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Cool, anecdotes don’t amount for much. Nazi Germany was far more corrupt and slaughtered millions of people, and modern Germany is an imperialist country that supports the genocide of Palestine more than most European countries do.

Corruption was far higher in pre-socialist countries, and in countries that pivoted from socialism. It wasn’t the communists that murdered everyone who disagreed, but the capitalists and imperialists.

Communists have been responsible for the greatest eradications of poverty in history, massive gains in quality of life metrics, and working class control. Communists currently run the world’s largest economy, which itself is making dramatic improvements year over year. Capitalism is a pure failure that has committed countless genocides.

I’m not spinning anything, you asked a question about communism and I answered, and now you’re moving the goalposts to revolution and early socialism.

I did, and I believe it’s a strong indicator of wishing to return to socialism, especially when combined with other metrics like huge increases in communist party membership and soviet pride.

You’re mixing up the revolution and ensuing socialist period with the communist, fully collectivized period. “From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs” applies to the fully collectivized communist period, and doesn’t need to be “enforced at gunpoint,” it just exists without capitalists anymore. The revolution does have appropriation from capitalists, as well as the socialist period of gradually collectivizing society’s production and distribution.

They do. For starters, famine was ended after the. 1930s (outside of World War II), and prison death rates weren’t astronomically high nor were prison populations particularly high either.

• As for increase in communist party membership, over four years, more than 63,000 people have become CPRF members, with most of the new recruits being young people under 30 and “people of prime working age.”.

• “We are now seeing not just nostalgia for the past, but a conscious choice by millions of citizens in favor of the socialist path of development,”

• We restored all ties with the Communist Parties of China, Vietnam, the DPRK, with India, with the Arab countries, with Latin America, with Cuba, with Venezuela, with Nicaragua.

• The expansion and astronomical growth of grassroot movements like the Inmortal Regiment. This movement grew so large that plenty of countries around the world organized a similar march. It started small until it grew in a international movement.

There are other examples, but it’s clearly on the rise.

The US.

That doesn’t explain the rise of communist party membership, nor can you wash away the fact that quality of life metrics were higher in the soviet union for the most part than they are today in post-soviet countries.

Capitalists already steal value from workers by paying them less than the value they create. One short bout of “theft” to take back what was stolen over centuries isn’t really theft, it’s returning what’s owed.

No, it doesn’t lol. There are still open sauce packets and napkins. People don’t have endless greed for that which they don’t need, especially if their needs are already met by strong safety nets like they are in socialist countries. Even in capitalist hellholes like the US, you still find restaurants with free napkins and plastic utensils, etc, and people don’t generally grab as many as they can.

I do read the primary data, and it’s also true that in many formerly socialist countries there’s surging sympathies for socialism and surging communist party membership.

Yes, capitalist property is hostorically siezed by the people through force, just like feudalism was ended by force. I don’t have rose tinted glasses, I know force is required, I just see it as necessary and the outcome extremely positive.

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No, that’s nowhere close to reality. China isn’t imperialist, full-stop, and that’s why the countries it trades with and establishes strong ties in the global south recieve multilateral development. When the west does so, it forces privatization of safety nets, sets up millitary bases, creates a class of compradors, and runs an extraction campaign.

I don’t see an “=” sign, so I’m not sure it even could be solved for.

Kinda? Tankie is just a pejorative for Marxist or anti-imperialist, generally. It’s a strawman with exaggerated characteristics that anti-communists fling at people to avoid actually listening to what they have to say.

As far as “authoritarianism” is concerned, all Marxists support the working class wielding its authority against capitalists, fascists, etc.

The transition from capitalism to socialism will nearly always be through revolution. It simply isn’t feasible to ask the ruling class to give up the very system that entitles them to their plunder, elections are carefully controlled so as to not allow genuine socialist or communist victory. Even when communists like Allende won in countries like Chile, they are couped, just like the US is attempting against Maduro. Revolution is authoritarian, it’s the forceful will of the majority against the minority. As Engels put it:

Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is. It is the act by which one part of the population imposes its will on the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannons — by the most authoritarian means possible; and the victors, if they do not want to have fought in vain, must maintain this rule by means of the terror which their arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if the communards had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach them for not having used it enough?

