It’s important to recognize that the primary contradiction within the US Empire is settler-colonialism. The ones most oppressed by the current society are generally the ones most quickly adaptive to theory and practice, and this isn’t because oppressed people are “morally superior” but out of sheer survival. It’s also why there are so many queer communists. Without combatting settler-colonialism, anything that takes the place of the US Empire will fundamentally replicate that and would be closer to barbarism.

The US Empire is already fascist, fascism isn’t a separate mode of production but instead capitalism in decay.

The death of the US Empire isn’t “accelerationism,” it’s an understanding that the number one obstacle to socialism globally is the US Empire, and with it out of the way socialist countries are under far less pressure from the outside. Ideally an indigenous led, decolonial socialist state takes the place of the former US Empire, but a strong and healthy empire isn’t going to get there. That’s why it’s decay is necessary for both Statesians and the international proletariat.

Sure, there are a lot of bad-faith critiques going around. I do think that your point using me as an example doesn’t really work if your example is out of context. The thing about propaganda is that anyone pushing a particular view is propagandizing, but that doesn’t mean it’s inherently misinformation. Identifying bias is important, as is developing media literacy to see where people are being less than truthful.

I don’t really think this is true, I engage with the entirety of what people say. As far as I know, you have Lemmy.ml blocked on your piefed account, and we haven’t interacted in years, so I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea from.

Oh hey, it’s worth noting that that particular screengrab is taken out of context and was deliberately intended to make me appear that way. I even concede that one can disagree with Marx and Engels, my point was more against those who claim to agree with them but strongly disagree with the socialist market economy of China. I oppose anyone that tries to treat theory like gospel, that’s why I usually don’t reference theory directly unless it’s directly relevent like it was in this case.

That’s the thing, people propagandize about us as well, like the MeanwhileOnGrad crowd that took that snippet out of context. You’re doing the same here, by extrapolating an entire behavior of me from a single, out-of-context snippet hosted in a Nazi bar. What’s important is that we actually pay attention to what others are saying, because everyone is guilty of thinking they are correct.

Why is she so cute?

I’m not assuming that there’s just one socialist or communist theory, though. The PRC, for example, has a socialist market economy, while something like Cuba has larger degrees of public ownership. The bigger problem is that you have a lot of misconceptions of socialism and communism to begin with, which is why I corrected them.

The best part is that it’s a crosspost of your own post, lmao, not even something you found there

Shareholders cannot exist in communism, which requires a stateless, classless, moneyless society with full collectivization of production and distribution. You are confusing socialism, a mode of production, with the government doing stuff. Police, firemen, libraries, Norwegian oil reserves, and TSMC are example of public ownership, not socialism.

There’s a lot wrong with this.

Socialism is a mode of production, something to be applied at societal scale, not something you can slice out of a broader economy.

Socialism is characterized by public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy, and the working classes in charge of the state. Publicly owned assets in an economy where private ownership is principle isn’t socialism, as its used to uphold capitalism.

Communism is a post-socialist stateless, classless, moneyless society where production and distribution are collectivized across all of society. There’s no such

Anarchism is, to the contrary of communism, a communalist, decentralized mode of production based on interlinked horizontalist cells with internal ownership.

Marxism-Leninism is just Marxism but with Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and organizational theory, nothing like “forcing” communism on the public. Further, socialist states have never called themselves communist, just that they were governed by communist parties working towards communism through socialism.

Maoism is the belief that certain formulations created by Mao as a Marxist-Leninist within China are universal to all revolutions, such as Protracted People’s War, Cultural Revolution, and the Mass Line.

The US Empire has social programs, but they aren’t socialist. Private ownership is very much principle, and capitalists in charge of the state.

🤣

Just crickets lol

If only that was true…

Socialists/anti-capitalists.

The fact that Lemmy is FOSS, and is developed and maintained by communists, is why there’s a bunch of us here. The “free exchange of ideas” is a fantasy.

Great point! And yes, it needs to be contextualized, as all texts really should be.

No problem comrade, any time! 🫡

Fantastic question! In short, there isn’t a correct answer to this, so the following is just my view on it. First, some clarifications:

1. Socialism in One Country isn’t a stance against internationalism, but the belief that socialism can be achieved without revolution in the west. This dates back to Trotsky’s insistence that the peasantry were counter-revolutionary due to having petty-bourgeois consciousness, and that the RSFSR would fall without support from a socialist west. The USSR practiced socialism in one country, but was directly interventionist, compared to the modern PRC.

2. The PRC’s foreign policy during the sino-soviet split was awful. If you want to learn more about why, I gave my thoughts in a recent thread here. In short, they supported Cambodia over Vietnam, the US over the USSR, all because they thought that the USSR was an imperfect ally due to adopting a revisionist stance that class struggle was over in the USSR. They were right, and this revisionism contributed to their eventual collapse, but so did the split, especially with the terrible foreign policy on the PRC’s part compared to the USSR’s.

