https://redsails.org/anticommunism-and-wonderland/

In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Which ranks of his people were put to death?

Declassified CIA report:

Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.

A lot of the cold war propaganda about Stalin turned out to be bullshit, as contemporary Western academic historians will tell you.

That’s if you’re even allowed to edit it in the first place.

The Nordic Model is socialism

It is not socialism. I already went over this upthread:

First sentence from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism :

Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.

The social safety nets in the imperial core—which are built on the backs of the neocolonized—are not socialism.