Historically, revolution has unfolded the same way, as the majority enforcing its will upon the minority. The French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, Korean, etc have all been such examples. They have been enormously liberating for the working classes, and terribly authoritarian towards capitalists, landlords, fascists, colonizers, etc. I’m not going to erase that that violence happened, but I’m not going to minimize that these were and are popular movements supported by the broad majority either. None of these countries are utopias, but all are real, with real working class victories.

Socialism is a mode of production, characterized by public ownership being the principle aspect of the economy. The western European countries don’t have socialism, they have social safety nets within the boundaries of capitalism. They fund these safety nets with the spoils of imperialism, ie international plunder of the global south, not through their own labor. The USSR, PRC, Vietnam, etc are socialist, not western Europe, and moreover do not depend on imperialism for their safety nets. Western Europe is not moving onto communism because it isn’t even socialist yet, and is under the dictatorship of capitalists.

Communism is a mode of production where all of production and distribution has been collectivized and run according to a common plan. It’s stateless, classless, and moneyless. It is post-socialist in that socialism is where production and distribution are gradually collectivized, erasing the basis for class, and the basis of the state as a consequence. Personal property remains, ie you can keep your toothbrush, but production and distribution are collectivized.

If you want a good introduction to Marxist theory, I wrote an intro Marxist-Leninist reading list. Feel free to check it out!

If you actually read Anti-Dühring and came to the conclusion that the Nordic countries are somehow more successful and that having any private ownership whatsoever means abandoning Marxism, then you did not actually understand it.

1. You have never actually addressed that the Nordic countries achieve their metrics through imperialism. The only conclusion here is that you support that, and believe imperialism to be necessary and good.

2. All economies are “mixed,” even the DPRK has some small level of private ownership in its special economic zones like Rason. That doesn’t mean there are no socialist states, none aligned with Marxism. China adopted a more traditional understanding of Marx than they had under the Gang of Four (which also had private property and markets).

The PRC is more classically Marxist than under the Gang of Four, when they abandoned materialist analysis and attempted to implement Communism through fiat. Large firms and key industries of the PRC are firmly in the public sector, while small firms, cooperatives, and sole proprietorships make up most of the private sector.

Marx didn’t think you could abolish private property by making it illegal, but by developing out of it. Socialism and Communism, for Marx, were about analyzing and harnessing the natural laws of economics moving towards centralization, so as to democratize it and produce in the interests of all. This wasn’t about decentralization, but centralization.

Markets themselves are not Capitalism, just like public ownership itself is not Socialist. The US is not Socialist just because it has a post-office, just like the PRC is not Capitalist just because it has some degree of private ownership. Rather, Marx believed you can’t just make private property illegal, but must develop out of it, as markets create large firms, and large firms work best with central planning:

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i. e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

I want you to look at the bolded word. Why did Marx say by degree? Did he think on day 1, businesses named A-C are nationalized, day 2 businesses D-E, etc etc? No. Marx believed that it is through nationalizing of the large firms that would be done immediately, and gradually as the small firms develop, they too can be folded into the public sector. The path to eliminated Private Property isn’t to make it illegal, but to develop out of it.

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital;[43] the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

This is why, in the previous paragraph, Marx described public seizure in degrees, but raising the level of the productive forces as rapidly as possible. China adopted a more traditional understanding of Marx, rather than the idealist Gang of Four.

It’s nice to read those, so props to you for that, but you should absolutely read Anti-Dühring to understand why social democracy is a failure while Marxism-Leninism is the governing ideology of the largest and most successful country on the planet, leaving the imperialist nordic countries in the dust. You should also read Imperialism, the Current Highest Stage of Capitalism to see how the social democracies you uphold act as parasites on the global south, living off of their labor and resources via financial domination.

Really, the idea that Marxism never went anywhere is absurd in the 21st century. Not only was the USSR the fastest developing country in the 20th century, but right now we are watching China adopt Marxist analysis and continue their rapid improvements year over year since their inception. Dühring was highly impractical, which is why his ideas were all failures.