Alright, back to your questions!

Question: China is rapidly developing and practicing the “socialism in one country” policy, do you think they’d ever become internationalist like how Cuba or other states were?

I alluded to this already, but the PRC is already internationalist, just non-interventionist. I’ll elaborate on that more later, but instead I’ll answer what I predict will happen in the future:

As the US Empire continues to decline and the PRC continues to rise, there is a leftward turn within the youth of the PRC. Conditions are rapidly improving there, it’s true, but staying so interconnected with the global market is a calculated risk with consequences for the working classes as well. They’ve relied heavily on exports, and this made them reliant on the world’s biggest treatlerites, the US Empire.

In the latest Five Year Plan, however, the one for 2026-2030, a huge focus is being placed on raising domestic consumption, lowering working hours, and raising quality of life directly. The last few Five Year Plans have been focusing on green development, rapidly improving production, and equalizing the rural/urban divide that was sharp due to rapid development in the cities, but now that those are well under-way, China is beginning to try to rely on itself moving forward.

This opens them up to more interventionism, as the multi-polar world emerges, if they so choose, such as if the US Empire truly does try to spark a hot war in Taiwan/Japan/ROK (though the ROK is moving more towards the PRC these days and against Japan/US).

If so, what are the requirements?

Essentially, they need to not depend on the US Empire for exports, and drive up domestic consumption, something they’ve already aconowledged. The PRC also has a defensive millitary, not an imperialist one like the US Empire, so they’d need to pivot their range to a more active role, something the US is trying to prevent now by couping a bunch of states in South America.

And why are they not currently?

This is where I will answer how they are already internationalist. It’s because right now they are undermining the basis of imperialism by focusing on win-win development with the global south, and bypassing unequal exchange. A huge part of how unequal exchange functions is tech monopoly allowing the west to charge monopoly prices for tech, but China doesn’t do that. That’s why BRI and cheap EVs, solar, etc. have been seeing a huge swing in the global south, and has allowed the global south to escape underdevelopment.

It’s a boring, slow, gradual internationalism, but they are trying to build that multi-polar world where the US Empire isn’t the only player. That’s why the US Empire is increasingly desperate to stop China, when they seemed just fine only 15 years ago. Chinese foreign policy during the Sino-Soviet split was terrible, and this is also a course-correction to not directly make the same mistakes they did for the latter half of the 20th century.

As time goes on, though, the youth are more radical and aren’t simply content with the current level of development, they dream of the social safety nets of the Maoist era and yearn more for direct action. The process of democracy in the PRC is slow and gradual, but does respond to the will of the people. As these demographics shift, and more youth enter the CPC, we will likely see a more radical shift.

Just as Mao, Deng, and Xi all adapted to their present material conditions of China, so too will Xi’s successor have to, and considering 2049 is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, expect big shifts in the years leading up to that.

Sorry that this was so long!

Yep! Revolutionary optimism is the absolute best attitude to have. The harsh reality is that, for now, the average worker in the US still gains more from imperialism than loses from capitalism, but the flipside to that is that the global south is breaking away from imperialism and thus weakening that very same system. As this happens, there will likely soon be an inflexion point where the proletariat in the US Empire aligns with the interests of the international proletariat, and this will mark the beginning of the end of this monster.

Dialectical materialism ensures that our hopium is based on solid ground, and not mere wishcasting! We’re in late-stage imperialism, the global transition between capitalism and socialism is long, messy, and queer, but is already well under-way.

It isn’t really a work of theory, but history, and as such it isn’t really critical for learning how to think like a Marxist but instead is one person’s application of Marxism to US history. What we can do with that history is better trace the ongoing class character of the US Empire, identify its primary internal contradiction (spoiler: it’s settler colonialism), and that can better inform us how to organize, mostly within the empire.

The thing with Settlers is that it’s somewhat easy to walk away with absolutely no hope for revolution in the US Empire. I’d say it’s closer to valuable historical analysis than theory in that it’s a historical materialist analysis of the US and not about a concept, it has a very well developed understanding of the Statesian labor aristocracy and how it formed through generations of genocide, slavery, and settler-colonialism. You’re 100% correct that people use this book as an excuse to not do any org work in the US Empire and see it as pointless, ironically shifting all of the organizational labor onto the global south, but this is a mistake, and in no way takes away from the importance of the book.

In short, its utility is as a historical materialist analysis, not as an excuse nor as the end-all be-all. The sheer fact that it utterly destroys the western chauvanism that causes passive support for the west common in new leftists is extremely useful as well. In your case, it will mostly be a look at the disgusting history of the world’s worst empire that it desperately tries to hide.

TL;DR don’t walk away from it as a doomer, take the historical analysis from it and use your own judgement. We need to destroy the US Empire, decolonize it, and replace it with an indigenous-led socialist state.

And no problem, comrade!